Dear Fellow Myconauts,

Save the date, for my art exhibition opening on October 4th at 10am at Monrovia Canyon Park’s Nature Center! I’ll be sharing a flyer with more details in the coming weeks.

I’m thrilled for my first exhibition featuring my photography, videos I’ve made, mushrooms and lichens I’ve collected over the years. and some other fun surprises. I can’t wait for you to see the hidden details in these photo-stacked macro photographs with these large prints. Many of the photos featured in this exhibition will be of photos that didn’t make it into the book and I haven’t shared yet publicly.

Brooke Sauer, the former official Naturalist of Monrovia whose cyanotype work is featured in the opening pages of Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles, invited me to do an exhibition at her former workplace the Monrovia Canyon Park’s Nature Center. Thank you Brooke!!! Check out their work on her website and insta @biminy.

I’ve got a personal favor to ask of you:

I’m looking for job opportunities in program management in environmental education or conservation, and general project management opportunities as well (I have over ten years of experience in it). You can check out my CV/resume here or find me LinkedIn here. If you know of any leads or potential employers you recommend that I check out please contact me here.

After being laid off at the end of last year, I am trying my hardest to transition from full time work in the corporate (IT) world to work with organizations that align with my values while supporting my overall conservation and education work here in Los Angeles.

I updated our logo to be more vibrant in high quality! 🎉

12 Principles of Rot + Regenerative Thinking

Monday, August 24th, 7:00pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

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

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

Every season since the origin of the Mycoverse, 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! We’ve got quite the list of short films we’re choosing from.

When the Forest Breathes Book Discussion

Monday, September 28th, 7:00pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

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.

Preorder a signed copy!

Links and Spores that Caught Our Attention

• Open Fung reached out to ask me to spread the word, they need help finding the elusive Ganoderm sessile who is one of our best potential mycomaterial producing fungi! For more information and photos of Ganoderma sessile check out their full flyer here.

• Continuing the discourse of Is a River Alive? local artists are bringing the conversation home exploring the underground watersheds and groundwater that sustain life in Los Angles.

• My colleagues at NAMA have asked to share their hard work of assembeling quite the list of cooking with mushroom recipes, if you’ve never checked them out before.

• The mammal and carnivore known as fishers (related to American martens, think Lyra’s daemon from His Dark Materials) in the Sierra Nevada mountains are adapting by eating mostly mushrooms when there has historically been less porcupines and other animals to eat.

• A new fungal hallucinogen was discovered which causes people to see tiny people.

• Patricia Kaishian, the author of Forest Euphoria whose work we’ve discussed at length in the Mycoverse on numerous occasions, their writing is featured on Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters from Love, where Patty answers the Substack’s prompt this week:
  
  Dear Love, what would you have me know about not getting what I desire?
  
  You don’t have to be a subscriber, you can listen to the letter by watching the video. If you’ve never encountered Letters From Love, I highly recommend reading and giving it a practice!

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian!

Dear Lovelets…

Read more

16 days ago · 204 likes · 113 comments · Elizabeth Gilbert

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

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:

Aaron Tupac’s Substack

An Ask for Help – Aaron's Job Search

Teaching at the Children’s Forest School – 📸: Lola @chicawithbees…

Read more

3 months ago · Aaron Tupac

10 Ideas for Earthly Flourishing

Monday, August 10th, 7:00pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

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

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

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

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

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!

When the Forest Breathes Book Discussion

Monday, September 28th, 7:00pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

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.

Preorder a signed copy!

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:

  The Microdose

  Fungi in the forests of Yunnan: 5 Questions for filmmaker April Fan

  Deep in the forests of Yunnan Province in southwest China, wild mushrooms push up through the soil each rainy season, and local families climb steep, pathless mountains to find them. Among them is a mushroom called Jian Shou Qing, a type of bolete that can be psychoactive and is…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 42 likes · Misha Schwarz

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

Art by Shanhuan Manton back in 2023 for the SoCal Funga Project. I love that document is signed in a spore print! Also love that Robin Wall Kimmerer just started a campaign to declare your INTERdependence.

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

This week marks a momentous occasion where “funga” is now a word in the dictionary. Big congratulations to Giuliana Furci and the Fungi Foundation for making this happen, coining this helpful term in effort to incorporate fungi into our everyday life and conservation frameworks.

I have been a big advocate of this term ever since I heard Giuliana introduce me to the concept at the Telluride Mushroom Festival at the beginning of my career with fungi. It gave language to fungi as relational beings tied to place and time and put them on equal footing with fauna and flora. Since then, you may have seen me sporting a playfully fluorescent orange FUNGA cap made by Riitta Ikonen to popularize and normalize the term. I also founded a regional conservation initiative the SoCal Funga Project utilizing iNaturalist and community engagement to illustrate the overlooked abundance of fungal diversity in Southern California.

Image by Giuliana Furci

I wore my first hat so much that I had to reach out to Riita to get another.

The SoCal Funga Project founded in 2022 (1) supports community science research, (2) fungal awareness educational public programming, and (3) public advocacy to incorporate fungi into conservation frameworks locally. Poster by Miranda Van Iderstine, Shanhuan Manton, and Aaron Tupac.

Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles publication update! Unfortunately, my publisher shared with me this month they’re needing extra time to finish putting my book together and the publication date will be moved from November 2026 to January of 2027. Looking forward to using the time to expand my book tour and further develop the companion class that will teach the book + lessons from Exploring the Mycoverse.

I’m appreciating the continued help and support navigating the challenging current job market. 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:

Aaron Tupac’s Substack

An Ask for Help – Aaron's Job Search

Teaching at the Children’s Forest School – 📸: Lola @chicawithbees…

Read more

3 months ago · Aaron Tupac

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic ✨🌝🍄‍🟫

Friday, July 24th, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm $10 – $40

join the magic ✨

I’ll be teaching a workshop on Mushrooms and Mythology. Exploring our ancient human relationships with fungi through stories of folklore, science, and art. Here’s more info from Descanso:

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic invites you into a night of wonder and whimsy inspired by the hidden magic of the natural world. From earth-based folklore to the secret lives of plants, explore the mysteries that surround us every day and lean into the wonder of Descanso.

Wander the grounds at your own pace, discovering performances and activities that unfold throughout the evening.

A World Appears – The Stakes of Recognizing Nature’s Consciousness

Monday, July 27th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ join the discussion 🎟️

Come along in Exploring the Mycoverse as we explore how the recent research about the consciousness of natural world is connected to the future of conservation. Michael Pollan’s new book sets the stage for the high stakes of who we consider to be conscious deserves legal rights and protections. Along with the rise of AI technologies and their trillion dollar industry, comes the claims for legal for protection and rights – arguments centered around consciousness.

Plant and fungal consciousness is an emerging field that is growing rapidly where there are now conferences and books dedicated to this subject such as the book we will be discussing the future once the free-open access version is released: Thinking with Plants & Fungi

We will be discussing the book in its entirety. If you don’t get a chance to read the book, we invite you to please watch Michael Pollan’s talk about A World Appears he gave at this year’s Bioneers conference, a conference centered on building better relationship with the natural world.

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. From the publisher:

Preorder a signed copy!

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

I met a new SoCal mycoheterotroph I’ve never met before!!! Pterospora andromedea (woodland pinedrops – they grow under conifers and look like pinecones that grew red stipes, I wonder if that’s how they got their name). Pinedrops are obligate symionts with the truffle-like mushrooms Rhizopogon, meaning they only partner with this specific mushroom and get their primary nutrients like carbon from them in order to survive. Below is an example of a Rhizopogon I’ve documented in SoCal (Rhizopogon brunsii - which has only been documented & identified six times on iNaturalist):

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

Next week Monday we will be celebrating Exploring the Mycoverse turning 5 years old this month.

I’m appreciating all the help – the job market is TOUGH right now. 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:

Aaron Tupac’s Substack

An Ask for Help – Aaron's Job Search

Teaching at the Children’s Forest School – 📸: Lola @chicawithbees…

Read more

3 months ago · Aaron Tupac

Spring and early summer bring the flowers of mycoheterotrophic plants! These plants otherwise live underground with the fungi so it’s a rare chance to meet them. Mycoheterotrophs are plants that evolved to live exclusively with fungi, known as obligate symbiots. They evolved to depend on fungi so intimately to get carbon they no longer need to eat/process sunlight into sugars. Hence why they are not green like other plants because they don’t have chlorophyll. Snowplants or Sarcodes sanguinea are another example of mycoheterotroph and are probably our most common one. I have a pretty cool photo of snowplants I’m publishing in my book I can’t wait for you to see.

A North American orchid (whoa!), Corallorhiza maculata (spotted coral root), I also met in June in SoCal’s mountains.

It’s uncommon to find large fleshy mushrooms in the mountains this time of year when it’s hot and dry so you can imagine my delight & surprise to meet this Suillus (slippery jack)!

Aaron’s Upcoming Talks

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic ✨🌝🍄‍🟫

Friday, July 24th, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm $10 – $40

join the magic ✨

I’ll be teaching a workshop on Mushrooms and Mythology. Exploring our ancient human relationships with fungi through stories of folklore, science, and art. Here’s more info from Descanso:

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic invites you into a night of wonder and whimsy inspired by the hidden magic of the natural world. From earth-based folklore to the secret lives of plants, explore the mysteries that surround us every day and lean into the wonder of Descanso.

Wander the grounds at your own pace, discovering performances and activities that unfold throughout the evening.

Five Years of Exploring the Mycoverse: Potluck and Celebration

Monday, July 13th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎉 celebrate with us! 🎉

You are invited to join us to celebrate our fifth anniversary of gathering and sharing our love of fungi together. We have grown and myceliated to have reached over 1,000 people these past five years of over 100 free, open to the public workshops.

We will celebrate be sharing food together and revisiting a few of our favorite fungi-inspired activities we’ve done together including activities from the Third F Manual and the feminist ethnomycological zine, Learning and Collaborating with Fungi by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell.

A World Appears – The Stakes of Recognizing Nature’s Consciousness

Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ join the discussion 🎟️

Join us as we explore how the recent research about the consciousness of natural world is connected to the future of conservation. Michael Pollan’s new book sets the stage for the high stakes of who we consider to be conscious deserves legal rights and protections. Along with the rise of AI technologies and their trillion dollar industry, comes the claims for legal for protection and rights – arguments centered around consciousness.

We will be discussing the book in its entirety. If you don’t get a chance to read the book, we invite you to please watch Michael Pollan’s talk about A World Appears he gave at this year’s Bioneers conference, a conference centered on building better relationship with the natural world.

Four months until November when my book comes out..!

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. From the publisher:

Preorder a signed copy!

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Thinking with Plants & Fungi recently published a book of their conference gathering last year. Wow this has been a delight to read so far – we will be reading and discussing this book later this year.

• Tonight 7/8 6:30p at Pasadena Presbyterian Church! An Evening for the Trees with environmental activist legend Julia Butterfly Hill

• Declare interdependence! A new movement by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Canadian town officially recognizes trees as living beings with rights

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

Sharing the wonders of purple fuzz (Punctularia atropurpurascens) with Whittier Narrows Nature Center docents 📸: Raquel Perez

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

My conservation and stewardship committee has a scholarship available for NAMA’s upcoming Michigan foray! The scholarship includes a ticket, as well as room & board. The deadline to apply is this Saturday, June 20th! I was a presenter at the last one and it was a great time meeting some remarkable mushrooms and connecting with folks from abroad. Bonus – the upper pennisula of Michigan is beautiful. Near where I grew up spending my summers in Canada, laid the foundations of my love and deep connection with the natural world.

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 last post for more about my experience, resume and how you can help:

Aaron Tupac’s Substack

An Ask for Help – Aaron's Job Search

Teaching at the Children’s Forest School – 📸: Lola @chicawithbees…

Read more

3 months ago · Aaron Tupac

Last weekend I had the honor to teach the nature center docents at Whittier Narrows. Thank you docents (including Raquel and Rocio)!! Thanks to fellow myconaut Raquel for referring me and this sweet note:

A group of myconauts and I went and saw Underland, a film based on Robert Macfarlane’s book (what timing!) by the same name and ran into Bradley Garret, a southern Californian urban explorer featured in the film! Through his explorations of the underground, he reminds us to be good ancestors. Highly recommend seeing it at the Laemmle in Glendale (last chance is Thursday 6/18) or catch it online once it starts streaming. Bradley is currently writing a book, “Groundbreaking: How Tunnels Define the Modern World.”

Aaron’s Upcoming Talks

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic ✨🌝🍄‍🟫

Friday, July 24th, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm $10 – $40

join the magic ✨

I’ll be teaching a workshop on Mushrooms and Mythology. Exploring our ancient human relationships with fungi through stories of folklore, science, and art. Here’s more info from Descanso:

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic invites you into a night of wonder and whimsy inspired by the hidden magic of the natural world. From earth-based folklore to the secret lives of plants, explore the mysteries that surround us every day and lean into the wonder of Descanso.

Wander the grounds at your own pace, discovering performances and activities that unfold throughout the evening.

Is a River Alive? Exploring the Rights of Nature

Monday, June 22nd, 7pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

As Exploring the Mycoverse grows, questions about what does a future with fungi look like have been a primary interest amongst the Mycoverse myconauts. To explore this question, we will take a step back and consider larger conservation movements of nature through Robert Macfarlane’s 2025 NYT’s besteller Is a River Alive?

In our discussion, we will explore how rivers and fungi can inspire us to rethink the conservation and stewardship of nature. How can we share the stories to show that a river runs through each of us? To protect the rivers (and fungi) is to protect ourselves.

From the publisher:

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Economist, Guardian, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly • One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • One of NPR’s “Books We Love” for 2025 • One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Favorite Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction for 2025

“Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.”

Five Years of Exploring the Mycoverse: Potluck and Celebration

Monday, July 13th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎉 celebrate with us! 🎉

You are invited to join us to celebrate our fifth anniversary of gathering and sharing our love of fungi together. We have grown and myceliated to have reached over 1,000 people these past five years of over 100 free, open to the public workshops.

We will celebrate be sharing food together, watching a short ethnomycological film together, and revisiting a few of our favorite fungi-inspired activities we’ve done together including activities from the feminist ethnomycological zine, Learning and Collaborating with Fungi by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell.

A World Appears – The Stakes of Recognizing Nature’s Consciousness

Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ join the discussion 🎟️

Join us as we explore how the recent research about the consciousness of natural world is connected to the future of conservation. Michael Pollan’s new book sets the stage for the high stakes of who we consider to be conscious deserves legal rights and protections. Along with the rise of AI technologies and their trillion dollar industry, comes the claims for legal for protection and rights – arguments centered around consciousness.

We will be discussing the book in its entirety. If you don’t get a chance to read the book, we invite you to please watch Michael Pollan’s talk about A World Appears he gave at this year’s Bioneers conference, a conference centered on building better relationship with the natural world.

Five months until November when my book comes out..!

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. From the publisher:

“Welcome to the Mycoverse of Los Angeles! In this wondrous guide to common local mushrooms, Aaron Tupac opens Angelenos' eyes to the mycelial ties that bind us all together. From the San Gabriel Mountains, across the sprawling metropolis, and clear out to the coast, Southern California is teeming with fungal life, whose underground networks support an array of ecosystems. Organized by habitat, and featuring full color photos to aid in identification, this guide will help you spot and marvel at mushrooms burgeoning throughout the cityscapes, sand dunes, oak forests, and deserts that surround us. These fungal neighbors have lessons to teach us, too: through loving observations and stories, Tupac shares our latest understanding of mushrooms' radical reciprocity, vibrant gender fluidity, and the incredible imaginative possibilities that fungi bring into our lives.”

Preorder a signed copy!

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length, study finds (go SPUN!)

• Sign up to volunteer for habitat care at Eaton Canyon Natural Area.

• PUSD Tree Removal Plan Sparks Outcry Over Transparency and Environmental Impact

• Resonating deeply with our reoccurring discussions of cultivating delight with nature, check out local Cass Marketo’s book Compost After Reading and this lovely interview:

  The Unwrinkling Roundup

  Composting for delight

  Professional composter Cassandra Marketos’s new book “Compost After Reading” has a very fun backstory: it started as a handmade zine that Marketos passed out to students of her composting workshops, morphed into a booklet printed by an indie press, and eventually got picked up by Timber Press, an imprint of Hachette, after which it…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Whitney Bauck and cass marketos

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

Teaching at the Children’s Forest School – 📸: Lola @chicawithbees

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

I could use a little help from my fungal friends. Two weeks before Christmas, while I was finishing writing my book, I was laid off from my IT project manager job of ten years due to AI replacing my job. Now that my book is almost complete, I have time to find a new job to support myself and I need help finding opportunities – potential employers you can recommend or positions you see posted online that align with the following. My gift lies in communicating technical ideas with non-technical stakeholders and vice versa. With this gift I excel at organizing, facilitating, and managing diverse groups of people to work together.

• Program Manager

• Development & Fundraising Coordinator

• Facilator, Community Partnerships

• Community Engagement Manager

• Public / Community Science Program Manager

• Strategic Initiatives Manager

My Experience – From IT Management to Conservation Organizer

My professional experience is in program management working at the intersection of conservation, community science, education, and cross-sector partnerships. I have experience leading complex initiatives, coordinating stakeholders, and guiding mission driven work.

See my current CV/resume here.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn too.

With a background in enterprise IT project management and a B.S. in Statistics, I bring strong operational and analytical experience leading complex initiatives every step of the way from planning through implementation to testing and feedback. I have managed international teams across software development and enterprise systems projects, overseeing scope, stakeholder communication, documentation, testing, training, and cross-functional execution for large-scale business operations.

Alongside my technical and operational background, I am deeply engaged in biodiversity conservation and community-centered environmental work, with a particular focus on fungal conservation and public engagement.

I am the founder and chair of an international fungal Conservation & Stewardship Committee, where I lead strategy development, partnership building, and organizational conservation initiatives. I have also founded fungi-focused conservation and education initiatives centered on stewardship, community learning, and values-based environmental engagement, including fundraising efforts that raised over $30,000 to support programming and impact.

My work includes conservation field mycology, leading field teams, project planning, stakeholder coordination, and specimen/data collection for publicly funded biodiversity mapping initiatives in California. I have also served in nonprofit board leadership, helping launch conservation projects, secure funding, and develop educational programming.

As an author of the first fungal field guide of Los Angeles and conservation educator, I am passionate about translating technical and scientific concepts into accessible, engaging experiences for public audiences, institutions, and stakeholders.

I am particularly interested in roles in conservation, museums, botanical gardens, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations where I can contribute to program management, strategic initiatives, partnerships, community science, public engagement, and conservation leadership.

I am interested in connecting around:

• Conservation program management
• Community science initiatives
• Public programming and education
• Biodiversity and fungal conservation
• Ecological remediation & restoration
• Environmental advocacy & climate action
• Strategic partnerships & interdisciplinary collaboration

Aaron’s Upcoming Talks

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic ✨🌝🍄‍🟫

Friday, July 24th, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm $10 – $40

join the magic ✨

I’ll be teaching a workshop on Mushrooms and Mythology. Exploring our ancient human relationships with fungi through stories of folklore, science, and art. Here’s more info from Descanso:

Join the creative community of Descanso Gardens for Descanso After Dark, a summer event series that brings people together through art, performance, and interactive experiences in nature at night in the gardens.

Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic invites you into a night of wonder and whimsy inspired by the hidden magic of the natural world. From earth-based folklore to the secret lives of plants, explore the mysteries that surround us every day and lean into the wonder of Descanso.

Wander the grounds at your own pace, discovering performances and activities that unfold throughout the evening.

Exploring the Mycoverse

Imaging a Queer Mycology with the Third F Manual

Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ come along! 🎟️

For pride this month we invite you to join us we learn how to enter the world of fungi and explore how fungi can queer us and our ways of living, rotting what no longer serves us. We will be following instructions and a deck of cards created by Riita Ikonen and Michael Crow call the Third F Manual to lead us into the world of fungi.

Our discussion is inspired by a queer mycology essay by Elliana Efird from last year asking the question, “how does one theorize with fungi?” The essay reflects on the state of queer mycology and how we can continue to grow on the foundations of one of this new mushrooming field of inquiry which started with the paper The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Disclipline by Patricia Kaishian (author of Forest Euphoria which we discussed last year) and Hasmik Djoulakian.

Aaron will also share a little about their new book about queer mycology coming out this November 2026, Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus which you can pre-order on their website here.

Note: prior knowledge of mushrooms may be helpful, but prior experience in mushroom exploration is not required.

Is a River Alive? Exploring the Rights of Nature

Monday, June 22nd, 7pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

As Exploring the Mycoverse grows, questions about what does a future with fungi look like have been a primary interest amongst the Mycoverse myconauts. To explore this question, we will take a step back and consider larger conservation movements of nature through Robert Macfarlane’s 2025 NYT’s besteller Is a River Alive?

In our discussion, we will explore how rivers and fungi can inspire us to rethink the conservation and stewardship of nature.

From the publisher:

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Economist, Guardian, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly • One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • One of NPR’s “Books We Love” for 2025 • One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Favorite Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction for 2025

“Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.”

Imaging a Queer Mycology with the Third F Manual

Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎉 celebrate with us! 🎉

You are invited to join us to celebrate our fifth anniversary of gathering and sharing our love of fungi together. We have grown and myceliated to have reached over 1,000 people these past five years of over 100 free, open to the public workshops.

We will celebrate be sharing food together, watching a short ethnomycological film together, and revisiting a few of our favorite fungi-inspired activities we’ve done together including activities from the feminist ethnomycological zine, Learning and Collaborating with Fungi by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell.

A World Appears – The Stakes of Recognizing Nature’s Consciousness

Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ join the discussion 🎟️

Join us as we explore how the recent research about the consciousness of natural world is connected to the future of conservation. Michael Pollan’s new book sets the stage for the high stakes of who we consider to be conscious deserves legal rights and protections. Along with the rise of AI technologies and their trillion dollar industry, comes the claims for legal for protection and rights – arguments centered around consciousness.

We will be discussing the book in its entirety. If you don’t get a chance to read the book, we invite you to please watch Michael Pollan’s talk about A World Appears he gave at this year’s Bioneers conference, a conference centered on building better relationship with the natural world.

From the publisher:

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.

Coming out November 2026…

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. From the publisher:

“Welcome to the Mycoverse of Los Angeles! In this wondrous guide to common local mushrooms, Aaron Tupac opens Angelenos' eyes to the mycelial ties that bind us all together. From the San Gabriel Mountains, across the sprawling metropolis, and clear out to the coast, Southern California is teeming with fungal life, whose underground networks support an array of ecosystems. Organized by habitat, and featuring full color photos to aid in identification, this guide will help you spot and marvel at mushrooms burgeoning throughout the cityscapes, sand dunes, oak forests, and deserts that surround us. These fungal neighbors have lessons to teach us, too: through loving observations and stories, Tupac shares our latest understanding of mushrooms' radical reciprocity, vibrant gender fluidity, and the incredible imaginative possibilities that fungi bring into our lives.”

Preorder a signed copy!

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Sign up to volunteer for habitat care at Eaton Canyon Natural Area.

• An immersive fungi exhibition in Canada featuring SPUN, Caro Arevalo, Modern Biology, and more!

• Robert Macfarlane’s Underland film is screening at the Glendale Laemmle making its North American debut this friday June 12th! Though tickets have yet to go on sale. 👀

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

Summer Orr/High Country News

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

We made the news! Why mycorrhizal fungi networks need more protection – High Country News

It’s exciting to see fungi continue to receive more recognition for their vital contributions. Mycorrhizal research is making the news, escalating the noise to start protecting them. I was featured alongside the Society for Protection of Underground Networks, Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation, and others in High Country News about the mushrooming conservation movement here in the west. This past week the ***front page of the LA TIMES featured fungal conservation*** featuring SPUN’s research in the HCN article that in order to save the Joshua Trees from going extinct, we need to protect the fungi.

One of the first steps to protect mycorrhizal fungi, is to learn more about who they are and what they do. Something we surprisingly know so little about when it comes to Joshua Trees’ relationship with fungi.

We are only just beginning to understand who the native fungi of Southern California are. Yet our work as conservation mycologists, including my own work, has largely been defunded in CA.

“Climate change is already altering ecosystems faster than scientists can document their fungi, Tupac said, so conservationists shouldn’t wait until fungal species are threatened or endangered to take decisive action or unlock financial support. “My colleagues in the fungal conservation world are saying, ‘Perhaps we don’t have to just think about what is rare and scarce,’” they said. ‘“Why not make the case for protecting what is abundant?’”

Fund the fungi!

Check out June & July’s Exploring the Mycoverse offerings!

Imaging a Queer Mycology with the Third F Manual

Monday, June 8th, 7pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ come along! 🎟️

For pride this month we invite you to join us we learn how to enter the world of fungi and explore how fungi can queer us and our ways of living, rotting what no longer serves us. We will be following instructions and a deck of cards created by Riita Ikonen and Michael Crow call the Third F Manual to lead us into the world of fungi.

Our discussion is inspired by a queer mycology essay by Elliana Efird from last year asking the question, “how does one theorize with fungi?” The essay reflects on the state of queer mycology and how we can continue to grow on the foundations of one of this new mushrooming field of inquiry which started with the paper The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Disclipline by Patricia Kaishian (author of Forest Euphoria which we discussed last year) and Hasmik Djoulakian.

Aaron will also share a little about their new book about queer mycology coming out this November 2026, Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus which you can pre-order on their website here.

Note: prior knowledge of mushrooms may be helpful, but prior experience in mushroom exploration is not required.

Is a River Alive? Exploring the Rights of Nature

Monday, June 22nd, 7pm, free by donation

🎟️ get your tickets 🎟️

As Exploring the Mycoverse grows, questions about what does a future with fungi look like have been a primary interest amongst the Mycoverse myconauts. To explore this question, we will take a step back and consider larger conservation movements of nature through Robert Macfarlane’s 2025 NYT’s besteller Is a River Alive?

In our discussion, we will explore how rivers and fungi can inspire us to rethink the conservation and stewardship of nature.

From the publisher:

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Economist, Guardian, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly • One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • One of NPR’s “Books We Love” for 2025 • One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Favorite Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction for 2025

“Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.”

Imaging a Queer Mycology with the Third F Manual

Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎉 celebrate with us! 🎉

You are invited to join us to celebrate our fifth anniversary of gathering and sharing our love of fungi together. We have grown and myceliated to have reached over 1,000 people these past five years of over 100 free, open to the public workshops.

We will celebrate be sharing food together, watching a short ethnomycological film together, and revisiting a few of our favorite fungi-inspired activities we’ve done together including activities from the feminist ethnomycological zine, Learning and Collaborating with Fungi by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell.

A World Appears – The Stakes of Recognizing Nature’s Consciousness

Monday, June 8th, 7pm, free by donation

(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)

🎟️ join the discussion 🎟️

Join us as we explore how the recent research about the consciousness of natural world is connected to the future of conservation. Michael Pollan’s new book sets the stage for the high stakes of who we consider to be conscious deserves legal rights and protections. Along with the rise of AI technologies and their trillion dollar industry, comes the claims for legal for protection and rights – arguments centered around consciousness.

We will be discussing the book in its entirety. If you don’t get a chance to read the book, we invite you to please watch Michael Pollan’s talk about A World Appears he gave at this year’s Bioneers conference, a conference centered on building better relationship with the natural world.

From the publisher:

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.

Coming out November 2026…

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. From the publisher:

“Welcome to the Mycoverse of Los Angeles! In this wondrous guide to common local mushrooms, Aaron Tupac opens Angelenos' eyes to the mycelial ties that bind us all together. From the San Gabriel Mountains, across the sprawling metropolis, and clear out to the coast, Southern California is teeming with fungal life, whose underground networks support an array of ecosystems. Organized by habitat, and featuring full color photos to aid in identification, this guide will help you spot and marvel at mushrooms burgeoning throughout the cityscapes, sand dunes, oak forests, and deserts that surround us. These fungal neighbors have lessons to teach us, too: through loving observations and stories, Tupac shares our latest understanding of mushrooms' radical reciprocity, vibrant gender fluidity, and the incredible imaginative possibilities that fungi bring into our lives.”

Preorder a signed copy!

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Joey Santore (crime pays but botany doesn’t) book talk at Non Human Teachers tonight, June 2nd 8pm (Glassel Park)

• Activating Community discussion & book tour Wednesday June 3rd 6:30pm (USC / NHMLA)

• Maria Pinto in the Guardian – ‘It didn’t seem real’: the Black mushroom hunters unearthing the US’s essential fungi

• Lyre birds not only are incredible song birds but are also truffle-eating foodies

Looking sporeward,

Aaron

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

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.

Preorder a signed copy!

Let’s Become Fungal! - Fungal Teachings Discussion

Monday, May 25th, 7pm, free by donation

Get your tickets 🎟️

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!

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• 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.

• Giuliana Furci interviewed by Willow of Atmos Magazine

• 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.

• 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.

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

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

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!

Mushroom Walks 🍄‍🟫🌱🌳🍄🔍🔬🥾✨

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.

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• 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.

4th Anniversary Celebration! 📸: Lola @chicawithbees

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

I’m going to try and be brief, as I am currently busy working on editing my Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles book project. Wish me luck!

📣 This Sunday afternoon, November 9th, I am honored to be part of Umi Hsu’s Fruiting Bodies: A Multisensory Worldbuilding Workshop at the LA Public Library in West Hollywood, featuring Umi’s fungi sound experiments with oral histories, fungi-inspired food by Gu Grocery, a fungi-inspired embodiment workshop, and I’ll be talking about fungi and deep time! Grateful Umi organized this program, which centers around the experience of trans and gender diverse individuals. ✨

🎟️ And below we have our next two Mycoverse events announced! We will be re-reading Entangled Life in the new year to welcome the mushroom season, so spread the word for those who are interested in discussing it or haven’t read it yet!

🌧️PS – Rain is in the forecast next week! The mushrooms are coming. Alas, I will not be hosting walks until the new year once I’m finished with my book!

I just realized that while posting this flyer, I recognized that those are, in fact, my painted fingernails in this photo Umi took of Schizophyllum commune on a mushroom walk I was leading with the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, where I first met Umi! ☺️

Film Screenings of Seeing Fungi & Microcosmos

Monday, November 24th, 7 pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Get your movie tickets!

Join us in the garden as we watch some inspiring nature documentaries together! First we will screen the recently released Fungi Foundation and Society of Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) short film featuring the recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Toby Kiers, Entangled Life author Merlin Sheldrake, founder of the worldwide Fungi Foundation, Giuliana Furci, and a fungi-inspired soundtrack by Cosmo Sheldrake.

Followed by a screening of Microcosmos (1996) featured in the book we’re currently reading and discussing, Forest Euphoria. A simple yet mesmerizing documentary on insect life in meadows and ponds.Providing inspiration for documenting tiny critters and fungi with captivating curiosity. The film is known as one of the longest films ever made, with 15 years of research, 2 years of equipment design, and 3 years of shooting.

More about the films:

🎥🍄‍🟫 Seeing Fungi (2025)

Seeing Fungi is an exciting film created by the Fungi Foundation and SPUN, direced by Mateo Barrenengoa and shot in the magnificent Tierra del Fuego in Chile.

Join Giuliana Furci, Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake as they explore the ways that fungi can be allies in our efforts to protect the living world. While they document fungal diversity in Nothofagus forests, pampas, rivers, fjords, and glaciers, the scientists discuss the vital role of #fungi in conservation and why they should be recognized as powerful tools for protecting life on Earth.

Follow them on this extraordinary journey to explore Tierra del Fuego’s funga and underground mycorrhizal networks.

Directed by Mateo Barrenengoa.
Music by Cosmo Sheldrake.

🎞️🐜 Microcosmos (1996)

An international co-production of France, Switzerland, Italy and the United Kingdom, the film showcases detailed interactions between insects and other small invertebrates, and features music by Bruno Coulais. Directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennoua

Forest Euphoria Part II: Queerness of Nature As an Antidote to Loneliness

Monday, December 1st, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Get your tickets!

By popular demand, we are having a second discussion! Our first discussion focused on the first half of the book so that we will focus a bit more on the second half in this discussion. Our discussion will reflect on the book’s overarching theme: how does a queer lens offer an antidote to loneliness in these times of crisis and transformation? How does a queer lens of nature help us transform anew? How can it deepen our relationship with the natural world?

✨🌜 Vanessa Machuca will lead a meditation at the start of our discussion. 🌛✨

Check out the link for more details.

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Fungi Forms – a playlist of music inspired by fungi (or at least mentioning a mushroom). Plus a poem or two. Thanks to fellow Myconaut Shanhuan for compiling these playlists on Apple Music and Tidal (original playlist by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was on Spotify, but Spotify has been openly supporting the Trump administration).

• Tongva names of our local plants are now featured at Tree People! This was brought up at the last Mycoverse discussion event.

• Just released! Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless – What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto. We’ll be discussing this book in the new year as well.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer's interview on how we can create engaging conservation models is very inspiring. Re-affirming our values-based community inspired by fungi via Exploring the Mycoverse!!

4th Anniversary Celebration – winners of our mushroom guides raffle 📸: Lola @chicawithbees

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

Join us at Exploring the Mycoverse as we discuss one of our favorite thinkers and authors, Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s new book, which explores the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal.

Forest Euphoria – The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Monday, October 13th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Come along and get your tickets 🎟️

🌿 “Forest Euphoria pulses with vitality, in the wondrous beings we encounter and Kaishian’s vivid storytelling. I’m in awe of her ability to interweave the little-known lives of slugs and fungi with memoir and social movements, so that every page broadens one’s vision. Her expansive view of life provides an antidote to the loneliness of our species.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

🍄‍🟫 Through reading Kaishian’s work previously in our Exploring the Mycoverse discussion sessions, Kaishian has expanded our minds by showing us mycology as a queer discipline and challenged how we think about parasitism and pathogens.

Kaishian is involved in numerous inspiring projects, including serving as the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum, founding the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists, and being a board member of the Fungal Diversity Survey.

1️⃣ This is the first of two discussions we have for this book. The second discussion will be in November.

✨🌜 Vanessa Machuca will lead a meditation at the start of our discussion. 🌛✨

📝 Before our Discussion, we invite you to read:
🌟 Roughly the first half of the book, around 100 pages, Interspecies Dens through Cemetery Crows, pages 1-114

✨🌜 Vanessa Machuca will lead a meditation at the start of our discussion. 🌛✨

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Patricia Kaishian is the guest editor of a new Sci-Fi magazine. This edition is called Something’s Rotting. You guessed it, it’s speculative fungal fiction exploring speculative ideas around farming, food, earth sciences, and beyond, imagining a positive future here on Earth (in the earth). So much of Sci-Fi is literally not grounded here on Earth, so it’s refreshing to see this!

• A new batch of Sheldraek and Sheldrake fermented hot sauce just went on sale in time for the holidays.

• Follow myconaut Brooke Sauer is hosting an autumn-themed (featuring mushrooms!) cyanotype workshop this weekend.

4th Anniversary Celebration – Learning with Fungi small group reflections 📸: Lola @chicawithbees

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

I am thrilled to share that fellow Mycoverse Myconaut Adrine will be leading the Mycoverse next week, on Monday, Offering Praise to Fungi and the More-than-Human World! Continuing the theme of our Mycoverse workshops this season on playing, listening, and learning with the more-than-human world, the focus of this workshop will be on noticing and speaking to (rather than about) the more-than-human world.

Adrine will be sharing two of the exercises she learned last summer with the author David Abram at the Hollyhock Retreat Center on Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada, where many of the thinkers we discuss in the Mycoverse gather, including Paul Stamets, Merlin Sheldrake, and Erin Robinsong.

To learn more about David’s work, Adrine recommends checking out this thought-provoking conversation between David Abram and Merlin Sheldrake on Magic and Ecology.

Link to the workshop below:

Offering Praise – To Fungi & the More-Than-Human World

Monday, September 22nd, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Get Your Workshop Tickets! 🎟️

“There are ways of speaking that open the senses and ways that close them down.” – David Abram

To paraphrase David Abram, these exercises live in the realm of speaking that opens the senses.

To develop a mutual regard with the more-than-human world, to touch and be touched, see and be seen, listen and be heard, choose a being and be chosen by them. These practices open channels of exchange and connection, to become porous with intention. To remember our senses as points of reciprocity, as “participatory organs”.

✨🌜 A meditation at the start of the workshop will be lead by Vanessa Machuca to ground us. 🌛✨

📝 About the creator:

David Abram’s work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. A leading proponent of the more-than-human turn across multiple disciplines, in 1991 David coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind (and all our cultural productions), yet always necessarily exceeds humankind”.

👋 About our workshop Facilitator and Organizer:

Adrine Arakelian is a naturalized, life-long Angeleno working in urban planning and an urban ecology enthusiast.

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• It’s the last day to submit a comment, please comment “I oppose” here! The biggest threat to fungal conservation in the US is the rollback of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, where they will pave places like Los Padres National Forest for extractive industries like timber and mining.

• Michael Pollan’s next book on consciousness is coming out, after many years of exploring fungi, psychedelics, and meditation.

• Tonight, fellow Myconaut Umi Hsu will be performing Playing with Critical Yeast featuring recordings of live yeasts – honored to have been invited to be part of this project and for the Mycoverse to inspire this work! Check out the performance at Human Resources in Chinatown at 7pm.

• Wanna learn more about fungi who grow on poop? Look no further. (there are many of these who live here in LA but not many people who study them if you’re looking to pick up a niche new hobby!)

Ganoderma polychromum (above) and Pisolithus arhizus (below) are out about seemingly unphased by the heat!

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

Next up! Mycoverse event, on September 8th, The Return Address, will build on this exercise and the more-than-human rights work we’ve been discussing this year. I learned this collaborative listening and response exercise from a workshop I attended two summers ago on Cortes Island in Canada, off the cost from Vancouver. I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to share this exercise!!

PS – Start reading Forest Euphoria: the abounding queerness of nature by my FUNDIS colleague Patricia Kaishian and Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane.

RETURN ADDRESS - Connecting to the Natural World

Monday, September 8th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Sign up for the workshop! 🎟️

Note: This event was rescheduled from August due to the excessive heat, we hope it will be a bit cooler next week.

Yay Arlington Garden has re-opened to the public! Join us as we explore a contemplative writing exercise developed by the poet Erin Robinsong to connect with the natural world around us. We will wander around the garden to practice noticing and responding to the beings we encounter in the garden.

This workshop builds on our work thinking about how we can get involved and promote the More-Than-Human Rights movement. We've learned that it will take all disciplines, including the creativity of the arts and writers.

👋 📝 For this workshop, please bring your own notebook and something to write with (pen or pencil). ✏️📕

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Survey Question! If you’re interested in discussing The Light Eaters again or missed the last discussion, fill out the survey below. I’m trying to see if there’s enough interest to host another gathering on this mind-bending book.

Start Survey

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Please comment “I oppose” here! The biggest threat to fungal conservation in the US is the rollback of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, where they will pave places like Los Padres National Forest for extractive industries like timber and mining.

• Speaking of Cortes Island, Hollyhock is doing a rare class with Paul Stamets – WILD MUSHROOMS AND THE MYCOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

• Turns out fungi are one of the reasons chocolate is one of the tastiest things on the planet - How cocoa beans' microbiomes are key to the finest chocolate flavours

From our fungal embroidery workshop last month with Shagane of Folk Lounge at Lauren’s house!
📸: Lola @chicawithbees on Instagram

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

I’m overjoyed to have some incredible teaching opportunities this month with my old bandmate Ian teaching introduction to field recording, and I’ll be back at Descanso to discuss the microbial migrations of fungi!

We had a wonderful fourth-year celebration featuring the Learning to Collaborate with Fungi exercise by Elspeth and Lenka, which we will surely be doing again due to the immense joy it brought and popular demand. Stay tuned. Our next Mycoverse event, on August 25th, The Return Address, will build on this exercise and the more-than-human rights work we’ve been discussing this year.

PS – Thanks to all who helped us find a new place to live. We are in the midst of moving into a new place, and unfortunately, we've discovered mold in it as well. However, we are working on remediating it, and so far it appears to be contained.

Fungi are truly everywhere.

Listening to Secret Worlds with Aaron Tupac & Ian Wellman

Sunday, August 17th, 9am @ Arroyo Seco & Fulcrum Arts, Pasadena, CA – $5-$25

Few tickets left 🎟️

I am excited to announce a new workshop I’m doing with my long-time partner in sound, Ian Wellman. For several years, we performed live in an electromagnetic field recording called Zzyzxzyzz, named after the location where we met at a field recording workshop at the Desert Studies Center in Zzyzx, where we recorded bats and ants.

This workshop is part of a Fulcrum Arts exhibition featuring Ian's documentation of the sounds of the Arroyo Seco River, titled ‘Between the Sound,’ which includes the soundscapes of the more-than-human world.

Now, about the workshop! Come along as we explore the sounds of secret worlds along the Arroyo Seco watershed. Following the activity, participants will gather at the Fulcrum Arts HQ for a short lecture where I will discuss my work and provide an introduction to lifeforms of Arroyo Seco, such as fungi and insects. Additionally, workshop leaders will discuss techniques for recording sounds the human auditory system cannot perceive, such as electromagnetic fields.

Descanso Gardens – Cultivate: Fungal Migrations with Aaron Tupac

Friday, August 22nd, 4:30 pm - 7:00 pm @ Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, CA – Free with admission

Image source from Nature.com, Fungal spores as a source of sodium salt particles in the Amazon basin.

More info

Come along to learn about the migrations of fungi and the migration of other local beings like birds with Friends of the LA River, pollinators with the Arroyos and Foothills Conservancy, and others! Free with admission.

RETURN ADDRESS - Connecting to the Natural World

Monday, August 25th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Sign up for the workshop! 🎟️

Join us as we explore a contemplative writing exercise developed by the poet Erin Robinsong to connect with the natural world around us. We will wander around the garden to practice noticing and responding to the beings we encounter in the garden.

This workshop builds on our work thinking about how we can get involved and promote the More-Than-Human Rights movement. We've learned that it will take all disciplines, including the creativity of the arts and writers.

Aaron learned this exercise from a workshop they attended two years ago on Cortes Island and has been waiting for the perfect time to share this exercise!!

👋 📝 For this workshop, please bring your own notebook and something to write with (pen or pencil). ✏️📕

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Survey Question! If you’re interested in discussing The Light Eaters again or missed the last discussion, fill out the survey below. I’m trying to see if there’s enough interest to host another gathering on this mind-bending book.

Start Survey

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Latest issue of Antennae is on gardening as a creative act.

• The Lichen Museum, a book

• Hummingbirds who use lichens to decorate their nests:

From our third anniversary celebration of the Mycoverse last year! We made clay sculptures, can’t believe this was already a year ago! 📸: Lola @chicawithbees on Instagram

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

The time has come to celebrate our fourth year coming together as a values-based community inspired by fungi, building better relationships with the more-than-human world!! Join us for a special guided walk, “Learning to Collaborate with Fungi,” on July 28th, designed by my myconaut friends across the pond in the UK, whom I met at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in 2022.

PS – I had a medical emergency last week, ☹️ so we had to postpone our discussion of Braiding Sweetgrass. I am grateful to share that my recovery is going smoothly. Stay tuned when we find a time to reschedule!

Listening to Secret Worlds with Aaron Tupac & Ian Wellman

Sunday, August 17th, 9am @ Arroyo Seco, Pasadena, CA – $5-$25

I am excited to announce a new workshop I’m doing with my long-time partner in sound, Ian Wellman. For several years, we performed live in an electromagnetic field recording called Zzyzxzyzz, named after the location where we met at a field recording workshop at the Desert Studies Center in Zzyzx, where we recorded bats and ants.

This workshop is part of a Fulcrum Arts exhibition featuring Ian's documentation of the sounds of the Arroyo Seco River, titled ‘Between the Sound,’ which includes the soundscapes of the more-than-human world.

Now, about the workshop! Come along as we explore the sounds of secret worlds along the Arroyo Seco watershed. Following the activity, participants will gather at the Fulcrum Arts HQ for a short lecture where I will discuss my work and provide an introduction to lifeforms of Arroyo Seco, such as fungi and insects. Additionally, workshop leaders will discuss techniques for recording sounds the human auditory system cannot perceive, such as electromagnetic fields.

4th Anniversary Mycoverse Celebration – Learning Collaboration with Fungi

Monday, July 28th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️ Come celebrate with us! 🎉

🎉 Join us as we celebrate our fourth year of Exploring the Mycoverse! Founded in July of 2021, at a time when the world felt lonely and hard, we made a community together, inspired by fungi. We pursued how to be in better relationship with the more-than-human world. We found love, joy, and purpose through these fungal adventures, which included over 100 workshops and reached more than 1,000 people over the past four years!!!

Fungi have taught us so much through their incredible diversity, ways of living, and creative ways of forming relationships.

Which leads us to how we will celebrate this year’s anniversary! We will take a guided walk together created by myconauts Lenka Vráblíková (Czech & UK) and Elsbeth Mitchell (UK). On this we walk, we will establish new and diverse relationships with nature and others, together with mushrooms. Inspired by life approaches such as collective action, the slow living movement, and radical mindfulness, it calls for establishing different kinds of relationships and cooperation. We will help decompose the old ways of being through unlearning lovelessness, selfish competitiveness, and rugged individualism. Now are the times that call for collective collaboration! During our walk together, you will learn something new about others and yourself - thanks to sensory, creative, and collective activities.

Let's follow in the footsteps of mushrooms and learn to live, move, and share with others again – and in better ways than ever! 🎊

🌟 Before our discussion, we invite you to:

• Bring a story or lesson you've learned at Exploring the Mycoverse about community and collaboration!

📝 About the creators:

Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell write and teach about contemporary art, transnational feminisms and critical ecologies at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Leeds.

Since 2017 they have worked together on art and fungi projects guided by decolonial strategies, radical pedagogies, and feminist ways of knowing.

Elspeth is committee member of the Mid-Yorkshire Fungus Group (UK) and Lenka is an advisory board member of Kafkárna - Center for Arts and Ecology UMPRUM (Czechia).

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Previously in the Mycoverse…

🧶🍄‍🟫🪡 Mushroom Embroidery Workshop Recap 🇷🇺
Forest Grandfathers: Russian Mushroom Wisdom And The Ancient Art Of Listening By Shagane Barsegian

Shagane wrote a wonderful, detailed recap of her workshop with us in June. Check out all the mushroom artwork and cartoons on YouTube she linked. Thank you, Shagane, for sharing your gift and cultural stories around fungi!!!

Survey Question! If you’re interested in discussing The Light Eaters again or missed last discussion, fill out the survey below. I’m trying to see if there’s enough interest to host another gathering on this mind-bending book.

Start Survey

Spores that caught our attention ✨

• Orion magazine dedicated their summer issue to fungi, featuring some of our favorite thinkers, thinking relationally about a future with fungi. They hosted a Future is Fungi magazine issue launch event.

• The Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference 2025 has officially been posted on YouTube, featuring Giuliana Furci on fungal conservation.

• Aishwarya Veerbahu's research on Golden Oysters has been published. It's not publicly accessible yet, Aishwarya said to keep an eye on the Pringle Lab website in the near future for its posting. She wrote about it publicly like in this article.

I know, things feel uncertain. Precarious as ever. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But have you ever seen a rainbow after a storm? Or during an eruption? Happy (belated) Pride 🩷❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🤍 – photo from a recent trip with my mother to Yellowstone.

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

It’s hard to believe, but it’s already our fourth year coming together as a values-based community inspired by fungi, building better relationships with the more than human world. We will celebrate Exploring the Mycoverse’s 4th Anniversary on July 28th with a special guided walk on Learning to Collaborate with Fungi, designed by my friends across the pond in the UK, whom I met at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in 2022.

However, I first need to ask for your help – my partner and I need help finding a 2-3 bedroom apartment in the Alhambra/South Pasadena/Pasadena area. I am currently navigating a toxic-mold housing (and health) crisis, and I need to find a new apartment.

In some kind of Shakespearean tragedy, as a lover of fungi, I have fallen ill from long-term exposure to toxic mold in my apartment and need to find a new place to live. After testing, I found several toxic-to-human fungal species growing in high abundance. I’ll share more later, but I’m dealing with a lot at the moment. Thankfully, living away from my old apartment for the past few weeks has significantly improved my health.

I’ve now added the paid-subscribers option if you would like to support me and my work through Substack. As always, this newsletter is free.

🍄‍🟫📰👤📝👋 I was recently featured in NAMA’s Mycophile Quarterly.

Reflecting on my gratitude for my Exploring the Mycoverse community that has come together after the recent LA fires. “Perhaps we can let our grief for the damage done to the places we love teach us to love them back together again.”

📸 Photo credit – Robyn Beck

Activism & Braiding Sweetgrass – Finding & Sharing Your Gift

Monday, July 14th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️ Get your tickets ✅

👋 Welcome back to Arlington Garden as we revisit one of our favorite texts through the lens of – how do we take action and advocate for the more-than-human world during times of great greed, as we have witnessed recently in current events?

📚 Before our discussion, we invite you to read the following chapters from Braiding Sweetgrass (around 40 pages total)

• The Gift of Strawberries

• Collateral Damage

• Defeating Windigo

• Epilogue: Returning the Gift

✨ Bonus material to consider!

If you have the time, we won’t be directly engaging with the following material at length but they will be informing and grounding our discussion:

• Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire (14 pages)

• Windigo Footprints (8 pages)

📣 NOTE: We will be back at Arlington this month after their shed burned down, containing our tables and chairs. We have significantly fewer chairs to offer, so please sign up to bring one if you can. 🙏

4th Anniversary Mycoverse Celebration – Learning Collaboration with Fungi

Monday, July 28th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️ Come celebrate with us! 🎉

🎉 Join us as we celebrate our fourth year of Exploring the Mycoverse! Founded in July of 2021, at a time when the world felt lonely and hard, we made a community together, inspired by fungi. We pursued how to be in better relationship with the more-than-human world. We found love, joy, and purpose through these fungal adventures, which included over 100 workshops and reached more than 1,000 people over the past four years!!!

Fungi have taught us so much through their incredible diversity, ways of living, and creative ways of forming relationships.

Which leads us to how we will celebrate this year’s anniversary! We will take a guided walk together created by myconauts Lenka Vráblíková (Czech & UK) and Elsbeth Mitchell (UK). On this we walk, we will establish new and diverse relationships with nature and others, together with mushrooms. Inspired by life approaches such as collective action, the slow living movement, and radical mindfulness, it calls for establishing different kinds of relationships and cooperation. We will help decompose the old ways of being through unlearning lovelessness, selfish competitiveness, and rugged individualism. Now are the times that call for collective collaboration! During our walk together, you will learn something new about others and yourself - thanks to sensory, creative, and collective activities.

Let's follow in the footsteps of mushrooms and learn to live, move, and share with others again – and in better ways than ever! 🎊

🌟 Before our discussion, we invite you to:

• Bring a story or lesson you've learned at Exploring the Mycoverse about community and collaboration!

📝 About the creators:

Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell write and teach about contemporary art, transnational feminisms and critical ecologies at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Leeds.

Since 2017 they have worked together on art and fungi projects guided by decolonial strategies, radical pedagogies, and feminist ways of knowing.

Elspeth is committee member of the Mid-Yorkshire Fungus Group (UK) and Lenka is an advisory board member of Kafkárna - Center for Arts and Ecology UMPRUM (Czechia).

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

Previously in the Mycoverse…

🧶🍄‍🟫🪡 Mushroom Embroidery Workshop Recap 🇷🇺
Forest Grandfathers: Russian Mushroom Wisdom And The Ancient Art Of Listening By Shagane Barsegian

Shagane wrote a wonderful, detailed recap of her workshop with us in June. Check out all the mushroom artwork and cartoons on YouTube she linked. Thank you, Shagane, for sharing your gift and cultural stories around fungi!!!

Survey Question! If you’re interested in discussing The Light Eaters again or missed last discussion, fill out the survey below. I’m trying to see if there’s enough interest to host another gathering on this mind-bending book.

Start Survey

Spores that caught our attention ✨

The Mushroom Keepers - a short film by Fungi Foundation’s India chapter is now streaming on YouTube

DIY oyster cultivation and solar cycling using a solar cooker by Damon Tighe. Loved the fermenting spent mycelium tip to prevent unwanted continued fungal growth (like of potentially invasive fungi like golden oyster mycelium from grow kits!).

Yayoi Kusama did mushroom paintings.

The utterly harrowing public land sales caught our attention, and many of us wrote to our senators. Thankfully it wasn’t included in the latest reconciliation bill but there are other things coming up like the recinding the ‘roadless rule’ that has protected our National Forests from roads and logging which will be detrimental to fungal habitats across the nation. Join us for the Mycoverse on Braiding Sweetgrass as we discuss activism to help fungal conservation efforts.

Stay safe,
Aaron

Subscribe now

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

📣 Due to the shed fire at Arlington Garden, we have relocated both of our June Mycoverse events below. Please RSVP for details. More spots have become available if you’re interested in joining us! 📣

A big thank you to Lauren Siegel for hosting the Mycoverse during this time.

🌟 Please share this free offering with friends and family! 📣

Upcoming Fungi Talk at LA Public Library Van Nuys Branch Saturday, June 7th 📚

Saturday, June 7h, 2pm @ Van Nuys Los Angeles Pubic Library, Van Nuys, CA - Free

LAPL Talk

San Fernando Valley, myconauts! I am thrilled to share that I will be visiting you this weekend to share some of my fungal collections and stories of fungi with you, as well as how you can get involved in the wondrous world of fungi.

🌱 The Light Eaters - Plant Neurobiology 🧠

Monday, June 9th, 7pm @ RSVP for address, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

✅Sign up to save your seat! 🎟️

Note that Arlington Garden is still closed, but it is expected to host workshops this weekend, so hopefully we will be meeting there next week.

We heard you, fellow Mycoverse myconauts! By popular demand and countless recommendations from folks in the Mycoverse, we will be discussing the science writing masterpiece, The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

As a fungal curious community, a lot can be learned by Zoe' Schlanger's approach to writing about plants and the incredible emerging field of plant intelligence. Many parts inspire thoughts about plant and fungal relationships. 🍄‍🟫🌱

📣 Before our event, we invite you to read the book, The Light Eaters. Don't worry if you don't finish the whole book before then, if interest is expressed amongst the myconauts, we will continue discussing this book in July. 📣

More about the book: 📖

“Burning with open-minded curiosity, this exploration of the emerging revolution in plant science will challenge what you think you know and ignite a new way of seeing. Part detective story, field trip, and philosophy, this brilliant book stretches the mind toward a profound new understanding of the sophistication of under-appreciated plants. I feel it as an antidote to arrogance, as it engenders humility, respect, and awe for the light eaters who make the world.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“I’ll never look at plants—or the natural world—in the same way again, after reading this stunning book. Instead of trying to ram the square peg of botanical life into the round holes of human biology and metaphors, Schlanger instead considers plants on their own terms, as they actually are. The result is mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

🍄‍🟫 Mushroom Embroidery Workshop with Shagoh of Folk Lounge 🧵🪡✂️

Monday, June 16th, 7pm @ RSVP for address, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️ Get your tickets ✨

Join us Monday for an enchanted evening in the world of fungal folklore with Folk Lounge. Immerse yourself in an exploration of the mysterious beings that have emerged from forest floors throughout human history.

We will sew our own spirit mushroom and explore in circle personal stories and cultural narratives, weaving our experiences into the rich tapestry of mushroom lore & the timeless magic of earth's most enigmatic kingdom.

Bring scissors & anything else for comfort. We’ll be working with donated materials. Feel free to add to the circle if you have extra: cardboard, stuffing, muslin, needles, thread, scissors, wire, paint or beads.

More about our Workshop Facilitator

Born in Vladivostok, Russia, ✥✥✥ Shagoh ✥✥✥ is of Armenian and Russian heritage and has traveled the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles.

With a background in luxury fashion, wearables, and human-computer interaction, she is a seasoned multidisciplinary design leader, blending creativity and innovation with global teams.

Her artistry spans textile arts, leatherwork, painting, and illustration, grounded in her MFA in Human-Computer Interaction (California College of the Arts) and a Fashion Design degree (Oregon State University).

A trained facilitator, she is passionate about fostering community, collaboration, healing, and shared learning. As the founder of Folk Lounge, Shagoh is dedicated to uniting people through the exploration of ornamentation and sacred symbolism across cultures.

Thank you for reading the Sporinator! Please share our work with your friends, family, and community.

Looking sporeward,
Aaron

It’s lawn mushroom season! Above, Ganoderma growing carefully around blades of grass without harming the grass in a Pasadena lawn. 🌱🍄‍🟫✨

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Dear Fellow Myconauts,

I am excited to finally discuss The Light Eaters with you all next Monday, June 9th. We had to reschedule some dates due to Arlington Garden’s continued closure following their shed fire.

“What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi” – Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin and his father, Rupert Sheldrake, make appearances in The Light Eaters, exploring our interconnected world. Rupert’s gives insight into how some plants can make decisions to mimic other nearby plants. The author Zoe Schlanger explores Merlin’s work and Toby Kiers’ research to better understand the social lives of plant interactions with fungi – and it’s not just a one-sided relationship.

🦠 Plants seem to be more entangled in the microbial world than I had ever before imagined. Opening my mind to such wonder and curiosity! 🤔

🌟 Please share this free offering with friends and family! 📣

Upcoming Fungi Talk at LA Public Library Van Nuys Branch Saturday, June 7th 📚

Saturday, June 7h, 2pm @ Van Nuys Los Angeles Pubic Library, Van Nuys, CA - Free

LAPL Talk

San Fernando Valley, myconauts! I am thrilled to share that I will be visiting you this weekend to share some of my fungal collections and stories of fungi with you, as well as how you can get involved in the wondrous world of fungi.

📣🧑‍💻 Reminder to check out my recent Instagram takeover of the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) Instagram account. It was a lot of fun to share so many photos and videos from Lola and others of my work. 🍄‍🟫✨🌱

🌱 The Light Eaters - Plant Neurobiology 🧠

Monday, June 9th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

✅Sign up to save your seat! 🎟️

Note that Arlington Garden is still closed, but it is expected to host workshops this weekend, so hopefully we will be meeting there next week.

We heard you, fellow Mycoverse myconauts! By popular demand and countless recommendations from folks in the Mycoverse, we will be discussing the science writing masterpiece, The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

As a fungal curious community, a lot can be learned by Zoe' Schlanger's approach to writing about plants and the incredible emerging field of plant intelligence. Many parts inspire thoughts about plant and fungal relationships. 🍄‍🟫🌱

📣 Before our event, we invite you to read the book, The Light Eaters. Don't worry if you don't finish the whole book before then, if interest is expressed amongst the myconauts, we will continue discussing this book in July. 📣

More about the book: 📖

“Burning with open-minded curiosity, this exploration of the emerging revolution in plant science will challenge what you think you know and ignite a new way of seeing. Part detective story, field trip, and philosophy, this brilliant book stretches the mind toward a profound new understanding of the sophistication of under-appreciated plants. I feel it as an antidote to arrogance, as it engenders humility, respect, and awe for the light eaters who make the world.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“I’ll never look at plants—or the natural world—in the same way again, after reading this stunning book. Instead of trying to ram the square peg of botanical life into the round holes of human biology and metaphors, Schlanger instead considers plants on their own terms, as they actually are. The result is mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

🍄‍🟫 Mushroom Embroidery Workshop with Shagoh of Folk Lounge 🧵🪡✂️

Monday, June 16th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️ Get your tickets ✨

Join us Monday for an enchanted evening in the world of fungal folklore with Folk Lounge. Immerse yourself in an exploration of the mysterious beings that have emerged from forest floors throughout human history.

We will sew our own spirit mushroom and explore in circle personal stories and cultural narratives, weaving our experiences into the rich tapestry of mushroom lore & the timeless magic of earth's most enigmatic kingdom.

Bring scissors & anything else for comfort. We’ll be working with donated materials. Feel free to add to the circle if you have extra: cardboard, stuffing, muslin, needles, thread, scissors, wire, paint or beads.

More about our Workshop Facilitator

Born in Vladivostok, Russia, ✥✥✥ Shagoh ✥✥✥ is of Armenian and Russian heritage and has traveled the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles.

With a background in luxury fashion, wearables, and human-computer interaction, she is a seasoned multidisciplinary design leader, blending creativity and innovation with global teams.

Her artistry spans textile arts, leatherwork, painting, and illustration, grounded in her MFA in Human-Computer Interaction (California College of the Arts) and a Fashion Design degree (Oregon State University).

A trained facilitator, she is passionate about fostering community, collaboration, healing, and shared learning. As the founder of Folk Lounge, Shagoh is dedicated to uniting people through the exploration of ornamentation and sacred symbolism across cultures.

Spores that caught our attention

• An exercise in hope - Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement (see you all in San Diego next weekend to catch Robert Macfarlane’s book talk!)

• Doug Bierend wrote up a charming piece on Patricia Kaishian about her debut book Forest Euphoria which we will be reading later this year so get your copy!

• The Future is Fungi – Orion Magazine’s latest issue is dedicated to fungi featuring many of the Mycoverse’s favorite authors

• Continuing our last Mycoverse discussion about listening, MOTH Rights, and César Rodríguez-Garavito’s work, check out this conversation with César and others on The Ethics of Listening to Whales

Thank you for reading the Sporinator! Please share our work with your friends, family, and community.

Looking sporeward,
Aaron

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Dear Fellow Myconauts,

Short newsletter this week after a long week. Some things to note:

• A fire at Arlington Garden on Wednesday 5/21 burned down their shed, causing us to relocate on Monday. Please consider donating and volunteering to help them out. The garden is closed until they can hire someone to do a burn site assessment and clear the debris.

• Monday’s 5/26 Bioneer’s Mycoverse discussion will take place at Lauren Siegel’s house (thank you so much for having us on such short notice!). Due to the venue change, we will not be screening this ever-so-inspiring video, so we ask that you please watch in advance:

• 6/2’s Light Eaters discussion venue is still up in the air, so RSVP for the address once we figure it out.

📣🧑‍💻 Check out my Instagram takeover of the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) Instagram account. I have never posted on social media so much in my life, but it was fun connecting with a larger audience about our work! 🍄‍🟫✨🌱

A Renewed Story About the Living World – Bioneers Screening and Discussion

Monday, May 26th, 7pm @ RSVP for address, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️Get your tickets✨

The universe beneath our feet and the movement for More-Than-Human Rights are renewing how we understand the living world around us and showing us how to be in better relationship with it. It's a story of life being alive all around us. Where we continue explore a question in the Mycoverse we frequently ask – how to be a good neighbor to each other and the natural world? Where do we find that balance between human civilization and other living systems?

Before our event, we recommend:

• Watch César Rodríguez-Garavito – More-Than-Human Rights talk on YouTube in advance (20 minutes)

• Listen to Bioneer's recent podcast episode: The Universe Beneath Our Feet: Mapping the Mycelial Web of Life with Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers

🌱 The Light Eaters - Plant Neurobiology 🧠

Monday, June 2nd, 7pm @ RSVP for address, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

✅Sign up to save your seat! 🎟️

We heard you, fellow Mycoverse myconauts! By popular demand and countless recommendations from folks in the Mycoverse, we will be discussing the science writing masterpiece, The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

As a fungal curious community, a lot can be learned by Zoe' Schlanger's approach to writing about plants and the incredible emerging field of plant intelligence. Many parts inspire thoughts about plant and fungal relationships. 🍄‍🟫🌱

📣 Before our event, we invite you to read the book, The Light Eaters. Don't worry if you don't finish the whole book before then, if interest is expressed amongst the myconauts, we will continue discussing this book in July. 📣

More about the book: 📖

“Burning with open-minded curiosity, this exploration of the emerging revolution in plant science will challenge what you think you know and ignite a new way of seeing. Part detective story, field trip, and philosophy, this brilliant book stretches the mind toward a profound new understanding of the sophistication of under-appreciated plants. I feel it as an antidote to arrogance, as it engenders humility, respect, and awe for the light eaters who make the world.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“I’ll never look at plants—or the natural world—in the same way again, after reading this stunning book. Instead of trying to ram the square peg of botanical life into the round holes of human biology and metaphors, Schlanger instead considers plants on their own terms, as they actually are. The result is mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

🍄‍🟫 Mushroom Embroidery Workshop with Shagoh of Folk Lounge 🧵🪡✂️

Monday, June 16th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️ Get your tickets ✨

Join us Monday for an enchanted evening in the world of fungal folklore with Folk Lounge. Immerse yourself in an exploration of the mysterious beings that have emerged from forest floors throughout human history.

We will sew our own spirit mushroom and explore in circle personal stories and cultural narratives, weaving our experiences into the rich tapestry of mushroom lore & the timeless magic of earth's most enigmatic kingdom.

Bring scissors & anything else for comfort. We’ll be working with donated materials. Feel free to add to the circle if you have extra: cardboard, stuffing, muslin, needles, thread, scissors, wire, paint or beads.

More about our Workshop Facilitator

Born in Vladivostok, Russia, ✥✥✥ Shagoh ✥✥✥ is of Armenian and Russian heritage and has traveled the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles.

With a background in luxury fashion, wearables, and human-computer interaction, she is a seasoned multidisciplinary design leader, blending creativity and innovation with global teams.

Her artistry spans textile arts, leatherwork, painting, and illustration, grounded in her MFA in Human-Computer Interaction (California College of the Arts) and a Fashion Design degree (Oregon State University).

A trained facilitator, she is passionate about fostering community, collaboration, healing, and shared learning. As the founder of Folk Lounge, Shagoh is dedicated to uniting people through the exploration of ornamentation and sacred symbolism across cultures.

Thank you for reading the Sporinator! Please share our work with your friends, family, and community.

Looking sporeward,
Aaron

Subscribe now

Dear Fellow Myconauts,

This week, I will take over the North American Mycological Association’s Instagram account. Check out some of the fun content that I’ve been saving to share for it. 📸🤳🧑‍💻

📣 We have some exciting programming in the works, such as a Bioneers screening and discussion on Memorial Day (5/26), a discussion of the masterpiece of science writing that is The Light Eaters (6/2), and a one-of-a-kind embroidery workshop led by fellow Myconaut Shagane (6/26). More info below!

🍄‍🟫 Say hi to the lawn mushrooms just starting to emerge! 👋

A Renewed Story About the Living World – Bioneers Screening and Discussion

Monday, May 26th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

🎟️Get your tickets✨

The universe beneath our feet and the movement for More-Than-Human Rights are renewing how we understand the living world around us and showing us how to be in better relationship with it. It's a story of life being alive all around us. Where we continue explore a question in the Mycoverse we frequently ask – how to be a good neighbor to each other and the natural world? Where do we find that balance between human civilization and other living systems?

We will be screening some highlights from the recent Bioneers conference and discussing them afterwards such as César Rodríguez-Garavito – More-Than-Human Rights.

Before our event we recommend listening to Bioneer's recent podcast episode: The Universe Beneath Our Feet: Mapping the Mycelial Web of Life with Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers

🌱 The Light Eaters - Plant Neurobiology 🧠

Monday, June 2nd, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

✅Sign up to save your seat! 🎟️

We heard you, fellow Mycoverse myconauts! By popular demand and countless recommendations from folks in the Mycoverse, we will be discussing the science writing masterpiece, The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

As a fungal curious community, a lot can be learned by Zoe' Schlanger's approach to writing about plants and the incredible emerging field of plant intelligence. Many parts inspire thoughts about plant and fungal relationships. 🍄‍🟫🌱

📣 Before our event, we invite you to read the book, The Light Eaters. Don't worry if you don't finish the whole book before then, if interest is expressed amongst the myconauts, we will continue discussing this book in July. 📣

More about the book: 📖

“Burning with open-minded curiosity, this exploration of the emerging revolution in plant science will challenge what you think you know and ignite a new way of seeing. Part detective story, field trip, and philosophy, this brilliant book stretches the mind toward a profound new understanding of the sophistication of under-appreciated plants. I feel it as an antidote to arrogance, as it engenders humility, respect, and awe for the light eaters who make the world.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

“I’ll never look at plants—or the natural world—in the same way again, after reading this stunning book. Instead of trying to ram the square peg of botanical life into the round holes of human biology and metaphors, Schlanger instead considers plants on their own terms, as they actually are. The result is mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.” –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.” –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

📣 Save the date for June 16th! Fungal Embroidery workshop led by fellow myconaut Shagane. More TBA soon! 🔜

Previously in the Mycoverse…

I learned a lot from the Santa Cruz Mountain Mushroom Festival, from being in good company on the Fire and Fungi panel (first photo) and the Fungal Conservation panel (second photo). I have too much to say here, but it left me with much to think about and inspired! Ask me about it next time you see me 👋

Thanks to Pedro and Vanessa for these photos.

Last month, Maya Elson shared their insights on how interconnected fungi-inspired psychology and meditation can help us find connection through the hard times. Due to popular demand, Maya also shared their experience with mycoremediation the Southern California Post Fire BioRemediation Coalition. Here are their resources: resources on soil contamination after the fires (thank you, Lauren, for sharing!).

Our apologies for not staying on the mycopsychology topic as we had advertised and hoped to dive deeper into. There was a misleading, bogus AI-generated news story through Pasadena Now about how Maya was leading a mycoremediation workshop, so attendees showed up expecting such a workshop. Maya was graciously flexible and shared their expertise accordingly. Pasadena Now has since removed its misleading story.

Special thanks to Lola for capturing more of the spirit of the Mycoverse through their art of photography.

Spores That Caught Our Attention

• Robert Macfarlane’s new book is out, Is a River Alive? and he’s visiting San Diego to give a book talk. Road trip!!! See.

• Chris Ritson on Instagram cultivated Clitocybe aka blewits in their yard – “Last year I plugged the lawn with stems and slurry of wild Clitocybe and just like that they growing happily!” – perhaps it’s worth experimenting to grow the local species in your backyard, especially if you have a shaded yard and oak trees!

Thank you for reading the Sporinator! Please share our work with your friends, family, and community.

Looking sporeward,
Aaron