Second Skin
The Long Road North to Rewilding the Soul of the Empty Glen: A Memoir
Poppy had a career in high finance, a glass-walled corner office and a broken heart. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that success cannot cure, and eventually it finds you. She found Scotland first.
When a second home became available on a remote peninsula on the wind-swept coast of Assynt, Poppy embarked on a journey unlike any other. Rekindling a childhood dream to care for abandoned creatures, she traded in her luxury apartment for a few acres of land and a barn full of broken vivariums. She had no idea that what she found would change her life, and her community, forever.
“It's not about what I brought to the land, but what the land taught me,” writes Poppy Strider in this hybrid atlas, herpetarium and diary of transformation. Moving between ancient folklore and contemporary colubriculture, she finds a grounded voice that’s by turns heartbreaking, inspiring, and breathtakingly alive. At a time where authentic community is needed more than ever, Poppy's story of turning her own estate into a sanctuary for rare venomous snakes takes readers into a timeless tale of self-discovery.
“The snake is an ess, a sinuous loop, a smoothening, like the fresh stream that winds from the old artisanal walls of the dam that powers my incubators. Snake in Gaelic, the lost traditional language of these wild places, is nathair, and the word sounds like nature on my tongue. Forceful. Free. Full of venom that could kill a man in seconds.”
Second Skin charts the highs and lows of Poppy’s quest to reinvigorate traditional Highland snake-breeding and ancestral worship of the four-tongued snake God who lives beneath Ben More. Braving the elements, Council planning policy and her neighbours’ initial suspicion, Poppy recounts how she learned from the local lore-keepers how to tend to the infernal hiss that echoes always and forever from the red, beating heart of the earth. As the coils of the world serpent draw ever tighter around our corrupt and decaying planet, this one-of-a-kind book shows us all a way forward into the fanged maw of surrender.
This is a book about shedding. About what we carry out of one life and into another, and about what – if we are lucky, if we are honest – we can finally leave behind, emerging rain-lashed, fresh-scaled and sharp-toothed into the northern light.
The Times: “Lyrical”
The Guardian: “Quietly devastating”
Dicky Douglas Scott: “A touching reminder of the importance of the old ways”
The West Highland Free Press: “A prime example of [...] Highland culture”
Amanita Willoughby: “Where can I buy a snake croft?
What I’m Up To
My zine Lines is part of an exhibition at The Wellcome Collection, The Coming of Age, running till November. It’s a zine about ageing as a trans woman and the complexity of wrestling with the beauty industry.
I have a short story called Mutual Aid out now in the collection Chop Chop from Rosie’s Disobedient Press, alongside work from Eilidh Akilade, Ocean Vuong, Shola Von Reinhold, Tishani Doshi and Lou Selfridge. It’s a story about a newly-out trans woman getting a horrible haircut, and is part of an occasional series of interlinked stories set in trans community in the early 2020s. Previous installments can be found in Extra Teeth and The Poet and the Echo.
My essay Cruachan Beann is coming out in Women, Walking next month from batsford. There are no snakes.
What I’ve Been Reading
Jim Carruth’s Knockan is very beautiful and painful. I want everyone to read it. It’s set in Assynt and is everything Second Skin is not.
Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day frightened me and made me think about different orientations towards a national literature.
I really admire Grace Curtis’s continuing commitment to serving up different varieties of gay longing in Heaven’s Graveyard.