The Art of Grief –
Hope and wonder in the face of environmental collapse…
PART 2: Grief Artfully Expressed becomes a Sacrament of Kinship
Caroline re-welcomes last week’s guest Eiren Caffall, science writer with the soul of a poet, the author of “The Mourner’s Bestiary”
“Lyrical reports from the apocalypse”
“The Mourner’s Bestiary is a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores. The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the necessary dedications ahead for the Gulf. Eiren Caffall carries a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease, raising a child who may also. The Mourner’s Bestiary braids environmental research with a memoir of generational healing, and the work it takes to get there for the human and animal lives caught in tides of loss.”
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago. Her writing on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV Fire, forthcoming in 2024 from The Center for Humans and Nature. She received a 2023 Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Her novel, All the Water in the World, is slated for release by St. Martin’s Press in early 2025.
Caroline W. Casey · www.CoyoteNetworkNews.com · Patreon