Greg Wrenn is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and is currently an English professor at James Madison University where he teaches environmental literature and nature writing. He received a BA in English with highest honors from Harvard and his MFA from Washington University. Greg’s first poetry collection, Centaur (University of Wisconsin Press) was awarded the Brittingham Prize by Terrance Hayes. His work has been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review,Poets & Writer’s, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, The American Poetry Review, The Southeast Review, and Prairie Schooner. Greg has received multiple awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Poetry Society of America, to name a few.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis is forthcoming from Regalo Press in March 2024.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis
by Greg Wrenn
Regalo Press, March 2024
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.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis is a deeply researched account of Greg turning to coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca to 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, Greg takes his readers on a journey across the globe. In his search for healing from personal and ecological trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche—and finds they have a lot in common.
Mothership is one man’s audacious search for healing when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late—and what well-being means in a fracturing society on a dying planet.
“Wrenn’s memoir is 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