“My partner left me, I had a miscarriage, and the pandemic started. I wrote this really long novel and it got rejected 27 times. My doctors were not feeling great about my health, and I thought… if I’m going to die, if I’ll never get published, I better just write about the things I would want to share even if I don’t live to see them make it. My big thing is: make good soil. Maybe I’m not going to be the person who gets to see these ideas sprout. But I should at least try and make some good soil… I used to go the very traditional route of getting things published by magazines, but I thought: if I’m going to die, who gives a fuck? I’d rather just have a relationship with readers. And within a week I had 3000 new readers… It’s kept me alive. It got me a book deal.”
In this episode, we meet utterly electric writer Sophie Strand. Tap into the wild energy of this moment which she shares with so much vulnerability but also with so much deep research and poetics: of being magically, violently channeled, being hit like a wave in a river crashing down a mountainside.
Step into circle with Sophie and the Missing Witches and when you do, send love along the listening lines to all who are chronically ill, all those who sit with a wound in the shape of the Earth wound, all who bear the exhausting wound of patriarchal capitalism. Close your eyes and feel the waves of something ancient and very new bubbling and composting and moving to you from within and beyond that wounding…
“Making art is an emergency and perhaps your survival is not the most important part of it…
I have a genetic connective tissue disease. I found this out after I had loved fungi and underground mycorrhizal systems for many years, which are the connective tissue of the soil. And for me, it felt like this pivot point where I could become very solipsistic and feel very bad about myself or I could see how I could become a channel for something else that perhaps understood me. How can we become a channel for another species, knowing that perhaps it won’t be pleasurable..? All we’ll be able to know is, like the carpenter ant, we are climbing up that piece of grass, we are sporulating something we aren’t totally in control of.”
https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny
References:
https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/entangled-life
