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