Stepping Into Wilder Form, 2025

Photo by Jasper Garratt of seagulls along the tideline in the Pacific Northwest

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 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 and tender book featuring Sophie and 20 other contributors like Tyson Yunkaporta, Sylvia Linsteadt, adrienne maree brown, Dori Midnight, and Stephen Jenkinson. It’s an archive, an altar, a trail companion—a distillation of 10 years of For The Wild with essays, art, poetry, rituals, and deep questions. 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 Book Study or Bayo Akomolafe's We Will Dance with Mountains: Vunja! Slow Study—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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