by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
Spiegel & Grau, 2025
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s Forest Euphoria is simultaneously a memoir, a natural history guide, a climate change manifesto, and an enthusiastic celebration of biodiversity and queerness in the natural world. The reader follows the author’s coming of age through gender dysphoria, revelations of repressed trauma, spiritual questioning, and queer awakening, and to her current life as a passionate mycologist. She is the curator of mycology at the New York State Museum, a faculty member of the Bard Prison Initiative, and a founding member of the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists. At turns informative and entertaining, sexy and uncomfortable, intense and lighthearted, this timely book presents a complex, critical view of the exclusionary history of science, as well as a simple expression of childlike delight, a “look at this, isn’t this so cool” view of queer beings, human and nonhuman alike.
While many fear and shun the species that glisten and slither in the shadows, Kaishian spent her childhood seeking out the company of snakes and toadstools and delighting in swamps. She describes “forests and mucky places” as sites “for queer expression and euphoria, presenting me with a family both chosen and biological.” Kaishian defines “queerness” as a multifaceted concept that incorporates social, political, historical, theoretical, and scientific ideas, with an aim to question dominant biases and faulty narratives. “Queerness is common throughout the tree of life,” she writes, “from fungi with more than two sexes to same-sex partnerships between crows to the intersex bodies of snails and eels, we find an inspiring array of diversity in our fellow species.” She questions the arbitrary division between humans and nature, and encourages the blurring of all binaries at every philosophical and physical level.
I first encountered Kaishian’s work through her essay “The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline” in the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory & Technoscience. Kaishian’s essay embodied a truly cross-disciplinary approach – an achievement that I would also apply to her new book. The chapters address various themes through vignettes about nonhuman beings – snakes, slugs, swamps, fungi, crows, bowerbirds, cicadas, eels, and spring ephemerals – before an epilogue that brings us in a full fairy ring back to fungi. Kaishian’s journey into mycology originated in her ritual engagement with medicinal mushrooms. She first took Psilocybe cubensis, psychedelic mushrooms, during her freshman year at Wheaton College, and this experience helped her process previously repressed memories of childhood trauma.
Later that year, she took a semester off and enrolled in a four-day naturalist certification course, where she witnessed the passion of the field biologists who spoke “with a reverence for each habitat and species.” She also observed their “grief and sense of urgency around climate change and the many ways their beloved creatures and systems were at risk.” When she returned to school, she brought a renewed interest in science and eventually pursued a PhD in mycology. Her dedication to the nonhuman world has only deepened since then; she feels affinity for mushrooms and what she calls “subversive organisms.” They are her strange kin – “my most constant companion, my queer lover, a bioluminescence in the night of life.”
Kaishian offers an antidote to pervasive negativity: despite her clear-eyed acknowledgment of climate and social ills, she also offers hope, actionable change, and visions of new habitats that form in damaged landscapes. “Mountain laurel hills peppered with glacial erratic, hemlock groves pocked with kettle holes that turn to buzzing vernal pools,” she writes, “these are examples of what can arise after total decimation.” Rather than a shrugging acceptance of the disasters humans have inflicted on the earth, this is a call to celebrate nature’s resilience through “anti-plantations” such as swamps and forests, an ode to the species that thrive in the margins of human error, and a road map for transforming our attitudes and practices toward a more queer, kincentric ecology, emphasizing mutualism, shared knowledge, and expanded access to science.