Relationscapes: Exploring Human Identity and Connection

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

W hat if the place that made you feel most alive became the site of your deepest grief? Brandon Wolf grew up multiracial and queer in a small Oregon city, where fitting in felt impossible. Years later, he survived the Pulse nightclub shooting—an event that shattered his world and ignited a lifelong pursuit of justice. In this powerful episode, Brandon opens up about internalized racism, survivor’s guilt, and more hard truths from his memoir A Place For Us. Through pain and resilience, Brandon reminds us why creating spaces of belonging is not just vital—but revolutionary.

Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 

Brandon Wolf is a nationally-recognized civil rights and gun safety advocate, and a seasoned communications expert. He currently serves as National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and in print publications (CNN.com, USA Today, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, Washington Post, The Advocate, Out Magazine) weaving personal stories into calls to action. He was recognized by HuffPost as one of “30 modern-day LGBTQ pioneers” and was on Out Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential LGBTQ+ people in the world. His memoir is called A Place For Us.

What if the place that made you feel most alive became the site of your deepest grief?

Brandon Wolf grew up multiracial and queer in a small Oregon city, where fitting in felt impossible. Years later, he survived the Pulse nightclub shooting—an event that shattered his world and ignited a lifelong pursuit of justice. In this powerful episode, Brandon opens up about internalized racism, survivor’s guilt, and more hard truths from his memoir A Place For Us. Through pain and resilience, Brandon reminds us why creating spaces of belonging is not just vital—but revolutionary.

Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 

Brandon Wolf is a nationally-recognized civil rights and gun safety advocate, and a seasoned communications expert. He currently serves as National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and in print publications (CNN.com, USA Today, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, Washington Post, The Advocate, Out Magazine) weaving personal stories into calls to action. He was recognized by HuffPost as one of “30 modern-day LGBTQ pioneers” and was on Out Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential LGBTQ+ people in the world. His memoir is called A Place For Us.

KB Brookins was struggling to know who they really were. And even though their quest for authenticity felt isolating, it couldn't happen in complete isolation. It took seeing someone else living more freely for KB to imagine new and better possibilities. That’s the paradox at the heart of becoming ourselves: We can’t do it alone.

KB is a Black, queer, trans writer and visual artist from Texas. Their award-winning memoir is called Pretty. It traces how race, gender, queerness, and masculinity are deeply entangled, not just in theory, but in the body and in everyday life with other people. In this episode, KB invites us to break through our rigid ideas about gender roles, and to feel the liberating power of seeing—and being seen.

Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 

KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. Their debut memoir Pretty (2024) won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Emerging Writer Award. Their writing has also appeared in HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Oxford American, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. KB’s poetry chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their poetry collection Freedom House (2023), described as “urgent and timely” by Vogue, won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. They adapted Freedom House into a solo art exhibit, displayed at various museums.

One of the most consequential moments in American civil rights history has been almost entirely forgotten. It was 1978. Conservative politicians wanted to ban gays and lesbians from working in California public schools. The outcome of that statewide initiative would have huge repercussions for the rest of the country, and young gay activists knew it. The battle was on.

And although it's been almost fifty years, their victory has surprising and urgent relevance for LGBTQ+ communities today. Journalist Christina Cauterucci tells the incredible story as host of season 9 of Slate's podcast, Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs. 

Complete transcript available here at relationscapes.org. 

Slow Burn, season 9: "Gays Against Briggs."

The top reason most news coverage about trans people is misleading and harmful is because journalists don't include the perspectives of actual trans people. Journalist Nico Lang was frustrated by how often reports talked about trans people without trans people. This is especially true for younger folks. 

Nico wants people to hear directly from trans teenagers. So for their groundbreaking new book, they spent a year traveling the country documenting the lives of trans, nonbinary, and gender fluid teens and their families. The book is called American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. And it puts perspectives of gender diverse teens front and center, where Nico says they always belonged.

Complete transcript available at relationscapes.org. 

Nico Lang is a nonbinary award-winning journalist with over a decade of experience covering the transgender community’s fight for equality. Their work has appeared in major publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New York Times, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, The Washington Post, and the L.A. Times. Lang is the creator of Queer News Daily and previously served as the deputy editor for Out magazine, the news editor for Them, the LGBTQ+ correspondent for VICE, and the editor and cofounder of the literary journal In Our Words. Their industry-leading contributions to queer media have resulted in a GLAAD Media Award and 10 awards from the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists (NLGJA). Lang is also the first-ever recipient of the Visibility Award from the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF), an honor created to recognize their impactful contributions to reporting on the lives of LGBTQ+ people.