on the edge of an estuary
in a web of animacy
among tides of uncertainty
i live in possibility
Welcome to my small corner of the vast web. I’m glad you’ve found your way here.
I’m an artist and poet working across the UK. I love language, both human and wild, and spend my days exploring creative forms of call and response within the living world.
I’m curious about how all beings, seen and unseen, known and unknown, made of breath, bone, sap and stone, can live more joyfully together. And how we, as humans, can both speak up and quieten down to help that happen.
I’m the author of five non-fiction books, all published as Sophie Howarth. I’m currently at work on a new book exploring the value of cultivating poetic habits in our increasingly prosaic world.
I’m happiest when practising wordcraft of one sort or another: weaving syntax, picking at semantics, spinning new metaphors and quietly unstitching the status quo. I’m a proud word nerd - talk to me about typography, poetry or etymology, and you will see me fizz with delight. My favourite toys are alphabets, my favourite books are dictionaries, my favourite sounds are windsongs and my favourite shapes are waterways.
Alongside my partner Sarah, I run Turadh, a social enterprise providing opportunities for rest and nature connection to those working for the common good in Scotland.
Together, we are also restoring fifty acres of saltmarsh, meadow and woodland along the Deben estuary in Suffolk. Our hope is to weave stronger webs of care and community between all who call this place home: the two-legged and the four-legged, the winged, the finned, the threaded and the rooted.
In 2025, blessed by the fortune of 49 revolutions around the sun, I decided to reclaim my matrilineal name, Chance. It was a gift from my Irish ancestors, lost on the winds of convention when my Mum came to England to marry my Dad in the 1960s, and it felt too beautiful to let slip away.
I love having a name that rhymes with dance, glance and trance. It reminds me how playful and fleeting life is, and what a stroke of luck it is to have it at all. And it helps me remember that nobody knows for sure how things will turn out, so we might as well gamble all we have to give life on earth a fighting chance.
