Spawning Season An Experiment in Queer Parenthood (Bloomsbury Publishing) is an intimate blend of memoir and incisive environmental, science and food writing that documents Osmundson’s own journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families. The book debuts May 26.
Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. A little boy assisting his mother in the Lamaze class she taught, he breathed in deeply and out in bursts, rubbing the backs of his mother’s pregnant students, picturing his own boy belly swelling with life. Two decades later, a couple he had known since college, two women, came to him with a proposition: would he be a bio dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
In Spawning Season, a genre-bending memoir that like Osmundson’s award-winning last book Virology examines the scientific as the personal, he considers the ethics of child-rearing, the brutal wonder of caregiving, the terrifying specter of climate change and global fascism, and the joy of building family by other means. Joe agreed to coparenting and the trio consulted lawyers and friends, prepared contracts, and found the right doctors. Everything was falling into place until just days before the egg retrieval. As quickly as fatherhood glimmered into existence, it disappeared.
Osmundson’s writing shines in its ability to hold two conflicting truths. In Spawning Season, the grief of losing a child that never existed is considered in the same breath as the joy of building a different kind of family. As Donna Haraway wrote, “Make kin not kids.” Osmundson carries on that tradition by proving that kinship is as much an exercise in family building as raising a child.
–From staff reports