Mushroom Walks Are Back! 🍄‍🟫🌱🌳🍄🔍🔬🥾✨

I’ve been having so much fun learning photography! Here’s Marasmius plicatulus, the pleated marasmius.

I am proud (and relieved) to share that I have completed editing my manuscript for my upcoming book, Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles! Wrapping up photos and illustrations this winter, so I will be busy with that for the next few months. Stay tuned for a published date!

As the valleys of life go, with the highs come the lows. This past year has been tough for me – from navigating personal health issues to moving three times, to recently being laid off from my IT job of ten years, which has been my primary source of income, allowing me to live in Los Angeles and do the fungal conservation, education, and community organization work that I do. As I navigate unemployment, Exploring the Mycoverse will be on a brief break. If you need something to read in the meantime, we will be discussing Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive, and Maria Pinto’s Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless.

However, I will still be holding mushroom walks as they are so life-giving, and I love them so. I will be announcing more mushroom walks in the coming weeks!

Wow, that was a lot of rain! The mushrooms haven’t been this abundant since two years ago, when we had back-to-back atmospheric rivers. Please share these offerings below with your friends and family!

• Sunday, January 11th, Befriending Fungi (La Cañada)

• Saturday, January 17th, Befriending Fungi (Santa Clarita - new location!)

• Saturday, January 31st, Theodore Payne Foundation - Finding Our Way Home with Fungi

More walks to be announced soon! I’ll be leading walks with Arlington Garden, Children’s Forest School, and the Center for Applied Ecological Remediation, too.

• Seeing my lifelong heroes, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, dressed up as mushrooms made my day. This conversation is inspiring!!!

• The Sheldrake family is hosting their annual class Science, Art, Sound, & The Sacred up at Hollyhock again. It changed my life and is a class I still think about regularly years later. Cortes Island and the Hollyhock Center are quite an incredible experience themselves.

• Maria Pinto is coming to LA this Friday, January 9th, 7 pm at Chevalier’s Books, and possibly leading a mushroom walk before? We shared Maria’s Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless – What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival in our last Sporinator.

• The first plant circle hosted by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Plant, Baby, Plant movement on the winter solstice was a balm of light in this time of darkness.

• California Lichen Society recently announced their annual gathering on 1/24/26 in Napa county. Several myconauts have attended in the past and have loved it.

• Yet another incredible interview with Merlin Sheldrake, this time with Emergence Magazine.

• Suzanne Simard has a highly anticipated new book coming out this year.

• Current Conservation dedicated an issue to conservation mycology and ABUNDANCE. So beautiful.

Also check out this viscid bolete, Aureoboletus flaviporus! They had such a slimy cap to protect them from drying out. Perhaps the slimiest mushroom I’ve met in SoCal.