1Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (2023) by Caro Giles and Cacophony of Bone (2023) by Kerri ní Dochartaigh are both memoirs written by authors living in different ‘norths’ during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Caro Giles is based in Northumberland while Kerri ní Dochartaigh is from the North of Ireland and their memoirs both deal with motherhood, loss, and isolation while foregrounding uplifting connections between humans and the natural environment which surrounds them. Their specific anchoring in the north of their respective countries, England and Ireland, is central to the main orientations of Twelve Moons and Cacophony of Bone which toy with the tensions between losing one’s bearings, bearing the brunt of loss, traumatic past events, isolation, and political uncertainty.

2The genre to which the texts by Giles and ní Dochartaigh might be said to belong, life writing, is such a broad category that its contours necessitate some curbing. The field of life writing, memoir, autobiography, and autoethnography is continually developing, making it increasingly difficult to circumscribe the limits of each of these and to identify the formal differences between them. Irish author and critic Éilis Ní Dhuibhne has identified one sub-genre which she perceives as growing in popularity, ‘what Neil Gelzlinger disparages as the “non-celebrity memoir”, what we could more neutrally term life writing which describes and analyses the everyday experiences of people who are not famous—in other words, its subject matter is similar to that of the novel’ (Ní Dhuibhne 2020). Ní Dhuibhne goes on to identify the hallmarks of the most recent contributions to this sub-genre (in Ireland) in the following way: ‘The very newest kind of memoir deals not with childhood, happy or miserable, however, but with specific adult life events of a traumatic nature. Topics which recur are illness, mental health, drug abuse, death, and bereavement’ (Ní Dhuibhne 2020). Neither Caro Giles’s Twelve Moons nor Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone can be described as autobiographies in the traditional sense of that genre since the temporal framework is, in both cases, a single year, specifically, that marked by the global pandemic of 2020–2021. They do, however, deal with ‘specific adult life events of a traumatic nature’ beyond the pandemic: in Giles’s case, a difficult separation and caring for four children, one of whom is neurodiverse, and, in the case of ní Dochartaigh, the final phase in the gestation of her first work Thin Places (2021), and her own trajectory to better mental health after a highly traumatic past during the Northern Irish Troubles.

5This article will strive to interrogate the ways in which both these non-fiction writers, who paradoxically emphasise their northern anchoring, also foreground loss of bearings as simultaneously uncomfortable and as a prerequisite for healing. Loss of bearings, they show, is what facilitates a reconnection and re-making between themselves and the natural environment (sympoiesis) and is what makes the pain of traumatic events more bearable. I will argue that both memoirs search for new literary forms which decenter humans while also taking to task the capitalist and patriarchal structures which adversely bear down on women and other minorities. These ideas will be unpacked along three main lines of enquiry which loosely correspond to the principal interpretations of bearing(s): first, how do Giles and ní Dochartaigh situate and locate their geographical bearings? Then, what specific aesthetic strategies do they deploy both to underline the ways in which they support sometimes unbearable weight and to make meaning? This will finally lead to a discussion of what is brought forth (in the Proto-Germanic etymological sense of to bear, as in to carry and give birth) and what posture (‘bearing’) these authors shoulder through these original works.

Situating/Locating their Bearings

6As Haraway reminds us, ‘staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’ (1). Haraway invites us to consider the kind of ‘material semiotics’ which is ‘always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly’ (Haraway 4). This is where I find the notion of ‘bearings’ productive as there is a tension in Giles’s and ní Dochartaigh’s works between those material semiotics of place, a strong anchoring in the topographies and politics of the north of England and the north of Ireland; ‘noplace’, a loss of bearings brought on by social isolation and individual and political turmoil; and, finally, the interstitial and immaterial ‘thin places’ both authors are sensitive to.

7In Cacophony of Bone the calendar year is 2020, and the twelve chapters relate ní Dochartaigh and her partner’s recent move to the Irish midlands, through successive lockdowns and, eventually, to Cornwall (a trajectory which takes them from one island to another and from north to south). Place is paramount, in particular the notion of dwelling in a specific place. Dwelling is to be understood here in both nominal and verbal forms, as a space where one can shelter, ‘home’, and also as the act of residing or continuing to live in a given condition or state, as the following passage indicates:

A small dwelling on an isolated laneway in the middle of an equally small island.
A westerly part of Europe; right where the land gives itself over to the sea.
The only place in the world I have ever sown seeds, into the soil.
The only time in my life I have watched them bloom & unfurl, collected their seeds for the new year—as the life inside them turned itself outside in. (282)

9Caro Giles’s Twelve Moons is a narrative of recovery from an acrimonious separation, a reflection on the challenges of neurodiversity and a meditation on anchoring oneself materially and psychologically as a family reconfigures itself and recalibrates. Giles foregrounds the spectacular topographies of Northumberland and particularly the regenerative qualities of both fresh and salt water. Northumberland is presented in its long history: ‘Northumberland opens up beneath us, a bird’s-eye view of the site of King Edwin’s 7th century palace, now only a field like any other, but hiding unknown treasures’ (Giles 130). Giles calls attention here to the contrast between a rich history and its invisibility, suggesting also that the ‘unknown treasures’ mentioned here are more likely to be geological strata richly inhabited by worms and insects than human-made materials, thus inviting us to rethink the very meaning of the word ‘treasure’ and to move away from its Capitalist or monetary connotations. This tension between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and intangible, is often reflected in this book by the waxing and waning of the moon which I will come back to shortly. It is, however, often in water that she ‘tri[es] to locate [her]self’ (Giles 145) both emotionally and physically:

Over to the north-west the sun is a pot of molten gold, dripping into the sea and holding me in its glare. I am screaming and jumping and riding the waves with my arms held high above my head, bathed in glossy rays that make me shine. Further out, two of my friends, strangers until now, laugh and bob about, and I watch The Mermaid push through the breakers with painted lips and strands of purple hair around her face. The dancer is watching from the fire. All around me women are swimming and staring at the sun and the sky is burning. (144)

10This joyful description of a community of women supporting the narrator is materially anchored in an environment which, albeit anthropomorphised, also supports her, the strong sibilant alliteration, the polysyndeton and absence of punctuation in the final sentence testimony to this as they reinforce the interconnectedness of the women, the sea, the sun and the sky. The passage moves from one which contains a hint of aggression (a ‘glare’ can be a harsh or dazzling light but also an angry stare) to a form of warmth, contentment and community where strangers become friends. The prevalence of the V-ING form (9 in all), initially centered only on the protagonist (the present simple being used for the others at first) creates an immediacy and the final, culminating sentence seems almost irenic. In this scene, there is no particular need for a specific place name to anchor the narrator as the natural surroundings fulfill this function instead. Moreover, the name given to her eldest daughter, The Mermaid, signals not only Giles’s desire to protect her daughters’ identities (the others are named The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer, and The Littlest One), but also to blur the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, reality and mythology.

11For all this deliberate geographical indeterminacy which places the focus on individuals as part of all-encompassing ecosystems, both writers also emphasise the local specificities of their respective Norths. Giles, for instance, systematically foregrounds the north of England as a space which provides her with an anchor in this time of turmoil. Initially reducing the increasingly gentrified south (19) and the whole of Great Britain to ‘a little country floating in the North Sea . . . cut off from the rest of the world, after gorging on its own ego’ (2), a scathing allusion to the 2016 Brexit referendum in which the country is portrayed as carnivorous and self-consuming, she presents the north of the country as ‘the wild north-east’ (29) where the boundary between land, sea and sky is tenuous: ‘On a clear day, you can see right across to the coast, to Sunderland where the River Wear pours itself into the North Sea, and to Newcastle and Gateshead, divided by the mighty Tyne. Not tonight though. I must content myself with the burning sky behind me, and as I run I crane my neck and inhale the explosion of colour’ (33–34). The agency of the River Wear (perhaps we might even hear an intended pun here on her own state of exhaustion), which ‘pours itself’ into the sea, is placed alongside her own movement and a moment of synesthesia (‘inhale the explosion of colour’), a gesture which reveals the sustenance she receives from her northern surroundings. For ní Dochartaigh, her ‘creative landscape’ (167) is shaped in similar ways. She notes, for example, ‘I am very comfortable with the elements. I grew up on the north-west coast of Ireland so was left with very little choice. . . . I am taken by storms, and I always have been’ (10). An almost mystical, esoteric dimension can be observed here in the passive construction and italics: to be ‘taken by’ is to be impressed by or admiring of something, but in this context it also suggests surrender of sorts, a relinquishing of agency and perhaps even the idea of being transported elsewhere. Shaped in this way through her interaction with the elements as they batter the north-west coast of Ireland, ní Dochartaigh also reveals how this formative experience continues to influence her ‘creative landscape’ today.

12In both texts, although the narrators initially experience forms of disorientation and distress due to Covid-related isolation, the emphasis is, ultimately, firmly placed on finding one’s bearings, and doing so through a (re)connection with the earth, the sea, the sun, the sky and, most centrally, the moon.

Supporting the Weight, Making Meaning

13In Cacophony of Bone and Twelve Moons, the moon occupies a central role, and both texts are divided into 12 chapters (each with its specific moon) where it is perceived by the narrators as a calming, sometimes prescient and often enveloping presence which, in times of strife and confusion, offers bearings (seasonal, spiritual and physical). The numerous names attributed to each moon testify to these different emphases laid on the moon at different times of the year. Carol Giles attributes four different names to January’s moon, while Kerri ní Dochartaigh attributes fifteen, the authors borrowing from Celtic, Medieval, Anglo-Saxon, Old English, and Native American words, knowledges and traditions. Each chapter of both memoirs is devoted to a different moon, its numerous vernacular terms and historically-different names given each time, thus already signalling a desire to reconnect with lost and multiple knowledges.

14In Twelve Moons, each chapter charts the narrator’s attempt to catch a glimpse of the moon as it waxes and wanes (and often in spite of the cloudy meteorological conditions): ‘The Mother’s Moon is waning but you would never know. . . . When I feel trapped by circumstance, the fleeting nature of the clouds, the shape-shifting absorbs me and I can fly a million miles while I’m standing still’ (Giles 97). This powerful description is particularly significant as the moon in question is the Mother’s Moon, and one of Giles’s primary concerns in her narrative is how to best care for and mother her four daughters. The emphasis here on the ‘shape-shifting’ of the moon is a reminder that the author-narrator is not just a mother, however much that role preoccupies her, but also a human living in a habitat shared by other sentient beings. Throughout the 12 months logged in this book, it is consistently the moon that energises Giles enough to continue to be the primary carer for her four children, the eldest of whom is neurodiverse and requires extra, round-the-clock care. In the passage just quoted, it is very much transience (‘fleeting’) and unboundedness (‘shape-shifting’) which she notes as the energizing factors. Even when the moon is not actually visible, which it often isn’t because of low-lying cloud, its presence is felt and it is through constancy rather than fluctuation by which it is defined, and through sentience: ‘There is no sign at all of the Mother’s Moon and the sky is still a smudge, clouds in ribbons trailing through the sky. But we know it is there, we felt it in the tides, nipping at our ankles. It is always there’ (Giles 78–79).

15Tim Ingold, inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, notes that the moon can ‘stir the soul’ and ‘help us recover that sense of enchantment, even of astonishment, which today’s science has crushed’ (Ingold, 23). In Giles’s work it is less ‘today’s science’ and more today’s ‘system’ which has the power to crush and which, for the author-narrator, is difficult to bear:

Endless times over the next couple of days I will be told that this is just the system, that this is how the system works. I wonder at what point I got caught up in this system, and whether anyone in charge of the system has ever had any need for help from the system, because it feels like the system is breaking me when I am sure the system is supposed to make things easier. (Giles 122)

16The anaphoric quality of this passage and its over-emphasis on a ‘system’ which is clearly not fit for purpose enables Giles to emphasise the gap between a self-professed system of care and the sad reality of a system of oppression which is based on circular, frankly Kafkaesque, thinking. This is far from the definition of care provided by Joan Tronto: ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world include[s] our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Tronto 103; original emphasis). No amount of rhetorical care-washing in a broken education or NHS system can provide the levels of care required, and so Giles must look elsewhere, to her natural surroundings for this. This is why the memoir is able to end on such an uplifting note, with the mother and her four daughters fully empowered by their environment:

We are revealed in the stars reflected in our eyes—the grand gestures that shine brighter, and tiny sparks that burn for longer, fizzing and simmering under our gaze.
And always there is the moon. Reclining in the sky, slim and cheeky; an orb rising high above the rooftops; submerged in cloud and felt only in the tides, or stunning the night with its glow. The knowledge that the moon is constant makes me feel small in the very best of ways; not so that I am diminished, but reminding me that the world is vast and unpredictable, and that anything is possible. (Giles, 276)

17The boundary between self and the surrounding environment is dissolved here through the reflections in their eyes and the suggestion that their ‘gaze’ encapsulates the ever-evolving existence of the stars (in a form of synesthesia, buttressed by the sibilant alliteration and consonance—‘fizzing’ / ‘simmering’). The moon is anthropomorphized here, taking on both a corporality (‘slim’) and a mischievous personality (‘cheeky’), but I do not think that this is an anthropocentric text and Timothy Morton singles this distinction out as paramount (Morton, 174), since the ‘I’ is depicted as a singular site of sentience, where the moon can be seen or just felt. Ultimately, it is the moon which holds Giles and offers her the tools both to bear (in the sense of withstanding adversity) and to find her bearings. In the words of Tim Ingold (still with Merleau-Ponty), ‘[i]t is a kind of symbiosis, . . . in which we give ourselves over to the light that invades us and saturates our awareness’ (Ingold 28).

19This question of belonging (to a genealogy of writers, a family, a nation, the earth, a place) is the dominant focal point of Cacophony of Bone. The narrative is punctuated with quotations, not just literary ones, in which ní Dochartaigh finds nourishment, but she is careful not to be extractive either in her word-mining: in response to Claire Ratinon’s painting ‘Black Lives Matter. Fuck Your Fucking Green Beans’, she writes ‘Yes to reflective silence but no to taking up instead of making space. We need to do so much better’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 129). Here, ní Dochartaigh acknowledges the tension between the desire to amplify invisibilised voices and the risk of occupying the space to the detriment of these same voices. The use of the plural pronoun ‘We’ gestures to the necessity of collectively becoming aware of the structural forms of discrimination at play on a societal level. One way in which she tries ‘to do so much better’ is when she weaves words by Audre Lorde into her Irish surroundings, testifying to the multiple genealogies she pulls from and to the longevity of Black, Indigenous or Minority Ethnic voices within eco- and life-writing: ‘Audre Lorde, again: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.” Louder’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 134). This is a quotation from Lorde’s 1985 essay ‘Poetry is not a luxury’ in which the vital necessity of poetry is foregrounded. Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s addition, ‘Louder’, placed after this excerpt, simultaneously conveys her admiration for Lorde (who speaks louder than others) and her desire to amplify Lorde’s voice in her own work, making Lorde relevant to this Irish context by rendering that ‘quality of light’ both metaphorical and material: ‘It is the solstice, and the light out there is changing. Stand and watch, now, as it bleeds out from the sky. Particular light, though, when it comes, it comes to change us. Some light, when it comes, it comes to stay. It takes our grief and helps us sculpt it into bone. It nestles in, beside those bones, a porcelain silence’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 139). Light here is both the material one provided by the solstice and that provided by Lorde whose words caress the ‘grief’ and violence of the past (perhaps encoded in the ‘bleed[ing] sky’) and help transform it into a fragile thing (‘porcelain’) which is nevertheless cushioned (‘nestles in’). This form of literary care is confirmed later when ní Dochartaigh notes: ‘I allowed myself to read, over and over, the books that deliver—again and again—sustenance. Yes I am still reading for work, still reading new words that have never crossed my eyes before, but I crave the old words as though they were medicine—herbs that my body needs’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 191). The potential of words to heal and care is paramount here, and the medicinal purposes they serve is not that of Western medicine but those of indigenous Celtic herbalists. The ‘old words’ can be understood therefore as not only ní Dochartaigh’s favourite literary texts, but also the ‘old words’ of Irish, the native language she does not speak and has had to learn, which contains knowledges now buried in silence and which require excavation. This brings me then to the final stage of this analysis, and to a discussion of what is brought forth and what posture (‘bearing’) these authors shoulder through these original works.

Bearing and Bringing Forth

20Central to ní Dochartaigh’s concerns in the generic anomaly of her first publication Thin Places is that of loss and possible extinction. It begins in November 2019 against the backdrop of acrimonious negotiations between the UK and the EU over Brexit and, specifically, the Northern Irish border. As such, it is steeped in anxiety from the outset, and the potential losses brought about by a new ‘hard’ border on the island of Ireland gradually become bound up in other losses: specifically, loss of biodiversity and of language. Reading up on the catastrophic decline in insect populations, she is struck by a double loss: “I have no words. . . . I am living on my home island, on the soil of my ancestors, and I don’t even have the word for butterfly in my native language” (ní Dochartaigh 2021, 20; original emphasis). Loss of language then, and specifically the Irish language which British colonization and oppression of native Irish inhabitants attempted to eradicate, is likened here to species extinction and is experienced as just as traumatic. As ní Dochartaigh explains: ‘How interconnected, how finely woven every part of it all was. In Ireland, the loss we experienced has had a rippling impact on our sense of self and our place in the world, which has its impact on our ability to speak out, to protect, to name. Our history, our culture, our land, our identity: we have had so much taken away from us’ (ní Dochartaigh 2021, 20–1). The fact that this final sentence initially places ‘history’, ‘culture’, and ‘land’ as subject before shifting into a passive formulation (‘so much taken away from us’) points towards the after-effects of colonisation which exploits and extracts from both land and people, diminishing indigenous agencies in the process. Ireland, this ‘small island / A westerly part of Europe; right where the land gives itself over to the sea’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 282) lives under the specter of the trauma of coloniality which is directly linked to language, knowledge, and biodiversity loss. Giles, writing from the north of England, is perhaps less concerned with the fallout from colonialism than ní Dochartaigh, yet she too displays a sensitivity to lost histories (as developed above). Part of what both writers are engaged in, therefore, is to commit to words, to bring forth, different ways of being and knowing in 2023. As Haraway explains it, ‘[s]ympoiesis is a carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming-with, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation’ (Haraway 125). This, I suggest, resonates with Giles’s and ní Dochartaigh’s literary projects and with their evident belief that their works constitute acts of literary care, ‘becoming-with’ as they ‘stay with the trouble’ and sketch out uplifting futures.

21Giles’s Twelve Moons ends with a reaffirmation of the powerful trajectory the last twelve months have been:

When I started this journey as a mother on her own, I felt tethered in a strange wild land, missing parts of myself that had developed under the glare of city lights. I thought that living in the middle of nowhere with the huge caring responsibility that is four young daughters meant that I had disappeared. . . .

But the way my life has unfolded, sometimes on the edge of what society expects, has required me to be feral in my desire to build a new one, almost as if the wilderness surrounding my home has inhabited me. (Giles 275)

22These lines foreground an unusual tension between a ‘material semiotics’ which is ‘always situated, someplace . . ., entangled and worldly’ (‘a strange wild land’) and a ‘noplace’ (Haraway 4), (‘the middle of nowhere’), a tension which has been reconciled by the end of the book since Giles highlights the osmosis between this ‘wilderness’ and herself in the final sentence and hints at the violent artificiality of London life (‘the glare of city lights’). The discovery of the ‘feral’ side of herself, alongside her reciprocal relationship with her surroundings, enables her to foster the ‘stretch and recomposition of kin [which] are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense’ (Haraway 103). For Giles and her daughters, the sea, the moon, and the land become kin during the course of this narrative, opening up new and previously unsuspected vistas of experience. Giles’s bearing changes over the course of these twelve moons as she reconfigures her coordinates from imprisonment (a struggling single mother ’tethered in a wild land’) to an embodied appreciation of ‘crescent beaches, secret waterfalls and ancient hills’ (Giles 276), and from this shift emerges her book. Literature then is salutary and a form of care.

23Just as she did in her first work, Thin Places, ní Dochartaigh takes up in Cacophony of Bone Haraway’s call to ‘make the relay, inherit the trouble, and reinvent the conditions for multispecies flourishing, not just in a time of ceaseless human wars and genocides, but in a time of human-propelled mass extinctions and multispecies genocides that sweep people and critters into the vortex’ (Haraway 130). She does so by being highly attentive to these ‘critters’ and by according them a place in her work that reverses the usual subordination of every other species to humans:

Moths, moths, so many moths

Reminding me that there is beauty in this world the like of which I could never have dreamed. Before this time, I used to say I’d attend to the moths once I’d done all my work. They came & they came & they came. Then I said I’d do the work once the moths stopped coming. Now I wonder if the moths are the work. (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 107)

24What is striking here is both the ironic admission (in a literary text) that the imagination and, by implication, art, can never match the beauty of biodiversity and the gradual importance accorded to moths (a species also omnipresent in Thin Places and very much associated by the author with a Celtic, perhaps even Greek, metaphysical dimension that humans can only barely glimpse at), to such an extent that they ultimately move from peripheral visitors to main characters. The anaphor ‘They came’ pays tribute to a flourishing multispecies world and sidesteps the ‘vortex’ Haraway warns against. This same anaphora is repeated later in the book as she describes how ‘[t]hey came and there was nothing I could do, no action I could take, no words that I could mutter, that would keep the moths from coming if I tried. I listed them, I named them, I hallowed them. I finally let them settle beneath my skin’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 281). Her own agency here is diminished, as the triple negation makes clear, and it is only in surrendering to the moths’ presence, and once again in recognising the inadequacy of ‘words’, that she finds peace. This flourishing and emphasis on bringing forth is accompanied by ní Dochartaigh’s own leap of faith as she and her partner try to conceive a baby during the lockdown, another act of bearing or bringing forth. The pregnancy, when it happens, is not, however, the trigger for re-centering the narrative on the protagonist or for reasserting the primacy of human life. Rather, it is placed on a par with the ‘multispecies flourishing’ that Haraway urges us to strive for and that she foregrounds in the more speculative part of Staying with the Trouble when she affirms the ways in which ‘biologies and storytelling’ become ‘the richest veins for weaving the needed fabrics to bind . . . together’ (Haraway 161). Ní Dochartaigh tunes into this sentiment when she writes about her pregnancy as a ‘sowing of seeds of hope in the face of such individual and collective despair.’ Although she notes that ‘despair keeps us harboured’, she also acknowledges, using the first-person plural so as to include readers, that ‘we are being called. . . . To action that will carry us far from what we deem as safe and perhaps it is time to listen to that call’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 266). Cacophony of Bone ultimately accomplishes the ‘weaving together’ of ‘biologies and storytelling’ that Haraway speculatively hopes for since it ends on a poetic reflection which conjoins precisely this idea: ‘the body, as it sows & plants, when it tends land, / as it hopes for growth, / gives itself over to a vast & shifting future / it could never, in that moment, quite imagine’ (ní Dochartaigh 2023, 276). There is nothing to suggest here that the author is limiting the body to a human one, given the variety of actions which follow, and the emphasis is firmly placed on the promise of what ‘the body’ brings forth through its actions and intra-actions. Although writing in the first person, ní Dochartaigh successfully decenters herself at the close of narrative, having stayed with the trouble and attempted to make kin with more-than-human species.

Conclusion

25Stories are boundless, they are ‘sustenance’, ‘medicine—herbs that my body needs’, writes ní Dochartaigh (2023, 191). Stories do not end, and earth care continues to matter. As she affirms at the end of Cacophony of Bone, ‘to sow / is to scatter light around, / like wee fluttering moths’ (276) and this is the gift she offers the reader. As Gloria Anzaldúa says in This Bridge Called My Back,

26Every person, animal, plant, stone is interconnected in a life-and-death symbiosis. We are responsible for what is happening down the street, south of the border or across the sea. And those of us who have more of anything—more brains, more physical strength, more political power, more money, more spiritual energies—must give or exchange with those who don’t have these energies but may have other things to give. (Anzaldúa xxvii)

27Both Caro Giles and Kerri ní Dochartaigh harness their trajectory through loss of bearings, bearing immense hurt and traumatisms, in order to produce (bear) these literary texts which are significant contributions to the flourishing genre of Anthropocene life writing.