Wednesday September 29, 19.00 BST/UTC+1

In the next in our series of Borrowed Time conversations, we introduce the extraordinary young writer Sophie Strand.

Sophie is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.

Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculineis forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God(Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come(Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach(The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, www.poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

To help get a better picture of Sophie’s poetic world than we can garner on one hour, we invite you to read her article Connective Tissue As Mycelial Metaphor. We will also be posting an article here soon that we encourage you to read before attending Sophie’s conversation (whether live or afterwards on video).

We opened a space for conversation and discussion – about poetry, about chronic disease as a metaphor and as a reality, about ecology, about life.

Follow Sophie on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny.

In Conversation with Sophie Strand took place September 29, 2021

Sophie has sent us excerpts from two pieces of her writing, which we encourage you to read – particularly if you are joining her session live. Excerpts are from Confessions of a Compost Heap and Living Between Stories.

View below, or download/view here.

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Confessions of a Compost Heap

Living Between Stories