Dear Fellow Myconauts,
It’s wonderful to be back at Arlington Garden during these summer months with friends, drinking tea, and talking until sunset as the parrots come through spreading the daily news through their songs. August and September Exploring the Mycoverse programs have been announced! Check out our upcoming events below.
PS – I’m busy planning the book tour for this year and I can’t wait to share more about it soon. If you have a recommendation where you’d like to see me give a book talk, send me an email or reply this post!
Thank you all for the continued help and support navigating the challenging current job market! I feel I’m getting closer to finally finding something. Thank you for sending me job boards, opportunities, and connecting me with potential future employers! Keep on sending them along! I’m still looking for job opportunities, see my previous post for more about my experience, resume and how you can help:
10 Ideas for Earthly Flourishing
Monday, August 10th, 7:00pm, free by donation
As the Mycoverse community looks for inspiration for rethinking conservation & stewardship, we turn to NYU Law’s More-Than-Human-Rights Program or MOTH for guidance. We’ve been exploring their work for over a year now and through this offering we will hear from many of their leaders. We will be screening then discussing a thought-provoking video series they created.
In 10 Ideas for Earthly Flourishing, a video series produced by NYU Law’s More-Than-Human-Rights Program or MOTH for short, we hear from a range of leading thinkers and doers working to advance protections for the more-than-human world on inventive ideas they have to promote the flourishing of the living world. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the MOTH field, this video series features biologists working with plants, fungi, and marine mammals; Indigenous leaders; advocates; lawyers; and artists.
We invite you to watch Merlin Sheldrake’s conversation with Guardian’s Global Environment editor Jonathan Watts at MOTH Festival of Ideas 2025 ahead of time to familiarize yourself with how fungi are inspiring new conservation & stewardship frameworks with their relational ways of being. This program is open to all and beginners to fungi and/or conservation & stewardship.
12 Principles of Rot + Regenerative Thinking
Monday, August 24th, 7:00pm, free by donation
Join us to explore a design principles come up with the by a design consultancy collective known as Sporesight. We invite you to read their 12 principles of regenerative design here from their playbook Fungi as Your Futurist. As the Mycoverse community looks to explore how to embody more fungi-like practices we turn to Sporesight to learn from how they incorporate fungi into their imaging of symbiotic futures.
From Sporesight: Regenerative thinking brings the design principles for what grows next. Everything we do is based on this framework: fungal principles for seeing what’s expired, ending it well, and growing what regenerates from the parts. This program is open to all and beginners to fungi.
Mushroom Movie Night
Monday, September 14th, 7:00pm, free by donation
Every season since the Mycoverse began, we have come together to watch different movies that are inspiring our community. Come along to see fungi in film to welcome in the fall season when our rainy season that brings mushrooms begins! More info TBA!
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When the Forest Breathes Book Discussion
Monday, September 28th, 7:00pm, free by donation
Join us to discuss the follow up book to Finding the Mother Tree, the book that changed how think about trees and fungi. Suzanne Simard returns with a book that, drawing on rigorous science and neglected indigenous wisdom, places nature’s own cycles of renewal at the center of a powerful vision for the future of our forests.
We invite you to read the book in its entirety before our gathering – while not required to have had read it beforehand to attend, it helps if you have at least read some of it to inspire deeper more meaningful discussion. Beginners to the world of fungi welcome!
“A masterclass on the inner workings of forests—a lush glimpse at the symphonic mutualisms and intergenerational cascades that sustain life at every scale. Simard, one of the boundary-pushing scientists of our time, is also a resplendent storyteller. Through her, new threads of connection between Indigenous knowledge and Western science are formed. The experiments and ideas in When the Forest Breathes are quietly revolutionary. This is science as an act of love for the world.” – Zoë Schlanger Author of The Light Eaters
🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🍄🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🍄🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🍄🟫
Now coming out in January of 2027!
You can now preorder my book Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus via my website or wherever you buy books! If you purchase through my website you directly support me and my work. I am offering signed and personalized inscriptions (fun for gifts!) through my website. I am so excited for you to read it. Unfortuantely the publisher ran into some production delays so we had to move the publication back from November 2026 to January 2027.
Links and Spores that Caught Our Attention
Song of the Cedars (from Is a River Alive) was transformed into a book by Robert Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, and Cesar Rodriguez Garavito!
A Lichenologist’s Journey Back to Wonder via Atmos (beautiful and ever so personally relatable)
Soil Remediation Guide for Residential Sites is a guide for LA fire-affected families – there’s been an overwhelming amount of information going around and this guide walks people through each step of the way
This upcoming documentary called Mushroom Mountain on mushrooming in Yunnan (with a funny website landing page) looks promising… “When you go into this story, you find it’s a touching story about return, about home and about love.” Check out the interview below. Have you heard about Jian Shou Qing who lives in Yunnan? The mushroom that is known to provoke visions of little people? This mushroom inspired the origin of this movie for this filmmaker to revisit their home back in Yunnan:
Looking sporeward,
Aaron
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