“Writing, writing, writing,” the psychic repeated. “Writing is all you’re doing.”
“Are you sure?” I was confused.
“Yeah, I see you at a…dining room table with your computer. Writing. Three more books. It’s all going to happen very fast. Really fast.”
It was July 2020. I’d just finished writing, rewriting, and revising a 900-page historical fiction novel that had taken me three years. Even in the chaos of the early days of the pandemic I’d managed to get an agent for the project relatively easily. For years I had ghost-written countless young adult chapter books. I was ready to sell my own work under my own name. Certainly, there were more books I wanted to write but couldn’t I have a momentary break?
I hadn’t even come to the psychic to ask about work. In fact, I do not make it practice of going to psychics. I don’t like to outsource my intuition, preferring to trust the birds and animals and dreams that find me where I am planted. I hadn’t been to see a psychic in over ten years. But I’d been plagued by a recurring dream that was beginning to bother me. I wanted to see if the psychic could pick up on this insistent intuition by virtue of clairvoyance.
She did. Immediately. And that’s a story for another time. But the thing she was most concerned with was the writing: “Don’t let anything get in the way of the books when they come through. Just write, write, write. And no more chicken and turkey. You’re allergic”
I filed away this information with a wry smile. Chicken and turkey were some of the only foods I was not allergic to and there was NO way I was writing another book for a long time. I needed to sell the book I’d just finished first! My agent had assured me that it would sell quickly with subject matter as popular as Mary Magdalene.
More practically, I was bone tired. Write another book? I could hardly write another email. The previous three years had included a black mold emergency move where I lost 90 percent of my belongings, recovering the memories of my abuse and deciding to finally break a twenty year silence and tell my family what had happened, a deep, expensive, and unsuccessful dive into trauma therapy, acute renal failure, acute liver dysfunction, aortic issues, an emotionally abusive relationship I’d convinced myself was the best I’d ever get as a chronically ill survivor. I was constantly working: freelance editing, running other writer’s social media accounts, and ghost writing. I accepted any gig I could get and used the early morning hours to finish my historical fiction novel.
Then in November 2019 a specialist in my genetic condition told me all the ways I was falling apart and would probably die. She listed the surgeries and interventions I should expect. The ways I was rotting. The ways I was doomed. I’ll never forget the look in my then-partner’s eyes as he sat in that room with me. I watched him leave me in that doctor’s office even though it would take months for him to make his ungraceful exit. I could probably sue that doctor for malpractice, something I’d never want to waste vital time or energy on. But her approach was admittedly unethical and alarming and deeply unhelpful. Such wild pronouncements are known in medical research as “nocebos”. Like a placebo convinces you into feeling better, nocebos can convince patients into manifesting worst outcomes.
I never went to her again. I didn’t want to live out her story.
The final log on this three-year trial by fire, was a Christmas miscarriage and the subsequent breakdown of my long-term relationship. I kicked him out of our apartment and sat in the late February morning light spilling onto the blonde hardwood floors. Immediately, I rallied. I invited all my friends over for meals and storytelling gatherings. I would claim the joy I’d been missing out on. I would find healing wherever it was hiding. I would make it a party everyone was invited to. I would make life a bacchanal. My book would sell. I’d share the story and characters I loved like my own family.
Cue the pandemic.
Let me curve away from the story. Settle into a river meander. Feel the water inundate soil that hasn’t been saturated in decades, particles compacted by absence now dancing in liquid matter. The river unearths fossilized trilobites and deer jaws, bones separated by millions of years bumping into each other, chipping off splinters of calcium.
In this liquid parenthetical let me say that I am shaking as I write these words and, for all my bravado in most of my other experimental memoir writing, I am usually shaking when I write about my personal life. First, I feel ashamed. I don’t want people to look at me. I do not want to be pitied. I want to be joyful and juicy and able to support other people. I want to wear costumes and write other characters. I want, sometimes, to pass as able-bodied and to hide the brutality of my lived existence. I do not want to fetishize what has happened to me. And I do not want people to see a stain where there is a self, a trauma where there is a teeming ecosystem of aliveness, a grim prognosis where there is the possibility of explosive healing. Because my abusers convinced me I would die and my parents would be killed if I told anyone the truth, a somatic spell haunts my nervous system, prickling through me every time I am honest about my life.
Do not speak, they tattooed into my child’s brain. And I didn’t for decades. And it is not easy to do it now. I am not writing this to be confessional and to ask for sympathy. I am writing honestly about my life because I am trying with my whole body, every day, to break the spell. I am writing honestly because there are other people whose bravery and honesty has saved my life.
And there are those who have not been saved. There are those who have not made it across the night sea that I honor when I try to speak about the grit, the gray, the grossest and most unseemly parts of a life.
When I went to the psychic in July 2020, I was still riding the manic high of escaping a bad relationship. Although I was beyond exhausted, I still had a sense that my world had dilated. I had been saved from a bad story. But seven months later that whisper of possibility was gone.
Three friends were dead by suicide. Cancer had claimed another and I’d been unable to see him in the last months due to the pandemic. Autoimmunity and illness kept me quarantining deeply alone, seeking solace from woodchucks and skunks and mushrooms and rattlesnakes when a violent and unexpected injury tore off a huge chunk of my knee and grounded me. I have a hard time staying inside and staying still and an even harder time healing wounds. At a moment when runs and hikes were keeping me sane, I was forced into excruciating stillness as the wound tried and failed to close. Finally, a wound specialist had to scoop it out and tear off the scab again and again to coax the wound into healing from the bottom up.
By March 1stmy novel had been rejected 23 times. “Incredible writing and research but I don’t think there’s a market” was the refrain. I am not someone prone to depression. Instead I would say that I have known great anguish in my life, using all my resources to move faster than the trauma, always trying to outrun the pain. But early spring of 2021 there would be no more running. I was knee-capped, literally. I was in the dirt, the rot, the compost heap. I had reached something that felt much deeper and darker than that ten-letter word depression.
Most days I was so physically ill I would end up at 4 p.m. lying on the floor somewhere in my apartment, trying to follow my breath. I was stitched to the present with radical intensity. No nostalgia for the past. No ability to envision the future. My breath was a needle, piercing the cloth of me with each inhale, sewing me into presence, embroidering an embodied instant, white-hot anguish for 1/18thof a second, unconsensual witness to a complete meltdown of every one of my dreams and imagined lives.
A woman I knew with my genetic condition had just died. What if I only had a year left? Less? What if I didn’t get to publish my novels? To live long enough to write all the stories I wanted to? What if I never got to experience love and partnership and building a family? What if all my beliefs were wrong? What if I was wrong about…everything?
The only thing keeping me going was my maniacal research into other beings and mythology. These two seemingly opposed studies have been the guiding stars of my life, but in March 2021 they were more than starlight. They were the sunshine keeping me alive. I poured myself back into my old loves: the Arthurian legends, the Tristan Romance, and Merlin folklore. Concurrently, I was reading every book on bacteria, fungi, microbiology, botany, and ecology I could find.
In the wonderful book The Once and Future King by T. H. White, the wizard Merlin instructs the young king Arthur: “The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” The boy Arthur, like the sixth century Bard Taliesin, learns not by book, but by becoming. In a sixth century poem attributed to Taliesin, we read, “I have been a blue salmon, I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain… A stallion, a bull, a buck, I was reaped and placed in an oven”. In order to become a storyteller, Taliesin has to live other lives, other stories. But the most important overlap between the young Arthur and Taliesin is that they learn not by becoming other human beings. They learn by entering into badgers and fish and insects: the minds of the more-than-human world.
I’d done years of talk therapy. Years of medical treatment. Years of somatic treatment. Years of investigating “my stories”: somatic, psychological, genetic, ancestral…But lying on the floor, filled with grief so viscous and gray I could scarcely breathe through it, I wondered what it meant if your stories didn’t nourish you? What if initiation – the story so many healers and lightworkers and mythologists tell – was a bad story? So many of my friends and loved ones had not survived. What assurance did I have that I would too? What reason did I have to believe that there was another season?
The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.
I vomited. I wheezed. I lay on the ground. I cancelled doctors’ appointments. There was no point. There were no cures. Nothing but bad news I didn’t want to hear and thus live out. Instead, I read and researched obsessively. Fungal systems. Root systems. Ivy. Vines. Parasitic mistletoe. Locust swarming. Soundscape ecologies. Amphibious gender flipping. Lesbian foxes. Woodchuck’s territorial behavior. The evolution of eukaryotic cells. Deep time. Extinction events. Eagle mating behavior. Ghost pipe’s strange relationship with Russala mycorrhizal fungi. When the physical pain got exquisitely intense, I would imagine myself lengthening into my last name: “strand”. Fungal strands. A silvery webwork of mycelia eating and feeling with its whole filamentous fabric. I imagined that every part of me had a reaching hand, a probing hypha. I imagined how delicious and helpful it would feel to be so embodied, so coordinated by appetite and desire. So intuitively tactile and curious.
I lay on the floor of my apartment watching the full moon rise framed by the window and I realized that if I was going to die before I could find wild, real love and make babies and write all the long, romantic novels I’d planned on writing, I was going to have to let myself become a mouth for a story bigger than just me.
“Make me an instrument. Blow through me.”
That night I had a very strange dream. I was in a dark forest filled with all my wild kin. Amber-hued chanterelles, blushing trillium, ivy curling over my feet, tufts of pigweed on the side of the path, berry-laden juniper trees like blue flames against the dim crepuscular light. Witch’s butter glowed on branches and honey-fungi bloomed from the cleft trunk of an old maple. A blue darning needle stitched a sapphire thread between two beech saplings. Behind a tangle of wild rose bushes something flashed like a bone. A white stag. He rounded the vegetation and stared at me with carnelian eyes.
“It’s time to let them tell the stories.” I heard the voice in my own mind but it belonged to the albino stag. I knew at once he meant the fungi, the insects, the plants.
“Okay,” I whispered. “Where do I start?”
“With men.”
And the dream ended with that riddle.
As I drank my morning coffee and puzzled over the dream, I had a bodily sense that something was rising in me. A vegetal tide. Some fungal infection hijacking my nervous system. It wasn’t until my dawn run through my neighborhood, down to the river, that all these threads started to braid together into something green and muscular. My years of research into the magician rabbi Yeshua known as Jesus while writing my book about Mary Magdalene. Jesus’ deep connection to other dying and resurrecting vegetal gods Dionysus and Orpheus and Osiris. My lifelong fascination with fungi and my long dormant idea of myths being the fruiting bodies of underground mycorrhizal systems. My love of invasive species. Fermentation. Microbial anarchy. My deep passion for the Arthurian myths. My research into Tristan and Isolde for my next novel. By the time I’d looped back to my apartment I could see a whole project. At that point I thought it would be an essay about rewilding myths of the masculine with ecology. Something I’d write privately, for myself, to save myself. Something to throw myself fully into with the hope that it might, like a boat, carry me to a safer shore.
Yes, it was strange. I had a lot of reasons to be angry at men at that particular moment. And some of the people I loved most in the world were men that seemed increasingly tired by the conflation of masculinity and patriarchy. I also knew that if I lived long enough, and found the right partner, I wanted to have a son someday. I knew the child I had lost had been a boy. Didn’t I need to understand magical boyhood and fertile masculinity in order to welcome it into the world someday through the vehicle of my own body? What stories would I want to give my son? If the curtains were dropped during quarantine, if all hope seemed lost, why not risk doing something strange, something goofy, something totally outside “the plan”?
I don’t know what inspired me to post this short excerpt on Facebook and Instagram. For years I had been deeply private about writing in process. I had no expectation that anyone else would want to come along for the ride. But a year ago today, I posted a slightly longer version of this:
As we approach Easter, that ultimate patriarchal death day, I’m going to investigate a series of figures that I think have the ability to reinvigorate a more flexible and magical idea of masculinity. I’ll give you Joseph and his technicolor coat, the bard Taliesin, Orpheus, the Green man, the wizard Merlin, Dionysus, Perceval, Viola as Sebastien from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and my personal favorite: Tristan of Lyonesse. Finally, I’m going to try and show that Jesus began as a lunar magician and was transformed into a solar god. What did this “mistranslation” mean for Christianity?
I’ll end this introduction with an Old Testament story that has been feeling like a “koan” or riddle about an older mode of masculinity. As King Saul sends David off to fight Goliath, he makes a great show of clothing him in his royal armor. As David departs, he turns to Saul and says, “I am not accustomed to these. I cannot walk in these.” And he takes the armor off. When he approaches the Philistine, it is “naked”. In order to come into his power, and his true kingship, David must accept profound vulnerability. He must approach the impossible without any hardness, any patriarchal adornment. What if becoming king, meant taking off all the “accessories” of kingship? What if it meant showing up completely naked?
Two things happened that I still can’t explain. First, it was like a pipe burst in me. Within a day it was clear this was not just an essay. It was a series of essays drawing on all the research – science, ecology, and mythology – I’d been doing for years directed towards fictional projects. Suddenly the writing wouldn’t stop. I’d be driving to go on a hike and have to pull over and open up my Notes app, emailing myself a whole essay that came through me like taking dictation at the side of the highway. I woke up in the night to write. I was on fire. Or, like I tried to explain to my mother, I was like the carpenter ants that, overtaken by the fungi Cordyceps, effectively become the instrument of the fungus until, attached atop a plant stalk, they sporulate a mushroom out of their heads. I was infected. I was possessed. I couldn’t stop.
The first draft and every major essay of the book was written in under 15 days. I’ve experienced inspiration before and mad writing bouts. I always write a lot – writing for hire, poetry, essays, long format fiction projects all simultaneously. But fiction projects while they are born from inspiration are finished through diligence and dailiness. I treated my novel writing like hygiene. I had to do it every single day in order to complete such a huge undertaking. I plotted, planned, revised, and reworked. Yes, I was deeply in love with my novel, but I tended to that love carefully, slowly.
This was something entirely different. It was almost anguish. Close to madness. It was all consuming. But it was also saving me, giving me energy and purpose out of thin air. Which leads to the second inexplicable aspect of this book’s birth.
Within a week three thousand people had showed up to read the work. I was dumbfounded but also too obsessed by my research and writing to give it much notice. However, as I continued to offer freely these essays online, another thousand showed up. And then another thousand. These were writers, scientists, poets, gardeners, mycologists, Tarot readers, herbalists, farmers, healers, educators. People who were incredibly supportive and interested in the work. And who provided crucial feedback and helpful research directions in real time as I wrote the book. Most of all, it was their outright enthusiasm and belief in the project and my writing that was miraculous. After months of rejections from publishers, being in direct relationship with readers was deeply nourishing and refreshing. Why spend years trying to shave down my maximalist, bawdy writing for some sterile imaginary audience? Why not offer my wildest version of myself and see who else showed up to join the party?
A lot of people showed up. Dionysus, arguably the main character of the project, seemed to be coalescing a digital bacchanal. And that’s the truth. There is so much about The Flowering Wand that feels like it happened “to” and “through” me, rather than “from” me and “by” me. It was as if I went to the crossroads and instead of the devil, the long-haired, leopard-pelted god Dionysus showed up, his flowering wand in hand.
“Do you want to write about me?”
“Yes,” I said fervently.
“Be careful what you wish for.” He grinned like a cat, pressing his magical wand to my forehead, bequeathing me with something halfway between infection and inspiration. Madness and motivation.
In a miracle totally outside of my expectation, a friend passed along this writing to the editor Richard Grossinger at Inner Traditions. Richard swooped in like the guardian angel he is and asked for the manuscript. Just a month out from its conception, I sent him the project in disbelief. He bought it the next day. Richard is an extraordinary writer and thinker and his endorsement of the book felt deeply meaningful.
I walked, shaking slightly, around my neighborhood, watching goldfinches wing mating dances through the bushes. Gilt scrawl of feathers hovered in the air like a message written in sunlight. I wept. I knelt in the grass near the river and said thank you to the puffballs and ducks and doves and purple loosestrife that greeted me every morning at the end of my run.
But to return to the metaphor of the carpenter ant with a fungal infection, the infection doesn’t end when you want it to. It ends when it has used you up for its reproductive act.
Within days I was writing again. Another book. And then another. True to the psychic’s prediction, I sat at my dining room table day in and day out typing, punctuated by swims in my favorite river, runs, and research.
“You should take a break,” suggested a friend. “You’ve already sold two books.”
“You see, this is keeping me alive,” I tried to explain. Every day when I woke, I could taste the anguish, the inability to imagine a future. I could feel the tremble of absolute physical and practical uncertainty. And then every day I would try to offer some medicine. For so long I’d sought the medicine for my ailing body and my glitchy nervous system. What then would it look like to offer medicine in return? Somewhere right after dawn, I would feel something flare in my brain. Why does the Wolbachia bacteria harm some insects and not others? How can I explain what it’s like to develop intimate kinship within a circumscribed ecosystem? How do hummingbirds migrate so far without stopping? What does storytelling look like that explodes human narratives? What kind of healing is available to someone with an incurable illness? How can I make my body, my life, my work into a home for other beings, good soil for other thinkers to come and plant their seeds inside? Each day, I would try to offer some tiny kernel of magic. And people would reach back, open-hearted and handed, weaving me into their ecosystems. Telling me I wasn’t alone.
This wasn’t writing as theory. Writing as hobby. Writing as a way of proving something. It was writing as emergency. The connections it fostered were and continue to be absolutely life-saving.
The psychic was right. Three books. Over a thousand pages of revised and edited writing in one year. God knows what the actual raw page count amounts to.
And yes, she was also right about me being allergic to chicken and turkey. Her prediction just took a year to come true.
But in a way I feel like Frodo and Sam on the top of Mount Doom. I have not packed enough for the return journey. And I do not know if I have arrived at any destination. I know I have made deep friendships and fertile connections. I have been invited into conversations that are wonderfully feral, bridging ideologies and continents. I know that my favorite writers, several of my biggest heroes, have reached out and supported my work. I know I am so grateful most days that I cry with joy. I also know that my gas tank was empty last March when I began this year long writing bender and it’s inexplicable how I have managed to produce so much work so quickly. If it was empty then, what is it like now? Sometimes I sense that I’m so fried that I might burn up, turn to steam.
There must be a new season. I keep thinking I’m too exhausted to write one more essay, give one more workshop or talk. I long for the long years of novel research and writing. But novel writing takes time and it happens behind the scenes. It needs a well-gardened, predictable, loving life to sustain its slow birth. I want so badly to write my queer ecological retelling of Tristan and Isolde but I am aware that as of right now my life has neither the stability nor the practicality yet that would allow me to disappear into the long effort it requires. Rather, I still wake with the sense of radical uncertainty, the longing for a partner as creative and eccentric as me, the knowledge that they may not ever arrive, that I may not be the character in a love story, that I may not have the son I dreamed of bringing into the world. But these books have been my children this year. And even though I’m not in a story I recognize, I’m still in a story nonetheless. I’m intimately woven into a multi-hued ecosystem of teeming, pricking, stinging, wild animacy.
I tell you this because I am astounded that I am alive. And I want to demystify the myth of a singular author writing behind a closed door. This was a porous multispecies collaboration. It was a madness. A Saint Vitus Dance. I am so grateful The Flowering Wand chose me for infection. That it has carried my spores to so many distant lands and that it has saved me from totally melting into the underworld. I am so thankful for the madness of Dionysus. And most of all, I am so deeply grateful for you, my readers and collaborators. It has been the connective tissue that has grown between me and many, many different people, that has kept me breathing, waking, eating, writing, risking every day to think differently, to risk telling a different story.
Strangely, it was the writing about wilder masculinities, this season of inhabiting other minds, that has, wildly enough, emboldened me to become myself and to tell loudly and publicly stories I had once been too ashamed to even whisper. Flanked by rhizomatic storytellers, bull-headed gods, lyre-strumming boy kings, and antler-crowned youths, I was finally able to confront and alchemize the abuse I had been trying to avoid for years. These wild, fungal gods were not afraid of mess. They knew just how to tend to the compost heap of my decomposing narratives.
So, I thank them – the plants, the fungi, the creaturely kin, the vegetal gods – for protecting me and helping me during this strange, strange year.
Let me end with a quote by my favorite secular saint John O’Donohue from his aptly titled poem “For the Interim Time”:
What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.
The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is available for pre-order:
Normally, my first and second newsletters are for my paid subscribers but given the collaborative birth of The Flowering Wand I figured it only fitting to offer this reflection for free. Normally I do not post new writing for the free version, once a month recycling an older essay. If you are able to and choose to support the paid version of this newsletter, you will receive two newsletters a month featuring everything from new essays, excerpts from my upcoming books and projects, mythic research, reading lists, poetry, book reviews to ecological embodiment exercises, playlists, personal updates, and generally a whole lot of funk and texture.
I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here (and throughout the past year across platforms). As someone struggling to balance chronic illness (and just how expensive it is to be sick in America) with writing, know that you are very practically keeping me alive, keeping me afloat. Thank you deeply.
writing to stay alive. i have been there. i understand so much of what you’ve written, just sitting here, nodding and grinning like a fool. i am so proud of you, sophie. so, so, so proud. just ordered. keep writing. the strand is infinite. ♥️
Breathing in every word. Beyond grateful to be walking through this life with you x