I Watched You from the Ocean Floor

by Erin Cecilia Thomas

Publication Date: July 1, 2025

An evocative debut story collection that explores the depths of grief, loss, and resilience.

The women and young girls in these stories lose their mothers, their best friends, their husbands, their homes—and yet, they are not simply wailing widows or distraught daughters. Erin Cecilia Thomas writes elegiac narratives that are also portraits of strength, resilience, and grit as her characters move through their grief and the beautifully rugged landscapes along the California coast, Tennessee farmland, and New Jersey suburbs.

In “A Rapture Coming,” a husband and wife have very different reactions to losing their home to a wildfire. The young girl in “The Shed” strategizes on how to save her family’s farm animals—and herself—after her mother passes away. In “So You May Sleep Again,” a thorny widow runs into trouble embroidering faces of departed loved ones onto pillowcases. The children in “The Hall of Life” try to envision bright futures as their lives are made uncertain by war. 

Poignant and haunting, I Watched You from the Ocean Floor provides eleven vignettes on what it means to grieve and to keep on living.

Early Praise

“With profound insights and a delicious wry sense of humor, Erin Cecilia Thomas deftly interlaces the tribulations, sorrows, and absurdities of our modern era with the timeless conditions of human nature. Grappling with love, loss, death, and the little tragedies of daily life, her characters are familiar to us, yet decidedly fresh, unique, and fully alive. Each of these darkly comic stories brings its own startling, stunning, and haunting inevitable surprise. I Watched You from the Ocean Floor is a disquieting and joyful read. A masterful collection!”
—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food and Counting Backwards

“Thomas delivers her lonely characters to us in gorgeous prose, crisp and clear as ice, while beneath we glimpse leviathans of dread. I turned every page in terror and anticipation. What a stunning debut!”
—Melanie Finn, author of The Hare

“A sonorous and stunning debut! I Watched You from the Ocean Floor deftly navigates the impossible weight of living and loving. For this inevitable journey, Thomas steadfastly guides us; to challenge isolationism in the face of global climate crisis, to defy the collective violence of the 21st century, to look down the long, dark hallway of our futures and dare not blink. In a world where grief threatens to drown us, it’s art like this that teaches us how to swim.”
—Loie Rawding, author of Tight Little Vocal Cords

“The characters in these deeply imaginative stories are often on the run from natural and man-made disasters, loss, and disappointment, only to discover hope again in the place where they began: in human connection and the power of their own dreams. An original and moving debut collection.”
—Hester Kaplan, author of Unravished

“Erin Cecilia Thomas writes eloquently of grief and the ways that individuals living on the margins—whether through climate apocalypse or simply high school cliquishness—seek to make connection with others. This powerful drive for interconnectedness—true for every one of us, as it is for Thomas’s characters—overshadows the tragedies and loss that people in her stories encounter, energizing and enlivening each of her hauntingly lyrical tales.”
—Tony Eprile, author of The Persistence of Memory

About the Author

Erin Cecilia Thomas is from Buffalo, New York. She graduated from Berklee College of Music and went on to receive her MFA from Lesley University. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, and Redivider Journal, among many others. In 2021, she was the recipient of the Beacon Street Prize in Fiction. She has lived in Boston, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and she currently resides in Nashville with her husband and their dog. I Watched You from the Ocean Floor is her first book.

Book Club Discussion Questions

Download the PDF below for discussion questions that you can use during your next book club meeting.