Writer Sophie Strand’s vigilant blue eyes scan a soon-to-be-abandoned, spartan apartment in Kingston’s Rondout. Seated cross-legged in cutoffs on the hardwood floor, she says, “This is my monk cell. I’ve led a pretty ascetic life here.”
The 29-year-old Strand has put the solitude to good use. In her five years in the Rondout, she’s gone from ghostwriting to producing a staggering amount of original work, all while sharpening social media skills to get that work to a growing, global fanbase. This readership enthusiastically responds to Strand’s distinctive intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology; folks of all stripes routinely engage with the author via the internet, mostly with love.
Strand’s most recent offering, the reason for our meeting, is her astonishing debut novel The Madonna Secret (Bear & Company), a sensual, epic retelling of the Jesus story, relayed through his beloved, Miriam/Mary of Bethany, AKA Mary Magdalene. Even before last month’s packed Golden Notebook-sponsored release party at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock, The Madonna Secret had gone into a second printing on preorders alone.
In addition to authoring books, Woodstock-raised Strand is a mesmerizing speaker, possessed of a burnished alto that seems either from the pre-industrial past or a post-apocalyptic future. This voice distinguishes her live events, as well as audiobook versions of The Madonna Secret, her acclaimed essay collection The Flowering Wand (Bear & Company, 2021), and dozens of podcast appearances in which hosts are audibly enraptured and/or hypnotized by Strand’s extemporizing. Her prodigious output also includes writing workshops conducted via laptop, and powerful (and occasionally hilarious) posts shared through social media and/or by subscription to her Substack Make Me Good Soil.
Songwriter-performer-author Amanda Palmer became a Strand fan when Palmer was living in New Zealand, alone with her young son. Someone sent a link. “I felt immediately comforted by the rare combination of compassion and urgency of her words,” Palmer says. On Palmer’s return to Woodstock, the two became close friends, and occasional collaborators. “When I first encountered Sophie’s writing I assumed—from the sound of her writing voice—that she was a woman in her seventies. Her understanding of the world carried the tone of a fully formed crone. I was so shocked to find out she wasn’t even 30. Her literary star is beyond the ascendant; I’m just wondering when she’ll be too busy and famous to return my calls.”
The Substack, the workshops, and the books—including a memoir-in-progress—have enabled a move from that Rondout monk cell to a Bearsville house featuring acreage, elbow room, and the wildlife from which Strand has drawn sustenance since childhood. Going forward, smart money says that natural sustenance will come in handy.
Untying the Knot
Things weren’t always so intense. Strand’s life path shifted significantly during a pivotal trip to Jerusalem to visit relatives in 2010, when she was 16. While walking with her aunt on the road Jesus reportedly traveled to be crucified—the Via Dolorosa—Strand got very, very sick, with no immediately discernible cause. It did not pass.
“I thought I was going to die,” she says. “I was vomiting blood, becoming irrevocably ill, stepping off of youth into decrepitude without any legibility.”
She made it back home, but continued to struggle with her health. Diagnoses eventually came, but Strand now asserts they were inaccurate, and accepts a chronic connective tissue disability, about which she writes and speaks robustly, challenging our culture’s reductive, binary perception of wellness as “sick” or “not sick.”
After years of illness, and an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing at Bard College, Strand’s health took a downturn. She scuttled plans for grad school, and, in 2016, moved back in with her parents in Woodstock. “I was having a lot of neurological symptoms,” she says. “I thought: What if I lose my cognitive abilities within the year? If I only had a year left, what’s the one thing I’d write? It was really easy to answer. I’d write the story of Mary Magdalene. I’d been fascinated by Magdalene lore since I was a child, and obsessed with the crucifixion as tragedy, not a miracle. I’ve often thought the intensity of my physical experience in Jerusalem had created some kind of knot in me that could only be figured out by writing this book.”
It took two years to write the story she’d been wanting to read her whole life. She took another year to revise and rewrite, excising hundreds of pages to get the manuscript down to about 600 pages. Getting published took a couple years more.
The Madonna Secret emerges as a work of formidable imagination and rigorous research. Strand delves deep into Second Temple Period Palestine: the Biblical characters like Lazarus and Martha, the overbearing Roman Empire entwined with the Jewish communities, the oral and written traditions of the indigenous people, and, crucially, the varying degrees of oppression under which the women lived.
Mystifying Scope
One of The Madonna Secret’s many surprises is the lush terrain, now mostly desert. Of the region circa 30 CE, Strand says, “It was more like Provence.” The book gives us verdant hills, food growing in the fields and gardens, animals coexisting with humans, all in rich detail. Against this backdrop, narrator Mary of Bethany, illiterate daughter of a wealthy rabbi, shares her childhood discovery of her intimidating powers, and her tempestuous young womanhood. By the time she meets charismatic, troublemaking, and similarly gifted Yeshua/Jesus, we are fully ensconced in a vibrant landscape. You can almost smell it. Along the way, we accompany Mary in both hardscrabble, earthy conditions, and unforgettably vivid, revelatory dreams and visions, some of which prophesy the co-opting and perverting of Yeshua’s nature-based teachings by rapacious empire.
Looking back, Strand is amazed, even mystified at the scope of her work. “The last couple times I read it,” she says, “I don’t remember how I wrote it, how I figured it out. I can’t even recall what it was like to make it. It feels utterly defamiliarized to me.”
The conjuring aspect of the process still fills her with awe. “There’s always a trinitarian quality to writing,” she says. “You show up, the story shows up, then this third element arrives that is totally unpredictable. Your characters interrupt you, they change shape. You throw your DNA in there, but it expresses in a way you don’t expect.”
Strand’s parents had well-prepared her for the ups and downs of a writer’s life, especially one focused on such things as Magdalene lore, and other indelible stories that shape religion and spiritual thought. Her father, erstwhile Buddhist monk and writer Clark Strand (Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for An Age of Extinction and Collapse) and mother, teacher and writer Perdita Finn (Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World) had raised their child in a household in which preschooler Strand was invited to join her interfaith scholar dad and a retinue of rabbis, monks, nuns, and environmentalists, all talking around the dinner table about Bible stories in nontraditional ways.
“It was a real generosity that he let me interrupt and ask questions,” Strand says. “There was a cuteness and preciousness about it, but everyone respected me and engaged me. It gave me a feeling of intellectual confidence that young girls don’t get.”
Among the many passages in The Madonna Secret that feel particularly lived are the scenes in which curious spitfire Mary insists on being part of similar dinner conversations with her high-status rabbi father. He eventually relents, but never teaches Mary to read.
The ecosystem in which all of The Madonna Secret transpires is itself a character, a facet Strand also lays at the feet of her folks: “My parents taught me that the environment and animals were more important than anything. The world is alive differently than me and so I had to be curious, ask lots of questions, be super respectful, and not take for granted that I understood anything. I was really lucky.”
That boundless curiosity about the natural world is also a hallmark of Strand’s Mary of Bethany, as is a rage to live and love in harmony with everything not made by human hands. Her Magdalene’s desires and wonder breathe new, fecund vitality into an ancient, yet persistent story. The Madonna Secret teems with valiant struggle for freedom, exhilarating risk-taking, unfathomable loss, undeniable eros, and ultimately, love beyond life, undimmed by time.
