Tag: books

“To tell you about the beauty, I must also speak of threat,” writes Greg Wrenn in Mother­ship: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. A complex exploration into personal and ecological trauma that also investigates alter­native healing and the cultivation of wonder, this book is as much a prompt for personal reflection as it is a call to climate action.

A survivor of childhood abuse, Wrenn spent decades in denial about and dissociating from his trauma. Much of Mothership is focused on processing relationships (especially that with his mother) and attempting to come to terms with his past. “It felt impossible to write about climate change without discussing my upbringing, to medi­tate on our future without thinking about my past,” he writes. “Denial leads many Americans to tell themselves pollution is a sign of progress and climate change is a hoax. It leads perpetrators to rebrand abuse as no big deal. … Whether we’re talking about abusers and victims—or people and the planet—it’s all part of what’s known as our extraction mindset.”

Built on a series of experimental eco-­essays that Wrenn composed before he fully undertook the work of trauma processing, Mothership is rooted in his formal education as a poet as well as a love of nature. A self-described citizen scientist, he first explored coral reefs on a fourth-grade snorkeling trip in the Florida Keys, and has taken countless diving trips since, including repeat visits to the Raja Ampat Islands of Indonesia, which he describes in detail. Still, when sharing these experiences in his initial essays, he says he “wrote from that place of [environmental] concern, but wasn’t ready to make it personal yet.”

This avoidance aligns with his earlier work. “For me, poetry was an escape,” says Wrenn. “I hid behind symbolism and metaphors. In the kind of poetry that I was trained to write, fragmentation was praised … and a traumatized brain struggles to tell a story about the past because it is in fragments. For some, it’s a craft element but, for me, it’s my lived experience.”

That shifted when Wrenn began participating in ayahuasca ceremonies as a way of coping with suicidal ideation and addiction that resulted from C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder).

“Ayahuasca helped me shift my identity from that of a poet to that of a prose writer, from a victim and an addict to someone empowered, who took responsibility for my brain … and in taking that responsibility, I realized I had a story to tell,” he says. Combining earlier essay themes with newer memoir work in Mothership, Wrenn reflects on the ways that silent meditation retreats, forest bathing, and medicinal use of psychedelics kept him alive and helped turn his attention to global concerns of impending climate collapse.

Indeed, after enduring ineffective attempts to address his trauma through talk therapy and psychopharmacology, Wrenn’s journey with ayahuasca led to dramatic change. From his first experiment with DMT, “in Tennessee at a multiday gathering of Radical Faeries, a group of back-to-nature queer folks,” to more focused medicinal use of ayahuasca at more than 30 private ceremonies held in places as varied as a Peruvian retreat center, the D.C. suburbs, the Amazon, rural Virginia, the Catskills, and—perhaps most stereotypical of contemporary ayahuasca culture in the U.S.—a Brooklyn loft. Wrenn reflects, “I was a patient, not a thrill-seeking tourist blind to the realities of cultural appropriation.” He expresses conflicted feelings about the colonialist power structures that are part of ayahuasca use among many, while nonetheless relying on these very structures for his own healing. However, he sees this as necessary after all other attempts to recover failed. “In healing myself, what awakened in me was the need for us to heal the planet,” he says. “So many of us receive healing from nature and it only seems fair that we should return the favor. … What we’re facing amounts to global C-PTSD.”

Alongside statistics about the severity of the climate cataclysm humans have wrought, Wrenn’s literary lyricism infuses Mothership in poetic phrasing and devices, including a chapter written as a letter to Adara, his “seventh or seventeenth great-niece,” a nod to the Iroquois’ Seventh Generation Principle. Here he grapples with one of the core ethical questions of our times. “As coral elsewhere is bleaching and dying, I’m here to document reefs that are still healthy and gorgeous,” he writes. “My carbon from my flights on this trip will melt Arctic sea ice about the size of my office.” Wrenn continues, “I did that to you, Adara. … No apology I could offer would be enough, but I want you to know I’m sorry. Sorry and ashamed you inherited the planet you did because of our inaction.”

Without looking away from the complicated and dark reality of climate collapse, Wrenn’s work is a project of inspiring wonder, sharing the beauty of reef ecosystems as a reminder to care. In this, he conjures coral textures and fleeting flashes of fish. He evokes an awe in the world, which might be more ephemeral than we know, if we continue to live with an extraction mindset.

“I tell myself, etch the shark and the coral into your mind’s eye. Hold these memories close like the philosopher’s stone for when you’re an old man and the ocean isn’t the same,” writes Wrenn. “Share them with anyone who will listen and believe.”

Drawing inspiration from The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, Fourteen Days is a “collaborative novel,” which brings to mind thoughts of exquisite corpses and shared Google Docs with a slew of anonymous animals. However, it is effectively a collection of short stories by 36 American and Canadian authors, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, and connected through a framing narrative by Preston.

Taking place between March 31, 2020, and April 13, 2020, Fourteen Days is set in an apartment building, the Fernsby Arms, on the lower east side of New York City. Here, a diverse collection of residents gradually come together to build community and support each other during nightly meetups on the building’s roof, where they drown their sorrows in cocktails, bang pots and pans for essential workers, and share stories from life before COVID-19. The building superintendent, Yessie—a Romanian-American lesbian with asthma whose father is in a nursing home when lockdown begins—frames the story as its narrator and supposed archivist, recording and transcribing the rooftop storytelling sessions of the building’s tenants as a way to pass the time and distract herself from the raging pandemic.

Though the residents were strangers before these rooftop sessions, they quickly develop a rapport and routine, even painting a mural together to honor their shared experience, their shared trauma. They are a multigenerational group, described as “the left-behinds.” Yessie reflects, “Naturally, anyone who could had already left New York. The wealthy and professional classes fled the city like rats from a sinking ship, skittering and squeaking out to the Hamptons, Connecticut, the Berkshires, Cape Cod, Maine—anywhere by New Covid City.” Still, there’s little desperation or struggle for day-to-day survival described among the neighbors, and they appear to be faring well with the Fernsby Arms to protect them from the circling sounds of sirens outside, the refrigerator trucks for the dead, and the tent hospital in Central Park, all of which Yessie notes only in passing.

Fourteen Days is annoyingly rose-colored at times, as the real-life stresses and trauma of lockdown only lightly impact the residents, who appear to be mostly protected from the world even as they acknowledge protests in the streets and nursing home outbreaks. Everyone pretty much agrees to mask up, making masks out of scrap fabric or Hermès scarves. Instacart and toilet paper jokes are made, but no one ever has to make do without. The cancellation of Eurovision 2020 appears to be as traumatizing as the pandemic itself for at least one character. Tensions rise enough for minor verbal sparring every now and then, but ultimately everyone forgives and forgets, positioned as being stronger for it in the end. Indeed, the only real tension in the book might come from a reader’s own memories of those two weeks of lived experience, mapped onto the characters and premise of this fictional version.

Of course, within the framing narrative, the reason for these simplifications is eventually explained, but the twist ending falls a bit flat and does little to alleviate the cognitive dissonance around this pandemic privilege. In a year when The Washington Post and other news outlets report that COVID-19 is once again surging in the U.S., this book feels, at times, like an attempt to forget or at least to remember something far better than what was.

As characters, the Fernsby Arms residents often seem flat, largely identified through referential nicknames and other shorthand nods at personality in lieu of character development. Many characters feel as though they were plucked out of a COVID lockdown stereotypes bucket, with little attention given to emotional motivations or history, though others have some depth and nuance. Similarly, the stories shared on the rooftop—including tales related to the Vietnam War, 9/11, the Iraq War, polio outbreaks, Trump’s presidency, ghost stories, and curses—feel like an exercise in checking off lists of trauma and coping.

Some of the individual stories contributed by the collaborating authors offer moments of inspiration and healing: De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s story of the love and pain experienced by a father and daughter; Tommy Orange’s about a man who seeks revenge after a hit-and-run, only to find himself forever changed by the realization of his own capacity for violence; Celeste Ng’s about a family matriarch full of superstitions and the ability to curse someone with nothing more than a piece of paper and an ice cube; Joseph Cassara’s story of rabbits and trauma bonding experiences. All of these examples startle the reader out of a stupor, wrestling with real questions of human existence in unpredictable and challenging ways. Unfortunately, these are in the minority, despite the excellent credentials of the contributing authors.

In the end, Fourteen Days succeeds as an escapist beach read that just happens to be set during two traumatic weeks in recent history. Despite the potential in the premise, it is a mostly forgettable collection of stories that feels off-key in a world still attempting to address the same public health issues as the book’s characters, despite the intervening four years. With little dramatic tension and stories that are inconsistent in their vast but often surface-level breadth, Fourteen Days is more of a novel-by-committee than a collaborative one.