The wetlands are vast and loud, filled with bullfrogs serenading their dragonfly dinner, humming insects chewing at your skin, herons staking their claim for their particular patch of mud that is better than all others. Follow the water until the river begins.  Walk along the banks, cracking in the August heat, through the humming short grass until the water flows underground.  If your shoes are good, cross the slip and walk up the tallest of the indigo hills.  Ignore the burrs, they come off easily with a good brush.  The sun is setting; you can see the houses now - glass and steel and wood asserting themselves on the land with all the good taste and modesty of their residents.  Follow these homes over the crest of the hill, one after another, until you can see the lights of the city reflected in the lake.  Find the biggest house, the cleanest, the one with no chickens or ducks or geese honking nearby.  This is Mikel Amisigi’s house.   This evening, well overdue by most measures, is the night he is going to die.

Ten fun facts about fungi

Alie Ward of Ologies interviewed Tom Volk!

Here is his fantastic website.

The Mycological Society of America ​

About the Author

My name is Pamela Mueggenberg, and I am an art therapist.  I have written a book that I would like to share with you: a speculative fiction novel I've named  60/40.  In my professional life I specialize in trauma and complex grief, using expressive modalities to help people make sense of and process all the varied kinds of pain we can experience.  I wanted to explore what would happen if, as I have wished so many times, I could make certain evil people disappear. How would that reshape the world?  How could we ethically determine who is evil enough to be erased?  And what would happen to the people they hurt?
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Reality does not allow for dichotomies.  Black and white ideas like “good” or “evil” are eroded by experience, smoothed into an understanding of life as it is, not as we expect it to be.  If evil were real it would be a more intrinsic part of our physical world, rather than a story we create to bring meaning to suffering.  We could see it, touch it, measure it - it would be subject to the demands of ecological necessity just like every other source of change in our world.  Ultimately, something would want to eat it.

​In the world of 60/40, we have co-evolved with just such a consumer.  Humanity, one of the most consistent sources of evil, is an ideal host for the endobiont: a complex mycological organism that spans - and changes - time.  Evil isn’t good for anybody and the endobiont doesn’t rely on us being awful to each other for its meals.  Rather, it carefully tends its human stock, absorbing away enough toxic material for the species to flourish - not unlike ribosomes leaching lead and other toxic metals away from tree roots to keep their habitat livable.