Maria Pinto is an author, naturalist, and mycophile living outside of Boston, Massachusetts. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and this autumn published her book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival. Maria leads regular mushroom forays at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and independently for people of color in Boston and beyond. When she’s not writing or scouring the forest for fungi, Maria enjoys practicing archery, thrifting, and making self-proclaimed “weird art” from natural materials.
I’m from Jamaica originally, but I moved to South Florida when I was very young and had sort of a feral childhood in the wetlands there. Every summer I would go home to Jamaica and run around the rural hillside where my family is from, picking fruit and climbing trees. In Florida, I would avoid venomous snakes and catch insects and frogs and wanted to be able to watch the growth and living of all the creatures around me. I wore my wellies and my Little Mermaid bathing suit all day. My younger brother and I were inseparable out in the Acreage, which is what this rural South Floridian area was called.
I’ve always been extremely curious about my surroundings and wanting to get my hands dirty outside. I got a little bit alienated from that interest when we moved to the suburbs when I was 7 or 8. Everything was manicured; native organisms were discouraged from flourishing. There were “No Trespassing” signs everywhere, which domesticates you a bit, makes you cautious about where you tread, and flattens your experience of the land. I had a love for wild food that came from being in Jamaica, where I could just pick some delicious mangoes off a tree and we ate nutritious “ground provisions” like green banana and breadfruit with our proteins. But it felt like that love could only be expressed during summers in Jamaica.
I’ve been a writer since I could write. I know that’s kind of a cliché, but as a kid I would pick up a book and if I didn’t like the ending, I would write a new one directly in there, in the margins. I went to Dreyfoos School of the Arts for high school, where I was the editor of the school’s literary journal. I sent poems I’d written out to other literary journals. My favorite authors were Lorrie Moore, Annie Dillard, and Toni Morrison – writers of lush prose. Even lyricists like Fiona Apple, Mariah Carey, and Tori Amos – their songs absolutely informed the rhythms I tried out in my own poetry as a teen. Teachers at the school encouraged us to take our art seriously, which was such a blessing.
I was into writing, but not really into science as it was presented in school. I wish the subjects I care so much about now had been taught with an eye towards the practical, and that their importance even if you didn’t plan to go into a STEM career had been highlighted. So often we were taught things as though they were only valuable if they had an application for work down the line. Microscopy for instance – I wish I had been paying better attention to those lessons. I’m catching up and learning – or relearning – how to do these things now. The value of a microscopical education is so much clearer to me now that looking at mushroom spores is on the table.
I went to Brandeis University in 2003 to study creative writing and women’s studies. I went specifically because they had an undergraduate program in creative writing, a concentration that you could do within English. I took a year off in the middle for mental health reasons. After I graduated in 2008, I did a yearlong fellowship at the Writers’ Room of Boston. I had written a short story for my creative writing thesis that my mentor thought could be a novel, so I expanded on it. The novel is called Queen Nzinga. It’s a wacky exploration of people navigating non-monogamous relationships.
Right out of college, I started walking dogs for a living. I continued to do that while submitting short stories to literary journals and contests. After finishing my novel, I was shopping it around to editors via an agent. In the end it didn’t work out with that book, and that’s when I took to the woods to do something, perhaps, that didn’t feel like it was a means to an end. I felt pretty done with the submission-rejection cycle that is so much a part of trying to publish. Among the trees I could just be me.
That’s when I started to notice mushrooms. I walked these two giant Old English Sheepdogs in the woods behind the Chestnut Hill Mall in Brookline. Running around after them took me off the beaten path and into the presence of the coolest fungal specimens. In college, I had been antsy to reconnect with wild food. I went on foraging walks and herb walks then, but it wasn’t until later that I really fell into foraging as a hobby. I became friends with a woman from Poland who grew up with mushroom hunting as a national pastime and she taught me the “Foolproof Four,” which are mushrooms that you supposedly can’t mix up with anything else.
I started to realize that fungi were fascinating and that beyond their culinary charms, they do a lot of amazing things in the environment. And yet, we know so little about them. I joined online forums – on Facebook and other social media – and joined the Boston Mycological Club. I’d experienced this shift from “These are delicious,” to, “Whoa, these organisms are doing really important work.” I went fully down the rabbit hole. Now I go to the regional (and sometimes national) convergences when I can, where dozens of us descend on the woods to catalog and collect specimens in the interest of getting their genetics sequenced and expanding our understanding of what’s growing with us.
I started working on my book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless in 2021, and it was just released on October 28. All this sprang from a hobby I took up to calm my nervous system and get away from the hustle and reconnect with wild food. Now, as beautiful opportunities to expand my career as a creative writing teacher and as an outdoor educator, especially for people who look like me, present themselves, I’m hoping to find the balance between carving out time to just be with my more-than-human buds and kin. The challenge is not to let the work-with-a-capital-W subsume the thing that has been so nourishing and given me so much joy. To leave room for the work that’s also play.
I get excited about ethnomycology and thinking about which mushrooms have cultural value that maybe haven’t made it into field guides. I’m interested in documenting the fungi in Jamaica, where there aren’t as many people studying mushrooms. I’m interested in historical uses of fungi that have been buried by colonialism, and in my book, I point to clues I found that Jamaicans actually have such a history. I find I need to be inventive about recipes, since it’s not a part of my culinary heritage to throw hen of the woods (which grows in temperate forests) into a curry for instance, but I love the new thing that comes out of wanting to see the extra local on my plate, prepared with Caribbean flair.
One of the real gifts that mycology has given me is a broader desire to know everything that I can about ecology. I’ve started to write in other kingdoms, not just fungi, not just animalia. With fungi, you learn you need to know about the trees. Really, you need to know about all local ecology: flora, fauna, soil types, geology, climate change impacts. It’s been a gift to take in this broader view. I wrote about strangler figs in Florida recently, and I’m starting to jot down notes for a novel where the protagonist is a survivalist who knows everything it’s possible for a human to know about New England’s natural processes. A lot of the things I’ve been learning inform and enrich the rest of my work.
Mushrooms are the sort of organism where you can’t know everything about them as one person. Even when people come really close, there are still knowledge gaps to be filled by other experts. It’s great because when you become a member of your mushroom community, you can get to know the person who is really into lichen, or Cortinarius, or Amanitas and call on them when that group stumps you. There are some folks who have been studying the kingdom awhile, like Bill Neill and Susan Goldhor, who are great mentors, and friends of mine up in New Hampshire, Christine Gagnon and Melinda Christian, from whom I’ve learned a lot and with whom I’ve had a lot of fun over the years. I know I’m going to have a stimulating chat when I go mushrooming with historian of science Kaitlin Smith. I have a group chat with Lindsay Blevins and Tyler Akabane – we call ourselves the “Mushketeers.” I have lots of folks who I check my understanding with. It takes a village.
Writing a book – on anything – is not an individual task. It has been so heartening and humbling to hear from people who have been moved by my take on the joys of learning about fungi. The book is really just my handing back, with interest, all that the community has given me. It’s a pretty neat trick to put something into the world with the help of all these people and to have them come back and say thank you. Part of the goal with the book was to document the ways I’ve come alive since starting to study this kingdom; how cool for folks to then say, “I would like to come alive in these ways, too!” or “Girl, same, mushroom hunting saved my life!”
I also feel lucky to be publicly joining the conversation about caring for the natural world during a time when it feels more important than ever for people to actively defend it. To be part of the reason someone might be paying closer attention to, and therefore standing up for, the more-than-human world around them is maybe the most important work I’ll ever do.
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