Emily Han & Gregory Han on Growing and Sharing a Passion for Fungi
&& Next month – Restoring & Conserving Fungi via Alison Pouliot!
Dear Fellow Myconauts,
Happy first week of Spring! Gosh, we sure are looking sporeward to our guest speakers next week! A reminder we typically meet second and fourth Mondays at the Mycoverse.
I’d love to share more about all the exciting going’s on right now but the mushrooms have me busy this season, below’s a little sneak peak of one of the things I’ve been up to – Fungal Diversity Survey’s, this time in the understudied fungally diverse chaparal. I’ll write more about it later.
Read on – Miranda’s back with an insightful recap of our Mycoverse discussions of The Flowering Wand.
Emily Han & Gregory Han on Growing and Sharing a Passion for Fungi
Monday, March 25th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free
Sponsored by Arlington Garden
(PS – Tickets are almost sold out!)
Join Emily Han and Gregory Han, authors of Mushroom Hunting: Forage for Fungi and Connect with the Earth.
Over a decade ago, an uncommonly wet season descended upon Southern California, awakening a wondrous array of mushrooms — as well as Gregory and Emily’s passion for fungi! In the years since, they have embarked on a journey of curiosity, sharpened senses, and a deepening appreciation for the seen and unseen relationships between fungi, plants, and animals, including human beings.
Gregory and Emily will share stories and images from their journey as mushroom enthusiasts, talk about their book, and open it up to a Q&A and discussion about sharing our love of fungi with others.
**The authors will be selling their books at this talk.**
About the Speakers
Emily Han is a naturalist, herbalist, and educator. She is the author of Wild Drinks and Cocktails and coauthor of Wild Remedies.
Gregory Han is a trail-seeker and writer for Design Milk, Dwell, and Wirecutter. He is the coauthor of Creative Spaces: People, Homes, and Studios to Inspire.
They live together in an oak-lined canyon in Altadena, California.
Restoring Fungi – Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms
Monday, April 8th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free
Sponsored by Arlington Garden
Join us in our second discussion on the recently released book Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms where we will focus our discussion on the last chapter of the book "Restoring Fungi" as the Mycoverse explores how fellow myconuats can get involved with mycological conservation.
The well-known photographer Alison Pouliot with over 20 years experience in the field, recently published Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms this last September about her personal fungal journey traveling across the world reflecting on “how appreciating fungi is key to understanding our planet’s power and fragility.”
It is a very fitting read for the Mycoverse as we explore deeper how to cultivate awareness, appreciation, and connection with the more-than-human world of fungi. The second half of the book will appeal more to seasoned Myconauts as it touches more on the relational and conservation pieces our focus in the Mycoverse is typically drawn to.
**Books are readily available via special order at North Figueroa Bookshop – mention Brenna & Exploring the Mycoverse!**
Before our discussion, we invite you to:
Read the second half of the book, Chapters 7 through 10 and the Epilogue, pages 132-255.
Our focus will be on chapters:
Women as Keepers of Fungal Lore (Ch. 9)
Restoring Fungi (Ch. 10)
Previously in the Mycoverse…
A recap by Miranda Van Iderstine
The Flowering Wand Rewilds the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand
October 9 & November 13, 2023
Trash
Before we wrote them down, stories looked around and lived. They responded iteratively, shaped and sustained across spoken retellings. At best and at worst, words on a page stare unblinking. They simply persist.
Stories settled to text can be useful propaganda—they’re definitive, detached, and authoritative. Patriarchy proliferates ideas this way. But its characteristic rigidity dooms it to precarity. Its inert stories are stale. The cyclical churn of decay is essential for ecological health, and revision is a critical churn.
In her debut essay collection, writer and self-proclaimed neo-troubadour animist Sophie Strand unearths and re-animates stories of mythic masculinity rooted in their earliest visual and textual representations.
These men (loosely speaking) were flexible, soft, curious, welcoming, and affirming of a “gestalt consciousness;” they didn’t hold court in the sky, they were feral and embodied; they wept, played, and sang; they didn’t wield swords, but wands.
Strand reveals that mythological Greek party boy Dionysus, for example, was a fundamentally slippery, androgynous character: “alternately ‘girl-faced’ and ‘frightening’ and ‘phrenetic’ and ‘prudent,’” celebratory, never alone, and appearing in stories not to quest or conquer but to “share the sacrament he’s already attained.”
In her rendering of the Dark Age romantic hero Tristan, Strand links his unending sorrow to relentless pressures to conform to a “sterile masculine archetype.” Popular rhetoric about healing and trauma situates the body within a progress-oriented framework—but Tristan’s heartbreak is inescapable. It cannot be salved with acts of triumphant heroism, or moved through. Tristan shows us that sometimes sorrow can only be moved with; it can only be held.
After Jesus died, he was digested by microbes to sustain new blossoms of life; his body did not evaporate into immaterial godliness. Why deprive ourselves by scripting it so?
Sources:
The Flowering Wand Rewilds the Sacred Masculine: Lunar Kings, Trans-Species Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists by Sophie Strand
Exploring the Mycoverse discussions October 9 and November 13, 2023
Myconautics & Links
NAMA Virtual Book Club (inspired by the Mycoverse!) is reading and discussing Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms by Alison Pouliot next week 3/28/24 at 5p PST. The discussion is led by Gyorgyi Voros – she’s a wonderful committee member of the NAMA Conservation & Stewardship Committee I chair.
National Geographic featured fungi for the first time on the front cover(s!) of their latest publications and adopted to include fungi in their definition of fungi. They also made a rad documentary on why the word FUNGA matters.
Interested in spreading the spores? The Fungi Foundation created a “Guide for Organizations Adopting a Mycologically Inclusive Approach.”
Next week, it’s finally arrived! Bioneers 2024 in Berkley with SPUN, Merlin Sheldrake, Suzanne Simmard, and many more! You can use my discount code (AARON7248) via this link. See you there!
Looking sporeward,
Aaron
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