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A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis
by Greg Wrenn
A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man's quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well.
Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, "The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological." What he's never told them is how he's lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.
Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It's a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia's Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Along the way, as his ecological conscience wakes up, he takes readers underwater to the last pristine reefs on earth, and into the psyche.
Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it's too late.
"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." —Kirkus Reviews
"A brave, beautiful testament to love both past and present, a meticulously researched account of our relationship to ourselves and the world…. Mothership does for coral what Richard Powers's The Overstory does for trees. I can't wait to assign this to my students." —Garrard Conley, New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased
"A powerful testimonial and call to action to save the equal opportunity healer that is Mother Nature." —Carine McCandless, author of The Wild Truth, the New York Times bestselling follow-up to Into the Wild
This information about Mothership was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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