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