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- Spawning Season
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Description
NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families.
Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a couple he had known since college, two women, came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two mothers communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe's whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.
Product details
| Published | May 26 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Audiobook |
| Duration | 5 hours and 45 minutes |
| ISBN | 9781639737857 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Beautiful nature writing, beautiful food writing, and above all, intimate, revealing, and heart-wrenching writing about complicated and deeply human longing for queer parenthood, and about the risk and loss inherent in putting our faith in reproductive futurity.
Krys Malcolm Belc, author of THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD
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Beautiful and deeply moving. Joseph Osmundson guides us through a topography where pleasure, kinship, gender, and procreative longing take new forms, and challenges us to expand the limits of human expression. He shows us queerness as the ultimate nurturing force, a place where cooking becomes an affirmation of chosen family, an act of love on a colossal scale.
John Birdsall, James Beard Award-winning author of THE MAN WHO ATE TOO MUCH and WHAT IS QUEER FOOD?
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An aching and imaginative memoir about the many ways to have and lose a child. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson unearths the confluence of his dream of becoming a queer parent alongside the odyssey of a spawning salmon. The grief that unspools in both stories will resonate with anyone who has wanted a child amid the threats of climate change and capitalism. Yet Osmundson also conjures new possibilities for the ways we nurture and nourish each other, and as such, has written a book brimming with as much hope as exists in the single glowing orb of a salmon egg.
Sabrina Imbler, author of HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES
























