Greg Wrenn: MOTHERSHIP: A MEMOIR OF WONDER AND CRISIS (With Thea Brown)

The Ivy is delighted to welcome you to the patio on May 14, where Greg Wrenn and Thea Brown will discuss Wrenn’s compelling new memoir of healing and ecology. 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.

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Greg Wrenn is the author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis, an evidence-based 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 Daily Beast, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. As an associate English professor at James Madison University, he weaves climate change science into literary studies. A student of ayahuasca since 2019, he is a trained yoga teacher and a PADI Advanced Open Water diver, having explored coral reefs around the world for over 25 years. He lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with his husband.

Originally from the Hudson Valley in New York, Thea Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of several full-length collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Her poems can be found in Oversound, Denver Quarterly, Pinwheel, the Iowa Review, LitHub, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.