Understories and Mycocosms
Tapping Hidden Networks
Some of the musings here were inspired by the panel “Understories and Mycocosms” at the AWP conference 2025, moderated by Anna Maria Hong and organized by Lesley Wheeler. Or were waiting to be released by that panel. Or were written down after rereading my notes. The other participants were Sarah Audsley, Amaranth Ravva, Asali Solomon—and everyone that attended.
Above: a model from Rainforestalliance.org.
Fungi breathe. They are the most populous kingdom of life. There are an estimated 3.8 million species of fungi—of which we have identified about 10%. We know relatively little about them. We do know that without fungi, death would quickly overwhelm the world.
Can we find a model for our works and communities in fungi?
Not to “use” our resources (up), but to connect to them. As the vast underground networks we refer to as mycelial networks function to connect distant plants and facilitate the exchange of nutrients H2O and chemicals that operate as messages between distant trees.
What is your network? What resources and people are you not attending to?
What inherited power structures do we replicate in our writing and the literary groups we are currently a part of? How can we deconstruct those structures, how do we want to reconstruct them?
How close, actually, is the poetry industrial complex to the military industrial complex to the farming industrial complex to the “ "…
There are more microorganisms in a single teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on earth.
The artist Paul Klee said, “art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible”.
What can I make visible?
Soil microbiomes may contain anti-depressants. Which is part of why gardening may be calming.
The speaker’s office where she works as a professor in the southern university outside the small southern town looks out on where they buried the Confederate general’s horse. What would be the cost(s) of digging it up?
What are you trying to unbury?
Can we experience the entirety of human experience from any place we may live?
What is and is not complicity?
I want/ed to be Anonymous.
Who among your peers is anonymous? How and why do you allow yourself to be Anonymous?
Do you really think of yourself as an individual as you write? Do you come back to your individuality after writing? Or are you most yourself when you write?
We might more often think of ourselves as microbiomes rather than as individuals.
Death and decay are a means to re-connectivity. Regeneration.
How do you “metabolize” your experiences into your work?
How many times have I thought: it’s my work that is writing me.
There is an awe that takes me out of myself. And also allows me to return to myself. That is what I am pursuing. If I have written anything worthwhile, it was because I pursued that awe without fear.
I think my literary “voice” is me connecting myself to the writers I have loved.
Soil is a non-renewable resource. And it isn’t “ours”.
Learn to interrogate the viewpoint of the pastoral.
Lecture by Victoria Chang titled “Other Pastorals” (I have not yet been able to find this, please let me know below if and where anyone does).
How can we rely on our networks to take back control of our methods of communication?
If your work was a plant, what species would it be?
It takes five to nine years for a trillium flower to bloom. A flower that exists in dense drifts of individuals. Its cycle connected to the deciduous forest of which it is a part. The young leaves are medicinal. The berries and roots are toxic. In the Victorian language of flowers, it represented resilience, balance, restoration.
Please, if you wish, leave comments. Answers. More questions.