Relationscapes

What does it mean to parent in a world that wasn’t built for you? Writer and disabled parent Eliza Hull joins us to talk about her groundbreaking anthology We’ve Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents.
These essays challenge ableist assumptions, confront stigma, and spotlight the resilience and pride of disabled parents. Their stories aren't about about pity or inspirational “overcoming”—they are about identity, ingenuity, and reimagining parenthood through unapologetically disabled experiences. 
Full transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
About the Guest
Eliza Hull is an award-winning musical artist, writer, journalist, and disability advocate based in Victoria, Australia. Her edited collection is called We've Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents.
 

Happy 50th Episode! To celebrate, I invited Lauren Passell, a podcast hero of mine, to revisit a Relationscapes episode she recommended on her excellent Podcast The Newsletter.
As a newly adoptive white mom of a child who is Black, Lauren was thrilled about Angela Tucker's interview.  Tucker is an incredible advocate for transracial adoptees.  Lauren opens up about the joys and challenges of raising a child in an open adoption, exploring questions about race, family, and community.
Full transcript available here at relationscapes.org. 
ABOUT THE GUEST
Lauren Passell (she/her) is the founder and CEO of Tink Media, Podcast the Newsletter, Podcast Marketing Magic, and is the producer of Feed the Queue. She writes about podcasts for Lifehacker. She has spoken about podcast marketing for SXSW, Podcast Movement, Podfest, London Podcast Festival, The Podcast Show, and has taught classes for Harvard, Columbia, and more. She is a judge for The Webbys, Signal Awards, The Ambies, and the International Women's Podcast Awards. She lives in West Philly with her cat, husband, and daughter, and loves Disney.

For decades, public schools have been a cornerstone of American learning and civic life. But far-right groups have worked for years to turn these institutions into battlegrounds, pushing to control curricula, ban books, and restrict the rights of marginalized students, while whitewashing history and steamrolling over accessibility. The battle is reaching fever pitch today. 
In her book School Moms, education journalist Laura Pappano takes us inside the world of parent activism, revealing how partisan actors mobilize to dismantle public education, enforce narrow ideological agendas, and silence dissent.
This episode exposes the high-stakes struggle over the future of schools and what it means for students, educators, and communities across the country.
Full transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
About the Guest
Laura Pappano is an award-winning education journalist, author, and founder of The New Haven Student Journalism Project. Her latest book is called School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education. She is a former education columnist for The Boston Globe, and has published work in places like The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Salon, The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, The Atlantic, and The Christian Science Monitor. 
 

When Anne Pinkerton's brother unexpectedly died alone in an extreme sport accident, she faced the same question over and over. People would always ask, "Were You Close?" They asked out of concern, but the question felt almost impossible to answer.
In some ways, Anne and her brother David weren't close—they lived in different states, he was more than a decade older. But that distance seemed beside the point when she considered all the ways they were close. And after his death, she set out to find new ways to be closer. In this episode, Anne Pinkerton joins us to talk about how grief over the loss of a sibling is one of the most overlooked griefs people can experience. 
Full transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
About the Guest
Anne Pinkerton is an essayist, memoirist, and poet. Her work often circles around grief and loss, as well as coping with these painful realities in our lives. Her memoir is called Were You Close? a sister’s quest to know the brother she lost. Visit her at annepinkertonwriter.com.
 

What if the image the world loves you for is the one that’s destroying you?
In her memoir Fetishized, Kaila Yu deconstructs "yellow fever," exploring how pop culture and Western beauty ideals shaped damaging stereotypes about Asian women—and how she once embodied them herself. After spending years in the pinup and import modeling world, auditioning for film roles steeped in dehumanizing tropes, touring globally with her all Asian American girl band, and altering her body to match impossible standards, the emotional costs became too much. So he began a new journey to reclaim her identity, beauty, and self-worth.
Full transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
About the Author
Kaila Yu is author of Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty. She is a freelance writer for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Business Insider, Conde Nast Traveler and more. Formerly, she was a model and the lead singer for the all–Asian American female rock band Nylon Pink. Fetishized is her first book. You can find Kaila online @kailayu.
 

In this candid and funny conversation, artist and author Mary Catherine Starr talks about her viral comics on motherhood, marriage, mental load, and more. From the story of the infamous peanut butter jar to the deeper patterns of household inequality, Starr explores how social expectations, internalized roles, and everyday choices shape parenting partnerships. Through humor and heartfelt honesty, she reveals why moms need to "eat the damn peach"—and why it's never just about the peach.
Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
 
ABOUT THE GUEST
Mary Catherine Starr is an artist and graphic designer. Her popular Instagram account @momlife_comics explores motherhood, marriage, and the double standards of parenting through funny, relatable, and sometimes maddening comics. She lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her husband, their two children, and her son’s large collection of plastic dinosaurs.

Most people who experience the death of a parent come to understand that grief isn’t something you get over—it's something you try to learn how to live with.
That's what author Maddie Norris discovered after losing her dad at seventeen. Instead of looking away from the pain, she studied it—through the lens of her father's own work as a medical researcher on the science of wounds. 
Maddie joins us to talk about her debut book The Wet Wound: An Elegy In Essays, weaving together the history of wound care and the rituals of mourning. Maddie challenges the idea that healing means letting go. She asks: what if grief is more like tending an open wound—something tender, and ongoing, and sometimes even joyful?
Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
 
ABOUT THE GUEST
MADDIE NORRIS is author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays. She is a visiting assistant professor at the Davidson College in North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her award-winning work has been named as notable in Best American Essays.

About 11 million kids serve as their family's interpreter in the US today. In this episode, Olivia Abtahi joins Relationscapes to talk about her beautiful new picture book celebrating these kids: The Interpreter, inspired by the lives of real kids navigating bureaucracies, burnout, and belonging.
We talk about how adults can better support children in this role and what it means to write a book that resonates in two languages at once. Olivia also shares how the chaos of a politically charged moment of xenophobia impacted her creative process.
Whether you’re a parent, teacher, former child interpreter, or someone trying to better understand cross-cultural relationships, this conversation will stay with you.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Growing up in the DC area, Olivia Abtahi devoured books and hid in empty classrooms during school to finish them. Her debut novel, Perfectly Parvin, was published in 2021, receiving the SCBWI Golden Kite Honor, YALSA Odyssey Honor, and numerous starred reviews. Her sophomore novel, Azar on Fire, was published in August 2022 and is a SLJ pick. Olivia's third novel, Twin Flames, is a New Visions Award winner and published in August 2024. The Interpreter is her first picture book, receiving four starred reviews. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and daughters.

Some family stories are proudly passed down. Others are buried under layers of silence, fear, and cultural taboo.
After immigrating to the United States, author Ingrid Rojas Contreras kept quiet about her Colombian family’s history of curanderismo—a lineage of mystical healers, visions, and spiritual powers. But after a traumatic head injury triggered amnesia, those buried stories vanished entirely.
Then, as her memories gradually resurfaced, Ingrid returned to Colombia with her mother to exhume her grandfather’s remains—a legendary curandero said to possess the power to move clouds. But what she unearthed on that journey wasn’t mere bones. She discovered a deeper connection to identity, ancestry, and a tradition of healing that refuses to be erased.
In this episode, Ingrid joins host Blair Hodges to talk about The Man Who Could Move Clouds, her award-winning memoir. Together they explore intergenerational memory, cultural understandings of truth, family divisions around faith, and what it means to carry both trauma and magic in the body.
Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
 
ABOUT THE GUEST
INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS is author of the Pulitzer-finalist memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among other places. She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia and now lives in California.

Masculinity is having yet another moment—from TikTok alphas and tech bros up through the rise of the manosphere. It's because when society feels unstable, many people try to get back to basics.
The problem is, those “basics” are a bunch of rigid, outdated masculinity norms—norms that helped create the very problems we're facing right now. In this episode, we dig into the research with psychologists Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor to understand how culture shapes masculinity, why it’s linked to violence and poor health, and what it might take to build something better. Their book is called The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence.
Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 
 
ABOUT THE GUESTS
RONALD LEVANT is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron. He is past president of the American Psychological Association and is one of the pioneer scholars on masculinity, having conducted masculinity studies for decades.
SHAYNA PRYOR is a licensed psychologist currently working with active duty military. She studies masculinity, gender, and men’s experiences of sexual trauma and interpersonal violence.
Together they are authors of The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence.