On a Mushroom Book ✴ Pt 1
The launch of my debut picture book, On a Mushroom Day, illustrated by the magnificent Alexandra Finkeldey, hovers so close on the horizon I can almost touch it. July 16th is the book birthday, and if you are in the Hudson Valley or NYC area this summer I’d love to invite you to a bunch of great events I’ll be taking part in to help promote the book. While ironing out the events calendar and logistics have taken up the lion’s share of my attention this week, I am hoping to resist the flow of activity enough to reflect for a moment on the journey that brought me here—or rather that brought this book here, into my hands, so much more than I dreamed it could be at the start.
Though I feel sure this feeling has been articulated more thoughtfully by others (and I feel somewhat strange admitting it at all), putting a book out into the world has some remarkable parallels to bringing a new human into it. A book isn’t alive, and yet it shares some of the qualities of a new life: You grow it over a long period of time (four years in this case) and do everything in your power to help it along…but once it’s in the world, it’s inevitably going to have a life all its own.
This book began, like much of my writing, as an obsessive little loop in my mind, almost a mantra, until I sat down on the couch in the evening and put the first words down in the notes app of my old phone. And yet it’s now destined, I dare hope, for many far-flung couches and classrooms and bedside book baskets. Most of the kids who read it won’t even have a real awareness that books are made by people, much less have an active curiosity about which people made this one... I can only hope that some of them believe in the world we made (we being Alex, our amazing editors at Tundra, Tara Walker and Margot Blankier, Sophie Paas-Land and the rest of the design team, the copy editor and sensitivity reader, the factory workers, plenty of other folks I’ll never even know had a hand in it, and myself) and carry what curiosities it kindles forward into their own explorations.
In the summer of 2020 I was, like everyone on earth, spending a lot of time grappling with the seismic sociocultural ruptures wrought by a global pandemic. Within the very permeable membrane of my one tiny human life, this also meant grieving the loss of a business plan that I had spent most of my “free time” in the year after giving birth developing—grieving one particular future as the idea of the future seemed to be disintegrating in real time. One image that comes to my mind when I think about that summer is just gazing out at the sea of unbroken, unfathomable unknowns, my toddler’s fat little hand grasped tightly in mine as the waves crashed in.
But when I look back in photos, the real images I captured at the time are jarringly sweet and almost desperately nostalgic: a well-tended garden lush with food and flowers backlit by the evening sun; a naked baby double-fisting ripe tomatoes with unadulterated glee; a ride “up high” on dada’s shoulders, soft and unkempt hair haloed by one of many narrow fingers of sunlight daubing the dark understory. I know, from many intimate conversations, that I’m far from alone with this dissonance: The worst plague to strike humanity in a generation also resourced my family in myriad ways we truly needed. We received access to socialized healthcare, something like UBI (which became the seed funding for Chicory Naturalist, the new business I launched the next year), and maybe most impactful, time.
With close to nothing “on the calendar,” and the real privilege of copious access to green spaces, my family spent maybe more time outside that summer than we ever have before or since. And of course, being deep down the rabbit hole of mushroom obsession—something I share with my spouse and have tried from birth to inoculate my daughter with—we found our way to the woods again and again. Not that it’s the only place to find mushrooms, which may be observed in almost all terrestrial biomes, but because it’s one of the best places to find a lot of different mushrooms. A forest, in the right season, with a nice dose of rain, is where “a mushroom day” is most likely to unfold. And so it’s no coincidence that I wrote On a Mushroom Day one evening of that strange summer.
But of course, as I am sure most folks who subscribe to newsletters (recreational readers by default) already know, very possibly from personal experience, writing a manuscript and seeing it published are moments that live an ocean apart. On a Mushroom Day was one of the few pieces of writing I ever completed that I felt very strongly and unequivocally should exist out in the world, mostly because at the time I wrote it down there were less than a handful of published books related to fungi for young readers, compared to the literal thousands of picture books that focus on animals and plants. While my running list of mushroom-related picture book titles has since swelled to *two* handfuls of books in the past two years, I am still incredibly proud to be making my contribution to the corpus.
That said, in 2020 I had no expectation and no avenue to work towards getting a traditional publishing deal. For better and certainly sometimes for worse, I’ve never been someone who assumed I’d be the one to beat impossible odds. When I wrote it, I was committed to doing my level best (which is to say a *not* great) job illustrating the book, trying for some of the very small number of publishers that accept non-agented proposals, and probably end by self-publishing a small run down the line. So it really felt like a deus ex machina kind of moment when I met my future agent at the very first mushroom workshop I ever led.
It’s important to say that every writer who secures a literary agent has won a lottery of sorts. There are not nearly enough agents nor publishing deals to accommodate even a reasonable fraction of the number of stories that people have to tell. On the one end of lottery winners are folks who pulled that winning ticket at birth, by their familial connections, or by some celebrity accumulated through their life. On the other are the stalwart souls with fantastic books who just stick it out querying agents, buying as many tickets to the lottery as it takes to improve their odds. My story fits none of these narratives, and is likely at the root of my imposter syndrome when that unhelpful feeling inevitably bubbles up.
My first agent was one of several people I met at the first mushroom workshop I led, in the summer of 2021, who I am still friends with to this day. I think the same could probably be said of most subsequent walks as well—it’s usually a wonderful and bonding experience to walk in the woods with folks and help them “get their eyes” for seeing mushrooms—but the first one was legendary, at least from my perspective. I had often thought, on various mushroom days, spending the whole afternoon on a fungal treasure hunt, What if I could do this for work? So it was a completely surreal experience to find myself doing just that. On top of which, we had one of the most engaged, interesting, funny groups of people I’ve had gathered for programming so far. It was just a fantastic day, and at the end of it many of the attendees posted their obligatory mushroom table photos (a magnificent array) and followed me on the ‘gram.
One of the people I followed back was Adriann, who I’d liked immediately for her distinctive blend of reserve and inquisitiveness. Nosing over to her bio, as we’re all wont to do at the end of a long day, my breath caught in my throat seeing that in addition to being a fellow parent and mycophile…for work, Adriann was an agent. In fact, she was an agent who represented picture book authors, among others. It took a bit of time to get up the courage to query her with the manuscript, but eventually I managed. The rest, as they say…is another blog post. ;)
Next week I’ll be highlighting some more phenology—there’s just too much happening right now to stay away for long!—but I’ll be returning after that to the making of On a Mushroom Day. Just a quick heads-up as well that I’ll be taking a break from the regular posts for the month after my book launch for my mini-tour, but I’d love to help put together some group-sourced phenology posts during that time, if some of y’all would be interested in contributing an observation or two. Please drop a comment if that sounds like fun to you! All bioregions welcome.
Would you like to pre-order a copy of On a Mushroom Day and haven’t done so yet? You can still do so HERE. Alex and I will be signing (and inscribing, if you’d like) all pre-orders through Chicory! Thanks again & forever to everyone who buys this book baby—if you like this newsletter and gorgeous forest art, I really think you’re going to like it.