Through luminous prose, Tiny Worlds invites us to consider what we might learn about connection, belonging, and repair by attending to the very small.

In Tiny Worlds, author Chelsea Steinauer Scudder seeks a different way to grapple with the enormity of the changing natural world: by narrowing the lens, and gazing at familiar artifacts of home through a microscope. Chelsea examines curious objects from the natural world in the mountains of Vermont: Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly wing; Goldenrod pollen; Oak gall; Bluejay feather. She does this, she writes, because "The very small can remind us that we exist within limits, within constraints, within particular environments and communities and moments in time." 

In Tiny Worlds, Chelsea bridges the worlds of a naturalist and a spiritualist. Her spectacular, luminous writing expertly guides us through the more difficult spiritual and ecological questions we are grappling with today. What can we learn about place-making and community-building by paying close attention to that which we can reach out and touch, smell, and taste?

About The Author

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn From Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books, 2025). She grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma. After receiving her masters of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, her writing became focused on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. From 2017-2022, she worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Her writing can also be found in The Atlantic, Nautilus, Terrain.org, The Common, Decor Maine, Crannóg Magazine, EcoTheo Review, From the Ground Up, CooNoor&Co, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten's The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Rochester, Vermont.