Eiren Caffall | Source | Writer, Musician
Eiren Caffall
EIREN CAFFALL is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, 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, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary is forthcoming from Row House Publishing in October 2024 and her novel All the Water in the World is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in January 2025.
-
Becoming Ocean
When climate-change journalist Eiren Caffall was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, she realized that, like the planet, she was slowly drowning. But instead of allowing the nearly invisible effects of her condition to overwhelm or paralyze her, Caffall uses her illness to look at the crisis of climate change in a way that makes “…problems we so often push away because of… their apparent distance from daily life, suddenly become intimate and human-scale.“ (Naomi Klein, Author: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
Video -
Conversations with Eiren Caffall - Voyage Michigan Magazine
Today we’d like to introduce you to Eiren Caffall. Eiren, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin? I moved to the Midwest after college on the West Coast and childhood on the East Coast. I never thought I’d come back to the Great […]
Article -
New Myths for the Era of Displacement: On Fábio Zuker’s “The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest” | Los Angeles Review...
Eiren Caffall explores Fábio Zuker’s writing about ecological collapse and resistance....
Article
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2022%2F05%2FThe-Life-and-Death-of-a-Minke-Whale-in-the-Amazon-Dispatches-from-the-Brazilian-Rainforest.jpeg)
-
Beguiling, idiosyncratic: Eiren Caffall makes an original contribution to the growing genre of memoirs that explore illness and healing. The Mourner’s Bestiary draws a poetic parallel between the body’s experience of chronic disease and the marine ecosystems Caffall knows well—an unexpected juxtaposition that gives new dimension to climate hazards we face and opportunities to address them. Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence. Water becomes an element that draws us together.
—Whiting Foundation judges’ citation
-
By shining a beam into the sea, Caffall confronts the abyss of her own wayward biological inheritance and the intimate ties that bind endangered lineages, both marine and terrestrial. A brave, kaleidoscopic and deeply felt exploration of collapse and the possibility of personal and ecological renewal.
—Sonia Shah author of Pandemic and The Next Great Migration
-
We are, all of us, wounded in some way, and this planet of ours is wounded too. This remarkable memoir somehow understands those basic facts in new ways; it will open your mind to new ways of thinking about healing, wholeness, reconciliation, courage.
—Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature
