INTERVIEW: Jennifer Case, Author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World

Iterations of care, like caregiving and self-care, are used with such frequency that they can be easily glossed over, but in her latest book, Jennifer Case urges us to pause and consider care more delicately.

Calling on elements of memoir, collage, interview, research, and cultural reflection, The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World (Terra Firma; Aug. 2026), illuminates how caregiving—often invisible, gendered, and undervalued—is central to survival. It also reveals how trauma and burnout affect our ability to connect deeply to others and how conversations around care and caregiving are crucial to larger discussions of climate, labor, justice, and self.

Jennie’s background in poetry lends attractive musicality to her prose as she probes less “hard-edged science” and more “healing the inner wounds that cause a culture of out-of-control consumption.” Jennie and I live about half an hour down the road from one another. We frequently bump into each other at literary events and conferences and sometimes find pause in our care routines to enjoy lunch. This interview was done by email and is edited for concision and clarity.

Please join me in a conversation with Jennifer Case.

---

 

Erin Wood: You first encountered the practice of koans reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. A koan is our deepest concern. Often, understanding it is a lifelong endeavor. Carework is your koan. You write, “I have been holding carework like a worry stone, touching it from all directions, turning it in my hands.” How can others determine their koan(s) and what can result from examining them?

Jennifer Case: In the Zen tradition, a koan is generally assigned to a student by a teacher, but here I am thinking of a koan more like a question you are asking yourself or the world. It closely parallels Rilke’s oft-quoted instruction: “live the questions.”

Writers and artists almost can’t help ourselves: we make art from our obsessions. As a result, the answer to your question might be simple. We just need to pay attention to our questions and obsessions. If we follow those and start to explore what might be underneath them, we can find great insight—and art.

EW: What do you hope will come from worrying this koan into the form of a book?

JC: I hope the book will offer something to readers who have asked themselves the same questions about care or struggled in similar ways with care—whether as caregivers or receivers.

EW: In your acknowledgements, you thank your publisher for taking on a book with an unusual format. Can you share how the creative process unfolded?

JC: I was inspired by Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had, which creates a book-length inquiry out of very short sections and chapters. I wanted to do something similar and began by writing brief scenes related to care. Around the same time, I was making collage postcards, most of which addressed climate anxiety and my longing for a more interconnected, caring world. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the postcards and the writing about care came from the same place and explored similar themes. I’ve always loved cross-genre work, so I decided to see what happened if I integrated the collages into the written project. I found that the collages helped keep the environmental theme visible even during sections that stressed economics and my own personal journey.

I knew a cross-genre book with full-color collages was a big ask and that some presses would turn the book down simply because production costs would be high. I’m glad Trinity University Press saw my vision and was willing to follow through on it.

EW: How and why do you suppose this book developed differently than your last?

JC: While parenting a toddler and infant, I could think in terms of single essays, but I didn’t have the headspace to hold a book-length project in my mind. When I began The Carework Project, my children were older—more or less sleeping through the night, entering elementary school, etc.—and I felt eager to try my hand again at a project with a cohesive arc. The fact that the book as a whole asks a single question—What does it mean to care?—also made this structure an intuitive choice.

 

EW: In the first part of the book, my head swirled with anxiety, “reckoning” alongside you with some of the biggest questions of modern-day life—how we can situate ourselves healthfully amidst daily horrors of natural disaster and human cruelty, (women especially) giving until we are “engulfed” within a capitalistic society that normalizes excessive consumption and transactional (health)care, and struggling with the limits of our empathy. When you’re working on a book that is tackling such potentially overwhelming (not to mention depressing) subject matter, how do you tend to yourself?

JC: Ironically, I found working on this book to be quite joyful. Maybe because it gave me the opportunity to be so playful with form. I loved working with the short sections and white space. Though the book tackles heavy material, I was always reaching for something larger: a more caring world. Getting to that more caring world became a kind of puzzle, and I enjoy the work of untangling knots and solving puzzles. Hearing the stories of the people I interviewed, and reading the published work I cited, felt affirming and encouraging (and helped keep my own story in context!). I was able to hold onto our collective feelings of care as an aspiration—that deep, warm nurturing—and it carried me.

EW: You share that 50% of women who caretake a relative report loss of income or loss of professional opportunities or promotions at work, and if this occurs early enough in their careers, they are 2.5% more likely to end up in poverty, often themselves lacking health care. What are some of the other ways that you see women being adversely affected by carework?

JC: In addition to financial repercussions, women can experience physical and psychological repercussions. I know so many women who have struggled with burnout after prolonged periods of caretaking. Women who become exhausted, bitter, and physically ill. In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté actually stresses this quite a bit. He describes how the tendency of women to prioritize others’ needs over their own, to suppress their own anger, and to become the emotional caretakers of others can lead to autoimmune disorders, weakened immune function, higher rates of depression, premature aging, and early death. In our culture, many women are trained to tend others before they tend themselves, but the costs of that add up.

EW: The burden of healthcare has shifted from paid hospital or healthcare workers to family members who must learn quickly to operate often high-tech medical equipment. I think about my daughter coming home after her birth at 23 weeks and 128 days in the NICU . . . how frozen and overwhelmed I felt by going from full hospital oversight to full personal responsibility for her survival while she was still on oxygen and a monitor that beeped constantly. What would you like to see recognized about the way that this shift impacts carework and those providing care at home?

JC: Oof. You’ve described that frozen overwhelm so well. I mostly want to validate family caregivers who have found themselves in this role. The medical industry saves money by sending patients home “quicker but sicker” (Kate Washington emphasizes the financial motives behind this trend), but that means the burden of care is increasingly falling on unpaid, untrained family caregivers. Family caregivers who then feel overwhelmed and unprepared—and who blame themselves when caregiving feels like too much. Once we see what is happening and recognize that the system has placed us in this predicament, we have more opportunities to enact change.

EW: You say, “When things become simply transactional–or when people are forced to work in systems where their work is simply seen as transactional–they can and often will burn out. If the system doesn’t value care, and caring work, but rather efficiency, their caring will suffer.” What are some burnout antidotes?

JC: Individually, when we recognize our own burnout, the antidote is often rest. Burnout is exhaustion, and so we need to pull back, give ourselves space to rest and heal, as well as space to rediscover joy and purpose.

Systemically, I’d love to see our culture shift from one that hyper-values efficiency (and thus is always striving, head forward) to one that values quality—and the quality of our presence. In Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, which I quote in the book, Thich Nhat Hanh talks a lot about the transition from striving to mindful presence. That spoke to me (in part because I recognized my own striving energy!), and I think another antidote to burnout is there.

EW: You’re frustrated by overuse of “self-care” references, now almost cartoonish because the word is so overplayed. As the term’s punch diminishes, is there another way you’ve found useful to think about this so the underlying care of self doesn’t?

JC: Yes, I’m frustrated with the consumerism behind “self-care” and wary of how the term creates a dichotomy between ourselves and others. Buddhist teachers stress that anytime we think in stark differentiations—self versus others—we are deluded! In reality, we are always interconnected, and the moments we don’t see how our wellbeing is connected to others are the exact moments we are lost.

For myself, I’ve found it necessary to learn how to feel that in my body. When I’m overtaxed, or overwhelmed, and giving to others out of a sense of obligation, how does that feel in my body? When I experience burnout, how does that feel? On the other hand, how does it feel in my body to be calm, present, and have a strong sense of compassion for myself and for others? I’ve found that, as I learn to better recognize those differences, I can catch myself quicker when I move from the latter to the former, and interrupt it (by doing something that would essentially count as self-care: going on a walk, drinking water, stepping away and getting rest, etc.).

EW: One aspect of care is community, with the underlying notion that we are biologically wired for connection. You suggest that perhaps we could emerge from a current cultural bent toward individualism—in which we all have to buy our own power tools, tend our own gardens, raise our own children, care for our own ill and aging family members—into an era where we are not carrying the psychic and financial burdens of these pursuits alone, where we return to the village mentality that has prevailed in past eras which guards against isolation. Where do you see potential for community carework versus individual carework?

JC: There’s been a lot of great work and research on mutual aid, especially coming out of social justice spaces and community organizing. Mia Birdsong, adrienne maree brown, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could answer this question better than me! However, I can say: mutual aid is messy, and community care is messy—just like all relationships. But there are models out there. Anytime a community forms where people are willing and able to support each other—and will do so almost naturally—we have an example, whether it’s within a church community, a neighborhood (Rebecca Solnit has written extensively about this), a civic organization, etc. I hope we start to see how vital these communities are, and to better value them individually and as a culture.

EW: In the latter half of the book, we meet a woman who recognizes she is “struggling thoroughly to open [herself] to the feeling of receiving care,” asking the most terrifying question: “Am I worthy of care?” As a girl, you received the message that “it is dangerous to have needs.” You hid needs, resorting to fantasies in which you were sick and your care needs were met. Fear underscores it all: “How can you ask to feel cared for when you feel/fear that the answer is no?” These are enormous questions, so vulnerable, so personal, and also so relatable. What does it feel like to pose them? What is the value?

JC: It feels a bit terrifying! That’s the section of the book I was most nervous about publishing, but also the section of the book that I feel is most important to the project. My hope is that this section will offer an invitation to readers to examine themselves and see how their own inner wounds might be impacting their abilities to give or receive care. I’ve come to agree with all of those who’ve said that true change comes from within. We can slap new policies on our society, but until we fundamentally change our internal relationships with care, that larger cultural work will stutter and stall.

EW: You find healing in nature and offer it your care in return. How would you describe this relationship?

JC: Even more than nature offering me care, nature is a place where the boundaries between me and others (other humans, other species, other life forms) soften, and I get a sense of that vast interconnectedness. When I spend time hiking or kayaking or sitting near a shore, I can feel myself as simply another being on this planet…as worthy and valuable as the frog sitting near me or the fern in the brush.

EW: You were hit by a car in a crosswalk several years ago. The urge to keep churning forward was still inside you, but you came up against the limits of your ability to push on. What did you learn about yourself and about carework during that time?

JC: I learned so much! It may seem odd, but today I’m incredibly thankful to the woman who hit me. I needed that wake-up call.

I’d always been someone who powered through difficult situations, but after getting hit, I couldn’t do that. I was physically and mentally incapacitated to a degree I hadn’t really experienced before. That, in turn, triggered all of my internal discomforts around receiving care or being dependent on others. It was incredibly uncomfortable (an understatement), but it forced me to really see those parts of myself—and then learn how to tend them.

Now I have a much healthier sense of self and a more mature relationship to care.