Hey For The Wild community, it’s Ayana.

It’s been a minute. Life has been moving—fast, deep, and full. I’ve grown, and with that growth, a clearer sense of what I want to share with you has come into focus.

After nearly a decade of digital episodes, I felt a longing—an ache to be in person, on the land, and heart to heart with our guests. That’s why you may have noticed we’ve slowed down on weekly releases. Instead, we’ve been on the road, spending sacred, unhurried time with people we love—tending to conversations that are raw, intimate, funny, beautiful, edgy, and alive.

We were hoping to keep it under wraps a little longer, but we’re just too excited: the first season of our new walking series will be released soon, and it features the luminous Sophie Strand. This series is an in-person, land-based conversation that is intimate, weird, raw, beautiful exploration of land, grief, myth, pleasure, and more. These aren’t studio-perfect interviews, they’re alive.

But there’s more. We’re also creating an anthology—a wild, tender, and nonlinear book featuring Sophie and 20 other contributors like Tyson Yunkaporta, Sylvia Linsteadt, adrienne maree brown, Dori Midnight, and Stephen Jenkinson. It’s a distillation of 10 years of For The Wild: essays, art, poetry, rituals, and deep questions. It’s a strange and beautiful offering: an archive, an altar, a trail companion. It is not meant to behave. It’s tangled and wild. It asks us what it means to live in fragmentary times and still root deeply. We hope to print it later this year.

To bring these projects to life, we need your support.

We’re looking for funding partners, sponsors, and publishers—and we’re dreaming of a book tour from the West Coast to the East, and across the pond to Europe.

If you’re an individual, foundation, or aligned company that wants to support the Sophie Strand series, reach out.
If you’re a publisher or lit world comrade, I’d love to connect.
If you’d like to host a live gathering for the book tour, let’s talk—we’d love to share good food, real talk, and tender moments with your community.

Email us at connect@forthewild.world

Thank you for walking with us—whether you’ve been here since the beginning or just arrived. My heart is racing as I share this with you. It feels risky, but right. Vulnerable, but true. And I’m so grateful.

In the meantime, you can spend some deep time with us through our Earthly Reads Series and Book Study or Bayo Akomolafe's We Will Dance with Mountains: Vunja! course—both on our website.

And of course, we’ve got over 350 episodes waiting for you on your favorite platform.

Here’s to what comes next. With love,
Ayana

♫ The music featured in this update is “Das Nuvens (Live)” by Fabiano do Nascimento, courtesy of Leaving Records.

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In the sixth and final episode of our Earthly Reads series, we are honored to welcome back Prentis Hemphill, author of What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. This episode offers a preview of the live Earthly Reads Book Study, join us there to access the full 75 minute episode.

Offering embodied insight into the ways in which healing manifests in our personal and collective lives, Prentis Hemphill brings a thoughtful and empathetic perspective to this crucial conversation. Exploring what the process of healing looks like within movements and the trouble with only focusing on the individual, Ayana and Prentis bring much-needed nuance and humanity to the dialogue. Dive right in for a conversation that invites us all to imagine new possibilities for justice, community care, and wholeness—one that fosters deeper belonging with each other and the Earth.

About the guest
Prentis Hemphill is the bestselling author of What It Takes to Heal, a groundbreaking exploration of healing, justice, and transformation. A therapist, somatics teacher, facilitator, political organizer, and writer, Prentis is also the founder of The Embodiment Institute and a leading voice in embodied leadership and collective healing.

About the series
Earthly Reads is a podcast series and online book study featuring conversations with some of our favorite authors including adrienne maree brown, Marcia Bjornerud, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Tricia Hersey, and Céline Semaan. This episode is just a small glimpse into some of the incredible live conversations that take place throughout the book study. For more details about the series and to purchase access to the full study, visit forthewild.world/bookstudy.

♫ The music featured in this series is “Nucleo (Live)” by John Caroll Kirby (featuring Logan Hone, Benny Bock, Paul Maramba, and Tamir Barzilay), “Joyous Dance” by Laraaji, and “The Rite Way” by Muwosi and Lionmilk from the compilation Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires courtesy of our partner Leaving Records. Compilation proceeds are directed back into the community of artists and families impacted by the fires. Learn more at staying.bandcamp.com.

Support the show

In the fifth episode of our Earthly Reads series, we dive into a conversation with the renowned Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. This episode offers a preview of the live Earthly Reads Book Study, now available for purchase at forthewild.world/bookstudy.

Throughout the conversation, Gumbs threads together her thoroughly-researched and deeply-felt knowledge of Audre Lorde with her own personal wit, observation, and openness. She also speaks to her understanding of Lorde’s work as “geological,” following the connection Lorde draws between Blackness and our existence at every layer of Earth’s interior. Reminding us of the value of the collective, Gumbs shares lessons for reciprocity, earthly embodiment, and the poetry of living.

Earthly Reads is a podcast series and online book study featuring conversations with some of our favorite authors including adrienne maree brown, Marcia Bjornerud, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Tricia Hersey, and Céline Semaan.

This episode is just a small glimpse into some of the incredible live conversations that will take place throughout the book study. For more details about the series and how to purchase access to the full study, visit forthewild.world/bookstudy.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more.

♫ The music featured in this series is by Cool Maritime, Matt Baldwin, and Sharada Shashidhar and Caleb Buchanan from the compilation Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires courtesy of our partner Leaving Records. Compilation proceeds are directed back into the community of artists and families impacted by the fires. Learn more at staying.bandcamp.com.

Support the show