The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning

"It’s a light-touch memoir -meets-nature book about the period after the death of the writer’s husband, when she decides in her grief to go to an introduction to mushroom foraging workshop that she and her husband had booked before his death. This workshop draws her into a completely different world and, in a way, out of her grief, or through her grief. It’s an incredibly powerful story of finding belonging in a place that is not originally your home, and of getting to know an area of expertise that can seem like it has a high barrier of entry. “Any book with recipes, I’m 100% on board with” One of the things I really like about this book is the tone that Litt Woon takes. How should I put it? It’s completely friendly. It’s completely easy to understand. I can imagine giving this book to basically anybody in my life, not just the hardcore nature writing readers, because she explains things with such clarity. And it’s funny! It’s a mix of memoir and mycology, and there are recipes in it—any book with recipes, I’m 100% on board with. It’s sort of a healing memoir but something much more exciting than that, too. Yes. I think it’s something that I look for, in nature writing particularly. I come from a scholarly background—I’m an environmental historian by training. I spend a lot of time reading those kinds of technical books, and there’s a place for them. But—how do I put it?—I think there’s a really strong need at the moment for voices that are able to demystify that process. When I was selecting these books, it was really apparent to me that these are all books that, while they may be very heavily researched, have bibliographies, and have a lot of intellectual work behind them, none of them make that an obstacle. None of them treat the reader as if to say, ‘I’m an expert, and I don’t need to tell you how I know these things.’ They’re all books that illuminate the process of learning. “They’re all books that illuminate the process of learning” I think that’s what’s exciting right now. Because, as much as I’ve trained in the field that I’m in, I’m also a 33-year-old millennial who grew up in the suburbs. I’m not some nature whizz. So when, in my own writing, I am thinking about learning about a place or telling the reader about a particular place, I think it’s really important to make clear how we get that knowledge. So these are all books that do that, which I think we need right now. It’s this openness and inviting-ness. You don’t need to be some bibliophile old man with lots of books, who’s read everything, and can remember quotes from every book. It’s okay to have to go to the library and pull out a stack of books and learn about it and tell your reader that. Yes, she passes the Norwegian Mycological Association test to become a certified mushroom inspector. But she’s always acknowledging the fact that there are different layers of expertise. She makes really plain the intricacies of this field, which I think is actually quite humorous. That’s not something you often find in nature writing, a lot of humour, but she talks about how grumpy people get when their secrets are shared—and then you see her get very grumpy when she founds out her favourite spot to find mushrooms is shared with someone else. There’s this wonderful openness in the book. I’ve done a lot of mushroom courses before. None of it has stuck in my head, but somehow when she wrote it down it, it would then stick in my head."