It feels a bit surreal by the time is here!! 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.
I am delighted to share the cover and title of the book as well! The title represents my journey with fungi. It all began with curiosity. Then the surprises of learning deeply about myself, my queerness and gender fluidity as a non-binary person as it turns out fungi live beyond the binaries of sex, gender, family, relationships, andcommunity, popular culture imposes on our lives. All the while finding community when I needed it most, thanks to the fungi. I learned how to love fungi and give back to the fungi by sharing my gifts.
I am so excited to share what I’ve learned along the way, and most importnatly, to share how I learned to love fungi in an unlikely place, the urban metropolis of Los Angeles. So you can meet the mushrooms of Southern California and learn to love them too. Stay tuned for more info soon.
Cover designed by Heyday Publishing. The cover features rainbow mycelium illustrated by Elissa Callen along with my photos of the gorgeous red pinwheel Marasmius plicatulus and the non-binary icons of Schizophylllum commune and Trichaptum abietinum who both have thousands of mating types/sexes. The overall cover design is based on the original mockups by Rachel Celinese.
Monday, May 25th, 7pm, free by donation
Through interactive activities prompted by the Let’s Become Fungal! Oracle Cards, we’ll delve into the fascinating world of fungi and discover how these organisms can teach us about symbiotic relationships, cyclical calendars, and more. Each card offers insights, questions, meditations, and exercises to help us connect with fungi and each other in our shared ecosystem.
“The oracle does not predict the future, it opens up possiblities that were not being perceived.” - Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead: Stores of Those Left Behind
Activities will be led by our fellow Los Angeles Mycoverse myconauts, stay tuned for more info!
Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts is a book by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez. She later published an oracle deck to inspire bringing people together through group workshops and deeper discussion of themes explored in the book. Yasmine will be visiting us in Los Angeles later this year in September so stay tuned!
Toby Kiers Tyler Prize “State of the Environment Address was beautiful and inspiring.
Hannah Read released her second volume of The Fungi Sessions inspired by fungi and a lovely tribute to her late father who was a mycologist.
Michael Pollan’s new book on consciousness and its implications on our relationship with the more-than-human world – we will be reading this in the Mycoverse in the future so start reading now! Here’s an interview with the NYT for a teaser of what’s at stake.
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.
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.
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