Writing Through Collapse: Eiren Caffall on Illness, Climate, and Finding Your Memoir’s Form

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Eiren. Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today.

Eiren Caffall [0:06]
Thank you so much, Lisa. It’s such an honor to be here. Thanks so much for asking me.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:09]
Well, I was seeing you all over social media, all about your books. And then, of course, we have a shared friend, Amy. When that all came together, I was like, I definitely want to have you on the podcast. And then, of course, I fell in love with your writing. I have a copy of The Mourner’s Bestiary right here for anyone watching this on YouTube. This book is such a work of genius—I just have to say that. My head was spinning thinking about how you put this together. I’m so excited to talk about that.

But you are not just a memoirist. You are in the middle of what I would call double trouble—you have a memoir that just came out and a novel within three months of each other.

Eiren Caffall [0:57]
Yeah, no, it’s bananas. I do not recommend. When I found out that these books were going to be coming out so close together from two different houses with two separate PR teams, there was fear and trembling—which was appropriate—and calls to the few people I know who’ve done that. Most of them said, “Don’t.” And now I kind of understand why. It’s a lot.

It’s a lot to switch between the two conversations. It’s a lot to manage the two campaigns. And while it’s great to be able to sell both books when I am out on the road, it also can mean very different kinds of audiences and approaches to each of the books.

Because—I think we can talk about this—there’s a lot that they have in common, lots of ways they pair. But there’s also—you know—one is a big post-apocalyptic adventure story, and one is a very thoughtful scientific memoir. So, they’re not naturally paired in people’s minds. Yeah, it’s been a ride.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:52]
Yeah, it definitely sounds like it. And I think that’s probably a good place to start—to talk about the ride.

But before we get there, I’d love for you to tell us a little about you and then also about the two books so that, for those who have not yet read them—and by the way, listeners, if you haven’t, you need to go buy them, because Eiren’s work is amazing—tell us about your novel All the Water in the World and also The Mourner’s Bestiary.

Eiren Caffall [2:17]
Yeah. So, a little bit about me is that I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was seven. I think most of us who get into this game have that kind of epiphanal moment when we’re kids, where we’re like, “Oh, there’s a job that makes these things I get to read all the time. That’s the one I want.”

And I’ve always written, but I’ve always written in multiple genres. My first year of college, I went to film school as a dramatic writer. I’ve written film scripts. When I got out of college with my shiny English degree with a concentration in creative writing, I immediately moved to Chicago, where I started writing music and song lyrics and teaching creative writing in the public schools here—which is how I met Amy. We were co-teachers together, which was a million years ago, but also very formative.

I was a musician for 10 years, and I didn’t really write much in the way of long form at all, although it was always percolating in the back of my head. Then, right around when my son was born, I was asked by a collaborator from my life here in Chicago—a photographer—to write an essay as a sort of non-expert about climate issues in relation to his photography, which was all these beautiful large-format landscapes.

Because my mother was an EPA scientist, all the things that had woken up in me as a songwriter—talking about nature, the environment, my body in a very oblique way—came bursting out in this first essay. And I was like, “Oh, okay, good. This is the time to go back to long form.”

So, I started writing journalism and essays around climate and environmental issues and the spiritual aspects of them. Then the idea for both books came fairly close together. I had the title for The Mourner’s Bestiary far earlier than I began actually writing it.

I was writing essays about parenting, spirituality, and environmental collapse, and I thought, “This could possibly be a book someday.” I want to say at least a decade ago—maybe more, maybe 15 years—I thought of the title and shelved it.

Then, about 13 years ago, I began writing the novel. So, in a way, both books have been percolating alongside each other since then. When I would finish a draft of the novel and knew it wasn’t quite ready, I would go back to thinking about, “Okay, what would this memoir/essay collection look like?” I worked on it over the course of several really fantastic residencies and fellowships.

Eventually, I came to the idea that if it was going to be a bestiary, I needed to write stories about individual animals. So, The Mourner’s Bestiary is a memoir of my family’s genetic kidney disease and how, growing up with that generational curse—which is what we called it—on the shores of an endangered ecosystem, the stories of the environment and the body pair together in complicated and interesting ways.

It explores how that legacy works both as the inheritor—as a child—so half of the memoir is about my childhood as a nine-year-old realizing for the first time that I might inherit what my father was dying of. The other half is about me parenting a nine-year-old, realizing that I had inherited it and that I might be passing it on.

Basically, the book works as a metaphor for what we’re all struggling with in terms of the generational trauma of living under climate collapse. We’re passing it on generation to generation, trying to figure out how to explain the catastrophic nature of our reality to those coming after us.

So, I knew that’s what I wanted to write about. I began writing it, but it took me a really long time to find the form.

All the Water in the World—at the same time that I was occasionally thinking about this memoir—I was really compelled by my own fear as a parent: What could the worst-case scenario in climate change look like?

When I couldn’t sleep, I would get up and work on the novel. It’s the story of a group of scientists and curators living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History post-glacial melt, when the world is flooded. They’re desperately trying to hang on to the collections and the scientific knowledge of that museum—until a superstorm destroys the seawalls protecting parts of the city. They have to flee in a birchbark canoe and travel up the Hudson to try and find safety.

So, both books deal with similar themes—water, protection, what we save, and what generations owe to each other. They just come at it from different angles.

As a person who’s been writing music and film about these themes all along, these projects feel very much of a piece. It’s the same basic question that keeps haunting me: What are we doing with generational information? And how do we build the resilience—in our families, ourselves, and on this planet—to survive what’s happening on a global scale?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [7:10]
Yeah, and what I noticed about these two works is that—when I was reading the interview with Amy Eaton that you did for Hippocampus Literary Magazine—the novel is about how people come together, and yet the memoir is really about that sense of isolation and feeling so alone.

So, there’s this beautiful conversation happening between them about the same topic—where do we fit, how do we belong, where do we belong? And this concept of flooding, which you talk about so beautifully in the memoir—thinking about PKD and how that is a way that the body gets flooded, right, through the cysts.

You are a master of metaphor—I just have to say that.

Eiren Caffall [8:17]
Thank you.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:18]
And so what’s speaking to me in this work—and then I want to talk about how you’re having these conversations out in the world as you manage launching two books—is that I’m a person who also comes from a family with a legacy of chronic illness.

I am actually the fifth generation of women who ended up on the couch with weird autoimmune issues.

Eiren Caffall [8:40]
Wow. Yeah, that’s a legacy.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:43]
And what I found for myself is that it’s not just what happens to the body—it’s the story around it. And sometimes it’s the story of the silence, which is something that you talk about.

So, there’s that angle. And then climate issues have been important to me for most of my life. I didn’t have the scientific angle that you had, but I grew up in a Buddhist community where the environment was very important.

So, I was learning about climate change, and—you know—I met this man when I was ten years old. I actually stayed in his house. I was getting ready to go on some other trip, and I was a typical Gen X kid where—at least in my family—you’d get put on the Greyhound bus by yourself, right? This was perfectly normal.

So, I ended up at this guy’s house. There was someone else there—this woman whose room I was staying in—but he had had this almost fatal car accident, which woke him up to what was going on around climate change.

He cared so deeply about it. I mean, you had to compost everything in his house. He was serious about this—and this was the 1980s.

Eiren Caffall [9:44]
That’s intense.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:45]
But it made such a profound impact on me, to really think about, generationally, what are we doing?

And you confront this in such a beautiful way, because you make us fall in love with the natural world.

Eiren Caffall [10:00]
Oh, thank you. That’s high praise.

I mean, I think part of it is just that I was taught to be in love with the natural world by two people who grew up in incredibly urban environments.

My parents were hippies, and they went back to the land—but the trick was, neither of them had ever lived on the land before. They moved to rural western Massachusetts, up in the Berkshire Mountains, and both fell completely, head-over-heels in love with the landscape in really different ways that I don’t think either of them expected.

My father came to it through hunting and fishing and making community with other people who were interested in conservation of rivers and landscapes. He really taught himself all this naturalist lore that he passed down to me.

Then my mother fell in love with geology when I was ten. She instantly understood the landscape in a completely different way. She did work on pollution in her training, and her job for the EPA really revolved around, “What do we do with the legacy of industrial manufacturing in the Northeast?”

We were living in mill towns almost exclusively. So, we got to see what that devastation looked like on the ground and in the water.

So, I had two people who were very passionate about making sure I fell in love with the natural world.

And that place—that place I get to go back to as a writer—is where I am most at ease. I was a little girl who used to be allowed to run around on the back mountain without supervision for hours—hours and hours every day.

I used to put my recorder that I was learning to play at school, a couple of Tolkien books, and a sandwich in my backpack and just go out and try to find bunnies in the garden, try to find a rock to perch on.

That sense of falling in love with what was around me—so much so that it turns into activism, storytelling, parenting choices—really was just there with me from my childhood.

It wakes up every time I make art. It definitely woke up while I was making records—which, if anybody goes back and listens to them, are all about water and glaciers and explorers and feeling.

But when I was parenting, and I was starting to pass it on to my kid—that love of the natural world—I started reading Rachel Carson. I read her last book, which was published posthumously, and it’s basically an instruction manual on how to raise kids to be alive to the natural world so they don’t get afraid of it.

And it seemed really important to me that in every book I write—even if I’m writing about something really scary like sea level rise or eco-collapse, or the new projects I’m working on now about fire—I find a way into the story that doesn’t push people back out with fear.

If we can keep that love affair going and describe things in a way that offers an entry point—whether someone’s ever been to that place or not—then the best-case scenario is that someone who’s never been to Maine can read my book and have it come alive for them.

It’s the same with writing about the dead. It’s a kind of preservation. I need you to fall in love with something you’ll never experience.

So, yeah, that was super important to get into the language—to make sure that was as present as the urgent messaging or the deep meditation on my emotional landscape.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:06]
And you definitely do that without making it preachy. I mean, I felt like I fell in love with all these different animals—fell in love with that place. And then, of course, Dog Shit Beach—okay—and it was a beautiful place. I wouldn’t have expected that.

Eiren Caffall [13:21]
Yeah, I love that place so much. Dog Shit Beach was the beach we used to go to when I was a little kid. My grandmother would rent a cottage, and we’d go down there for a couple of weeks in the summer—sometimes just for the weekends—to visit her.

And it was the ’70s and early ’80s—I think we stopped going around ’80 or ’81. You know, the Clean Air and Water Act is almost my same age, right? It was ’71–’72 when those things finally, finally got codified.

So, I was going to the beach as a little kid when radial tires were still washing up on the shore, and there were still huge blooms of algae, extirpation of the critters that lived in the water, collapsing fisheries—all of that was going on because of unregulated pollution. It was just starting to be regulated and healed.

And yet that was the beach where every piece of my natural history—my understanding of the ocean—was conveyed to me. Every moment of picking up shells and identifying them, or seeing seabirds, or learning about horseshoe crabs, all of it happened in this very homely kind of environment.

It’s not a fancy beach. It’s not a protected area. It’s almost suburban in its way.

I think we talk about unspoiled nature like it’s the only place we’ll fall in love with the world. And then there’s everything else—places we’ve done all sorts of things to. But I think that’s a terrible way of talking about our world, and a terrible way of cutting off the possibility of falling in love, even with places that need healing.

That beach needs healing. That ecosystem needs healing. And it’s capable of healing, as all places are—with a few exceptions.

And I think when we start to reconfigure our sense of how thin the veil is between us and all that complexity—the complexity of the deep ocean—if you realize that the veil between me on this slightly crappy beach full of cottages and the humpback whales is nothing, that there’s really no separation between those two places?

Yeah. We can start to understand how to recontextualize what we think of as healing—what we think of as our relationship to the natural world.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:30]
Yeah, that’s making me think of all the things you put in the book. Two images are coming to mind as I think about how you wrote this.

There are the animals. Then there’s your personal story. Sometimes it blooms out into the science, then it comes back to the story. It loops back to the animals. There’s this almost circular nature to how it works. You know?

There’s a swirl. That’s the experience I had with it. And I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, it was so intricate and woven together.”

And yet someone could have taken me on that journey, and I’d be thinking, where is this going? and how is this going to come together? But you have a payoff. Yeah. There’s always a payoff in every single chapter.

What did you do? How did you approach that?

Eiren Caffall [16:22]
I wrote the book like seven times, because I knew I wanted it to do that.

There’s this real gift in being a songwriter that I have to acknowledge here. When you write a song—I sing my own music, I write my own lyrics—I would write something in private and it would make sense, and then I’d have the chance to arrange it and make it make sense with all sorts of dynamics. Right?

Somebody else brings in their genius, and the dynamic changes and the lyrics respond differently to those changes. Then you perform it, and you see what works in the room with a large audience. Then you record it, and you listen to how that recording of that particular song meshes up with all the other things on the record you’re making.

And you can change things in the room as you go—collaboratively. You have a large number of people forming opinions about what you’re doing. And you know—sonically, spiritually—there’s a moment when all the tumblers fall into place, and you have something that works as a cohesive whole. It takes the listener on an emotional arc.

Maybe they only listen to the song by itself—you should be able to let them do that. But also, when they see the entire picture, it needs to work.

And I think that when I came to crafting this book—and actually both books I’ve written—it’s a very similar process. I use those skill sets to say, “Okay, there’s one melody here. Here’s another. Here’s a third.” And they need to fit like that—like tumblers popping into place.

And I need to keep moving them around, thinking of them lightly as forms—almost musical forms—until they resonate correctly with the thing they’re next to.

So, if I am fascinated—and I am—by longfin inshore squid, and I happen to have seen them at a really seminal moment in my life, a moment of real rupture—old life, new life—and the squid happened to show up at that moment, but I don’t know anything about them?

The nice part of this process is that I can remember that story and keep it. Then I can go do the research and find out what their story is. Right? The squid has a story. I’m curious about it. I get to know it. And then I can see how that story fits into something I’m trying to cue the reader into—emotionally.

There’s also a spiritual valence to the story of animals, which is why I chose the bestiary, right?

Because that’s how the Church Fathers taught natural history and religion at the same time—by presenting the scientific information that was available, and the spiritual, metaphorical, lyrical, poetic story. Mythology. Syncretic information. All layered into the entry on that animal.

And I wanted my book to feel like that, too.

What that meant was a ton of trial and error—trial and error of structure, and trial and error of which animal goes with which part of what I’m trying to say—until I could feel it. Feel the vibration of it.

And then, once you’ve got those pieces, all you have to do is go through and scan for what takes you out, right?

One of my writing group members—this brilliant short story writer, Malia Dumbleton, whose work is amazing—she doesn’t have a book yet, but she’s got one in the works. Her work would blow your mind. She’s in my writing group.

She uses this sort of classic yellow highlighter technique for when she’s taken out of a piece—when she’s rushing through it with you. She goes through the whole book, thinking about where it isn’t working. Where I’m going too heavy-handed with a metaphor. Or “Oh, that metaphor works better over here.”

Then just scanning it.

It took six years of very intense writing—off and on—to make it flow the way it does. So, one of the things I tell my students is: don’t be impatient with the story.

Because when you do find a form, and it clicks? It’s liberatory.

You go, “Oh, I see it. I know how to put it into the right pieces,” like you’d make any other kind of art. Like you’d make a record. Like you’d make a painting. Or a good piece of pottery. You’re like, “Oh. Now it works.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:27]
I love how you describe this as a very collaborative process. There’s the original creation; there’s how your personal story fits—or juxtaposes—with an animal story. There’s thinking about what the reader’s experience is, thinking about how things fit together.

There’s what happens on the page, there’s the interaction between the page and your reader, and there’s the interaction between the page and you—and your own intuitive knowing. It’s all of it together.

And so I always ask people—because I think intuitive knowing is so important to this process, and yet it gets so dismissed, because we tend to live from the neck up, most of us, because of how our society works, and we’ve lost touch with what that is—when you had that intuitive knowing, like “Yes, this is it,” what did it feel like in your body?

Eiren Caffall [21:23]
Oh—just joy. I mean, I think that’s the thing. There’s that moment where you write a really great sentence, and you’re like, “Oh!” Like, that didn’t come from me.

It feels like this huge gift—just being open enough to channel something, some way that this animal wants to be understood, and I just happen to be the vehicle for that right now.

I was raised by someone who was very interested in utopian movements—and the Shakers, specifically. They have this great phrase: “Hands to work and hearts to God.” Right?

I’m a non-denominational person, but I consider myself very, very interested in spiritual questions. That’s laced throughout the book. I had an agent tell me this was a “stealth spiritual memoir.” I’m like, “Is it really that stealthy?”

But you know—that moment of being of best use to the story that wants to be told? That’s what it feels like in the body.

And I mean, I love this work because it’s play—because it’s the closest I get to my childhood self. But I also love this work because when the tumblers all click into place, and I can get out of the way of the ego—right? Your whole job is to get rid of the “I,” right?

To get rid of the ego, and the overarching “Thought Monkey” that comes in and says, “This isn’t written correctly,” or “My editor isn’t going to like that,” right? That Thought Monkey—that Thought Monkey goes away.

And if you’ve put in enough time, and enough patience with yourself, and enough faith in the work, there’s that sort of moment—like meditators describe—of suddenly feeling like you’re sitting in the palm of the Buddha. Right? Like—that’s it. You’ve got it.

And then there’s a lot of work after that moment. Because—I don’t want to say you have to chase that feeling—but I think there’s a discernment process that requires an enormous amount of patience and faith. That voice inside says, “I haven’t accomplished what I want to in the book yet. And I deserve more time. And the book deserves more time.”

We are bound up in capitalism. Capitalism is about productivity. Productivity is a huge part of the publishing world. And I think it’s really hard to be waiting for the book to settle into that space while people ask you, “Oh, you’re still working on that memoir? That’s cool. How’s it going?” Right?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [23:40]
Oh yes. We get these questions all the time.

And we’re so conditioned to this capitalistic idea that it’s all about products. And if you don’t have a product, then your work doesn’t have value. Right? So, why are you continuing to do this?

I work with writers all the time—I’m sure you do too, because you also teach writing—who want to hurry up and get it done. And oh my gosh, I’m a writer myself, so of course, I also want to get things done.

How are you teaching the writers you work with to have patience? Like, do you have an exercise? Or what do you tell them that helps them do that work?

Eiren Caffall [24:15]
That’s a really good question.

Right now, I don’t really have an exercise that specifically does that, but I taught a really wonderful weeklong retreat with Megan Stielstra for Story Studio last year. One of the things I loved about being together for a week was that we got to model the emotional and collaborative work of a community, and enough personal resilience to take our time.

It wasn’t about what we produced at the end of the week together. It was about inviting in the space—and inviting in the deep work and deep time—it takes to do this kind of thing.

The only other thing I do is that whenever I give a craft talk—whether at book events or public lectures—especially when it’s around craft, I try to tell my story to model the complexities of choosing the writing life. Especially around that question of productivity.

I don’t want to say gatekeeping, but there’s a lot of mythologizing around things like: “The book just came to me,” or “I understood how to do it,” or “I took one great craft course.” But none of that is actually how it works to make a book.

It’s every conversation you have with other writers. It’s your writing group. It’s your spouse. It’s your family.

Writers often want a formula to place their story into, and I’m a big fan of using things like Meander, Spiral, Explode and Native nonfiction to talk about how we can invent the structure that will best serve the story—if we take the time to do it.

So, I’ll describe how many different versions of my book there were—different shapes of it—even before I settled on the shape.

I talk about it as being like kidneys or bivalves. There’s a hinge—like a clamshell opening—or two kidneys joined by a central connector.

And I talk about how long that can take.

This is a product that will live beyond you—hopefully. Even if it goes out of print. Even if it only ends up in a few libraries—it’s available to be found. Out-of-print books get discovered by people all the time.

This is a message someone will find years after you’re gone.

So, if you can look at it as an ancestral project, you can take the part of you that’s afraid about time and set it aside. Take the part that’s afraid of commerce and set it aside.

And then we can be more genuine with each other as a writing community and say: It takes the time it takes. It takes the therapy it takes.

I was a single mother making no money from my writing—my serious writing—for the entire time I was writing these books.

Every time a writer like Cheryl Strayed famously writes about how broke she was when Wild got published—it’s so important. Because every time a writer says that out loud in public, it normalizes it for my students.

And I think we need to do that more for the kids we’re teaching in colleges and universities—to be able to talk about those bigger questions of timing and finance.

How are you going to take the pressure off the book so the book can become what it needs to become?

And how are you going to support yourself—with those communities, with the people who are your go-tos—who you can be real and open and genuine with, and not competitive?

Because I think—again—the arts can be so competitive. And one of the things I value most about my writing group is that we’re all deeply vulnerable with each other. We’re always talking about our failures and our successes and what’s painful about this work.

I think we need those models.

So, what I strive to do as a teacher is to put that out there—so the conversations I’m having with my students send them back into the world with permission.

Alyssa Altman talks about this too. She’s got a new book—literally called Permission—but it’s that exact idea: Permission to take the time they need to take. To find the grace. To understand there’s huge complexity in doing this work, and there’s no timeline except the one that’s internal to you—and the work itself.

You’ve got to trust it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [28:14]
You do.

And I think one of the exercises I give people a lot is a mantra exercise. I have them place their hand on their heart and say: I and my writing are on time. Yes. I and my writing are on time. Yes.

I think the more we say that and honor the fact that once these books are out in the world, they don’t belong to us anymore, we begin to understand—this time, which can feel endless, is precious. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.

So, you have all the control right now. Enjoy it.

I wrote a piece for Jane Friedman on the importance of playing with structure—how structuring your book in different ways can actually help you understand what the structure of your book really is.

You and I are going to have to geek out on all this some other time, because I was like, “Oh my gosh. We are so in alignment.” And I love that. I love when that happens.

But yeah—don’t put so much pressure on the work. Understand that it’s perfectly fine to have a job. Just—to have a job, period. And to have that job have nothing to do with writing.

Sometimes that can be really freeing. Because when you have a job that’s about stories, then suddenly your own writing can take on a very different experience—especially when things become a product, or when you’re dealing with other people’s stories.

So yeah—having that permission is so important. And being willing to just embrace the process.

And so, before I hit the record button, we were talking about trusting the process. I’m becoming an Akashic Records reader, and I do readings every morning. I was doing a reading and asking the question, “What should we talk about today?” In addition to the questions, I’d already shared with you.

And the response was: Algae blooms.

Yeah?

I was like, “Okay… that’s a part of the work. It’s something she wrote about.” But I didn’t know where it was going to take us.

So, let’s talk about algae blooms. Maybe how this relates to writing. We’re just going to see where it goes, because I think it can be really instructive to just do this live.

Yeah?

Eiren Caffall [30:22]
I think that’s great. And I think, you know, when I think about algae blooms in relation to The Mourner’s Bestiary, I actually think this is really instructive to the work.

There were really two pivot points where I finally understood the book I was writing. I had lots of pieces in lots of different forms for years and years, but I was terrified to write about my illness—because my family had been passing as “not sick” for, you know, four generations.

The patriarch would drop dead before 50, and nobody would have known he’d been working sick for a decade or more. And we didn’t talk about it, because of all the lost possible opportunities, and, you know—the basic eugenics of American culture.

So, coming to the point where I felt like I could include that in the book was wrenching. It happened because I wrote an essay I never intended to publish. I talked about it with a friend of mine who’s a filmmaker over dinner, and he said, “Great. I think I want to make a film of that. Can I read it?”

He went ahead and did it. The short film toured film festivals for over a year. I got to be in rooms with people who were, for the first time, connecting with my story—and the story of the environment—in a really alive and activated way.

And the emotions that were there for them were what I’d been trying to get to without being honest about my own story.

The other branching point was when I was really wrestling with structure and system. I submitted what I thought was an essay—about algae blooms and red tides—to Guernica. Total long shot. Their window opened; I sent the draft. I didn’t hear anything for over a year.

I didn’t assume it would ever be published. Still wrestling with the book, still stuck. And then, one of the editors from Guernica wrote to me out of the blue. She said, “We love this. We’d like to use it. Is it still free?”

Yes.

She teaches a class on this, and I think it’s brilliant. I’m so glad she does.

She started with my first draft—we did seven drafts of that one essay. It was a really complex story about algae blooms, pollution runoff, nitrogen in the soil and water, the history of red tides—which go back to pre-colonization in New England, something that was known about and worked with.

Now they have the potential to get out of control and poison shellfish, and that shellfish can poison humans. It’s something people on the coast understand. They fish and clam around it. But it’s got a very different valence than it used to.

That required me to research the Clean Air and Water Act, the invention of dialysis—those two things happened at the same time, both under the Nixon administration. I had to look into how the biology of those blooming creatures is understood in the scientific literature, and the history of my family in a new way.

And every time we got to a new draft, she pushed me to find more or to make the tumblers click into place a little better.

With every revision, I better understood what I was trying to do with the entire book. I realized—every chapter has to do that. Every chapter that didn’t do it got pulled out and reworked.

That editor’s time—that incredibly deep, generous process—helped me not only understand my voice as a writer, or even just that essay, but the entirety of my work and how it sings properly together.

It was like being in a recording studio with a really great engineer. They’re like, “Okay, this is how we organize it,” and you never hear yourself the same way after someone gives you that gift.

So, there’s the gift of the story, which I love—and I know people teach that essay, and I’m so proud of it still. It’s my third chapter in the book, basically.

But there’s also the gift of someone helping you refine your vision—giving you a masterclass in what your structure is. That’s a huge part of developing as a writer.

When those kinds of things happen, you just have to run with them. You have to let go of the part of you that’s like, “Oh God, I had to go through that seven times.”

I want her to teach other editors and writers how that happens. And she’s taken every one of those iterations and said, “See? We got closer. Not there yet. We got closer.”

Because that’s the nature of it. That’s the nature of the work.

We should all be so lucky to have that kind of deep attention and care put into helping us understand ourselves as artists in a new way.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:01]
Oh my gosh. I love that story—and I love this editor now.

I mean, there are so many times I’ve had publications where it almost terrifies me when something gets accepted and there are no changes. You’re like, “Oh… really? Really?”

I mean, sure, it’s worked—but to have that level of care brought to your work, where someone is loving the story into its truth, is truly a gift.

And I think as the writer, it can feel really frustrating—because people are like, “I want to get it done,” or “Why are you making me do this again?”

But in the end, the payoff is so much greater. And the payoff for you wasn’t just that you had this amazing essay that’s now taught and that you’re really proud of—it ended up being the linchpin that helped you understand your entire book.

Eiren Caffall [35:52]
The entire book.

And all the elements were there in the essay I submitted a year and a half before—but they weren’t doing the thing.

It was those outside eyes that helped change me.

And it made every other editorial conversation I had after that easier, because I had a template—something that really bloomed my work in this incredible way.

It’s a huge gift.

I mean, I won the Whiting Award for this book—and I have to be clear, I didn’t win the big Whiting. I won the wonderful Creative Nonfiction Writers Whiting, which is still big enough.

And it was the same year that Guernica also got a Whiting Award. They give them out for nonfiction publications too.

And I just kept saying that editor’s name over and over again. Her first name is Erin—and I’m forgetting her last name because I haven’t said it in a while—but every single time I could buttonhole someone from the Whiting, I was like, “I’m so glad you’re recognizing the Guernica editorial staff in this way.”

Because it was life changing.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:48]
See—it all came from talking about algae blooms.

That ended up being the linchpin of your entire book. And I love that.

And I also love how—see?—trusting the process. We just trusted the process. Neither of us knew where this was going to go. We just said, “Hey, we’re going to talk about algae blooms,” and didn’t know what would happen.

But we ended up talking about how your entire book came together, and how your book was a collaborative process.

And once again, that teaches us something that’s so foundational to the work you do—and so foundational to us as humans: that we are all interconnected, and all our experiences are interconnected.

And the way I talk about spirituality—because it can be like the big “S” word and people don’t want to talk about it—is that it’s just how you make meaning from the world and where you find hope.

Your books allow us to do both.

We find hope in them as we explore these really deep topics, and we see how we are not separate from the world around us—or from each other.

And I just want to thank you so much for doing that for us.

Eiren Caffall [37:55]
Thank you.

It’s the only work that I’m fit to do, and I’m delighted to be able to do it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:01]
Well, I would say the universe chose well for you—because you do it incredibly well.

And we could talk about this for the next five hours—I could totally see that.

Yes.

We do have to wrap up. So, I’m going to end with two questions.

We didn’t get to talk about your book launch, so I may have to have you back to talk about that, because I think that is huge. I think you’re going to have insights—especially six months from now. You’re going to know so much more, having gone through this with two books. I can’t wait to see what that is.

But—how are you taking care of yourself as a person with a chronic illness who has two books out?

I’ve talked to people who have one book out and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I have no idea how I’m going to do this.”

You’ve got two.

What are you doing?

And everyone always tells me, “Oh, I go out in nature,” or “I sleep”—which are simple things, but important. So, listeners, I’m not dismissing any of that.

But I’m curious—what’s the thing you’re doing that might surprise people?

Eiren Caffall [39:01]
I’m not sure it would be surprising, because it’s sort of in that same category, but I’ve been seeing an acupuncturist to take care of my kidney disease since I was diagnosed—basically two years after diagnosis.

So, we’re talking 30 years of going to see an acupuncturist.

And I had gotten to the point where I was going once, maybe twice a month for maintenance care. But it took a lot for me to recognize that I actually needed to go every week while I was on book tour.

I had to make sure I was scheduling all my travel around that—because that kind of care for my body is the only way I’m not going to get really sick, or fatigued, or have other co-emergent issues.

And the other thing I’m trying to learn how to do is recognize that I— as a person with some neurodivergence—do not thrive unless I can find really quiet spaces while doing this work.

Every time I go to a city, my instinct is to tell everyone I know that I’m there—to schedule dinner, coffee—that’s the perk of book tour, right?

But I can’t operate like that.

I struggle with things like AWP or big conferences, yes—because I need an enormous amount of downtime and private time.

Learning to recognize when I’m emotionally flooded by people’s energy—because I’m dealing with topics people are really struggling with right now.

And we were, even before this new administration. But now? We are in free fall.

I did an event in L.A. two weeks after the Palisades Fire. The entire room was people who had had to pack go-bags in the last two weeks.

Someone at the book signing said, “I love your novel. I’m so excited. I’ve asked my wife to read it. She probably won’t be able to—she lost her house.”

Knowing that that amount of energy is coming in, and that the amount of energy I’m putting out is just as significant—that means I have to spend much more time alone.

I’m structuring my tour so that I can recognize the windows when I need to shut it all down.

That’s been incredibly important for protecting what I’m able to offer—recognizing what fills up my battery and what depletes it.

Nature does a good job of that too, but I’ve had less time to be on the trail since I’ve been on tour.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [41:22]
I would imagine so—but I love that you’re thinking about your nature.

And I would say that we are kindred spirits, because I actually need a lot of alone time. And it’s been surprising for me how much I actually need. I’m getting more and more in touch with that.

Because the outside world—especially when you go off and do things—there’s this expectation: yes, go, do, be with. And we have to be with ourselves.

So, I love that you’re doing that.

Also—shout out to acupuncture. I have done tons of it. When I was actively very sick with Lyme disease, I would go every week to the free acupuncture clinic to get treatment. And it was amazing.

So, I can’t recommend it enough, and I’m so glad you do it.

Oh my God, and there are so many—oh my gosh—yeah, so many things that we need.

And nature teaches us.

Its cycles, all the ways it works—if we can pay attention to the natural world, which is another thing I do a lot—it’s instructive.

Yeah. It’s teaching us what to do, if we can pay attention to it.

Eiren Caffall [42:23]
I think that’s completely true.

And I think, you know, we don’t really understand much about the energetics of life on planet Earth.

There are starting to be some really great studies about things like how long a trail of pheromones from a predator can be picked up by a prey animal after it moves through a forest.

And you know, if there’s a modality you’re curious about—something to help restore you as you try to do this work and offer things to the world, especially the vulnerability of memoir—then try it.

If you want to try Reiki, or you’re like, “I think I need to try chiropractic,” or acupuncture, or whatever it is…

The restoration of the body, the restoration of the spirit, when you put this much out into the world—it’s real.

And we ignore it at our peril. Even if we’re not chronically ill.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [43:01]
Absolutely.

We need to pay attention to our energy. And we need to protect it—and respect the energy of all things around us. Not just humans, but all beings.

And one way we can do that is by reading your work—because it’s such a great reminder.

So, if people want to learn more about you, see where you are on your book tour, and—most importantly—buy copies of The Mourner’s Bestiary and All the Water in the World, what are the best ways for them to do that?

Eiren Caffall [43:28]
The best way for people to do that is through my Substack and the Linktree in my Instagram.

Those are usually pretty up to date with upcoming events, and both are good ways to find out what I’ve been up to.

I’m bad about promoting my events, so you kind of have to sleuth it out a little bit through my Substack.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [43:47]
Well, like how your book has a payoff—sleuthing you is also going to have a payoff.

Because people will get to see you, and they’ll get to hear you read, and they’ll get to learn more about your work.

And I invite everyone to do that.

And I just want to thank you so much for being on the show today. It has been an absolute delight, and I look forward to having another conversation with you.

Eiren Caffall [44:06]
Me too. Thank you so much for your time. It was an absolute joy.