The original “fun-gal” of CanLit is back for a Power Q & A. We welcome the exubriant Ariel Gordon to the blog to talk about how she selected the home for her newest book, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (June 4, 2024).
Both personal and entertaining, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest is the highly anticipated second book of a trilogy and shows Gordon at her best: interweaving the personal with the easily overlooked local and natural and local world around her, and passing on her contagious delight for the world at—and under—our feet.
In a diverse range of essays, Gordon showcases her background in biology, taking us deep into the fungal world, exploring mushrooms both edible and not, found and foraged, and the myriad ways in which mushrooms and trees make up our ecosystem and are in fact a reflection of the way we build our own personal communities and connections.
This collection of essays will resonate with anyone who’s ever thought, “can I eat that?” when seeing a mushroom, but also those with larger questions about our place in the natural world.
Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon.
Q: Tell us about working with Wolsak & Wynn. What made you want to publish with them?
A: After publishing two books of poetry, Wolsak & Wynn’s nature-y non-fiction is what made me want to start writing non-fiction. I loved Jenna Butler’s A Profession of Hope and Daniel Coleman’s Yardwork, how they considered land-use, history, colonialism, and the more-than-human. And suddenly I was writing things that combined all my experience and training: my science and journalism degrees, which taught me curiosity; my experience writing poetry, which was all about compression, about writing beautifully; and the decades I’d spent taking macro photographs of mushrooms and peering at trees.
Part of my interest in being published by W&W in particular was that I knew publisher Noelle Allen edited their non-fiction. I trust Noelle implicitly, which is saying a lot as someone who has worked in publishing a long time AND who is sort of professionally ambivalent, given late-stage capitalism, given climate change. Noelle’s also an excellent publisher and a leader among independent publishers. I would follow her anywhere (with a battered suitcase full of manuscripts neeeeeeeeding a home…).
Author Ariel Gordon.
More about Ariel Gordon:
Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was 2nd place winner of the 2022 Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain Magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius, and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon's fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.