A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Greg Wrenn is the author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis, an evidence-based literary account of his turning to psychedelic plants and endangered coral reefs to heal from complex PTSD, and Centaur, which was awarded the Brittingham Prize. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. As an associate English professor at James Madison University, he weaves climate change science into literary studies. He lives in the Shenandoah Valley with his husband and their growing family of trees.
The emblem, not the animal, mattered. We swatted mosquitoes, made no pilgrimages to Vermont to see bears and moose. I wanted to get as close as possible to my potential animal totem.