Your eyes haven’t strayed from from the anomaly. Saffron yellow and rubbery. It’s head is not round, but opened like a thick serving platter facing the heavens and it undulates with its own seismic waves. Iridescent dimples are holding wetness and flecks of pink and white and green. Does it have legs? It doesn’t seem to be moving.

The center of the platter presses up gently towards the sky like a miniature mountain. A soft mountain, unlike a jagged, rocky one. This central lump also becomes thatched with a deep ochre color. With your head stooped, your eyes trace the shape of this head. Like a nipple or a nose, the life on this irregular disk seems to radiate around the central mound.

You notice the slab is actually slightly tilted and from the edge that is curled upwards you see a hint of what’s below. Stark white and pillowy — something a lot more delicate underneath.

You reach your finger down to poke the peak of the mountain and the impression your finger creates seems to bounce back like the inside of a freshly baked loaf of sourdough. Spongey.

You realize in order to see more you must crouch down on the ground. You bring down one knee and then the other. They rest on surprisingly soft moss, but one knee lands directly on a spiky pinecone. You gently move it to the side without glancing away from your subject. Moisture from the earth starts to saturate into the material of your pants, but you don’t mind.

Now you are able to bow your spine even lower and you are able to look underneath this porous shelf. There are legs! Or maybe one leg? Did it just move? You peer back up at the top of the golden-orange platter to see if anything changed. You’re not quite sure. You look back underneath. It’s as if a whole new ecosystem becomes viewable down here. It is shaded from the sun and it smells like… like something slightly unpleasant. Sort of like cheese, or feet, or soil. Definitely pungent.

On the underside of the platter the tiny, chalk white puffs attach to the circumference of the disk like they were sewed there by a woodland nymph. You can see the stitches traveling around the edge of the disk, some loops pulled more tightly and others more of a knotted mess.

Within this white plush underside you begin to notice tiny black dots that are nestled within individual chambers. Each channel is but a pinhead wide and each is separated by a white wall. You begin to crawl your hands and knees around the rubber disk and notice that the white pillows underneath are actually comprised of many, perhaps hundreds, of these individual channels. They are all stitched to the outside edge of the disk and run towards the center, into the core of the disk that is underneath the soft nippled mountain. Is this thing breathing?

From this underside center protrudes a thick leg which travels almost straight down and attaches itself to the ground. Is it tan, or purple, or yellow? It’s hard to tell what color it is. It has tiny scale-like tufts that begin partway down the leg and continue down until they get covered over by ferns and grasses. A deep thud. What was that? Did that really just come from inside this thing? A few tiny insects fly from the scales on the leg and rise to your face. You pull your head up to focus your eyes on their glistening, almost microscopic wings.

With your head up you see the sunshine dapples between the branches of the forest begin to fade into purple. You could’ve sworn you began rambling this path before noon. You’re not sure if anyone has walked past you for… for however long you’ve been engaged by this oddity. This squishy saffron starship that called your attention. You were just minding your business, weren’t you? You let your neck relax and your head drops back down. By this point your body is fully laid on the wet earth.

You’ve walked this path countless times before. Was she here this whole time? Watching you breeze past her in incongruous bliss? Or did she just appear for you today marking an important occasion?

Before venturing further, I’d like to ask you, my humble reader, do you remember a time when the world first felt more than human to you? What stories do you tell yourself about the world’s aliveness? Pause and imagine the narratives of the animate earth that exist in your mind. Perhaps the stories you carry are more of an inanimate earth, where humans are more conscious and intelligent than other beings. What values do these stories reinforce? Where did these stories come from? Did you pick them up by walking in the woods? Did you pick them up from words in a book? Were they told to you by anyone? What do they tell you about your relationship with the earth? Do your relationships with the earth inform who you are and the decisions you make?

When people find out I work with fungi — “like mushrooms,” I add — one of the most frequent responses is, “Like magic mushrooms?”

It has been very clear to me, even when I was very early on in my studies, that there was only one reply. “Yes,” I would smile. “All mushrooms are magic.”

Of course, these folks are asking about psychedelic mushrooms—particularly those containing psilocybin, of which there are over 200 known species. There are hundreds of other compounds found inside mushrooms, including ones that are medicinal, toxic, and psychoactive, but my interest in fungi stretches far beyond these chemical categories. Depending on the method of assessment, there are an estimated 2- to 10-million fungal species on this planet, only about 5% of which have been scientifically described. Whether you’re a stinkhorn or an endophyte, these diverse beings steer a multitude of processes that render this planet livable, and perhaps much more magical.

Psychoactive mushrooms are incredible, but it’s hard for me to choose favorites. From toadstools to parasites to molds and soil mycorrhizae — there are many ways to be a fungus, and I fell in love with the whole Fungal Kindom (drop the g and it becomes gender neutral, and we are all kin). Fungi are found in virtually all environments on our floating orb of life. This includes deep sediments on the seafloor, the surface of the driest and saltiest deserts, frozen valleys in Antarctica, guts and skin and orifices of animals (like our very own), and on the Chernobyl nuclear reactor walls. Their high genomic plasticity allows fungi to thrive in diverse and extreme environments and for their incredible morphological diversity.

Having worked predominantly in fungal conservation, as Director of Fungal Diversity Survey (FUNDIS), maybe my values of protection and stewardship are exemplify my belief that all fungi are authoritative directors of ecological alchemy and they should be respected as such. If we love fungi — mycelial, saprobic, parasitic, medicinal, and edible — let’s do something about it. Let’s act like we love fungi. Let us learn from fungi and reflect their wisdom in our communities. Let our cultures sing the mycelial praises of interdependence and rot. It is in this stew that the idea for this project grew.

Whilst falling deeply in love with fungi, in the thick of my own spark shroom phenomenon, I opened up my first mushroom field guide titled “All The Rain Promises And More”, a fungal totem about West Coast mushrooms, written by David Arora — a mycologist as acclaimed and unparalleled as William Shakespeare himself. Upon flipping through the pages, attempting to find a way to begin to identify the mushrooms I had found earlier that day, I saw photos of adults wearing massive, inverted mushrooms as bonnets, and holding up boletes bigger than their heads with a crazed grin, hair disheveled, and wearing clothing that looked like they had just come from either a Renaissance festival or a jazz club. One picture in particular sits deep into my memory. A hairy man, with strong, dark curls, lifts his head up into the glistening sunlight as though the spirit of the Lord has chosen him. He is lifting the underside of a white, large, gilled mushroom to his nose, uniting the flesh of the mushroom with his face in a dazzling bliss. What did these people know that I didn’t? Why were they just so entirely happy? Were they high on drugs, probably the mushrooms themselves?

Just a few seconds into looking at these portraits — human and fungal — I immediately felt one thing. I’m back. From wherever I had been. I had been somewhere else, but now, I am here. I laughed. Joy reflected from these pages into me and I couldn’t help but smile. From the photos alone I knew I had found “my” people, but I didn’t think they were actually living in real life. I thought perhaps these portraits were lost to the ages, a fantasy wedged into an untraceable timeline.

Now, this is not to say that fungi were entirely unknown to me. I had first encountered the concept of anything more than button mushrooms in my music appreciation. The only thing in life I was entirely forced to do was to play piano, essentially upon being birthed from my mother’s womb. When I was born my nana Vivian gifted me with a stately upright piano that I later practiced pieces on by Debussy, Tchaikovsky, the Gorillaz, Sara Bareilles, and also tantrumed at and surely babbled tears on. I was born into a family of musicians, I considered my father the best guitarest I ever met, and my nana herself was a pianist and sang in her church choir. By the age of twelve I could name every member of a major classic rock band from 1965 to 1975 and I could recognize a Chopin from a Rachmaninoff and a Grieg from a Liszt.

I naturally gravitated to experimental music. I wanted to listen to composers who were tinkering with perceived boundaries and diving into depths of the creative unknown. While my music education consisted of everything from Connie Francis to Brian Eno, I came to like music categorized in the psychedelia genre. Good helpings of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, and The Kinks led me into bands like 13th Floor Elevators, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and The Incredible String Band. (For some reason it took me 18 years to start listening to the Grateful Dead, but I digress…) The swirling hammond keys, the exploratory, hot-fuzzing guitar melodies, and the mystical lyrics made me feel seen. I had lived in landscapes that sung strange songs, too. To complement the circuitous, droning sounds, the associated visual art struck a chord (pun intended). Record covers featuring tropical amphibians and tree roots dissolving into footsteps or cloaked magicians falling into a crack in the earth. These images took on their own life.

I was familiar with psychedelic substances, I suppose mostly by extension of having a dad who attended Woodstock. Perhaps turned on, tuned in, and dropped out more than “attended”. He said, “You know Dr. Oz? Well my buddy was his girlfriend so we were able to get some pretty primo acid there. I kid you not his sign said, ‘Good shit, no shit, five bucks a hit.’” My dad would cackle as he referenced Dr. Owsley Stanley, who later became known for supplying the Grateful Dead with both the Wall of Sound, the largest sound system of its time, as well as with their LSD.

Psychedelia was no mystery to my family. I’m sure my dad was also proud that he never hid me from anything nor instilled fear. Upon entering new or dangerous circumstances, his adage was simply “be aware of your surroundings”. However, it was obvious to me, a native Utahn surrounded by mostly Mormon and Christian families, that our family seemed pretty different. Though I lived in the “blue dot” of the red state, the silver mining, brothel lined, ski bum laden, film festival town of Park City, Utah, my dad was still very eccentric to effectively every resident in the state, and I think that’s how he liked it.

In my larger culture, psychedelics were nowhere to be found. They were taboo, and as with all drugs, they were hazardous, addictive, and led to shameful lives. Why was it, then, that mushrooms and LSD showed up in this particular musical culture? Maybe, just maybe… since I took so much appreciation in this music, that perhaps I might also take appreciation in psychedelics.

While it is true that I say that I didn’t get into fungi because they are psychedelic, perhaps I got into fungi because they are psychedelic. When I was 17, one of my best friends and I, bought some acid from a kid I had known since preschool. Instead of attending winter formal we each ingested two tabs at 5:30 pm on a very dark winter’s eve. Her dad was on a business trip, so, naturally, we used his home as our den.

We had absolutely no idea what we were getting into, but thankfully we did cue up some music and had some milk on hand just in case the trip got too strong. I remember reading the Papyrus of Ani, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that winter in preparation for something like this. In the book it never mentioned that your trip might last 7+ hours and that you might want to call off work the next day. Additionally, it was years later that I learned that some scholars translate “food of the gods” or “flesh of the gods” from the book to mean mushrooms themselves. We toasted one another and put the tabs on our tongue in her dad’s Scandinavian designed kitchen.

What followed was a welcomed frenzy of encounters with animals, deities, energies, and portals that I will never forget. Dragonflies were central. I could feel the energies of below and above, and of the other four directions. I saw us sitting in pools of blood and somehow I found that reassuring and fascinating. We both were crying for much of it. We allowed ourselves to express the roaring waves of each emotion: laughing into awe into gratitude into laughing. We listened to only two songs on repeat until the sun came up: Purple Haze and Strawberry Fields Forever. We tried to drink a little milk, but it an hour to get to the kitchen, pour some into a glass, and attempt to take a sip. Going to the bathroom seemed like the most impossible thing until I tried to change the song, which meant looking at my phone. And that, turns out, was the absolute most impossible thing. My body shirked away from electronics like they were hungry jaguars. Good thing we could just put those 2 songs on a repeated playlist.

Dawn was beginning to light the sky and the hills in the distance danced. When the acid hadn’t worn off by 7:00 am I texted my coworkers to see about covering my 9:00 am shift. The best they could do was trade me, I would come in at 11:00 am instead. I was honest enough to tell my coworkers that I saw a manatee while driving on the road to work and that I should only be in the back on sandwich-making duties for the rest of the day. I was able to smother mayo on a piece of bread and artfully assemble a tasty sandwich. I was not to talk to the customers.

The next day I picked my friend up and we drove to the top of Guardsman’s Pass. She and I were entirely transfixed by this experience. We were brought to tears just recounting it in the car, in the darkness on top of a mountain. We agreed that to commemorate this journey, we would get matching tattoos. I pulled out a pen and paper and began sketching a theme we kept coming back to. It was like all of the darkness was also the lightness, and they each expressed the same whole. They needed each other and they were a part of each other. I ended up drawing a simple circle, and inside shaded half black, the other half clear. It was perfect.

When I was a child I was led by my heart from the secrets of nature. I was convinced the babbling creek was speaking messages directly to me. I heard the wind carry information from the next valley over. During recess I became enamored by the impenetrable feeling of the small marsh behind the swings set. The seeds of the cattails fluffed out more each day as I eavesdropped on the conversations had by the frogs.

In grade school one of my treasured memories was finding what we thought was clay at the base of the quaking aspens and rubbing it all over our hands and arms. I don’t remember washing it off my skin upon coming inside, or if it was actually clay or sandy soil, or if our teachers thought anything of it. But I remember sitting on the ground amidst the aspens, sunlight dappled by the heart-shaped leaves, laughing with my friend, and feeling the sensation of the cool clay cover over my pores and then dry and crack.

By the age of 18 I had spent thousands of days in snowy mountains, all amongst the West, cued into the subtle remarks of the day’s weather patterns, wind storms, or rising heat. By the time I went to college, I had spent a hundred days watching the sun crest over the horizon from the top of 10,000 foot peaks. If there was a big storm coming, often the snow began falling after the sun ascended above the horizon. Within an hour after sunrise some mornings looked like snow globes of flurries with already over 12 inches of fresh, light powder piling on the ground. I was able to ski my way down to the base of the mountain carving tracks into the snow before the ski lifts even started running.

While growing up I encountered only one wild mushroom species, and I didn’t think twice about them. They looked like the typical supermarket mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) only bigger and growing from our well watered lawn. I often dug my fingers into their flesh, savored their smell of mushroomy moisture, and left the conversation with smears of tobacco brown spores all over my hands. It was always in the stillness of late summer, in the sunny afternoons, when we spent this time together. Perhaps I was playing in the sprinklers and stepped on a few. After familiarizing myself with many mushroom species, I now know she was a mycelial mass belonging to the lawn mushroom (Agaricus campestris) that fruited mushrooms once she had enough water and nutrition. It wasn’t until many years after crushing these mushrooms and undoubtedly helping their spores spread that I paid attention in a new way and my spark shroom found me.

Following the lawn mushroom encounters of childhood you’d think I would’ve learned anything about fungi in school. My 400 page high school biology text book featured all of 2 paragraphs on the entire Fungal Kindom. It’s no secret that fungi, one of life’s most essential and complex cornerstones, have been misunderstood, unappreciated, and neglected in most western, mainstream cultures across the globe. Even in cultures that praise fungi for their edible or cultural traditions, it doesn’t always reflect a high valuing of them scientifically or ecologically. It is true that fungi are currently having a moment. T-shirts haven’t had this many mushroom designs since the 1960s. But this cultural hype certainly has yet to translate to meaningful relationship, education, and scientific engagement.

When I found my spark shroom, or when she found me, it was at the strangely perfect moment in time. I had been whirled off to college and I was ready to learn new possibilities and meet unfamiliar people. I didn’t know I would meet mushrooms or that they would meet me. I suppose I was open to being changed by the fungi at this point. They were awakening something laden, deep down in my heart that hadn’t been spoken to since I smeared the meadow mushroom spores on my hands or lost a whole day to meandering around the creek bed.

Perhaps at this point in life I had been exposed to a world that was not in unison with its magic. I had grown out of childhood and I had learned about the planet’s disharmonies. I had been tempted to disbelieve in the earth’s consciousness. My culture was one that enjoyed recreating in nature, but I’m not too certain it bowed in honor to its intelligence.

While in high school I became aware of the subject of “the environment”, like it was a character from a new television show. Around this time my dad considered purchasing one of those new hybrid cars. “Do you think it would be environmental?” I remember my dad asking. I had never heard anybody speak like this before. What would environmental mean? Isn’t the environment the land where life lives? How can a car be environmental? “These new hybrid batteries are supposed to have less of an environmental impact than combusting engines.” My dad was a serious car guy and to him the places where automotive technology was headed was as hot as sliced bread. That year in school I began learning about environmental degradation and I connected the dots with our new Ford Escape hybrid. “The environment” became the butt of jokes to my rowdy high school class. Me and another friend in my grade became seen as the creative softies who cared about the land and the animals and the plants.

These days “the environment” is in fact a central character in our cultural stories. However, the stories that get told speak to its degradation. In some indigenous and non-western cultures there is not even a word for the environment for life is a continuum in which humans are not separated. I grew up finding myself enmeshed in life — I was not separate from it nor did I have a word for it myself. Through enculturation I found myself “fighting for the environment” through a Bachelors of Arts in Environmental Studies. However, I began noticing that the stories being shared of environmental tragedies were somehow at odds with my own relationship with the earth.

Yes, wiping out ecosystems, depleting soil, and bleaching coral reefs are catastrophic, should not happen, and we humans should do things to prevent these things happening. Every day up to 150-200 species around the planet go extinct. Especially in the case for fungi, species are going extinct before we can even find and describe them. But what kind of species are we if we live only in these stories? Who do we become if solely stories like this lead us forward?

The reality is each of us have encounters with the beauty of the more-than-human all the time. The groundhog that lives underneath your shed. The reishi mushrooms somehow growing on decorative oaks that were planted in the sidewalk bed of New York City. Sitting in your own body and thanking the millions of microbes for existing in your gut or your mouth. Feeling the sunshine, or the moonshine, on your skin. Feeling the wildness of your inhales and exhales. I want to live in a place that orients itself around feeling alive.

I’m not talking about thinking on the positive side. For in fact fungi are sorcerers of death and decay. Fungi teach us about the initiatory powers of death and how they’re of the same breath of the initiatory powers of birth. Fungi, frankly, eat death. Saprophytes, a major group of fungi, decompose and break down matter, and their name translates to “death-eaters”. Rot and death are essential components to the great roundedness of earth.

I am well informed on how we can be better stewards of the more-than-human. But, I’m talking about orienting ourselves around our direct relationships with the more-than-human world and how they make us feel. This is radical in a culture that is addicted to the production and consumption of information. To allow ourselves to be immersed in presence and to exchange intimacies that cannot be understood. For, the earth is intelligent and the moments that we listen to it are the moments it works things out through us. To trust in an enchanted world and to see something from a new perspective as time falls into the background. I want this for you, too. I want this for my parents and I want this for my great grand children.

My intention with the Spark Shroom Project is to share stories of profound aliveness. Ecologist and philosopher David Abram writes that magic is an experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. Everyone has the birthright to live in a world of magic. The thing is, the world becomes less and less alive the more that we fragment our attention and our landscapes. A disenchanted world disintegrates into facts and explanations. An enchanted world cannot be explained.

Mushrooms belong in magical worlds. Worlds in which things enter into relations with other things and are woven back and forth, around one another. Fungi exist as the malleable, neural network of nature, they are showing us our old story of independent heroism is false. Fungi are very good at making visible the enchanted world and more and more people are listening. Are we good at meeting them in the enchanted world? Are we able to be changed by our encounters with them?

This project wouldn’t exist without mushroom people. My relationship with fungi helped remember a cosmology that is powerfully animate: the universe is intelligent and participating in relationship with me. I’m not exactly sure if it’s remembering the magic or becoming it, they feel oddly similar. After finding myself surrounded by mushroom people I’ve seen that most of them have a spark in their eyes. And that spell, shall we say, is what I’m interested in. What made them fall madly in love with fungi, and thus the world? Can they recount, through every labyrinthine detail, the opening of their hearts? What were the melodies, emotions, and textures of that alchemy?

Ask any mycologist and one thing is for certain: fungi are impossible to pin down. You think you understand the distribution of a species but it is now found thousands of miles away this year. You think you understand the mycorrhizal lifestyle this fungus is having with the roots around them, but then they begin to decompose and now they’re flirting in between many different “functions”. The more science tries to define fungi, the more we see how limitless they are. This is also true for when fungi are ingested — the only thing consistent in the psychedelic experience is how ineffable it is. Fungi have been referred to a half-alive, somewhere between mineral and plant, in ancient Arabian texts. Sixteenth century herbalists defined fungi as somewhere between animate and inanimate. It was only in 1969 when we figured out fungi aren’t plants and they should belong in their own Kindom of life. These days, we still can’t quite figure out what makes a fungus a fungus or what it is that they do during their days or during their nights under starlight.

It is no coincidence that fungi have so captivated us in recent years.

They have told me, and many others, about their wisdom. It is magic, and much of it seems to rewrite our dreary stories of capitalism and patriarchy, haste and fragmentation. Fungi bring people together over a dinner table, who are sharing stories about being in old growth forests or about tracking down a mountain bog. Their bodies extend out beyond one individual, forming connected, coherent ecosystems that are often unseen if you don’t slow down to look. Their trade routes are intricately knotted, they alchemize death and decay into birth and new life. It is impossible to isolate them from their environments, though we try. They have brought healing — physiologically, mentally, and spiritually — to humans when seemingly nothing else works.

All mushrooms are magic. And, mushroom people are pretty magical, too. You don’t have to spend too much time with mushrooms, or mushroom people, to see that.

I believe the greatest power of fungi right now is in their ability to orient humans with the great roundedness of the more-than-human. They teach us to be present with the abundance. They tell us how to slow down and let it rot. They show us that to relationship is not through the mind. We must do so with heart and feeling and smell and liquid exudate and relational accountability. They teach us magic.

The Spark Shroom Project grows out of being surrounded by people who have deep love and reverence for the magic found in the planetary beings that go by names other than “human”. Having immersed my adult life in fungi and mycology, unbeknownst to me, I was also lucky enough to find myself surrounded by mushroom people.

The Spark Shroom Project is a growing anthology that weaves the stories of falling in love with fungi. I will be interviewing prominent mycologists and mushroom people and releasing chapters on this publication, Fungi Talk. This oral-history and storytelling project honors the moment, fungus, or single mushroom that sparked wonder, a shift in perception, and a deep, lasting, often obsessive interest in fungi and mycology. Some might call it magic. These stories are not about expertise or identification, but about encounter, relationship, and transformation. What was it that made their heart flutter and drew them closer to this mysterious world?

The term Spark Shroom builds from the term Spark Bird, originating in the birding community, as a parallel term for fungi: the catalyst that transforms birds or mushrooms from simply being a part of the scenery into a focused passion.

I hope you’ll read along as I narrate these stories, and I hope they inspire you to live magically on this earth, with each other, each and every day and night.

Have you noticed this phenomenon? I have.

Welcome to The Spark Shroom Project, an anthology I will be sharing online with the intention of making a book and supportive multimedia.

A few years ago, Molly Adams introduced me to the term Spark Bird during her book launch reading of Birding for a Better World. I had met her because she attended our Catskill Fungi Friends of Fungi Retreat at the Menla Retreat Center. At her launch event, surrounded by nature-loving locals at the animated “neighborhood nature shop”, Chicory Naturalist, she spoke about this phenomenon in the birding community where people undergo a shift of perception. “Spark Bird” gives a title to the experience that catalyzes birds from simply being part of the scenery into a focused passion.

“Spark Shroom!” I turned to my husband and gasped, probably a little too loudly.

My husband and I are both devoted mycologists who have watched the fungal awakening fruit for the past many years. In 2015, if you shared you studied fungi people used to look at you as if a cordyceps was bursting forth from your forehead. Nowadays they want to “sit next to you at dinner parties,” as Eugenia Bone says.

My husband John Michelotti and I continued to have this inside joke about Spark Shrooms for a few years. Although fungi were rapidly gaining appreciation in collective consciousness, especially since 2020, they are still incredibly neglected, undervalued, and misunderstood. As self described “mushroom people”, we can’t help but notice how much attention the other showy mega-fauna receive in education, science, and culture at large. It’s not a competition. But, there are many things so powerful about the Fungal Kindom that many of us mushroom people believe the world would be a much better place if we centered fungi more.

From being powerful and holistic sources of medicine and food for the human body, to aiding in detoxifying and remediating our lands, to sequestering carbon, to allowing communication between habitats, to providing homes and nourishment for plants and animals to live, to decomposing 90% of everything on the planet rendering it habitable, to allowing soils to be fertile, fungi are no doubt wise, wise creatures with many stories to tell.

While birders have inspired the Spark Shroom concept, I humbly and partially jokingly ask, “why should birders have it all?”

In 2025 I began a ceramics project where I wanted to create wares with scientific inspired illustrations as painted underglaze decoration. Which creature should I start with? Well, none other than my own Spark Shroom, of course, Amanita muscaria. It wasn’t until a friend, Erwin Karl, invited me to show work in the Funga Est Primus art show at the Andes Academy of Art in October, in which I decided to title my prototype. Well, clearly it should be “Spark Shroom”.

I wrote an artist statement and description for my ceramic work. (It is still on exhibition if you’d like to make a day trip to the Catskills haven of Andes, NY.) A couple of paragraphs later I had given voice to this concept in a new way. My description was poetic and provocative, asking the onlooker to consider what made them fall in love with nature, or perhaps fungi. What mushroom made them see mushrooms everywhere? What mushroom got them hooked? How did this experience feel?

I enjoyed thinking about this notion so much that I published my own Spark Shroom story in length a few days before opening night. I received some intimate feedback about other peoples’ stories and I had hopes of building even more on this concept. After getting back home after the art opening and reading my Spark Shroom piece, my husband said, “you should make a book out of it.”

So a winter later, after workshopping the idea with a couple of friends, I present, The Spark Shroom Project.

After going through a few iterations, my project is ready to begin recording and recounting Spark Shroom stories, and I expect the project will continue to expand, evolve, and acquire legs, or stipes and peridioles, of its own.

Please follow along and share my project with your friends if you think they’d connect with it.

I’ve already interviewed a couple of friends for this project and I am immediately surprised about what kind of material surfaces and how we both feel at the end of the 75 minutes. I’m really enjoying giving people so much time to go into depth about such a transformative part of their life. In creating space for these stories to be said, and heard, I hope that it sparks people to have more intimate connections, and complex relationships, with the sparks of nature in their own life.

This project will be continued in installments as I interview mycologists and mushroom people.

Spark Shroom is an oral-history and storytelling project honoring the moment, fungus, or single mushroom that sparked wonder, a shift in perception, and a deep, lasting, often obsessive interest in fungi and mycology.

These stories from prominent mycologists and mushroom people are not about expertise or identification, but about encounter, relationship, and transformation. What was it that made their heart flutter and drew them closer to this mysterious world?

‘Spark Shroom’ builds from the term ‘Spark Bird’, originating in the birding community, as a parallel term for fungi: the catalyst that transforms birds or mushrooms from simply being a part of the scenery into a focused passion.

The goal with this anthology is to further living knowledge of nature: felt, remembered, repeated, and relational.