Imagine relaxing on a warm, sandy beach in Costa Rica when a porpoise beaches itself in front of you. You run into the knee-deep water to see if you can help, but it dies under your palms. Colorado author Christina Rivera Cogswell experienced these exact events and they launched her into a literary exploration of eco-grief, womanhood, motherhood and conservation.

On Thursday, March 20 at 6 p.m., come to the Bookworm to hear Cogswell talk about her book, “My Oceans,” an urgent exploration of caring and mothering on a planet in crisis.

“About ten years ago, I began writing into a pool of emotions I couldn’t quite name,” Cogswell reflected. “Today, a full book later, I would call what I felt in that moment in Costa Rica ‘eco-grief.’ ‘Grief’ sounds like a sad word, but it’s the flip side of love. We grieve only as deeply as we love. So the whole book, to me, is a series of love letters to a planet that is suffering from the mass extinction of biodiversity. Motherhood expedited the urgency of my love for a planet in crisis, and my desire to make the world a place worth living for my children — and all our descendants.”

Becoming a mother connected Cogswell in a new way with the planet. “Motherhood was my portal to my animalness,” Cogswell said. “The physical act of birth completely deconstructed the borders I held between myself and my environment. I was suddenly multiple people and yet also newly connected to every mothering body on the planet with an experience of caring for a split self. After having my children, I also learned how the boundaries between my body, and the body of the planet, physically thinned. Eco-feminism looks at the parallels between the systems trying to control women’s bodies and lives, and the same systems that exploit and extract from the environment without considerations of consent and care. In this book, I wanted to look closer at these threads of interconnection, not by just sharing climate facts, but by weaving science with personal, embodied, storytelling.”

The form this embodied storytelling took is just as unique as the content itself. “Most people are accustomed to reading novels or more narratively-driven books, which offer a more linear experience,” Cogswell said. “But my pregnancy traumas (like most traumas) shattered time. And motherhood also broke my concept of time. This book came to me in fragments. I did once try to shove those pieces into a tidy narrative, but it didn’t work, because it wasn’t authentic to my experience. ‘My Oceans’ is now in the shape of what I call, ‘a book of essays.’ Essays just means short, but true, stories. The stories are connected by the themes of water, women, and the marine kinship I feel with mammalian bodies since the birth of my children.”

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After reading Cogswell’s book, she hopes people are motivated to fight for vulnerable populations of all kinds. “Vulnerable species, and vulnerable people, are suffering on this planet right now,” Cogswell said. “My book is about caring and loving and protecting what’s vulnerable. I do want us to collectively care more, to do better for the generations that will follow on this planet. And I think caring begins with feeling more — including our sadness, grief, and our outrage at injustice. Pick one thing you love and channel your grief and care into protecting it. Be it whales, rivers, neurodivergency, unhomed people, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, or whatever. I love the people who choose to fight for what they love despite the odds. What we lack in number, we can make up in spirit and heart. What makes me feel alive is a fight worth fighting — and being surrounded by community invested in a culture of caring.”