Maria Pinto, who writes and educates about mycology, is the inaugural Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA) writer-in-residence. From Oct. 6 to Oct. 10, she is living in the recently renovated lodging at CERA, 365 acres of restored prairie land owned by Grinnell College, and will engage with the community through a series of events.
On Wed., Oct. 8, she ran a creative workshop entitled “The Climate Collagist: Writing Hybrid Work to Meet Our Times” in the Joe Rosenfield Center `25 room 209 at 4 p.m. On Thurs., Oct. 9, she will do a Writers @ Grinnell (W@G) reading at 8 p.m. in JRC 101. On Fri., Oct. 10, she will lead a fall mushroom walk at 4:30 p.m. around the south side of CERA. Those on the walk can also go birding with Hai-Dang Phan, director of W@G and associate professor of English, and collect native prairie seed at sunset with Jake Hill, CERA horticulturalist.
Her residence is sponsored by W@G, the environmental studies concentration, the Center for Prairie Studies (CPS) and CERA. Last year, W@G hosted another environmental writer Jonathan Meiburg, who wrote a book on the caracara, a bird of prey, for three days that culminated in a bird walk at the end of the week.
As the inaugural CERA writer-in-residence, Pinto is the first to experience living in the newly renovated lodging, which she describes as a beautiful, minimalist space. The back of the house is all glass that overlooks the 14-acre Perry Pond. Looking through the telescope near the lodging, she said she watched a deer grazing the algae in the pond.
“We want to provide the prairie as a site of inspiration for art and for literature and for other people to be inspired by the work that is done there but also by what Iowa has to share — how that might inspire them,” said Cori Jakubiak, director of the Center for Prairie Studies.
Pinto’s debut book of essays “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival” will be published on Oct. 28 through the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press.
Pinto leads mushroom walks and forays, especially for Black and brown communities, in the Boston area. Like how birders ask fellow birders what their spark bird is, Pinto said that she will ask other mycophiles what their spark mushroom is.
Though Pinto said that there was not just one moment or mushroom that sparked her mycophilia, two stand out.
In 2015, when Pinto used to walk dogs, she went to a woods and saw a yellow Anamedia muscaria, the type of mushroom that mushroom emojis appear modeled after. To Pinto, this mushroom seemed metallic and glowing from the forest floor, so she said that she got down on her knees to capture it.
“There was no capturing it. It was almost magical. I found it really hard to look away from it,” she said.
She also has a friend who used to hunt hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and host parties during these hens’ bumper years. When she saw this friend was giving away pounds of gourmet mushrooms she found on the ground, she said she could see herself foraging for mushrooms everyday.
After years of studying mushrooms, she turned her obsession into a book by solicitation from an editor she had sold a short story to in 2014. This editor became an acquisitions editor for UNC Press, the eventual publisher of Pinto’s book.
The day after Pinto arrived in Grinnell, she took a 45-minute walk in CERA. During her brief explorations of the prairie land, she saw golden oyster mushrooms on the ground, an invasive species of mushroom.
“You can look down. You can look at eye level because they grow on tree bark. You can look up at the canopies sometimes. You can really look anywhere,” said Pinto.
