Big news: I'm writing a book!

Imagine for a second a force that knits the earth together under your feet, seeds the clouds overhead, keeps most of the plants on earth alive, and helps regulate the climate. The force you’re imagining is fungi, a kingdom of life so crucial that it’s helped build the world as we know it, and yet so often overlooked that we’ve only recently started to really become aware of it.

Now imagine that force in trouble, threatened by pollution and a warming atmosphere and habitat destruction. And on some deeper level, threatened by our ignorance or ambivalence: our belief that this kingdom of life is somehow impervious to threats, if we even stop to think about it at all. What would we lose if we lost that force, if it started to unravel?

I’ve become so preoccupied with this question, and so convinced that the answer matters deeply for the health of the planet, that I’ve spent the last few years of my life traveling the globe and researching and interviewing experts to try and answer it. And now, I’m doing what writers do when we get obsessed with a big question that we think really matters: I’m writing a book about it.

I’m over the moon to have the chance to do this. It took an enormous amount of work to even get to this point of scoring a book deal, and yet I know that the real mountain climb — writing the dang thing — is just beginning in earnest. I have my work cut out for me.

I also know that writing a nonfiction book in these early years of the 21st century, in an era of short-form video and even shorter attention spans, is kind of a funny thing to undertake. Nobody reads anymore, goes the claim, and if they do, they’re certainly not reading nonfiction, at least not in great numbers. One fellow author told me to think of writing a nonfiction book like taking up a kind of antiquated, niche art form, like making a lithograph, maybe.

I understood her point. And yet the truth is that my own life is one that has been changed over and over by books — I don’t just mean in the sense of “I really loved that,” I mean the course of my life and my career trajectory and my relationships and my priorities and my finances have changed because of things I’ve read. What I’m trying to say is that I still believe in books (how could I not? I’ve been stringing words together for a living for more than a decade) and so I’m thrilled to be writing one, in spite of all the good reasons not to. I think the work of protecting this planet’s fungi is high stakes, and it will take all kinds of people with all kinds of skills offering their gifts to get it right. I’m a writer, so I’m offering my writing. (And occasionally my community science, but that’s a story for another day.)

It will be years before this thing is out in the world for you to read. In the meantime, I have a LOT of work to do, which may mean a bit slower of a publishing pace here in the newsletter at times. But I hope you’ll stick around, because I think what will be coming out on the other side is going to be worth it. The movement to protect fungi is young but it’s growing rapidly and it is full of some of the most inspiring, fascinating and energizing people I’ve ever met, and I can’t wait to give you a peek into their worlds. (And if you’re working in the fungal conservation space and we haven’t connected yet, please drop me a line! I’d love to hear about what you’re up to.)

We need the fungi, and the fungi need us. What a thrill to get to tell the story.

Thanks for being here,
Whitney