MOTHERSHIP: A MEMOIR OF WONDER AND CRISIS
Weaving together cutting-edge science and memoir, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It’s an evidence-based account of how Greg has turned to endangered coral reefs, rainforests, and psychedelic plants to recover from repeated, prolonged abuse which he couldn’t escape. From the tide pools of his childhood home in Florida to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat Archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is one man’s audacious quest to heal using nature when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Along the way, he takes readers underwater to the most pristine reefs on earth.
Mothership will be published in 2024 by Regalo Press, a new standalone imprint distributed by Simon & Schuster that Big Five-publishing veteran Gretchen Young recently founded. Once Mothership is published next year, Regalo will make a donation to an environmental charity, and Greg has committed to donating at least 10% of his profits to the Nature Conservancy.
Mothership will be published in 2024 by Regalo Press, a new standalone imprint distributed by Simon & Schuster that Big Five-publishing veteran Gretchen Young recently founded. Once Mothership is published next year, Regalo will make a donation to an environmental charity, and Greg has committed to donating at least 10% of his profits to the Nature Conservancy.
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Mothership is unusually timely: it speaks to trauma, body shame, addiction, the climate crisis, nature as a mental health resource, and, most controversially, psychedelic therapy. After the 2018 release of Michael Pollan’s New York Times-bestselling How to Change Your Mind, there is an urgent need for trustworthy, non-kooky follow-up books to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of psychedelic therapy--Greg's book is one of the first.
What's more, his memoir is the first extended mainstream literary look at Ayahuasca, the psychedelic tea that Greg drank in the Amazon rainforest. How to Change Your Mind spends a few pages on it, whereas a third of Mothership is devoted to it. The trauma of the pandemic has caused many people to look for mental health treatments that actually work--the laws around psychedelic use are quickly changing, and so are many minds.
Mothership is also the only mainstream literary account of coral reefs. Greg takes readers underwater to the last intact coral reefs on earth as pollution and warming ocean temperatures threaten their survival. In Mothership, as he seeks healing from trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche, and find they have a lot in common.
Represented by Wendy Levinson at the Harvey Klinger Literary Agency.
What's more, his memoir is the first extended mainstream literary look at Ayahuasca, the psychedelic tea that Greg drank in the Amazon rainforest. How to Change Your Mind spends a few pages on it, whereas a third of Mothership is devoted to it. The trauma of the pandemic has caused many people to look for mental health treatments that actually work--the laws around psychedelic use are quickly changing, and so are many minds.
Mothership is also the only mainstream literary account of coral reefs. Greg takes readers underwater to the last intact coral reefs on earth as pollution and warming ocean temperatures threaten their survival. In Mothership, as he seeks healing from trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche, and find they have a lot in common.
Represented by Wendy Levinson at the Harvey Klinger Literary Agency.
SAMPLE PUBLISHED ESSAYS
- "The Lantern" in The Iowa Review (adapted from memoir manuscript)
- "Paddle" in The Georgia Review (adapted from memoir manuscript)
- "Purple" in Kenyon Review
- "Seas of Change" in The American Scholar
- "Trees" in The Southeast Review (nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize)
- "Innocence" in Kenyon Review (selected as Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016)
- "Otter" in The Rumpus
- "Ice" in The Southern Review
- "Beacons" in Prairie Schooner
- "One Whale Shark Eye" in Mudlark
- "The 23rd-Century Nature Poem" in The American Poetry Review
- "Reef Album" in Essay Daily
- “'Immortality on Their Faces': The Persistence of Autobiography of Red" in AGNI
- Listen to Greg's NPR interviews about his memoir manuscript and teaching: "The Environmental Imagination" & "The Peace of the Reefs"
- Watch Greg reading from his memoir manuscript while Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House