Mushrooms Are Not a Metaphor

Maria Pinto finds climate futures hidden among wild mushrooms.

By Almah LaVonJanuary 15, 2026

• Environment

• Memoir & Essay

“THERE IS NO separate paradise,” writes naturalist Maria Pinto in her new book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless, “just the one that we ignore and destroy chasing after capital.” Such a sentiment would not be unwelcome among 19th-century transcendentalists—and Pinto aptly draws on Ralph Waldo Emerson not only for her debut’s title but also for the first of its three epigraphs:

Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores tomorrow or next day … A fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time.

Like Emerson before her, Pinto is based in the Boston area. There, she leads mushroom hunts in the woods—and now, across page after luminous page, in her book of essays with the subtitle “What Fungi Taught Me About Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival.”

Pinto’s collection blends memoir, field reports, and lyric essay. Yet Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless is also an exercise in character study, with most of its 10 entries centering protagonists like Tuber melanosporum, otherwise known as the black winter truffle, or Schizophyllum commune, the split-gill fungus, a nonbinary being boasting more than 23,000 sexes. In doing so, each essay-story illustrates how the very idea of “protagonism” can be much more various—and mysterious—in the mycelial context. For where does Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (the zombie-ant fungus) end and the “parasitized ant” begin? Pinto’s essay “In Search of Amanita phalloides (The Death Cap)” begins with an origin-myth prose poem that speculates how spores were among the numberless dispatched during the transatlantic slave trade. Yet even in narratives like these, where hyphae thread through human plots, she is clear that the members of queendom Fungi are “sovereigns of their own biology.” Again and again, Pinto—whether she’s examining a bouquet of boletes she found in a Target parking lot in South Florida or interviewing psilocybin entrepreneurs in her native Jamaica—points to the otherness and “us”-ness of the fungal world.

I spoke with Pinto over the phone while she was on her way to a mycological convention in Vermont. At one point during our conversation, she stepped out of the car to explore a roadside forest; I could hear the crunch of leaves as she dowsed for mushrooms between the trees.

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ALMAH LAVON: The title of each essay in Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless begins with “In Search of,” and serves as an organizing map for the reader. But do you think of the book as a collection of discrete essays, or as a macroorganism, like the honey mushroom in Oregon?

MARIA PINTO: You mean like a big, sprawling, untamable, oldest-organism sort of heavy thing? The title sure is sprawling! “Fearless, sleepless, deathless” is taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet,” in which he compares the soul of a poet to a spore. And the subtitle was me wanting folks to know exactly what they were getting.

I made a conscious decision not to do chapters. Part of that was because I wanted to feel like each hunt had finished, and we’d left the woodland with our baskets in between them. Like maybe we’d found the mushroom in question, or at least some tantalizing evidence that it might live where we’d been looking.

It could be that treating each episode separately was more important for me in the writing than it ends up being in the reading—and, of course, themes do recur throughout the book, like Anansi’s tricksterism, and the fact that every single particle on this planet is kin to every other particle. The book feels hard to excerpt perhaps for this reason; no matter how I tried to make each essay into an island, they myceliated their way into one another.

Your writing style is so extravagant and exuberant and earnest … and playful, and impish. As a writer, you mirror the generosity of the mycelial universe.

Aw—thank you! It seems like the right move to be “extra” when we’re fed a diet of scarcity. Fungi have taught me that there’s abundance everywhere. Our stubborn human hierarchies have taught me that this abundance includes cruelty and depravity and forced privation. But there’s also an abundance of people wanting to connect, of people wanting to lead with their humanity, and of people understanding that we don’t have to continue to live in these isolating, capitalistic, commodified ways. So, the exuberance might come from my joy in joining a conversation in which we’re insisting on redistributing the fecundity that’s plainly visible, right there, [albeit] behind barbed wire.

As you say, we’re “fed a diet of scarcity”; in the book, you interview a variety of people about their menus for the “mycofuture.” Could you talk more about that?

I think developing what I call a “fungal lens” is what mushroom people do. When you apply this lens, it becomes clear that scarcity is a man-made fiction; everything is everywhere, all at once! Still, anyone who studies ecology knows that we’re actively winnowing the planet’s—stunning—biodiversity, and that message of scarcity turns to a self-fulfilling prophecy every day; so we’re anxiously attached to the future.

When I asked subjects what the mycofuture meant to them, I got a range of answers. There are “mycophile survivalists” who got into foraging because they want to be able to find food wherever, come what may. There are “myconauts” wanting to find hidden abundance within their own minds. There are people who found mycological communities as a speculative space—prospectors who want to trade in mycelial futures, like gold. There are people who simply want to be able to continue to feed and heal their communities, and there are people who want to make a name for themselves scientifically. There are people, of course, who find fruiting bodies beautiful and want to share pictures of the bounty with the world, to entertain or educate.

I was struck when some I spoke with took “mycofuturity” to mean only what capitalists are doing with mushrooms, or what people who want to make money from the “shroom boom” wish to do with mushrooms. It gets taken there, of course, because that’s the reality of the kinds of lives we’re leading; it’s always “I love this: how can I monetize it?” It’s a move I might make, in leading a paid mushroom foray or saying yes to writing a book. That certain mycelia, as Anna Tsing says in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, refuse to be enclosed [by capitalism] is one of the things that obsesses me though—that we live among wily tricksters who will not fall in line with endlessly extractive visions for the future. Some very valuable mushrooms grow only in association with certain trees, in certain soil, or only when it pleases them. (Matsutake is one—I picked some a couple days ago, even in this mild drought.)

For me, one of the most compelling answers is that we’re going to have to find our abundance where it’s offered in addition to where we sustainably make it, and not just stranglehold and “monoculture” it into existence. It’s looking through a fungal lens, which instills humility and finds the plenty that’s already here so that we think twice about looking for more, more, more. It’s how we are going to hold one another and be there for one another and show up for one another without money as the mediator. Does that kind of answer your question?

Abundantly! It reminds me of the portrait of your ideal mycofuture in your book’s final essay:

The mycelial networks of mutual aid. […] The de-emphasis of money. Reacquaintance with indeterminacy, with open expectations, with what is available versus what one wants. The windows into the smallest details of the forest floor, just about everywhere, shared just because. The care forged in Minneapolis fire. The unofficial belowground economies of the petit marronage. The anarchism that has always marked Black life. The wonder and reciprocity of truly living on the land we’ve been divorced from […] The things I want to see in the future are things that now survive mostly underground, but I want to see them fruiting everywhere.

There is a similar idea in the introduction, where you wrote, “[T]here’s nothing like the study of fungi to encourage ecological thinking and explode notions of discrete individuals, lone actors, and single-stream histories.” This feels so important in an age of hardening borders and deepening atomization. Could you say more about this porousness, or “contamination,” to use the term you invoke throughout the book?

One of the main ideas informing my thinking in the book is Anna Tsing’s thesis about how we survive in a capitalist ruin, and how it will require cross-species entanglement and contamination. It’s a short walk from “purity” to reinforcement of hierarchy and various supremacies. This idea that anything can be pure is laughable if you actually know anything about biology; we’re so multitudinous, we’re so legion. We’re so needful of the kinship lines we’ve severed to our more-than-human world.

“We’re so ‘slutty,’” you wrote.

Exactly. It’s not a reasonable goal to be pure. I’m constantly unlearning notions of purity for myself as I learn more about fungal ecology. Because where does the plant start and the fungus end when you’re talking about a mycorrhizal association? You’re seeing how one organism actually spins itself into the roots of another in a way that makes them both flourish. That dramatizes how all relationships actually are.

In the most productive sense, everyone (and everything) who has come with me into the woods and looked through a fungal lens at the world co-authored the book. These dusty ideas of sole authorship and ownership and cordoning off and remaining pure within a silo are being used to pick us off. I relish seeing them exploded. Gatekeeping can protect—I know that well with my litany of threatened identities—but I think it’s also true that we’ve been working at cross-purposes with our own survival by upholding completely unattainable notions of purity.

In this book, you write, “Fungi, to be clear, are not metaphors,” which is something you’ve also expressed elsewhere, including in your recent Orion essay “Mushroom as Metaphor.” Why is this so important to say?

I do say that a lot, yes. We are rediscovering what is amazing about kingdom Fungi right as we’re passing all these extremely bleak milestones—human milestones, planetary milestones—and there’s a tendency to want the cool new thing to be what saves us. We want the panacea. And while we’re busy (rightfully) adoring the mystery and otherworldliness of fungi, we can’t help but make them into superheroes. In writing, I didn’t want the fungal metaphor to stand in for work that has to be done by all of us together, and I hoped to interrupt the tired story where we “discover” something and we ask too much of it and it disappoints us.

Fungi have been here toiling and playing for millennia. They’re fine without us. They might enjoy a whirl as an ingredient in our digestive stew, or as athlete’s foot in the summertime, or a nasty bout of fungal pneumonia. And maybe it even amuses them to see us fantasize about a member of their crew, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, bringing about the end of the world in our popular stories, like The Last of Us or The Girl with All the Gifts. But they don’t need us like we need them. They’re not here to save us. They helped terraform the world to make us possible. That has to be enough! To heed their example seems fine: build when the time is right, form decentralized coalitions without hierarchy that move with the lightness of a spore, and go in a trickster’s quiet when it’s time to dismantle. We can learn from them, but they’re not the revolution. That’s our work.

This reminds me of where you talked about the eight-year-old mushroom-hunter Lucian renaming “false turkey tail” (Stereum ostrea and S. hirsutum) to the more apt “vulture tail.” In that passage, you write: “[I]f you predicated your entire relationship with an organism on what you had hoped it would be, rather than actually seeing that organism for what they were, you were setting that relationship up for failure.” You reveal how hard it is not to be solipsistic. Yet this is very difficult as human animals, as storytelling creatures.

That’s something that I was conscious of wanting to balance because we are storytelling creatures. There’s a whole essay in the book, “In Search of Schizophyllum commune (The Charismatic Mushroom),” in which I question the scientistic assumption that to anthropomorphize, for instance, is always bad. Assigning human traits to what we see is what we do. Western insistence on making inert matter from an animated world, a world built on process rather than progress, is a blip in history, and what a destructive blip it has been. At the same time, deciding that an organism only has value because it has “human” traits ain’t it either. Can we hold both things at once? A tree is not a mother … the tardigrade, though super cute at magnification, is not your son. These are creatures that have a right to exist that has nothing to do with their utility to us. And at the same time, the tree is our mother. A tree is useful to us, but we can also be useful to the tree. And while we’re at it, our mother doesn’t owe us their life. But we’re happy to be able to engage in a reciprocal relationship with family.

I was thinking of the etymology of “metaphor”—deriving from the ancient Greek word meaning “a transfer” and “a carrying over”—and how metaphor is a kind of spore, a dispersal unit but of the rhetorical variety. That thought was inspired by your engagement with metaphors and mushrooms in the book, which begins as early as one of the epigraphs, from Anne Boyer: “We are the metaphors for them.” What would you speculate that we stand for in the fungal consciousness?

I’m gonna start with the easy: we’re spore vectors. We’re carrying their next generation around in our lungs, among other things. They’re all about our bodies in their millions; we cannot walk into a space without being their regeneration.

Maybe they see us as changers of their ecologies and their worlds. Maybe they see us and mind their own business, staying hydrated and in their lane. There’s intelligence in a spore: it carries information about the perfect conditions in which to fruit. They carry that story from their origin point, which could be many hundreds of miles away. I love the idea that they might identify with other migrants.

Maybe mycelial consciousness is awed by how rapidly their homes are changing. Maybe certain fungi wonder where all the human waste has gone! Maybe they’re watching hungrily as all these changes make material for them to gobble up, whole species of trees under threat from various blights. Maybe they’re dismayed to have to adapt so quickly, and they’re leaving things they once knew behind in the flurry, and they’re fruiting in places they never used to, getting banished from others where they “always” did, and seeing their extended families go extinct before we humans even have an opportunity to catalog them. Maybe as profound changers themselves, they recognize that we’re profound changers.

So we’re spore vectors. We’re changers, we’re warmers and burners. At our best moments, we’re allies.

You’re sparking me to think about the different layers of the word “culture,” and how we’re their culture carriers. That’s another way of talking about storytelling. We’re spreading their culture for them.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

The first essay, “In Search of Junjo (The Jamaican Mushroom),” is electrifying because we, as readers, discover with you. The way you unfold this linguistic detective story is so effective—speculatively linking one of the Jamaican words for “mushroom” to similar ones in Uganda and “the African diaspor[e]a.”

I try to bring the reader along during these moments of research. I’m not an expert, I’m not a linguist, I’m not a lettered ethnomycologist. This is just me being utterly fascinated by the possibility that I stumbled upon a missing historical link, and I wanted to bring people with me! This involved a kind of live blogging of my reactions to very old primary sources. But since fungi have been underdocumented and I’m an unfunded independent scholar, I spent so many nights trying to find threads with limited information, and had a limited ability to visit archives where information would probably be more complete. These limitations were frustrating, but also freeing—a bit like a forager’s conception of a dish. In the essay, I don’t make any final pronouncements.

That’s what I loved. It was unsettled, which is one of my favorite ways for things to end. You open the last essay breaking down how you broke down a deer skull during a writing residency at Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

The quiet of the Virginia countryside was very conducive to the kind of meditation that was necessary to bring the book to a close. So it felt a little bit naughty to be picking apart this remnant of an animal, a little gothic and regressive to get so dirty in such a genteel place, where the other residents and I were supposed to be living in our heads. Since this weird thing I chose to do was ostensibly part of the writing process and I was working on that last essay, it had to be a sort of a culmination. It’s probably pretty appropriate that it got that messy, sinewy, smelly—bodily.

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Maria Pinto is an author and educator living in the Boston area. She teaches for the literary nonprofit GrubStreet, and her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Longreads, Necessary Fiction, and Arnoldia. She has led workshops and given lectures for mycological societies around the country, and she leads regular forays at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Her debut book is a collection of lyric essays about mushrooms called Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me About Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (2025), out with Great Circle Books from UNC Press.

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Featured image: Photo of Maria Pinto courtesy of the author.