Greg Wrenn’s Mothership is a powerful and unforgettable memoir of healing, both global and personal.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Taking readers along on his fascinating journey, the author emphasizes the interconnectivity of the self and Mother Earth, drawing connections between his own C-PTSD and the complex being that humans are actively destroying with our ‘gimme-gimme, carbon-belching society.’… Wrenn paints a vivid image of a dying planet at the hands of humans—not as an issue of tomorrow, but as the current consequence of our daily actions and inactions, a form of trauma all its own…. A memorable book that capably interweaves the personal and the universal.”
In his own words, here is Greg Wrenn’s Book Notes music playlist for his book Mothership:
“The Chain” – Fleetwood Mac
If Mothership were adapted into film, I could imagine this Fleetwood Mac song playing in the opening scene. I’m in my wetsuit lecturing in my environmental literature course and I have flashbacks to my childhood in Florida. “I can still hear you saying,” Stevie Nicks and her bandmates sing, “we would never break the chain.” For most listeners, “The Chain” might seem like a spirited, cutting take on toxic romantic love, but as a teenager, even if I didn’t have the vocab for it, I understood the song as being about intergenerational trauma. As I write in Chapter 2, “ancestral trauma is self-perpetuating, passed down like a black-magic heirloom that makes us do things we later regret.” That chain.
Mothership tells the story of how I’ve tried to break inherited addictions and imbalances by turning to endangered coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca. Along the way, I see how we as a species must break the conditioned patterns of consumption and ignorance that are destroying the planet. Collective ecological trauma, I contend, is rooted in personal trauma, and vice versa.
“End Credits,” E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – John Williams
When I was a kindergartener, the end credits soothed the heartache of E.T. having to say goodbye to Elliot. Listening to it today with goosebumps, I sometimes think of it as a sonic translation of the very love that powers E.T.’s mothership, a melodic distillation of his bodhisattva heart. E.T., I write in Mothership, was my first ecological teacher. Whether he was marveling at redwood saplings or saving frogs from dissection, E.T. was a lumpy, blue-eyed guru who taught me early lessons about caring for the earth. I never forgot them, even in those moments I wanted to end it all.
“Part of Your World” – Jodi Benson/Disney
How could an eco-memoir by a queer scuba diver not include the signature song from The Little Mermaid? For three minutes and fifteen FOMO-infused seconds, being human doesn’t seem all that bad. Her longing to break out of a soul-deadening realm, no matter how wonder-filled, supersedes any other consideration. Only in leaving will she be able to return with new-found appreciation of her birth kingdom.
For a closeted gay kid with a scary home life in the Deep South, Ariel was singing about coming out—about the yearning to be accepted by a straight, judgmental world—and getting the hell out of Dodge. “Part of Your World” takes the pain of alienation and turns it into a dragaliciously hopeful anthem about the resolve to become fully human, to be accepted by those who think you’re a mistake. I remember thinking of my latest born-again crushes while rocking out to this song—as a high school sophomore, it felt better to fantasize about a hopeful future than to feel the pain of the present.
“Society” (Into the Wild Soundtrack) – Eddie Vedder
As Carine McCandless searingly recounts in her New York Times-bestselling memoir The Wild Truth, Jon Krakauer’s book about her brother Chris is incomplete: it doesn’t fully account for why he cut ties with his family and eventually entered the Alaskan wilderness to live off the land. Readers learn from her memoir that Chris, as a trauma survivor who often experienced violence in his suburban home, was seeking to flee his triggers and heal his wounds. I can partly relate to this—in a sense, the remote reefs of Raja Ampat, 10,000 miles from my parents, were my Alaskan wilderness. Though I wasn’t totally alone and never attempted to live off the land, as a C-PTSD survivor I understand the need to escape to a place where your family can’t find you. A wilderness that, while not truly pristine, sure feels like it is. An outer refuge that fosters an inner refuge—a basic sense of safety in body and mind that’s elusive when we’re in what I call in Mothership our “gimme-gimme, carbon-belching society.”
To my sympathetic ear, Vedder’s ironic yet scathing takedown of materialism conveys the eco-manifesto that Chris’s story has come to represent for millions of people. For a song that took 20 minutes for Vedder to record, this is quite an accomplishment. If we’re going to survive, less must be more.
Icaro – Herlinda Agustin Fernandez (traditional Shipibo curandero)
The first ayahuasca ceremonies I sat took place in a pitch-dark thatched hut in the Peruvian Amazon. The two traditional healer-doctors (curanderos), first cousins named Raul and Lidia, took turns singing healing songs called icaros that were channeled by the psychedelic brew. While this song on my playlist isn’t sung by my first curanderos, it will you give you a sense of what a typical Shipibo icaro sounds like. Their mystical beauty, though, is best appreciated in ceremony rather than on Spotify. As the medicine helped me heal traumatic memories, Raul sang stern icaros that in my book I called “skull-penetrating incantations that rotated my brain cells ninety degrees like Tetris pieces with each quick, sharply separated note… conducting the trillions of cells in my body like an orchestra.” The music was soul surgery that I gratefully received.
“Lua Branca” – Mestre Ireneu (sung by Carioca and Circle Music)
When Afro-Brazilian rubber tapper Raimundo Irineu Serra first drank ayahuasca around the same time WWI was breaking out in Europe, he had visions of the Queen of the Forest, an entity that came to be synonymous with the Virgin Mary. In particular, he saw the moon coming toward him with an eagle in its center and received his first song, “Lua Branca,” which came to be part of a hymnal in the syncretic Santo Daime religion that he founded in 1930. There is rapture in the lyrics and reverie in the melody. You can think of the Santo Daime songs as icaros that have been preserved in a hymnal and memorized by the Daimistas.
“Sometimes Love Takes So Long” – Illiterate Light
This is my favorite song by the irresistible breakout rock duo Illiterate Light, who hail from the small college town where my husband Tony and I now live.
Learning to love again does take a long time. By trial and error, Tony and I are learning how to be good husbands in a marriage. To manifest the honor and loyalty that that his boyhood church relentlessly valued between man and wife. We’re getting better at cultivating joy and breathing through the fear that bonding can stir up. We both survived, and, if you can excuse the word, grace found us.
Illiterate Light’s Jeff Gorman and Jake Cochran sing of the unglamorous, dogged work of commitment, whether it’s love for a person or a planet: “Here’s my heart to write on / Every word is bittersweet… Come on sweet to stay strong / Circle back to you and me.”
A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Greg Wrenn is the author of Centaur (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), which National Book Award–winning poet Terrance Hayes awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry.
Greg’s work has appeared in The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from the James Merrill House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Poetry Society of America.
As an associate English professor, Greg teaches environmental literature and creative writing at James Madison University, where he weaves climate change science into literary studies. He was educated at Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis.
Greg is a trained yoga teacher and a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver, exploring coral reefs around the world for over twenty-five years. He lives in the mountains of Virginia with his husband and their growing family of trees.