Join us for a book talk with Greg Wrenn, author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Award-winning author Greg Wrenn’s forthcoming book Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis (Regalo Press), is an intimate, brave work that is not only a queer coming-of-age story, but also a deeply researched account of Greg turning to endangered coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca to heal from complex PTSD.
“The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological,” Greg Wrenn tells his nature-writing students at James Madison University. What he’s never told them is how he’s secretly lived out those correspondences in nature to heal from childhood abuse. “Coral reefs and ayahuasca saved my life,” Greg says.
Mothership is one of the only literary accounts of coral reefs and is also the first extended mainstream literary look at ayahuasca. Greg takes readers underwater to some of the most pristine coral reefs left on earth as pollution and warming oceans threaten their survival. He also shares his life-changing experiences working with ayahuasca in the Amazon and in the US. As the trauma of the pandemic has caused many to seek mental health treatments that actually work, the laws around psychedelic use are quickly changing, and so are many minds.
A story of personal and global healing that blends memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is written with prophetic urgency and ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late. On publication, Regalo Press will make a donation to The Southern Environmental Law Center, and Greg has committed to donating at least 10% of his book profits to The Nature Conservancy.
About the Author: Greg Wrenn is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and author of Centaur, which was awarded the Brittingham Prize. Greg’s work has appeared in The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. As an associate English professor at James Madison University, he teaches environmental literature and creative writing, weaving climate change science into literary studies. An Advanced PADI Nitrox diver, he has been 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.
Mothership will be released on March 26. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"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."
—Garrard Conley
New Dominion Bookshop Book Order Form
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Greg Wrenn Photo Credit: Matt Mendelsohn