This episode was recorded Friday, February 21, 2025

Co-hosts: Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond and Kathryn Kirkpatrick

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Jennie Case, We Are Animals

We Are Animals examines moments in Case’s life when her experience as a woman in twenty-first-century America came in conflict with her experience as a child-bearing mammal. From the surprising salve of parasocial interactions on baby forums to the not so surprisingly intertwined history of industrial dairy farming and wearable breast pumps, Case explores an array of realities that give historical and cultural context to the experience of motherhood.

The essays collected here offer a balm for women who have struggled in silence over childbirth trauma, conflicted responses to motherhood, or a deeply felt intuition that what their bodies needed as mothers did not match what society provided. They also offer a much needed, nuanced perspective for policymakers, activists, and medical professionals who continue to shape women’s experience of motherhood.

Jennifer Case is the author of We Are Animals: Essays on the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024) and Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review, while her scholarship can be found in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and Assay. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.

Sarah Giragosian, Mother Octopus

Mother Octopus (Middle Creek Press), co-winner of the Halcyon Prize, is animated by eco-poems that raise questions about the nature of human and animal appetites and the increasing levels of consumption that threaten the environment, while also exploring forms of resilience in the Anthropocene. In this manuscript, you will find poems inquiring into the forces and agencies (ie: gut flora, bacteria, toxins, and microorganisms) that impact animals and human animals in complex ways, yet may not even rise to the level of consciousness. In an era in which the global pandemic shaped discourse about animals, peoples, and environment (often in reductive ways), my manuscript seeks to deepen the conversation about how the crisis derives from our problematic relationships to animals and the environment, as well as the indiscriminate omnivorism that characterizes our age. Elegiac and yet critical of false consolation, Mother Octopus delves into the anxieties, violence, and pleasures of consumption (corporeal, economic, and societal) and its impacts on peoples, animals and environments.

Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish (winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), which she co-edited. She also wrote Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Tin House, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University of Albany-SUNY.

Ted Toadvine, The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology

The Memory of the World contends that our obsession with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future, misleading sustainability efforts and diminishing our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.

Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in contemporary Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and recent French philosophy, and the philosophy of nature and environment. He is author of The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (Minnesota, 2024) and Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Northwestern, 2010), and has edited numerous titles, including Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Springer, 2020), The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Northwestern, 2007), and Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (SUNY, 2003). He co-directs the Contributions to Phenomenology Series with Springer.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong, The Tubercled-Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope

This project is an ongoing creative collaboration in honor of a freshwater mussel species, Epioblasma torulosa torulosa, that was stricken from the Endangered Species List in 2023. Conceived under the auspices of Jennifer Calkins’ project DELISTED, the Library of Hope involves twelve creators working in the literary arts, sculpture, photography, film, and outdoors.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a writer of fiction and essays. Her essay collection Listen, we all bleed was a 2022 ASLE Book Award finalist. Her novel The Box, published by Graywolf, was shortlisted for the 2023 US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize. Forthcoming in 2026 from Graywolf is her essay collection devoted to aquatic invertebrates, A Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl. Mandy-Suzanne’s prose piece “Notes from Underwater,” nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize by The Cincinnati Review, was written for her curatorial, collaborative project, The Tubercled-Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope.