Hello Loves,
I am sending out this rare two-in-one-week Substack for the best reason in the world: I won a 2023 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant for my forthcoming memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary (Row House Press, October 2024)!
I have been keeping this secret through almost two months of delicious and challenging silence while this incredible organization prepared me and my fellow award winners for one of the biggest celebrations of our professional lives. They are incredible, the Whiting Foundation folks and my fellow awardees both. I am so deeply honored and overjoyed to have found myself here. It is an overwhelmingly good thing, and I can finally share it with you all.
Today, awardees and staff will meet each other for the first time. Tonight, there will be a party. Tomorrow, we have a lunch. At the end of the week, I fly home to Chicago. So much celebration.
In the last two months, I’ve had the privilege of the Foundation’s support preparing for this week, so many thoughtful details, the plane tickets and hotel room, the thoughtful way of talking about my work in the winner’s chapbook, care about language and logistics both. It has also given me time to adjust a little bit to the overwhelm of the good news. If you know me, you know I’m excellent in a crisis. Disasters are my business. I’m comforting in times of loss and regret and sorrow. Joy? Still working on it.
I saw the call come in from Courtney Hodell, the Director of Literary Programs at the Whiting Foundation, on a very busy Thursday back in October and didn’t have time to call her back until the following morning. When I reached her, she was upstate, and delivered the news from beneath a pine tree in the driving storm that flooded Manhattan and made everyone talk about climate collapse for a few days. Like I’ve said before, sometimes the timing of weather events and catastrophes feel a little on the nose in my career. It also a day that had the editor for my novel of the flooding of New York The Weight of All the Water in the World (Saint Martin’s Press, 2025) emailing me how relevant that storm was to the work on that other book. Serendipity is welcome, even when it is difficult.
I think I left my body a little while I spoke with Courtney, hovering just above my office floor as she told me what would unfold, then read me some of the comments from the judges.
For those of you not familiar with the Whiting Foundation and their awards, since 1985 they have given out a famous yearly prize for emerging writers, the Whiting Award, which has been won by Alexander Chee and Megha Majumdar. Many winners go on to win additional prizes that would knock your socks off.
They also fund writers with the Creative Nonfiction Grant awarded to writers who have sold a book but are in the final, and often expensive, stages of perfecting that last draft, doing research, fact checking, travel, or simply letting go of other work responsibilities as they complete what is often a multi-year Herculean task. Here’s what the Whiting Foundation says about it:
“The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction. The Whiting Foundation recognizes that these works are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The grant is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving recipients the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition. Learn about the grantees below and explore their work in our chapbooks.”
Past winners of the Creative Nonfiction Grant include Patricia Evangelista and Sarah Broome and too many more brilliant people to mention. It is incredible company in which I find myself.
So, as I left my body, talking to Courtney that Friday back in October, I could hear her say, “The judges felt that you were creating a new school of nature writing.” I pretty much didn’t hear anything after that, lost in some haze of joy that’s hard to take in.
A few days later, I got shingles, just when I had a vaccination appointment for the disease in the books. Incredulous, I told my acupuncturist Mark, “But I just had the best week of my professional and artistic life!”
Mark looked at me with all the weight of the twenty-plus years of treating me in his kind expression and said, “The body doesn’t know the difference between good stress and bad stress.”
Now, here—almost two months after a very easy recovery from shingles (thanks, acupuncture and antivirals), and weeks after getting Covid shots and outfits for events I didn’t think I’d be attending and a massage, buying extra masks for the airplane, flying into the city where I was born, making dates to have lunch with the editor for my novel (who I have never met in person), dinner with my agent (who I also have never met in person), and my beloved godfather Tommy, who I have not seen since before the pandemic—I am sitting in a hotel room only a few blocks from Katz’s Deli and the New York Tenement Museum, resting up before all the celebration really kicks off.
I am so delighted to find myself here. It is all one hopes for, as a writer, that your work finds the readers that need it. I’ve been working on this book for a long time—years and years. I knew it would have a good birth in the world because the folks at Row House have been taking good care of it, and Julia, my agent, has been taking good care of it, and I have been gearing up to shout about it a lot. But this award provides it a chance at reader attention that I could not have imagined, and a sense that I have been on the right path to tell this story all along.
Here, burying the lede, is the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant Judges’ citation on my work:
“Beguiling, idiosyncratic: Eiren Caffall makes an original contribution to the growing genre of memoirs that explore illness and healing. The Mourner’s Bestiary draws a poetic parallel between the body’s experience of chronic disease and the marine ecosystems Caffall knows well—an unexpected juxtaposition that gives new dimension to climate hazards we face and opportunities to address them. Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence. Water becomes an element that draws us together.”
Raise a glass or a salute to me where you are and think of Andy and Dex and me all raising our glasses too! You were all very much a part of getting me here. I promise I’ll work on letting in the joy and sharing it with you as I go!
Love,
Eiren
The most gorgeous and welcome news! Cups raised in big congratulations from Atlanta!
💛💛💛💛