No Greater Magic: A Conversation with Writer and Mycophile Maria Pinto

Maria Pinto is a writer, mycophile, and educator based in the Boston area. She was born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida. She is the author of the forthcoming book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (UNC Press, 2025). Maria spoke at the 2025 TWPF Conference. Watch her introduction to Ned Friedman, Director of the Arnold Arboretum, on the CSWR YouTube Page.

Rachael: Can you tell us about your first encounter with a mushroom that felt truly significant? What hooked you?

Maria: I’ve had several “spark” mushrooms, and it’s impossible to say which one is responsible for the predicament of my obsession: was it the yellow fly agaric button with its metallic sheen, looking surreal—like a toy—on the forest floor? Was it the delicious, sculptural hen of the woods I found secreted at the base of an oak in a forgotten edgeland in my old neighborhood? Was it the impressive troop of Mycena leaiana that dyed my fingers orange when I handled them? Each time, I think it was the startling realization that mushrooms had been right there, plain as day, all along, spectacularly weird and eye-catching in the periphery, unincorporated into the way I processed the world, until by sheer charisma, they myceliated their way into the foreground. I was a Highlights Magazine “Check and Double Check” girl, you know the puzzles where you spot the differences in two pictures that seem identical at first? I think I’ve always had a deep love for hiddenness and worlds within worlds. 

Rachael: How has your relationship with “place” evolved through your relationship with fungi? 

Maria: I grew up in South Florida, having immigrated to the United States from Jamaica as a young child. I came to the Boston area for college and never left, but it wasn’t until mushrooms brought me into the woods that all of the places I’ve called home gained fascinating dimensionality. I often say I didn’t live with seasons until I learned to anticipate the morel in spring, the black trumpet in summer, matsutake in fall, oysters and enoki in winter. 

In Jamaica, the fruit trees around my grandmother’s house were simply that; now I see wood ears on the backyard ackee and wonder what fungi Jamaican mycologists are preoccupied with as climate changes force questions about food futures and sustainability. Learning about the ecologies and history of “kindom” (sic) fungi has given me a particular lens on the landscape. You must be versed in forest forensics to hunt mushrooms well—how old has this copse been allowed to grow? What kind of biodiversity can I expect in this region, and how will it affect the fungal spread? How recently has this woodland burned? These are now questions I ask myself whenever I go anywhere new. It took leaving South Florida and falling in love with the Charles River to realize what an incredible place the River of Grass, or the Everglades, is. Now, I know that my feral childhood in the “swamp” was a blessing. 

Rachael: The mushroom world is diverse, but historically, mycology as a field has been predominantly white and male-dominated. Do you feel that’s shifting? How do you imagine a more just or inclusive future for mycology? 

Maria: I think so many “ologies” have always had their fair share of students and experts who aren’t white and male. It’s just that the Western lens that we inherit tends to treat other ways of knowing as illegitimate. They just “discovered”—or rediscovered—a sacred mushroom medicine tradition in Lesotho. The lede of the article that brought this to my attention is, “Psilocybe maluti has been used by healers in Lesotho for generations but had evaded discovery by scientists.” How exactly does that work? Doesn’t the systematic use of a chemical compound for healing over the course of generations count as science? Aren’t these healers necessarily mycologists—that is, students of mushrooms? Sure, the spaces where I move and learn tend to be predominantly white, but that’s an accident of the historical exclusion of certain people from outdoor spaces where I live, and the longer tradition of only considering certain others legitimate naturalists. By the way, the minute I offer a mushroom walk for Black and brown folks in Boston, the walks fill up.

Rachael: In your mushroom walks, how do you invite people to see fungi not just as objects of foraging or study, but as teachers or collaborators? 

Maria: On all of my foraging walks, we discuss each mushroom’s ecological niche. It’s the best way to remember and differentiate the varieties we’re likely to encounter—the chanterelle is, yes, delicious. But it’s also stitched into the very essence of this pine tree in a particularly fascinating way. And when we move them, we spread their spores. And look at how this black trumpet patch rewarded your slowing down, so that you also noticed a cool bug, which is pollinating that flower. These relationships make it so much easier to see how everything is written in everything else and how the pretense of being able to survive as an island will always be a creature’s greatest delusion. 

Rachael: What drew you to write Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless? Did mushrooms shape the form or language of the book as much as its subject matter? 

Maria: I was solicited by the acquisitions editor at my press, to whom I’d sold a short story eons ago when he ran a literary journal. But I found when it was time to write the essays that they just poured out, like they’d been waiting behind a dam since I first fell in love with mushrooms. 

Rachael: Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless is both lyrical and visceral. What role does the fungal play in your imagination as a writer? 

Maria: The book is a collection of essays, but there were definite moments of cross-genre hallucination, almost, that, to my great surprise and delight, passed the editorial vibe check. I found that sometimes, especially when imagining the life of a Black woman in nineteenth-century Jamaica, for instance, who left no trace of her existence except in the form of a lineage of Jamaicans who know which mushrooms to eat, I had to give my subjects the speculative fiction treatment briefly and write about an aspect of their lives with only that source as the spark. Thank goodness books like Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman have shown what is possible. 

Rachael: Has writing about mushrooms changed your writing practice more broadly? What have they taught you about attention, time, or language? 

Maria: I love this question because I think I’m coming into an understanding of how they’ve changed my process as I start a new piece of fiction. Attention is holy, but too often I’m indiscriminate about how I spend it, except in the woods. I often write in the woods now. I set up a camp chair and a folding desk and use my laptop, or I’ll lie in a hammock with a journal and get to writing. Sometimes there’s no phone signal, so the temptation to waste my time scrolling is minimal. But I’ve always had a practice of walking composition. When I wrote a novel while working as a dog walker, moving between the homes of clients and strolling with their canine companions would put me into a rhythmic trance, where hearing lines of dialogue between characters was easier than if I tried to tune in while sitting still. Walking to look for mushrooms every day has reminded me of what I knew a decade ago: that embodying the language of every sentence helps me to know what’s true, what has style.

Rachael: If you could speak from the voice of a mushroom, or if one could speak through you, what would it most want to tell us right now? 

Maria: Love one another well and beware the coming flood, fire, or famine. Learn from me how to work with those who appear vastly different from you. Learn to relish the interspecies dens that some of you have worked so hard to abolish. 

Rachael: What practices help you stay attuned to the fungal world, even in the bustle of everyday life? 

Maria: I’m invested in my time in the woods; it helps me feel balanced. It’s also how I get my exercise. My partner loves the outdoors, so there are opportunities there for parallel play. And, I consider the fungal world my work, so there’s always an excuse for that eight-mile hike in the middle of the day.

Rachael: Finally, what’s one mushroom you think everyone should meet, and why? 

Maria: Everyone should get to heft a 15-pound hen of the woods and feed a whole gathering using its fronds. Everyone should smell the maple-syrup sweetness of a dried candy cap. Everyone should look for the foxfire glow of a Jack-o-lantern mushroom on their walk through a local park at night. Trust me: there’s no greater magic.