Eiren

Caffall

Novelist & Memoirist

Environmental Nonfiction Writer and Essayist

Travels from: Chicago, IL

“Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership.” — Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

EIREN CAFFALL is a writer and musician. She has published the novel, All the Water in the World (Saint Martin’s Press, 2025), which was selected as a Barnes and Nobel Discover Book, and an award-winning memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary (Row House Publishing, 2024). An excerpt of her memoir appeared in Elementals: Volume IV. Fire Center for Humans and Nature, 2024), and in the art books Chemical Alterations (Kerber Verlag, 2024) and The Time After (Front 40 Press, 2009). Her essays on loss and nature, oceans and extinction have appeared in Orion, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus.

Ms. Caffall received a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2023 for The Mourner’s Bestiary, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2016, and a Frontline: Environmental Reportage residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2017 where she studied with Naomi Klein. She has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, The Millay Colony, The Ragdale Foundation, and was waitlisted for a MacDowell Colony residency.

She has guest lectured at UCLA, University of Chicago, and other universities across America, taught creative writing for The Chicago Humanities Festival, taught a memoir body and place week-long masterclass and Memoir in a Year for Story Studio in Chicago, led creative nonfiction workshops Maine Writers and Publishers, and mentored graduate students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has performed her writing live at Joe’s Pub and other venues and been interviewed and appeared on podcasts including Chris Hedge’s podcast, and many local NPR stations.

With her collaborator, the filmmaker K. Scott Foely, she adapted her essay “Becoming Ocean: when you and the world are drowning” into the award-winning short film Becoming Ocean, which screened at film festivals across the United States and in Amsterdam and Morocco. She has released three records of original songs with her band, including Slipping the Holdfast, Civil Twilight, and Prairie Music, and was awarded a 3Arts Make a Wave grant in music in 2021. She lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago with her family and three cats.

Eiren's Featured Titles

All the Water in the World: A Novel

St. Martin’s Press |

January 7, 2025

Dystopian Fiction

In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

“Gripping…tense, delightful and rich with resonance.” ―Scientific American

“Captivating…The setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent.” ―Library Journal (starred)

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they’ve saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story―with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive.

Fantasy, Speculative & Science Fiction, Fiction, Mystery & Thriller, Natural World, Speculative & Science Fiction

The Mourner’s Bestiary

Row House Publishing |

October 15, 2024

Environmental Science

A critically-acclaimed literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.

“Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership.” Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review

Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.

A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.

The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.

“Beguiling, idiosyncratic […] 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.” ? Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant judges citation

“Eiren Caffall has produced some of the most powerful writing on the ecological crisis I have read anywhere. Caffall is a gifted writer, and this book is strong medicine.” ? Naomi Klein, author, social activist, and filmmaker

Animals & Wildlife, Environmental Concerns, Grief & Loss, Memoir & Personal Journeys, Natural World, Nonfiction, Parenting & Families

What We Save: Protecting Eachother in our Vulnerability in a Threatening World

In this talk, Eiren Caffall will dive into the lessons learned in her book, the novel All the Water in the World. The novel is set on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, in a world after the melting of the glaciers. In that moment, a small community of scientists and curators has stayed behind to protect and catalogue the collections, preserving what matters for a future they hope will arrive. Inspired by stories of curators around the world who held on during war and siege, the novel inspired Caffall to tell a story that is less than common in a world obsessed with disasters and zombie—one where human beings band together to make communities of care and preservation in hopes that all will not be lost during the darkest times. In her work, and in her thinking and speaking since beginning the book, Caffall began to collect stories of survival, ideas about how we protect each other. She will speak to our common impulse to protect each other, and her worldview that, in the end, we work to keep other humans, and human ideas, safe no matter what comes.

Robust Hope for a Collapsing World: What We Mean When We Say We Believe in the Future

Eiren Caffall is a survivor of a family which has lived with an incurable, fatal, genetic kidney disease for over 150 years. This illness killed most of her family before they turned fifty. Many of her relatives opted not to have biological children, so strong was their fear of the future that the illness brought. Caffall wrestled with the question of her faith in the future for years, finally deciding to have a biological child of her own, a gesture of hope aimed at a possible future of treatments and cures that she might never live to see. In her work as a nature writer and science journalist, she came to understand that this life experience united her story with climate collapse, a generational crisis that has lead many people to question their own hope for the future, and the futures of their children. In this talk, she unites the story of her own journey to the stories of ecosystems and our more than human kin, as people work to protect the future for them, and as medical innovators work to protect the future for her and her child.

The Web that has a Weaver: Crafting Complex Stories for a Complex Time

In this craft talk, Eiren Caffall will discuss the work that it takes to construct complex narratives for this complex time. In both fiction and non-fiction, Caffall has tackled the task of combining science, history, personal stories, and the realities of climate change and ecocollapse. Her work is deeply researched, and strives for scientific accuracy and relevance, even in her speculative fiction. She will unpack the work it takes to get there, and discuss the systems she uses to construct this work. Ultimately, this is an invitation to freedom. Caffall believes that we should allow ourselves to think in more neurodivergent ways, using metaphors of our own choosing, weaving webs and braids and baskets to hold the ideas that don’t traditionally seem to go together, and forming a new kind of storytelling for a world more connected and intertwined than ever.

“Eiren Caffall’s guest presentation made me think about how each individual activist can use their own experience and knowledge to be an advocate for change in their own unique way. Eiren connected illness to the natural world in her beginning work and that has expanded from books she writes to others making documentaries about this correlation.” — UCLA, 2023

“Engrossed in Eiren Caffall’s presentation, I was deeply moved and inspired. The way she narrated her personal journey and effectively connected it with a compelling issue was both captivating and innovative. It made me realize that each of us has unique experiences to share and can establish meaningful connections with relevant issues. Her talk moved me to tears, and it served as a powerful reminder not to underestimate my own potential. After listening to her, I felt a surge of encouragement and empowerment.” — UCLA, 2023

“Eiren Caffall’s guest presentation was particularly inspiring. Her approach to storytelling emphasized vulnerability and authenticity, encouraging activists to share their truths courageously.” — UCLA, 2023

“Caffall’s presentation and storytelling styles have further inspired me to incorporate more personal and emotional elements into my advocacy, making my messages more compelling and relatable.” — UCLA, 2023

“Eiren Caffall’s talk was truly one of the most important things that I’ve experienced this school year. Her story – which was full of unconventionality and family tragedies – resonated with me on a personal level. I know that I’m not alone, and I’m extremely grateful that Caffall took the time to remind me of that. Caffall also proved that being open and honest unlocks the potential for meaningful connections with an audience. Her raw vulnerability throughout the session gave me the courage to share my own life experiences – which I normally keep rather private – in front of the class.” — UCLA, 2023

“Eiren Caffall’s presentation and work spoke to me most personally and brought to life everything I have been learning in a very distinct way. Her words are poignant in ways that cannot be reduced down to simple emotion; they carry a weight that enraptures her audience while bringing up meaningful conversations about some of the most painful aspects of the human experience. Engaging and heartbreaking and healing all at once, her storytelling carries a comforting honesty I wish to emulate, and I don’t suspect I will soon forget it—she has a way of voicing things I did not previously have words for. Or, rather, she has a way of creating a soft landing for the necessary but unbearable confrontations we actively run from. The way that Eiren weaves parallels and imagery between body and earth and life is the exact kind of existential uprooting that bears the vulnerable, soft underbelly we all share. Social justice and activism are, at the core, inherently linked with adversity, grief, mourning, and—even in times where we cannot feel it or do not see it—each other. Eiren’s voice has made a significant impression on me, to say the least.” — UCLA, 2023

“Caffall channels her considerable ecological expertise and wrenching personal experiences into her commanding, heart-pounding, and haunting first novel, which follows her ravishing memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary.” — Starred Review, Booklist

“Lyrical yet gripping.” — Scientific American

“Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you.” — Starred Kirkus Reviews

“A future classic of nature writing—if, that is, there is a future.” — Starred Kirkus Review

“In this stunning and original debut, writer and musician Caffall draws links between hereditary illness and the fates of marine life in collapsing ecosystems. This deserves a wide readership” — Starred Publisher’s Weekly Review

“Red Tides” by Eiren Caffall

“Sky of Plankton, Ocean of Stars” by Eiren Caffall

“What Will You Save When the Climate Crisis Comes For You?” by Eiren Caffall

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Barnes & Noble Discover Book, January 2025, All the Water in the World
Junior Library Guild Crossover Selection, 2025, All the Water in the World
Gold Medal, Memoir, Foreword Reviews, INDIES Book Awards, 2024, for The Mourner’s Bestiary
Bronze Medal, Nature Nonfiction, Foreword Reviews, INDIES Book Awards, 2024, The Mourner’s Bestiary
Winner, The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, 2023, The Mourner’s Bestiary
Recipient, Make a Wave Grant, Three Arts Association, 2023