"The Slow, Unglamorous Long-Game of Living Deeply": An Interview with Sophie Strand
On the body as a doorway, and finding our ecological place in the world.
Hello all!
I’m so thrilled to share this interview with the immensely talented . Sophie’s writing has such a unique style, and feels otherworldly at times. Based in the Hudson Valley, Sophie writes about spirituality, storytelling and ecology in her Substack, Make Me Good Soil. She is also the author of The Flowering Wand, an exploration of the magical secrets of sacred masculinity hidden in familiar myths, and The Madonna Secret, which reveals a new world hidden within the Gospels. She now has an eco-memoir about chronic illness, called The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope and the Human, which will be released in March 2025. I love the way Sophie writes so honestly about her experiences with her health, and challenge readers to engage with nature in a new way. I hope you enjoy!
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Troubadour. Animist. Lover.
What made you first start your Substack, Make Me Good Soil?
During the pandemic, when I was faced with failing health and multiple rejections of my historical fiction novel, I started posting writing for free on my social media accounts. I didn’t have much of a following then. But I knew I desperately needed community and so for the first time in my life I started to write more openly about living with chronic illness and PTSD.
Eventually, several years down the line, as I confronted mounting medical costs, increasing disability, and a much larger audience, I decided that while it was still deeply important to me to share a lot of my work for free, in order to have the energy to do that, I needed a way to generate income with my writing to pay for my medical costs and support me while I finished upcoming book projects.
Substack proved to be such a wonderful place to share “the compost heap” of all my research, excerpts, and big uncertainties. The community that has showed up there has quite literally kept me alive in the past few years as my health has been increasingly unpredictable.
Which chronic issues were you diagnosed with?
I am increasingly wary of diagnosis – especially as someone who has been sick for a long time and seen multiple diagnoses prove flimsy. I’m also worried by the “nocebo effect” – the opposite of a placebo effect. Dir prognoses, diagnostic criteria, and lists of medical side effects influence how we live into the future. A diagnosis is a type of story. And often it is a story that limits us, telling us what we will lose. Sometimes a diagnosis has an easy cure attached. That’s when I think they are useful. But they can also gift us with “bad story” – a foreshortened life expectancy, a schedule for bodily breakdown. We “predict” our own demise.
Holding this paradox, I will share that I have a genetic connective tissue disease that has caused ever multiplying multi-system issues implicating my vascular system, my GI tract, my spine, my joints, my lungs, my immune system, and my heart. As of today, this condition is degenerative and has no cure.
For the past several years, smoldering autoimmunity that has worn different names and different diagnoses has severely damaged my kidneys, lungs, bone marrow, eyes, and brain. I’m also cognizant that as a CSA (child sex abuse) survivor, I’m constantly trying to disentangle my body’s “glitches” and how they relate to the complexity of nervous system dysregulation and PTSD.
And where are you currently in your health journey?
I don’t believe in a linear hero’s journey of health! And I no longer believe health is a whole body or a well body. I am in the spiral. The mist. The great uncertainty. I am able to access so much joy in my life. I am rooted in a community of human and more-than-human kin who make me laugh every day.
When it comes to prioritizing your health, it can always feel difficult. But you have one of my favorite out of office email responses I’ve ever seen:
How long have you had this? Has it helped?
Thank you! When my work initially spread online, I was so overwhelmed with gratitude that I vowed to respond to every message, email, or comment that anyone left. While this practice initially worked – connecting me with other chronically ill writers, artists, and activists the world over – it very quickly became unsustainable. I could spend all day and night hunched over my computer, never taking care of my health or going on a walk in the forest, and still be “behind” on all of my correspondences. How could this possibly be healthy for me? And how was it modeling an unhealthy level of availability for other people?
Melissa Febos, a writer I really love, wrote an amazing piece, “Do You Want To Be Known For Your Writing, Or For Your Swift Email Responses?”. In the piece, she shows how patriarchy skews our priorities especially as female-identifying writers. This piece came to me at a key moment when I was losing my eyesight and experiencing extreme health setbacks. I couldn’t be “reliable” on email and also write books and take care of my health. I had to decide what mattered.
I was so glad Melissa Febos modeled that for me and I’m hoping I can model it for other people. This world is careening towards extinction and collapse because we do things so fast. As my friend and often-collaborator Bayo Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent. We must slow down.”
Also, as a chronic illness “spoonie”, my energy – my spoons – are limited. I have to choose whether I want to spend them on email every day or on walking my dog, going to the doctor, or writing another chapter of my queer fantasy novel! I am trying to pivot towards the slow, unglamorous long-game of living deeply, slowly, in a small radius of kin that I really show up for on a day to day basis.
In your work, these is a particular focus on spirituality and ecology, and the connection between the two. How has ecology helped you move through your chronic illness to learn about yourself and your body?
Everything I do is ecological. With every breath, with every bite of food, with every medicine and pill, I rebuild my body from otherness. When I use the word ecological, I root back to the original etymology: Greek oikos for household. I am not a noun on an empty page. I do nothing alone. I am a syntactical being, strung together by my metabolism and needs and desires, to thousands of other beings. Together we are all a household, and every choice we make, mundane or explosive, takes place within the networked household of relationships.
This helps me to understand that just as the world is suffering from ecocide, so is my body as intimately connected to that larger household, registering the pain of clear-cutting, acidic oceans, and pollution. But along with the potential for understanding my pain and illness as a microcosm of what is happening on a planetary scale, so do I also open to the potential for wider pleasure and joy. I am never alone, even in a hospital bed. I am always built by kinship – my very body a polyphonic ecology of microbes, fungi, viruses, and multiplicity.
Can you tell me more about your new book coming out, called The Body is a Doorway? What’s the significance of the title?
The title of this book comes from a piece of writing I shared on social media back in November of 2021, expressing my frustration with current trauma modalities. An excerpt reads:
“What if the abused body didn’t passive aggressively keep the score? What if it acted more like an aperture, capturing pictures of horror as well as also imprinting cosmic light from distant galaxies? What if the body was a doorway open to more than human stories?
Just as I realized my connective tissue disease mapped directly onto my love of underground fungal connective system, so could I understand my trauma to be less of a mortal wound, and more as a compass pointing out of anthropocentrism. What if the shape of your wounding, the exact flickering silhouette of your hypersensitivity, was the shape of the doorway into another being’s pain and experience?”
I was tired of my body being a score-keeper. I was ready for it to be a portal to something wilier and weirder than our narrow ideas of neuro-normativity and physical wellness.
How long have you been working on this book? What do you want readers to take away from this?
I think I’ve been “working” on this book since I first fell ill in summer of 2010. However, a more practical answer is that while the book “composts” many of the essays I shared on social media during the pandemic, it was primarily written in the six months after I sold the book on proposal to Running Press – May 2023-October 2023.
In the latest excerpt from your book, you talk about how we need to take less from our surroundings, and “be the medicine.” How it is possible to not only live in harmony with our ecosystem, but to benefit it. How can we practice this day to day?
I like to say that human beings these days are largely illiterate. Yes, we can read human words on flat pages. But we have forgotten how to read the seasons, the flip of leaves for incoming weather, the difference between a medicinal and a poisonous variety of a plant.
We have forgotten how to speak languages other than human and, most importantly, we have forgotten how to listen to voices and sounds that move on different temporal scales, use roots and spores and stone instead of tongues to tell a story. Humans have been living sustainably on the earth for many thousands of years.
Forest disturbance whether it is caused by honey fungi or rutting deer or human beings often opens up or “aerates” densely wooded areas, letting smaller vegetation grow up again, providing a habitat for new mammals and birds. We are not a virus on this planet. We are necessary. But we have forgotten to “listen” for what that job might be.
It might be to pick up burrs on your pant leg on a walk, depositing them somewhere else to root down and then sprout. It might be to protect a certain swath of forest from development. Or it could “interrupt” our ideas of immediate productivity and result, merely being our role in placing our bare feet on soil, placing our bodies like acupuncture needles in a specific part of a landscape’s larger body.
But first we need to stop projecting our anthropocentric ideas onto ecosystems. I think welcoming uncertainty to the table is key. Can we approach our mountains and fields and backyards with a receptive quietness, waiting to see if a bird flies across our path or a specific flower catches our attention? I like to say, what you love, loves you. What you notice is also noticing you. Is there a being quietly asking for your attention?
What helps you get through the harder moments, when health can be so cyclical?
Oh man. Sometimes it is just so hard and the only way through is breath. I often times joke that anyone trying to practice mindfulness meditation should try living with chronic pain! It stitches you to the present moment like nothing else.
Things that do help are my friends, my family, my dog, and my deep and abiding sense that I am part of an evolutionary “long” story that far outstrips my human life. I am embraced by deep time. I am also embraced in the day to day of my meteor-streak life by my community.
What is the biggest thing you've learned this past month?
I’ve gotten some very scary health news recently and none of it comes with easy cures or answers. I’ve really come up against my own panic and desire for concrete answers. The biggest thing I’ve learned is that uncertainty is a generative place to be – especially when it can open the door to outcomes that are better than what I could have imagined for myself.
What’s a project you’re currently excited about?
My first love is epic fantasy and romance! I’m currently heading into the writing of Book Two in a fantasy retelling of my favorite medieval myth Tristan & Isolde. Fingers crossed that the series finds a publisher!
What have been some Tiny Joys lately?
Friday potluck night dinners with my friends. The spicy curl of wild thyme pressed underfoot as I walk through late summer fields. Introducing my dog to other dogs and seeing how excited he is by the interaction. Making very strong black coffee and drinking it on my back porch. Reading “fairy smut” and fantasy novels that help me to remember that love is possible. And that good storytelling can be sexy!
In the Comments…
What parts in this interview did you resonate with most?
How have you been able to embrace uncertainty in your own life?
What can you notice more in your surroundings from pausing more?