Sophie Strand Introduces Bodies, A Hauntingly Soilpunk Mini-Issue
Guest Editor Sophie Strand on death, decay, and becoming food
Trick or treat soilpunks,
It’s officially rotting season! 🍄🪱🍂
Here lies our inaugural mini-issue, Bodies, a collection of three short stories on death and decomposition, illustrated by our community through our first open call. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the amazing art we received:
Self-identified compost heap and writer Sophie Strand joins us as guest editor.
Sophie Strand (@cosmogyny) is a poet and writer with a focus on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Body Is a Doorway, The Madonna Secret, and the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.” She lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.
Over the next few days, she’ll share commentary on each of the stories through what we like to call our “annotation layer” to enhance your soilpunk reading experience. Read on to hear her thoughts on this new collection and make sure you’re subscribed to receive the stories as they drop exclusively on Substack!
To enter life, be food…
instructs Chickasaw poet and environmentalist Linda Hogan. While it’s compelling to hold this as a metaphor, imagining ways to make our days as nourishing and helpful to other people and beings, it is important to remember that, in a much more important way, the imperative is not abstract. Our matter persists past personal death, longing to be woven back into the web of appetites that underpins the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere.
We think of rot as being the signature of death and tombs. But it is also a womb. Fungal and microbial appetites and alchemies churn our ingredients into new configurations of aliveness.
A dead body in the ground is a type of seed, ready to rot and split and melt into the connective tissue of forests and fields and interspecies relationships: soil.
In this late hour of extraction and ecocide, human beings are good at eating and not very good at being eaten. Interruptions in cycles of decay and regrowth are known to set off unpredictable perturbations in climate systems attempting to correct the flow of matter and energy. The undigested biota from the Carboniferous period represents such an interruption and it is this accumulated ancient sunlight that now powers the industrial systems causing massive extinction. (Read: fossil fuels.) When we interrupt decay and deny rot’s inclusive appetites–when we turn away from death–we paradoxically cause more death and more harm.
In the Bodies Mini Issue, death is inseparable from life. In The Caretaker’s repurposed planters, the Fruiting Bodies’ rotting mangos, and the future squashes sprouting from the grave in What Transcends From Rot, we see the intimate tie between decay and future appetites. We have denied the world the sustenance of our bodies for a long time. We have hoarded food and resources and let other species and other beings starve. We have hoarded our own matter, making it indigestible with concrete and formaldehyde. When we take responsibility for the practicalities of mortality and decay–both our own deaths and the deaths of other beings we have inadvertently caused–we conversely move closer to participating in life. When I speak of life, I speak of the life that outlives us all and that uses us all as food: the continued evolutionary dance of the biosphere. A central theme that runs its fungal hyphae between these stories is of material responsibility. What does it practically mean to compost and transform our mess into the soil foundations and sustenance for new life–life that, although it might not include us as humans, will make intimate use of our materiality?
Rot is a tomb and a womb...It can transform these death-phobic systems into soil of future forests and visions of messy, inter-species survival.
Rot is a tomb and a womb. And it is also a biospheric mouth that can eat the toxicity of anthropocentrism and imperialism and ecocide without perishing. It can transform these death-phobic systems into soil of future forests and visions of messy, inter-species survival. If we want to enter life, we might have to turn towards death. If we want to continue living beyond our meteor-streak lives, we must truly ask what it means to become edible.
Sophie Strand
Poet and Writer, “Make Me Good Soil”
Bringing Sci-Fi Down to Earth…
Tractor Beam is a soil-based Sci-Fi publication that explores speculative ideas around farming, food, earth sciences, and beyond, imagining a positive future here on Earth (in the earth). Our goal is to connect people to regenerative agriculture and soil health in a meaningful way. We call it “soilpunk.”
Wanna get involved? Shoot us a DM or email us with your ideas at community@tractorbeam.earth, and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to stay connected on the latest. Let’s grow a better future together. 🤝🌎
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