Mushroom School Workbook (PDF Version)

This is the digital (PDF) version of the Mushroom School Workbook.

The Mushroom School Workbook can be used as a supplementary companion to our year-long Mushroom School, or, as a standalone interactive guide where you can work, write, ponder, and continually become at your own pace.

This workbook is a way for us to delve into processes and practices of learning and unlearning from mushrooms, fungi, mycelium, and our own bodies, as well as revered teachers. Our goal is to move away from human-centered ways of conceptualizing narratives, and instead to learn new ways of being, language-ing, and storytelling from landscape assemblages, roots, soil, and various fungal beings. We hope these prompts, quotes, questions, and portals will encourage the re-visioning of your whole being and allow your stories to be broken open and reformed into new shape-shifting beings.

In Star Trek Discovery, the USS Discovery travels subspace via a vast mycelial network, mycelia forming the foundation of space connecting all life across the universe. In our world too, mycorrizhal & mycelial networks represent the vast space between all of us, space that is far from empty and instead replete with relationality, nourishment, connection, rootedness, and story. These networks serve as reminders that as human beings we are not individual, self- enclosed systems, but assemblages, porous and constantly spilling over, still becoming, and that as writers, we are the fruiting bodies of something vaster, more ancient and wise than any one of us alone. As Robin Wall Kimmerer has written about, there exists a word in Potawatomi: "puhpowee," which she translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight," (Braiding Sweetgrass). As you turn each page and enter each portal of this workbook, we invite you to imagine and feel into the power of "puhpowee" with each word you jot down. That force is real, and it's important to pay attention.

So, will you write with us? We can't wait to see what emerges.

CONTENTS

OPENING

SOIL

ROOTS

MYCELIUM

MUSHROOM

REST

AIR

SPORES

DECOMPOSITION

ADAPTATION

184 pages.

Front Cover Art by Katie Collins-Guinn / Back Cover Art by Miles Mingo / Typesetting/Design by Janice Lee
Workbook Contents Compiled by Ella deCastro Baron, Daniel Isaiah Elder, Katie Collins-Guinn, Leigh Hopkins, Janice Lee, Anya Pearson, Domi Shoemaker, Lidia Yuknavitch
Illustrations by Katie Collins-Guinn, Janice Lee, Miles Mingo, Venka Payne, Lidia Yuknavitch