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