INTERVIEW: Eiren Caffall, Author of The Mourner’s Bestiary

Interviewed by Amy Eaton

Eiren Caffall’s literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, The Mourner’s Bestiary, was released in October 2024.

I met Eiren in the early ’90s. We were both artists living in Ukrainian Village in Chicago looking for someone to play music with and while that didn’t pan out, our friendship stuck. We started a writing group over twelve years ago which has evolved into one of the most powerful communities in my life. (Find the people that love you when you’re up and when you’re down). I’ve known her through working in arts ed programs together, romances, marriages, births, divorce, mothering, hiring each other for gig work, health crises, and lots of pies. She is a paragon of grit and determination, as well as compassion and generosity.

Having the chance to talk about her work and the long road to well-deserved success was a delight.

Amy Eaton: This book took you a really long time to write. Twelve years ago, you came into our writing group after you had been working diligently on your novel which is now All the Water in the World.  Maybe you’d gotten another rejection from an agent or a query, but you announced, “I put the novel in a drawer! I am now writing a new book, and it’s called The Mourners Bestiary!” I was like the exploding head emoji, like I don’t even know how you can do that! How do you just do that after working on the novel for so long?

Eiren Caffall: I had the idea for Mourner’s and its title before I began working on the novel. But I date working on Mourner’s to the year that I applied to a residency in Canada, at the Banff Center for the Arts. It required a chapter of a project in progress, so I wrote what became part of Mourner’s. That really crystallized the voice and the structure of the book. I used animals as the chapter subjects. I started zeroing in on the center point of the story—parenting during ecocollapse as a person with an incurable genetic disease that I might have passed down to my kid.  The idea for Mourner’s is older than All the Water, and I worked on that book off and on for 13 years.

AE: Right. They both took a long time!

EC: The real crystalline center point of the memoir didn’t show up until I was ready to start writing about my chronic illness openly. That first chapter got me into Banff, where I met Naomi Klein and writers from all over the world, a science and nature writing community who were trying to change the way people thought about environmental catastrophe. Those people have an urgent mission to get information out to the public in a way that changes minds, changes policies, changes politics. When I landed in Banff with this very personal story—which was about how much I loved certain places and people and processing the grief of watching them be under threat—I thought that the way I wanted to write the book wasn’t correct, because I still needed to be able to write with this hectoring urgency of: “Wake up! It’s all going to crap!” But that wasn’t what I was writing.

AE: That is one of the things that I think is really exceptional about the book. It’s not strident. It just sort of opens up as you’re reading it. In the book your kid has these moments of discovery and wonder and then a sense of sorrow as he realizes “Oh! We’re gonna lose this, aren’t we?”

EC: It’s funny you say that. My kid is now 20, and as a birthday trip yesterday we went back to our favorite place in the world, which is the Field Museum. We saw an exhibition about cats, and there was a movie playing about conservation efforts to protect wildcats from extinction. It was extremely explicit about extinction and climate change. Sitting next to me was a kid of about seven. I realized how much the language around climate disaster, ecocollapse, and what we say to children has shifted since I was trying to parent my own kid. I wanted to teach my kid an outlier story back then—it’s broken, and it’s whole, it’s wondrous, we could lose it. I wanted to parent inside of the reality of loss. Now parents can’t avoid parenting that way. It’s not a theoretical question any longer—what the world is going to look like under climate disaster. We’re in it. It’s snowing in New Orleans because the jet stream has gotten wonky because the climate has changed, it’s burning in Los Angeles, the polar vortex I’m sitting in right now is part of that.

AE: I’ve known you so long that I’ve been getting previews. You said years ago, “Oh, yes, the West is going to be on fire.” I remember thinking, well that’s just kind of unimaginable. Yet, look at the last several years. It’s all sort of unimaginable until it happens.

EC: There are people who can imagine it. Go back and read Octavia Butler or Bill McKibben. People who’ve been imagining it far longer than I have. What changed for me was recognizing that I didn’t have to write a book that said, “Did you notice….?” I could just write my books knowing what I knew, proceeding as if everyone was going to catch up, because we are. We can’t help it. I hoped that if I took the argument out of the book, proceeded from what I understood, my audience would meet me there and they would feel relief. Because we can all see it. When we spend our time trying to convince people that what they’re seeing is real, we’re buying into a system of oppression. We can just step around the edge of that wall of oppression and say, “I see what’s on the backside of this.”

AE:  I think the book does that really, really beautifully. It doesn’t feel like it’s a manifesto. I do think it’s a powerful tool for changing hearts and minds on things environmentally because of that exact thing. Which is, I think, in the larger scope, not just the environment, but all the things we’re up against right now. Stop trying to convince the other side they’re wrong. Stop trying to convince people to see what they don’t want to see.

EC: I want to write books that show the interconnectedness of different oppressions. My life story shows the multiple ways in which the disregard for the planet, for the climate, for the ecosystem and its animals is the same type of disregard for disabled bodies, for different neurologies, for chronic Illness, for diversity of race and religion and gender, for the imbalance in power between men and women. It’s essentially a fear of death and loss and vulnerability that a patriarchal fascist cult will exploit in people.

The more we fear death, the more we hide from death, the more we believe somehow, that if we store up riches and become billionaires, we can escape death, the more we’re ready to take everything we can from every vulnerable entity, because their death doesn’t matter, but ours does, right? When we live in that system, it’s no different to decide that the pollution that’s going in from my factory destroying plankton is not a big deal. The person I’m denying health insurance to—that’s not a big deal, because it’s not me. My wealth, my attaining protection in a dangerous world is all that matters, even if what I do to achieve that makes it far more dangerous for everyone else.

And I think the more that we create narratives that demonstrate that my vulnerability is bound up with the vulnerability of plankton is bound up with the vulnerability of people in East Palestine, Ohio, is bound up with the vulnerability of a rich person in LA who just lost their house, is bound up with the people I’ll never meet across the planet—the more that we know that, the more that we explicate that in our art, the more that we create a narrative where we don’t feel, as people who are working actively against fascism, that we are isolated in a single identity or a single battle. Telling complex stories keeps us from becoming isolated and in fear. We each have to take on whatever thing we can do.

I’m a person with a chronic illness. I can’t be on the barricades in the way that I might have been able to when I was really healthy. I can write books. I’m not saying you have to take on the entire spider web of oppression. You can still work in your own corner and do the thing you’re good at. But understanding how interconnected everything is, is actually the key that turns us from isolated and siloed people without power into a collective voice, that creates power, that pushes back against oppression. When we tell stories like that, when we write that, we give people a template to think about themselves as part of a collective instead of individuals that are oppressed by a thing that’s never going to get any better.

AE: I know we come from the same lack of spiritual tradition. Ironically, there is almost something religious and holy about that.

EC: I agree, and it’s actually the first argument I ever had with my husband, when we were early in our dating life. I yelled at him over dinner in a really nice restaurant about how he couldn’t tell me that he wasn’t a spiritual person because the work he did connecting people to their power through the Union movement was absolutely a spiritual pursuit. And he was like, no, it’s collective power, it’s political. I’m an agnostic. I don’t have a wisdom tradition that I follow, and my first agent when we were discussing the book said to me, “This is a stealth spiritual memoir.”

AE: Interesting.

EC: I’ve read a lot of spiritual memoirs, they’re fascinating. My father was interested in people of faith without being a person of faith, explicitly. He studied utopian movements and made Shaker furniture, and so I grew up in curiosity about what brings people together to understand something larger than themselves.

I admire people who do have a specific faith, because I think that discipline is admirable and beautiful, even if it isn’t my particular path. You can’t ignore the sacred. You can’t ignore the holy. You’ll fail to connect with most of the planet. Most of the planet has a wisdom tradition. If you believe that only science and rationality will save us, you’re losing a very powerful organizing tool. You also miss out on things like going to your local Union hall and sitting and having a bad cup of coffee with somebody who is trying to protect their job, even though they’ve been having to take a lot of time off, because their kid has a spinal issue and has to be in the hospital all the time. Right? You do the work of protecting each other in a way which is, on the surface of it, very small. But by seeing each other we see how we’re all deeply in charge of each other’s welfare.

Religion, for all its faults, does that in a beautiful way, as a part of climate justice. So do small connections—you gardening in your own back backyard as an act of climate justice, joining a committee that is working to stop an AI facility in your hometown from being built as a part of climate justice. That siloing of, “Well, there’s an environmental movement over here, and then there’s everybody else.” Or “I can’t join the environmental movement because I can’t go hiking because I’m a wheelchair user.” We have to combat that. One of my favorite nature writers a couple of years ago, saw some of my hiking photos and said, “I really love that you love the woods. I don’t like the woods.” And she wrote one of my favorite books about living in environmental collapse!  I think it’s important to push away those categories that pretend that we can identify what it means to be a person fighting for the survival of the planet anymore. That’s a big part of why I chose to write about animals. We have this idea that if it’s not human we don’t have to empathize with it.

AE:  I do love the choice of animals in Mourner’s.  It’s like, very, very, very specific animals.

EC: I’ve made this joke a billion times that I would rather talk about fish than anything else. I wanted to find animals that demonstrated connections between humans and fish and ecosystems, to make it explicit and understandable. And that was served by the complexity of the stories of the animals I chose. Take the horseshoe crab, for example. We are so bonded to them because we have a collection system to find those animals, bring them into labs, use their blood as part of vaccine testing and proving. Without our relationship to them, our use of them, our extraction of them, but also our investigation of them, we wouldn’t have one of the most important tools for mass vaccinations on the planet.

AE:  I wonder who thought of that? Look at that weird horseshoe crab and see if we can get some blood out of it.

EC: I mean, scientists are amazing, and they think of all sorts of things that regular people don’t. There’s so much history in how we’ve related to the animals in the ecosystem. It may seem like, “Oh, well, yeah, there’s a horseshoe crab. My kid picks that up at the beach.” There is a personal relationship to it, and a personal narrative. And then there’s how our lives are altered by those connections most of us don’t think about most of the time. I hope that, with Mourner’s, I’m enabling people to get curious about what’s happening outside of human spaces, or even in their backyards. Like, “Oh, I see that monarch! I see less of them this year. What does that mean?”

AE: You and I have been in the same writing group for a good dozen some years. I’ve gotten to watch this whole process up close, which has been very exciting. You got told “No,” a lot with this book, “this is beautiful, we don’t know how to sell this. I love what you’re doing, but I don’t know what to do with it.” But you just kept going and going and eventually pieces of it were published in LitHub and Al Jazeera. Then of course, you won the Whiting and then boom! Both the memoir and the novel were released within three months of each other, which is kind of insane. I mean. Besides knowing you’re a Taurus …

EC: I’m very stubborn.

AE:  Yeah, and that stubbornness…

EC: Helps, it helps!

AE: How do you not just throw up your hands and say, well, I guess this isn’t for me, maybe I will go buy a goat farm instead. Twelve years is a long time, Eiren.

EC: I’m not gonna pretend that I was just head down, absolutely happy just to be asked to be a writer by the universe. That is not a narrative that I would ever bring to any place, but certainly not to a readership of creative nonfiction writers for whom the journey is mostly like this. Right? It’s mostly, Oh, I had an idea! I think I’m stretching beyond what I’m capable of doing as a writer. I’m being told it’s not working. I’m being told lots of different reasons why it’s not working. I’m being told even the genre we work in—like if you go to somebody and say I’m a memoirist? Well, good luck, and also nobody buys memoirs from people who aren’t famous anymore.

I think there’s a real vulnerability when we start to do a high wire act of: I’m going to tell this story, and no, I think I should tell it like this because this is who I am. This is how my brain works. This is what I’m interested in. We can get shot down so many times that we can start to believe that the conventional wisdom is more correct than our own internal compass about what we want to write. Which does not mean don’t take criticism. Editors are the best people in the universe! It’s a deeply collaborative job, what we do, and finding the people to be in a writing group was part of what kept me going. I could come every month to hang out with you all, and we could talk about what wasn’t working, and I trusted your readership, even though we’re all very different. I trusted that you were willing to hold something really precious, that I was trying to work towards. And also, if you get the gut feeling that somebody is really good at their job, and really right about what they know, but not right for your project, you deserve to find somebody who’s going to understand the weird, tender thing you’re making and champion you through the painful process of seeing whether anybody will publish it or resonate with it.

For the memoir, I started submitting it very early, when I only had a couple of chapters and a book proposal. I got an agent out of that pretty quickly. Didn’t feel quick at the time, but it was pretty quick, and the agent said to me, “I mostly represent science writers and more straight narrative. Do you think you can do that?” And I was so desperate to have a win I said, “Sure, I can learn. You know more than I do. Let’s try to make this work.”  I then spent three years writing and rewriting and rewriting the first three chapters and the book proposal to fit into that mold. And when finally, after three years of trying to fit the book into the mold that it was never going to fit into, I broke up with that really good agent during the pandemic, with absolutely no prospect of another agent and just was like, I have to write the book that I would write if I was un-agented, and nobody was coming to help me. If I can do that, I will find the person who knows how to sell that.

I found my second agent, Julia, Lord, who is fantastic and who I picked because when I was looking at her catalog of the people that she’d represented, I found the weirdest, quirkiest stuff that she’d managed to get into the New York Times, or that she’d managed to move into being Pulitzer finalists. Because she wasn’t trying to control or contain the voices and the specificity of the writers she was working with. It still took an enormous amount of work after finding the right person to kind of unlearn a lot of the mistakes I’d been making, trying to get the book to fit into other people’s ideas.

AE: Yeah.

EC: And, then I got lucky, you know—I broke my leg. I had sold the book. Then I broke my leg and was bedridden. I went to my editor, Gina Frangello, and said, “I know I sold you this book and you love it. But would you mind if I tried another pass at it?” She said yes, and that permission—the freedom I felt, having sold it, having an editor that I trusted, having time on my hands—helped me take all of this material and think about an ideal reader. Not an agent, editor, publishing house, but a reader. I was editing the novel at the same time, which was really helpful because I could borrow things I was learning in that book as a writer about how to write a propulsive story.

AE: I can see it here. Yeah.

EC: I’d never really thought of it as something that could be propulsive and emotional. And I love many memoirs that do that. I just didn’t think I could do it. When I finished the last draft, that was the version I used to apply for the Whiting—the first fifty pages that my editor had never seen. Gina looked at it and said, “This is better. I don’t think the publisher understands that they didn’t buy this book, but this is a better book than what they bought.” Most people don’t have the freedom to do that. I wouldn’t do it that way again. I would get to the propulsive, fully realized book before I tried to sell it.

AE: And you would not break your leg.

EC: And I wouldn’t break my leg. But the freedom was a huge gift. And then, very shortly after having Gina’s excellent feedback, the Whiting came and put a stamp of approval on it. They told me that they thought I was creating a new type of nature writing.

AE: That’s huge!

EC: I wasn’t setting out to do that. I wanted to make something emotionally compelling that tricked people into reading a full third of the book that was extremely well researched scientific information about ecological collapse. When people talk to me about it—and this was the goal—they aren’t talking about the science.

AE: No, they’re talking about the emotional stuff in it.

EC: The feelings. The people. But they learned the science, too. Also, you asked about ‘how do you keep going?’ and we made a joke about me being a Taurus. But the other thing that kept me going was that I was surrounded by a community that believed in me as an artist, even when I was really broke and in dire straits as a single mother with a chronic illness that was beginning to disable me. Working freelance. Paying for expensive health insurance. Hustling five or six jobs. Trying to write these books and research them without any institutional net at all, without a book contract, without a grant, without a job in academia.

AE: That was a conversation I think you had with one of the book events you did. Where   you talked extensively about how difficult it was to do the work until you had that social safety net. And how many people do not have that social safety net.

EC: I’m not saying I wasn’t making good work when I was a single mom.

AE: You were! Absolutely you were.

EC: I made a record album. I was publishing essays. I was performing live. I was still hustling as an artist, even while I was in a position of deep vulnerability, so I never lost sight of that as part of my identity. I was raised by artists. I lived in a community of artists here in Chicago—very workaday about being artists until they die, even if they’re never famous, working class art making. There are very few places in this country where you can still afford to do that. When I landed here, and for most of my career, this was a place where you could have a day job as a librarian and still make rock and roll in the evenings, the Chicago way. I didn’t feel less than because I was making my living writing ad copy or textbooks. That kind of community gives you permission, recognizes your lifelong identity and how it changes depending on your age and your circumstance. Can you not write right now because your mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and you’re at the hospital every day? You deserve a community that says, “You’re still a writer, go, take care of your mother, we’re here when you get back.”

If you have that, you can sustain yourself through periods of great discouragement.  And also, I couldn’t have the time to finish my projects to their highest level until I was lucky enough to meet my second husband, who is a union organizer, and has union health insurance—a ripple effect where I could get the best nephrologist and get on a wonder drug that reduced my chronic pain by 40%. I could afford to take time to go do residencies, have somebody to help raise my kid, a partner who sees me as an artist, because he’s also a poet, so he knows how essential it is for me to create. We’re really embarrassed with each other when projects are stalled, when somebody asks how the book’s going.

AE: Yes.

EC: And you’re like, “I don’t know. I’m in year three of it. What do I do next?”

AE: Truth.

EC: But I think if we were more open with each other we’d have more generous, loving, supportive places where we’d get more work done because, God forbid you bring up how expensive it is to be a single parent in a room full of people who have fantastic achievements in the literary world. There’s a real freeze response like—we don’t say that out loud.

AE:  I work a lot in storytelling and the Live Lit world as well as with writers. But that brings up a lot of classism – just having the time to devote to going to events, paying for tickets because lots of stuff is not free. If you want to improve what you’re doing and take a workshop, can you afford to?  My friend Lily Be talks about that. There’s a lot of gatekeeping. Who controls the narrative of what voices, what stories we hear? As a producer of a show, I try to be mindful of that.

EC: A lot of unwillingness to admit privilege. I’ve been on both sides. My parents met in the film business, and they left the film business because they didn’t have financial support to stick it out. There are beautiful objects and films and sculptures and books that we won’t ever have, because we insist that the safety nets that are there for people aren’t there. I don’t have that net if I take a big artistic leap and fail. It’s embarrassing.

AE: Right.

EC: I don’t want to be embarrassed about that anymore. I have a net right now. It’s enabling me to do this. I never feel completely secure, because I know how perilous and mercurial life is. But while I have it, I don’t want to pretend I don’t have it. I want to say to young writers, “Oh, yeah, that person who had success right out of the gate at twenty? Were their parents in publishing? Did they have grandparental money, and we just don’t know about it?” I don’t want to shame anybody for that.

AE: Right? That’s wonderful. That’s lucky.

EC: Yeah, it’s really lucky! Some of my friends have plenty of money, and really great spouses who support them, and I don’t begrudge them, because I want the art they’re going to make. I just also want the art that my friend who’s disabled and can’t afford rent is going to make. I want their art, and I want the art of the wealthy. I want our system to stop making us choose.

AE:  All right. So last question. In five sentences…

EC: Have you met me?

AE: I have. In five sentences—how do you think the new regime that we are now living in is going to affect the work of your book and your work in general?

EC: I’m not gonna try to think in five sentences, because I can’t. But I’ll try to keep it short.

AE: I just wanted to see if you could do it.

EC: Oh, I can’t! You know that. The first draft of my novel was 160,000 words. Come on.

AE: Okay.

EC:  Well, it’s gonna make everything harder. And it’s gonna make everybody who’s vulnerable more vulnerable. Every activist that I know feels like they’ve just had their entire toolbox stolen and thrown down a pit. It’s gonna take a lot of work to try to get them back out. And all the people that are fighting are fighting beautifully, brilliantly, bravely, but it’s going to be an incredibly difficult slog. I want us to sit in mourning together now, because I certainly couldn’t function on Inauguration Day. I think it’s okay for us to sit with all the things we’re gonna lose. But I also think it’s going to change how we see interconnectedness and building power.

I think we’ll see how much we all are in the same boat—whether the activism that we do is around settler colonialism, Indigenous land rights, immigration, reproductive justice, disability justice, or climate justice. The idea we can see any of those things as separate—there is absolutely no way to respond to rising fascism without recognizing that we’re all working towards the same goal. Artwork that says that—explicitly or subtly, that teaches us this way of interconnected thinking—binds us together as a collective working for the same level of liberation from fascist control. That’s the kind of work we need to produce now. I wrote a book to make us feel that in our bones and in our bodies with a lot of tenderness. That’s the kind of book I want to read now so that I have strength to get through this.

AE: Alright, then.

EC: There we go. That was not five sentences.

AE: It was not.

EC: It’s really been a joy to talk to you, especially considering that we have this long, beautiful relationship.

AE: Well, it is always a joy to talk to you.