fungi – Francesca Brooks

‘Choosing Jewels’ and the pleasures of searching for fungi

I’ve just had a poem published in the fifth issue of Propel Magazine, edited by the wonderful poet Alycia Pirmohamed (author of Another Way to Split Water). The magazine is available to read online for free. You can also listen to me and all of the other poets reading our work aloud and bringing the poetry to life.

My poem ‘Choosing Jewels’ is a love letter of sorts to the pleasures of searching for fungi. It takes its title from a phrase garnered magpie-like from the digitised manuscripts of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which you can explore here. I don’t want to say too much more about the poem here, as its spare and lyrical (I hope) and does its own work.

If you are curious about fungi too and would like to read more of my writing on the mycorrhizal world, I do have an essay about being landlocked and searching for mushrooms on The Clearing here.

The pictures below show some mushrooms, or fungi, that aren’t at all shy about displaying the secrets of their gills.

Propel Magazine has a new guest editor for every issue and aims to showcase the work of poets who have not yet published a first collection. In her editorial Alycia writes beautifully about the work of editing as an opportunity not for ‘gatekeeping’, but for opening doors:

Anyway, all of this is to say I find being a gatekeeper a complicated thing, and though the job is to select only a few from the many, I hope that doors have also been opened: to new voices and strategies, to perspectives that are experimenting with subject and form. To poems that found a home here because they came across my particular gaze, and maybe I saw something, understood something, or felt something that the poet wanted to get across in a magical kind of symbiosis.
Alycia Pirmohamed, Propel Magazine Issue 5

I’m so grateful that my strange little mushroom poem caught Alycia’s eye.

‘Landlocked’, an essay for The Clearing

Photograph of reflections in ice at Fletcher Moss Park (author’s own)

Over the course of 2021 I slowly and incrementally worked on a prose essay that would set to paper some of the things I had been turning over in my mind on long, lockdown walks. The piece begins with an expression of longing for the sea and coastal edgelands, and thinks about how my move from south London to south Manchester during the pandemic offered me a strange, damp surrogate for this landscape.

The essay was published on The Clearing, a blog run by Little Toller Books, and you can read it here. I’m really grateful for the editorial input of Jon Woolcott, who helped to make it a tighter, more focused piece.

There is a dampness that sustains the teeming, liveliness of life on every surface of this landscape.

Photograph of frozen Jelly Ear fungi at Fletcher Moss Park (author’s own)

In the damp waterparks, woods and floodplains of Manchester, the meditative attention given to fossil hunting and beachcombing was translated into a search for fungi, lichens and slime moulds. The essay is about landscape and imagination and how a different kind of attention to the world might transform it. Here’s the link again, in case you are curious about the piece: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/landlocked-by-francesca-brooks/

Here was an alternate world to the rock pools of the coast: landlocked but equally various. The Scarlet Elfcups were radiant wounds in the dark of Stenner Woods at dusk. In the snow the Jelly Ear were rouged and glistening like obscene ripe fruit, their icy crusts peeling as if from plump, chapped lips slick with lip-gloss. In the Birch woods at Chorlton the planetary rings of the Turkey’s Tail were like hovering plates thrown into the hungry mouths of bark: a fungal solar system in orbit of the pale, silver trees. One afternoon, crawling into the low tangle of a den, I found a kind of bonnet mould flourishing on a hollowed, rotting limb. I thought I had found mushrooms hairy with the December frosts, spiked with fine glass tendrils, but this was Spinellus fusiger – the bonnet mushroom transformed into a beaded pin cushion.
‘Landlocked’ for The Clearing