“Unveiling Grief: Eiren Caffall Reveals the Hidden Wisdom in ‘The Mourner’s Bestiary'”
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.
