Welcome to Meditations on Kinship

This newsletter meditates on kinship of all kinds.

In keeping with my book, Ancestor Trouble, it’s concerned with family history, mental health, generational trauma, reverberations of harm, and spiritual practices around ancestors and our alienation from those practices in much of the Western world. Beyond family, Meditations on Kinship invites readers to consider other kinds of relations, including our connection with the earth, our most foundational ancestor.

I’m Maud Newton, a writer, critic, amateur genealogist, and native woodland restoration practitioner. I believe in the power of acknowledging troubled family histories honestly, open-heartedly, and with imagination. And I believe in seeking a more caring, connective way forward, even in times like these, when (for me at least) fear, sadness, and anger are easier to come by.

I grew up steeped in Christian fundamentalism and various permutations of the Protestant church, from staid to tongues-speaking. I often write about the ironies of evangelical intolerance, and the very real harm it inflicts. I’m interested earth reverence, by which I mostly mean the possibilities that open up when we look beyond humanity to the whole of earth as our kin.

Ancestor Trouble was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, Washington Post, Time, Esquire, The Boston Globe, Garden & Gun, Entertainment Weekly, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Chicago Tribune. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and a Roxane Gay book club pick.

This newsletter is free, and I do my best to send it once or twice a month.

• My pronouns are she/her.

• I live on the unceded land of the Lenape people in Queens, New York.

• You can read more about me over on my website.