What We Save in the Flood: Writing Through Disaster to Find Hope and Joy: A Guest Post by Eiren Caffall
Haunting and unforgettable, All the Water in the World tells the story of a flooded world, and one family’s determination to keep their community alive. This all-too-prescient story introduces us to a fictional account of a possible dystopian future. Read on for an exclusive guest post from Eiren Caffall on writing our Discover pick, All the Water in the World.
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
All the Water in the World: A Novel
All the Water in the World: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.
In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.
It was a disaster that started me writing All the Water in the World, but it was hope that helped me finish it.
I wrote this book because I was afraid of climate change and couldn’t sleep. I was a single mom, a freelance science writer, daughter of an EPA scientist. One night, my godfather called me from the devastated Brooklyn post-Hurricane Sandy, and I knew climate collapse had come for New York City, the city where I was born.
As a kid, I loved the American Museum of Natural History; my own kid loved the Field Museum in Chicago. I’d grown up with scientists, my mother and grandmother and the women that were my mother’s mentors, watching movies where the scientists are the heroes. But the call from my godfather made me realize that I needed to write my way through my fear of what we could lose if the worst comes to pass, and we face losing the places and people and things that we love.
That night, the voice of a young girl living on the roof of the museum I loved as a child—my narrator Nonie—showed up. I followed her voice into writing this book, through the empty city, into the ruined museum that she and her family were trying to save. It took me eleven years to write this book. I researched tide patterns, birchbark canoes, the Monuments Men, the Indigenous history of New England, what parts of New York would flood if the ice caps melted. What was more important than all the facts of the possible future, though, was learning over that writing that I truly believed that even in the worst disasters we will still save what matters.
As I wrote, I read the stories of the curators of the Hermitage Museum during the Siege of Leningrad in World War Two. When the city was surrounded and cut off from the outside world, they stayed behind in the museum, living in the basement air raid shelters and eating restorer’s paste to stay alive while they chipped ice off the remaining paintings. In the Iraq War, curators came back into the National Museum of Iraq during the worst early weeks and risked their lives to stop the looting of the antiquities. This is what we do. We try to save what we love. We find, in our duty to our callings, the hope of the future.
I wrote this book for my kid, my mom, myself. I needed a story that would help me when I was afraid about what was coming in climate disaster, and about what was already here. I wanted to write it for all the friends and strangers who told me how afraid they were about what was happening to the planet. I wanted to be able to send them something when a hurricane ripped through their hometown or their grandmother’s house was lost to fire. I wanted to use what I understood about grief and fear and science to remind all of us that we will still have each other, even if the worst comes to pass. We will still save what is most important for the future we can imagine.
When I was done with the writing of the book, I knew something essential: I would still be afraid of climate collapse, overwhelmed sometimes with grief, but the future wasn’t something to be feared, it was something to be protected. We fight fear by protecting what we love, by saving each other, by coming together, and by imagining not the future we fear, but the future we want.
