Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process · Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers, Journalists & Showrunners Talk Writing - Creative Process Original Series

All the Water in the World with Writer & Musician EIREN CAFFALL

·1 hr·4 clips

Caffall calls beauty and preservation “an act of resistance” against illness, fear, and climate collapse.

1. Books & Writers: Novelists, Screenwriters, Poets, Journalists, Playwrights, Non-fiction Writers & Showrunners Talk Writing, Creativity & The Creative Process features Eiren Caffall and her novel All the Water in the World. 2. Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in Orion, Guernica, the LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera, and the anthology Elementals. 3. The episode asks how writing can hold collapse, grief, preservation, and repair without flattening them into simple endings. 4. Caffall reads from the opening chapter, “What We Save,” and introduces Noni, Amen, and a storm that breaks the flood walls. 5. The excerpt names the American Museum of Natural History as A.M.N.H. and then Amen, the roof village where the family lives. 6. Caffall describes a museum logbook that lists anthropology, archaeology, geology, paleontology, ichthyology, hydrology, geography, and entomology. 7. Noni keeps a separate “shadow list” of water notes, drawings, clouds, puddles, rainbows, and pressure changes before squalls and hurricanes. 8. Caffall says the novel is shaped by stories of utopian communities, Shaker furniture, and her aunt’s work as a medievalist. 9. She also says that, as an American writer, she has to account for colonialism and the “very recent” destruction of Native life within the last 300 years. 10. Caffall argues that speculative fiction about collapse must account for Christian history, the colonial project, and the record-keeping traditions that survive change. 11. She describes “spider web thinking” as a form of neurodivergent awareness that recognizes interdependence across every gesture. 12. She rejects the idea of a “pristine earth” and says it keeps humans in a Christian-centered frame with “us” versus “everything else.” 13. Caffall says the stories she values are the ones that include non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, fear, hopelessness, grief, and pain. 14. She describes her own grief experience with a genetic kidney disease that has killed most of her family before age 50. 15. Caffall says her mother was an EPA scientist and that she grew up visiting endangered water systems starting at age 11. 16. She frames grief as a spiral, not a five-stage ladder, and says that model helps her face climate collapse without pretending loss is finished. 17. Caffall says beauty and preservation are forms of resistance, especially when diagnosis or climate fear pushes people toward shutdown. 18. She describes the novel’s preservation project through the Museum of Natural History, the curators who stay behind, and the historical example of the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad. 19. The episode is conversational, reflective, and detail-heavy, with Caffall moving between memoir, ecology, family history, and passages from the novel. 20. Readers interested in climate fiction, grief, museums, and more-than-human storytelling will likely respond most strongly. 21. Listeners wanting plot-heavy entertainment without ecology or memoir may skip it.

As heard by us

A reflective conversation about storytelling, survival, and the links between family, illness, and the natural world.

Eiren Caffall's conversation treats storytelling as a way to hold ecology, illness, family inheritance, and survival in the same frame without flattening any of them.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a thoughtful talk about survival, ecology, and what stories owe the living.

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