Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Welcome back to this series on You Are a

tree and other metaphors to nourish life, thought, and prayer. This week's episode can be paired with

the chapter, Creation is Birth. I discussed this topic with Jennifer Banks, senior executive

editor of Religion and Humanities at Yale University Press. We had a conversation about her book,

Natality toward a philosophy of birth, which explores the theme of birth in philosophers across history,

from Hannah Arendt and Frederick Nietzsche to Adrian Rich and Tony Morrison.

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Thank you so much for joining me today. Why don't we just start? I would love to hear about your

inspiration for the book, how you came to write it and how long, to use a little bit of a

birth metaphor, kind of bore it before it was born into the world. So the book really began

after the birth of my first child, unsurprisingly, that that was the event

that really attuned me to the subject and got me interested in it.

And when I went through that experience, I felt like it was not only one of the most meaningful

and hardest experiences I had been through, It was also to me the most interesting.

It was just very interesting. And I, you know, as a staff member at a university at the time,

had a very short leave. And then I was back at work and came back to the business of publishing

books and working on books and coming up with ideas

and kind of constantly scanning the marketplace and thinking about what was being published and getting

noticed and what wasn't. And it was just very striking to me that there just wasn't much

on birth being published at that time, at least not in a very

visible way. Most of what I was seeing, you know, at least what I was really noticing were books on

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