Myco-local

Two weeks till Mycocosmic launches! In the meantime, I snuck in a four-hour Sunday workshop run by two mycocologists and foragers about an hour away in Churchville, Virginia. They stuffed my head full of information and my body full of mushroom soup, mushroom hand pies, and pieces of shiitake, maitake, and lion’s mane sauteed in butter. Also cheesy mycology jokes: “Any mushroom is edible…once.” I feel much more confident about what I can forage for safely nearby, even though I’m still learning those spectacular terms for mushroom anatomy: ovate, depressed, umbilicate, infundibuliform… We also took turns drilling holes in logs and inoculating them with spore to bring home. If I do it right, the log will erupt in shiitake this fall. That’s a long time, but the book took WAY longer.

I’m still getting ready, but I have my giveaway book stickers, my shroomy cocktail napkins for the launch party, and multiple thematically decorated clothing items. I don’t have a playlist of different lengths worked out, although I learned some things about which poems work aloud at fall readings. Some review and thank-you copies are in the mail; more to go. Above is the updated spring event list; I have a big grading push ahead since I frontloaded assignments. Everything is semicolons; I’m dwelling in the pause between this winter’s linked clauses.