An interview with: Sophie Strand

In conversation with spell binding author and poet @cosmogny

"Sophie Strand 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 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." - sophiestrand.com

Read on below for our full interview...

Photo by Franco Vogt

First of all, how has 2025 been so far for you in Hudson Valley and are there any new experiences or ideas emerging in your life currently that you would like to share? 

2025 began with extreme intensity for both me and my close family. My mother almost died from sepsis and was hospitalized while I simultaneously experienced a rapid intensification of ongoing issues related to my genetic disease that caused me to go almost blind. Like a bottleneck event in evolution speaks to an extinction event that wipes out most life, only letting a few animals through the “neck”, opening up ecological niches for those surviving species to repopulate, these crises acted to extinguish all superficial noise in my life, allowing only the hardiest “species” through into an ecosystem wiped clean. Mortality is a powerful lens through which to examine our lives. What really matters if we know that no tomorrow is given? I was forced to reevaluate how I wanted to spend my time and energy and for that lesson I am grateful. The Hudson Valley provided a wonderful foundation during this moment of personal breakdown and self-inquiry, sending me snowstorms and radiant moonlight, and then finally a long, cold spring with enough rain to nourish the root systems of the hardy oaks and my own small, soil-bound life.

'Hudson Valley at Sunset' - Frederic Edwin Church (1870–80)

What lights the flame of passion inside of you that motivates you to do what you do on a daily basis?

More and more these days, I want to introduce myself not by some superficial title, but by a confession. “I’m a lover.” I follow my love like a bee follows its hunger into the flower, incidentally facilitating pollination along the way. The way I express this love and profound gratitude for the many beings that quite literally weave my world and my body together is in through storytelling – but that storytelling is always at its root a kind of love song or ode. Each book or poem or essay I write is the transcript of a dialogue I am conducting with the object of my affection. Sometimes that object is a myth like Tristan and Isolde, sometimes it is an animal like the woodchuck. Love – well beyond heteronormativity or the human – is what compels me to keep writing.

'Tristan & Isolde' - John William Waterhouse (1916)

What was the inspiration behind your new book 'The Body Is A Doorway' and what do you hope people may be able to learn or take away from it? 

When I first became ill at the age of 16 and then subsequently found at that my condition was degenerative and incurable I felt profoundly exiled from the standard narratives of illness, diagnosis, and a return to wellness. What is health inside the machinations of late-stage capitalism where wellness is something bought and sold? Where pollution sediments in populations not responsible for its creation? What does it mean to be well in a sick society? I wanted desperately to imagine health as being something divided from a well body, an optimized body. How could I write a story where my inability to “get better” was not a failing?

'The Body Is a Doorway' (2025)

Could you tell us about the idea behind your concept of 'Myths As Maps' and what captivated your interest in pursuing research into mythology in relation to your book 'The Flowering Wand'? 

One of my favorite writers Robert Bringhurst writes that while science quantifies elementals, myth personifies them. But both stem from the same impulse: to dialogue with our world and to understand our relationship to our situated ecologies. Originally, our mythic systems were created as vessels for our most precious environmental knowledge. Stories in an oral culture are easier to remember than lists. If we look back far enough, sky gods transform into storm gods and then, finally, become storms. Mother goddesses very quickly melt back into their original essence—matter itself. Very often, heroes and heroines represent anthropomorphized plants and animals, their romantic entanglements representative of real-world relationships between symbiotic species. In myth, elementals are personified. Harvesting schedules are embedded in episodic family dramas. A myth is a patch of soil where we can plant the best practices of a community: how to relate to each other and to our shared ecosystem.

'The Flowering Wand' (2022)

The Flowering Wand was trying to look at the history of how myths have been uprooted by empire and then to reclaim and “rewild” with modern ecology, science, and psychology this impulse to dialogue with our environments. How do we create the narrative soil that will sprout stories freshly adapted to our current conditions? The mythmaking we are called to do now is probably somewhere closer to composting. We live in a culture that is remarkably good at abstracting itself from waste and off-loading it onto the marginalized communities least responsible for its creation. We cannot simply decide that civilization and patriarchy are toxic and then reject them. Instead, we must take responsibility for our bad stories through the alchemical power of rot. On the compost heap, nothing is exiled. Beliefs and epistemologies that were never designed to touch, combine inappropriately in the moist refuse pile, fermenting into soil that can grow something new to meet the demands of our dire circumstances. Much of my work aims to be a compost heap where disciplines and ideas not meant to overlap are put into contact, combing to create weirder, more fertile soil.

Where did the idea to write a novel for 'The Madonna Secret' stem from and what was it about that particular period of ancient religious history that resonated with you as a setting? 

I have always been fascinated by the story of Jesus – Yeshua as he would have been called in the original Aramaic he would have spoken. How does an anti-imperial, almost anti-agricultural wandering storyteller become the figurehead for empire, ecocide, and sexism? How does a mistranslation like that happen? The Madonna Secret was my attempt to live inside that question and bring back to life all the animals, plants, and women that we know inspired and supported that teacher whose life was interrupted and then coopted by empire.

'The Madonna Secret' (2023)

I have also always been drawn to historical retellings that give marginalized characters back their voices. We know Mary Magdalene was central to the ministry and is often called “the apostle of the apostles” and yet her voice, her gospel, were never recorded. What would it be like to give her back her voice?

Are there any particular reoccurring ideas or areas of study from your research in ecology and mycology that you feel have had a strong impact on how you view the world around you? 

Fungi queer our idea about selfhood. Many employ a type of cellularity called supracellularity, where cells open and close, allowing protoplasmic and genetic material to freely flow through the network. They make complicated decisions without a central node of cognition, showing us that thinking doesn’t just happen in singular brains. They are prone to symbiosis – body-sharing with other beings with such intimacy that it’s hard ultimately to know where to draw the species line. In an age where atomized individuality has left us shipwrecked in climate collapse and social fragmentation, they help me think through ways of co-becoming that might be riskier and ultimately more rewarding.  

'The Intruder' - John Anster Fitzgerald (1860)

Are you concerned about the future of poetry in response to the surge of AI use which may devalue the integrity of poetry written authentically, and the problem of how we can differentiate between authors who use AI and those who don't? How do we maintain authenticity in a post-truth society?

The environmental impact of fueling AI and the eugenicist and racist thought-leaders at the helm of its development greatly worry me. But when confronted with the existential question of it overtaking our creative roles, I am more agnostic. AI is iterative. It eats its own tail like the ouroboros snake, feasting on stories and cliches. Perhaps AI will force us to chase a new type of writing. One that is weirder, harder, and less easy to capture or imitate. As AI learns how to sound like us, we must learn how to sound like something else. Perhaps that momentum will create necessary creative leaps. But as a reader of sci-fi, I’m decently terrified of what may happen.

'Poetry' - Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1879)

What does the word 'spirituality' mean to you? 

Spirituality comes from Latin spiritus for breath. In many cultures, the breath is holy. It is that which comes from the outside to animate use. To give us life. Spirituality to me is an understanding that I am a vessel for otherness. I must breathe in the world in order to live. I must constantly risk being changed with each inhalation. 

instagram.com/cosmogyny

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- Astral Magazine