We are in a complex and delicately balanced relationship of connection to everything else on the planet. I think of it as one of the gifts of neurodivergent thinking: this idea of spider web thinking, where we begin to recognize, write into, and speak into the complex interdependence and interconnection of every gesture that we make on the planet. Most storytelling that I really respond to, whether it's from my own culture or from previous civilizations, acknowledges that we are in this complex relationship where every gesture we make is connected to the lives of every other creature on the planet.
The more narratives we allow to be complex in that way and interconnected, the more we begin to change our brain chemistry around how we protect ourselves and everything that is in relation to us. The more that you have that evolving relationship with it, that's dynamic and alive to the moment you're in, and that's not afraid of the feelings of fear, hopelessness, grief, or pain that attend paying close attention to the world as it is evolving around you, the better we are able to be flexible in the relationship we need to form with fixing what we can and holding onto what we have.The more we rely on that black-and-white thinking of either being in grief or being out of it, where we have a loss and we have to move on, or we don't and we're fine. The more that happens, the more difficult it is to flow into what we really need in terms of emotional flexibility to get through the staggering changes that are starting to happen regarding climate issues.
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion, Guernica, The LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera, and the anthology Elementals. She has received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and a 3Arts Make a Wave grant. Her work includes her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary, the short film Becoming Ocean that she made with Scott Foley, and her novel All the Water in the World.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Your writing really makes me reflect. There is a kind of biblical or mythological tone, with a character called Amen. That makes us think of “In the beginning was the Word.” This is really the importance of one element of the novel: the importance of having a museum log, a water log where you're preserving the things that can be preserved, that won't be washed up. We have to hold this knowledge. There is some speculation that maybe we, if we go back to our old mythologies, if we go back to the Bible, we read these stories of the Great Flood. We hear these stories of original sin and leaving the garden. There are alternative readings on that. Was this because of disrespecting Earth and its bounties? If we don't learn those lessons from history, if this has happened before and we just keep on repeating these things that we don't learn from these stories—ways of describing previous ice ages.
EIREN CAFFALL
I was raised by a father who was obsessed with utopian communities. He made Shaker furniture, studied, and had a huge library of all these utopian projects within American culture. I was also raised in a family that was very interested in talking about not only the ways in which we, as human beings, keep records over the course of our existence on the planet from a European perspective. My aunt is a medievalist, and she wanted me to understand the ways in which these religious communities that survive great change within human culture are the places that record the memory of previous civilizations and kind of hold on to them for the next generation.
But also, I’m very aware that I'm writing as an American. As an American, you have to recognize that you’re living on land that has experienced, within the last 300 years, a massive apocalypse of the people and the way of life that existed here before colonialism came to this part of the world. When you tell the story of America, I think it's an instinct for many writers, especially those of us in speculative fiction, to recognize that we are revisiting a story that has existed before. When we tell a story about collapse, we have to take into account the ways in which the Christian history of the settlers and the colonial project maps over the incredible human history of the retention of information, the response to shifts in culture, and the possibility of change.
What we hold onto when the worst thing happens to the established culture that works, functions, and makes sense to the people involved is essential. I couldn’t write the book just from the perspective of the museum or the logbook because we have the privilege of being able to see and understand this larger human project of trying to hold onto what matters most.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
And who decides what matters the most? We’re living in a moment where the past is inaccessible. We’ve lost that pristine Earth where we lived more in harmony with the planet, the way non-human animals do. The past is inaccessible, going back to that Garden of Eden or whatever that foundational myth is. At the same time, the future is uncertain. So how do you approach writing into a time like this?
CAFFALL
We are in a complex and delicately balanced relationship of connection to everything else on the planet. I think of it as one of the gifts of neurodivergent thinking; it's this idea of spider web thinking, where we begin to recognize, write into, and speak into the complex interdependence and interconnection of every gesture we make on the planet.
When I'm thinking about the cultural story of the pristine Earth, I think it tells a lie that still places us in kind of a very Christian-centered perspective of there's us and then there's everything else. Most storytelling that I really respond to, whether it's from my own culture or from previous civilizations, is storytelling that acknowledges the complex relationship where every gesture we make is connected to the lives of every other creature on the planet—non-human animals, more than human life forms, plants, and the ecosystem itself.
It's trying to present as much as possible narratives and language, thought processes for us to absorb as people that state emphatically and with a lot of joy that every action we take has another action. It's that interconnectedness that we lose when we have a story of humans that can either do wrong or right, and then everything else.
It's the integration that we need to take in. This idea is not new; it’s not original to my work or the work of other writers doing this kind of work right now, but I think it's fallen out of how we think about ourselves in relation to the planet and the culture we've built. The more narratives we allow to be complex and interconnected, the more we begin to change our brain chemistry around how we protect ourselves and everything that is in relation to us.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
You talk about your different modes of essays, filmmaking, music, and storytelling. You also wrote a memoir that talks about different kinds of grief. It’s a personal literary memoir, and it’s also a meditation on grief through the collapsing marine ecosystems. They say grief is a teacher that walks in silence. For you, what is the relationship between despair and the truth, illuminating something otherwise not visible?
CAFFALL
This narrative that we have, that there’s an ecosystem, and it's either broken or whole, is part of the problem. We either have ruined it, and we can just keep ruining it, or it’s fixed, and we can’t really touch it anymore. Those binary relationships to how we regard the planet are limiting.
When we start seeing ourselves in a constant relationship to the gains and losses of conservation, you can have a great win, and things can get a lot better, and then be reversed by politics or changes to the environment. The more we have that evolving relationship with it—dynamic, alive to the moment we’re in, and unafraid of the feelings of fear, hopelessness, grief, or pain that come with paying close attention to the world as it evolves—the better we can be flexible in the relationship to fix what we can and hold onto what we have.
The reliance on black-and-white thinking of either being in grief or out of it, having a loss and moving on, or being fine, makes it difficult to flow into what we will need in terms of emotional flexibility to get through the staggering changes regarding climate issues.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about the world and respecting it. The whole world is alive, not just what we benefit from. This search for beauty, memory, and preservation of culture and nature—is that also a kind of healing process? Is it an act of resistance?
CAFFALL
Absolutely. It’s an act of resistance. It's an inborn response to a disease diagnosis in youth. I was in my twenties when I found out that I carried the same disease as my family. It shifts one’s thinking into a real sense of legacy and generations: What am I inheriting? What am I passing on? It’s also about maintaining and deeply appreciating the beauty of life when you’re being told it’s going to be cut short or complicated.
We’re all in that moment right now. We've been given this complex diagnosis about what could happen with the worst-case scenario regarding the climate, global warming, eco-collapse, and extinction. We can take that in and recognize it. There are two responses: one is to shut down emotionally, stop seeing beauty, and think only of use; the other is to open up to the gift of mortality and fragility.
Proximity to loss provides clarity. The incredible glory of every moment on the planet becomes visible when you observe, feel, and experience. There’s a lot of fear and alarm in the global response that’s appropriate, but if we stay there, we’re just as close to despair as someone in denial. Acknowledging fear and grief, while flexibly moving through it, enables us to see what we have that is worth preserving, still beautiful, and thriving.
As a writer, what I need often is to go to the woods every week or to the ocean a couple of times a year. I just came back from crossing the country and visiting deserts, mountains, and hot springs, seeing the complexity of the natural environment. If the lens says it's all doomed, then I can’t fully participate in the glory of what is here. I can see what’s lost, and I can stay in the moment to see what is still available, even with a disease.
It's a discipline that rewards us with the ability to hold both fear and grief while being gentle with it, recognizing what remains available and glorious in human experience.
It's interesting, as a musician, that I'm still working on a new record and starting to think about recording. It’s written. What’s true about me as an artist is that I'm constantly grappling with the same questions in every project. Much of my music revolves around water, family, love, loss, and holding on to what's glittering in the darkness.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Do you see yourself as an activist, writer, artist?
CAFFALL
I think the project of being an artist is an activist practice. I think a lot about Toni Cade Bambara’s idea that the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. When I sit down to write and tell complex stories, even fictional ones, I'm trying to put a story on the page that enables people to gather strength for the complicated work they can do.
The activists today, whether for a lifetime or for a season, need narratives, stories, and art that refill them with passion for their work so they can go back out and do it again. My husband, who is deep in the labor movement, recharges by reading poetry and cultural criticism. I became aware early that I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist, as I'm more interested in the big picture and how every piece of inquiry connects rather than working alone.
I’ve felt a lot of grief about that, as I love scientists and their vital work. There are days when my work doesn’t feel as vital as activism or science, but I keep coming back to the necessity of striving for something, yearning for the collective human experience.
The beauty, poetry, and complexity of storytelling remind us what we're trying to protect. This is as essential as the forests I walk in or the right whales I observe from the boat.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Yes, it’s fascinating to hear about your family. Let's go back to all the water in the world, Nonie’s family, and their relay race.
CAFFALL
We have stories throughout human history of people making decisions to protect. I spent a lot of time imagining what their rules for life would be, ensuring that even if the worst came to pass and the museum was destroyed, the knowledge of what was in it could be passed on. This logbook could be wrapped in oil cloth and taken north, where it would wait for times when things can be put back together again.
The knowledge, understanding, and complex relationships with what they protect are very important. They use things from the collections only as necessary while trying to protect and record as much as possible. The relationship of those people to imagining a future when things can be restored is critical.
They are all trying to hold on and gift the next generation with the ability to rebuild, to imagine a society coalescing again after the end of the world. This was incredibly important to me because I don't want to just present a dystopian story where everything is terrible. I want to address my fears regarding global happenings while grounded in the reality that humans do rebuild, even in the face of stark circumstances.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Can you reflect a bit on your teachers or mentors, what they passed on to you, and what you’d like to pass on to young people? What would you like them to know, preserve, and remember?
CAFFALL
Every project I’ve worked on has been collaborative. While I may be the author on the title, I'm surrounded by readers, editors, and scientists whose ideas inspire me. This same relay race of knowledge and understanding applies to the artist's life as well. We can't operate effectively within the sense that if I don't do it myself, it isn’t really me or art.
We must see ourselves as part of an ecosystem of vulnerability and complexity. The more we work within that framework, the better our work becomes, and the more relevance it holds for more people and for more time.
