Hello Loves,
In May, Dex and I went to Field Museum of Natural History Member Night—AKA Nerd Christmas. It was our, what? fifteenth year running? I had forgotten about it. Dex was not at work in the Field’s entomology department the week prior as it was finals week, so he wasn’t reminded of the date. I was reminded to go the night before, on an organized walk to see the black crowned night heron rookery at the Lincoln Park Zoo, where another attendee and I realized we both were obsessed with natural history museums.
“Well then, I’ll see you at the Field tomorrow,” she said.
“You will?” I replied, and then she told me.
Dex hustled and got us on the list of museum volunteers and their plus ones and I met him after work in the lobby, and we made our usual rounds behind the scenes: the fish labs, the entomology department, the library.
He is now a veteran of working in rooms you usually need a badge to enter. I am on the brink of publishing a novel about people who do just that kind of work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and felt wistful in the back corridors, in love with the reality of the museum, surrounded by other people who love it as well, imagining readers who I hope will fall in love with my book born of that original love.
After fifteen years of going, there was a difference in how we walked through the museum, more stewards than fans, still outsiders in many ways to that huge institution, but carrying our parts of loving it like a collection of buttons on our jackets.
We made new friends in line for dinner. We saw new exhibits. We talked to people. My phone filled up with texts from Robin and Martha and their plans to drive out of the city to see the northern lights. Solar storm reports filed in, catching me as off-guard as Member Night had. “Where is the best place to see them?” we asked each other over text. “Where are you going?” “Will we miss them?”
As the museum finally closed around nine, Dex and I drove along the lakeshore, north to the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary—AKA the Magic Hedge—chasing the flares. We parked the car and stood with other Chicagoans and watched the northern lights swirl over Lake Michigan, a thing I have never seen in all my years here, a thing I have seen only once over the small placid pond in my hometown on a late winter night when I was roughly Dex’s age.
The moved like water over the water, purple and green and blue. Dex whooped for joy and jumped up and down as they spun. All of us by the water were whooping for joy.
On the way home we listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland, a nod to the times we listened to it in his childhood, a nod to my sixteen-year-old self listening to it on a Walkman as I passed the graveyard next to my high school, the one where Emily Dickinson is buried.
These are the days of miracle and wonder, we sang, as we drove home, and don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.
There I was in a run of wonder. I watched my kid choose a new path. I found community in the love of birds. I found inspiration in the preservation of natural history. I was fresh from watching totality. I was about to go to a literal mansion and be fed well and walk a prairie and teach writing. I had two books coming out. I was with a kid I adore and we had just seen one of the great wonders of the world in a city I chose thirty years ago.
All the layers of me were there in that moment, and all of them lit up and sang, all the small choices towards what I love, towards loving myself, loving my kid, believing that we deserve wonder, that we generate wonder. We are deeply and firmly saying yes to wonder, even as horrors play out in other places, even as horrors may be coming.
The world warms and the bombs fall and the fascists are incoherent in public. Evil emerges and it looks powerful, it is powerful, it is deadly. And yet, here we are, whooping for joy under the grace made from solar storms in hopes that our work and our wonder belongs by rights to all of us, and that by embracing it we are fueling ourselves to fight even harder so that everyone can have it.
My wonder is the fuel that enabled me to battle for your birthright to have wonder too.
Sometimes, when you are trying to write a newsletter, life intervenes. Each week goes by with ideas for a love letter to you all. Should I tell you about the northern lights, I wonder, what about the eclipse, what about the cicada emergence, the blurb on the novel or the admission of Dex to college? So many letters have flitted through my mind that I feel as if I have been talking with you.
A few weeks ago, texting a friend from somewhere (Portland? Atlanta? Ragdale?) I said how tired I was. She asked if anything was wrong. I texted back, Everything is wonderful, there is just so much of it.
How can I catch you up when I cannot catch up to the speed of it myself?
Probably, I will be unpacking the stories of this summer when the weather turns colder, and our house turns emptier, and the books emerge. Probably then I will have time.
For now, though, Dex has chosen a college in the West. He will leave for that new chapter in August. We all are adjusting to the coming separation, and we are all so hopeful and grateful and excited and also wistful, and likely wholly unprepared. In the wake of it all, we’ve been in constant motion since late May—flying to visit college, flying home, visiting the grandmothers, sending in forms, sending in money, making plans for a summer suddenly shaped by this new information. I tell myself that the story of the eclipse can wait, become a longer essay as it has a right to be. I tell myself that the black crowned night herons are a story I will tell in another essay. I think that the story of looking for pelicans in central Illinois belongs in the book I’m cooking up for three books from now. When things slow down, when I have time. There is so much to do.
And in the midst of all of that, I’ve been doing the first pass proofread of both my books, and seeing the memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, on, of all things, the Target app, and the novel, All the Water in the World on Bookshop.org.
Meanwhile, blurbs roll in and planning the book tour goes on, and I went to Ragdale to teach a retreat masterclass with Megan Stielstra, about whose luminous grace more soon.
At Ragdale, I was surrounded by the historic cicada emergence, the insistence of their UFO sounds, the drunken push of them through the air, onto the shoulders of our students, little red-eyed Yodas affirming the beautiful work the writers were doing to learn the prairie, to write place and bodies and selves through the long summer afternoons in the garden, in the oak forest, on the porches.
These are the days of miracle and wonder.
And now, home from that, breathing between passes on the books and travel for the summer, I feel the stories of all of it catching up to me.
There is Robin on the dock in the lake as the sun shuts off and we approach totality. There is the bald eagle over the water as the light comes back and we reassemble ourselves from the holy madness that descended.
There is the purple Chihuly seedhead of wild garlic on the Ragdale prairie. There is the cicada on the trunk of a shagbark hickory humming the much lower tone of the call his siblings make all around us, a drone like a meditation.
These are the days of miracle and wonder.
There is the page of the Field’s giant Audubon volume, open in the library to a new page for Member Night. There is the reflection of the northern lights on the lake I have loved for my whole adult life.
There is the robin’s fledgling in my garden, alongside the enormous elderberry, alongside the child preparing to leave home.
Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
I’ll write soon.
Love,
Eiren
P.S. I wrote a few weeks ago about how important it is to pre-order books. That one act can move a book into a different range in the algorithm that currently rules much of book publishing. Hell, it can make a book a bestseller because all those pre-orders show up at once on the day of publication. Since I have two books coming out in the next seven months, I will be saying this a lot. Please, pre-order them both.
Pre-save them on Spotify or Audible if you are a book reader with your ears. Ask your librarian to buy them if you don’t have $50 of disposable book cash. Ask a lot of librarians to order them, so lots of people without disposable book cash can read my work on the government’s dime. The books are both available now, and if you want to do a really good thing, use Bookshop and select a great local bookstoreto get the money. I have mine set to Women and Children First where I’ll have my book launch for The Mourner’s Bestiary on October 17, 2024 in conversation with the previously-mentioned, luminous Megan Stielstra.
And here is just one lovely wonderous moment: me holding the advance reader copy of my damn book, my first novel. This is the first galley I’ve held, and, as many writers have said, it was one of the great moments of my life. I was fully Jo at the end of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, grasping the first copy of her novel with tears in her eyes and a big smile on her face.
Here are two blurbs I love:
"When the world collapses, will our love for each other? Eiren Caffall answers the hard questions in this luminous novel. All the Water in the World is a masterful story of a family fighting to not be drowned by a changing world. Each sentence is a treasure. Read this and be changed."
—Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder and Sleeping Giants
"We are, all of us, wounded in some way, and this planet of ours is wounded too. This remarkable memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, somehow understands those basic facts in new ways; it will open your mind to new ways of thinking about healing, wholeness, reconciliation, courage."
—Bill McKibben, author The End of Natuere