MOTHERSHIP is Greg Wrenn’s account of healing from complex PTSD and the awakening of his ecological conscience.
After surviving childhood abuse by his mother, Greg turned to Mother Earth—endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants like ayahuasca—when traditional therapies failed.
There in nature, he underwent a radical transformation.
In this dazzling, deeply researched memoir, a traumatized mind’s search for peace meets the planet’s cry for rescue.
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, GREG WRENN is an award-winning author, professor, and eco-spiritual teacher. His work has appeared in HuffPost, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Centaur, was awarded the Brittingham Prize by National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes.
On his Mothership book tour, he spoke to audiences around the world, including at Yale School of Medicine, the University of Utah School of Medicine, Vancouver Island University, and the UK Psychedelic Society. He has also been on numerous podcasts, including Levi Chambers's PRIDE, and was recently interviewed by Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Vargas on NewsNation.
Greg is an associate English professor at James Madison University, where he directs the JMU Creative Writing Minor. A student of ayahuasca since 2019, he has explored coral reefs around the world for over 25 years. He and his husband divide their time between the mountains of Virginia and Atlantic Beach, Florida.
Order Mothership from Amazon, Bookshop.org, B&N, or Parentheses Books
Or listen to Greg narrate it on Audible or Spotify
10% of Mothership's book profits go
to The Nature Conservancy
Praise for MOTHERSHIP
“A powerful testimonial and call to action to save the equal opportunity healer that is Mother Nature.”
—CARINE McCANDLESS, author of The Wild Truth, the New York Times-bestselling follow-up to Into the Wild
"A brave, beautiful testament to love.... Mothership does for coral what Richard Powers's The Overstory does for trees. I can't wait to assign this to my students."
—GARRARD CONLEY, New York Times-bestselling author of Boy Erased
"As humanity stands at the crossroads of catastrophe and consciousness, Wrenn's wonder-filled, carefully researched memoir makes a strong case for not only the sacramental value and healing power of psychedelics but also for safe, legal access to psychedelic-assisted therapy for PTSD. Mothership is a deeply moving roadmap through the intertwined destinies of individual well-being and the urgent need to heal our planet."
—RICK DOBLIN, PhD, Founder and President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
“Taking readers along on his fascinating journey… Wrenn paints a vivid image of a dying planet at the hands of humans—not as an issue of tomorrow, but as the current consequence of our daily actions and inactions, a form of trauma all its own. A memorable book that capably interweaves the personal and the universal.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“A deeply felt, clear-eyed memoir examining what it means to grieve nature’s losses and yet still manage to find healing and love in what remains.”
—FLORENCE WILLIAMS, author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey
“Mothership is a story of personal and, hopefully, global healing. With rare insight, Wrenn captures a mystical reciprocity with the natural world that leads to a love affair with all life he encounters under the sea. At the same time, he is learning, painfully and little by little, to love himself and to be loved. The turning point in his memoir is his encounter with the spirit of ayahuasca, Madre Ayahuasca. Wrenn elegantly describes his own emotional journey as well as the psychological process of working with this powerful psychedelic medicine. Mothership, a story of how healing happens after a traumatic childhood, is an important contribution to the growing field of psychedelic study."
—RACHEL HARRIS, PhD, author of Listening to Ayahuasca and Swimming in the Sacred
"Greg's life story and spiritual journey are one of the greatest examples of the power that ayahuasca and plant medicines have to bring about personal transformation... A raw, real, and riveting personal story, Mothership brings the reader on a journey through the darkness of deep traumas, woundings, and addictions into the light of divine consciousness. Page by page, we witness a transformation from being broken to becoming whole once again."
—ALANNA COLLINS, RN, co-founder of Truth is One, kambô & plant medicine facilitator