The Web That Has a Weaver: Writing Personal and Science Narratives During Ecocollapse

I came up with the title The Mourner’s Bestiary years before I knew how to write it. It was a decade ago, when I worked as a freelance blogger for Tikkun Daily and could send them an essay every month about whatever topic I liked in the realm of the environment and spirituality, animals, parenting, and my feelings about the age of ecocollapse. I was a young mother with an incurable genetic kidney disease and the daughter of a woman working at the front lines in the EPA. 

(4 Lessons Learned Writing a Braided Narrative.)

I was traveling with my kid at the time, sitting next to a tidepool on an island in the Gulf of Maine, the planet’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and watching them play with periwinkles, loving the place without being aware of the danger it was in, and I thought, I’m writing a bestiary, a book about animals that is about their loss, their symbolism, and the science of what is happening to them. The story of my family, my body, and my life was an absolute afterthought, and it remained so for the 10 years it took me to complete my research and learn what kind of book The Mourner’s Bestiary had to be.

I was born into a family with Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) that had killed almost everyone before the age of 50. I was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 22. Like my family, I was terrified to be public about PKD for a very long time. We’d suffered the discrimination and the losses common to the disabled and chronically ill, the loss of work, relationships, health insurance, life insurance. 

Instead, I made art that leaned into science and landscape, a gift of my training at the feet of my scientist mother. And then, after I came up with the title to the book, I had an accident related to my illness, on that same island, from which it was difficult to recover without help. My friends organized a fundraiser. Finally, my PKD was public, my story felt urgent, and it was impossible to spin a narrative web without weaving in that part of the story.

I began weaving it more openly. I wrote the essay “Becoming Ocean,” a meditation on living with an incurable disease, the lessons I’d taken from generations of my family, how those lessons could help us all live with climate collapse. That essay became the short film Becoming Ocean which toured national and international film festivals. My story resonated with those audiences and what had felt private, dangerous, shameful, became a bridge to their stories, a way to talk about everyone’s fear of the worst things in their bodies or in the places they lived in and loved.

From that moment on, it was clear that this kind of weaving was essential for me; understanding exactly how to do that was a different matter. It took so long to write this book because it is time consuming to understand a complex story, tell a complex story, sell a complex story. When I first pitched it to agents and editors, the writing was praised, the urgency of the message was acknowledged, but the plan to weave my story with the story of the ecosystem gave everyone pause.

My illness is not an environmental illness. It isn’t exacerbated or cured by the ecosystems or animals I write about. I simply exist, living with a deadly illness, on the shores of oceans at risk, loving those threatened ecosystems. Asking the reader to see the connections between those things requires changing how we write about collapse. It is the most important thing we can communicate as writers in this moment: The web is real, we are all connected, no story is removed from environmental collapse any longer.

It is essential to make the connection between vulnerable bodies and vulnerable ecosystems; we are all linked, it is all linked. If we are open to it, we can find the evidence of those links in language, poetry, symbolism, personal narrative, personal obsessions, and science. Our revelation of the evidence as artists can help move our readers forward. Finding that evidence requires patience and serendipity, sometimes in short supply if we worry about what will sell, catch fire, go viral, or resonate with a population of readers maxed out on stories of disasters both personal and environmental.

When I understood at last that my job was to weave this web, I dove deep into the science and histories of the places I was writing about. Working outside of institutions, I joined my university alumni association for research access, used connections to interview people at the sources of the stories. I spoke with a right whale researcher about the population crisis in the species, and in that single conversation, I began to see that the extinction threat he talked about was another strand on the web that connected to the way my family understood our 150-year relationship to our extinction. 

I researched the red tides from my childhood and realized that estuaries like the Sound operate like kidneys filtering toxins, and red tides another thread in the web connecting to the poetics of kidney failure. I found connective tissue that led from the legislation that protects kidney patients—giving them what has been referred to as America’s socialized medicine for a single organ—and its passage within the same set of legislative innovations that brought us the Clean Air and Clean Water acts and gave birth to the EPA. In the decade after the passage of these laws, my father would benefit from protected access to dialysis and transplantation and my mother would go back to school to support our family, eventually working for the Massachusetts state EPA. My narrative and these facts were inseparable.

I’d touch one strand of the web and the whole thing vibrated. And when it did, even if the vibration was more lyrical than scientific or historical, I followed the science deeper, learned about myself as I learned about fish and water. The web shaped my narrative, it resonated with the way my neurodivergent brain worked, sometimes referred to as spiderweb thinking. It changed how I understood our family story. 

I saw the connections between what was happening to us and what was happening to the ecosystems we loved. It changed my book. It changed how I thought of what it takes to live through collapse. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken the time, prioritized complexity, done the research, and trusted that the story I wanted to tell was essential, even if it was hard to sell. The lyricism, the idiosyncrasy, was a truth as well, and a thread that could lead the reader back to the central story I was revealing.

I tell students to follow what they can’t let go, to write the weird thing, to allow their minds to stretch out, to get so wildly specific that no one else could tell the story. I am obsessed with fish. I love to swim. I grew up on the Atlantic. My parents were bohemians. I made record albums. I have a disease that is killing me. 

These things shouldn’t go together in a narrative of a life, but they must. They shouldn’t make for a compelling book, but they do. The science matters, the research enlarges what you know, your story shapes and is shaped by the dynamics of a complex planet whose story is also yours. Weaving the web requires your confidence and curiosity—and the world’s great need for your unique perspective—guide you towards the truths that, once reached, seem inevitable. 

Check out Eiren Caffall's The Mourner's Bestiary here:

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