250. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian with Taha Ebrahimi: Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

It’s only human to project the notions we already hold onto the world around us. We want to feel connected, and we start from what we know – categories, similarities, rules, expectations. But nature is endlessly expansive, at once wildly different from the societies we are used to and yet surprisingly similar to the nuances we hold as individuals. In her debut book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, author Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian invites readers to wander off the prescribed trails and embrace the full range of what we can take away from unexpected corners of the natural world.

Growing up, Kaishian felt most at home in some of these less-traveled pockets – namely, the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley, studded with wildlife and odd creatures. As a child who frequently felt out of place – too much of one thing or not enough of another – she found acceptance in these settings, mainly among amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and especially fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her – and a personal path to a life of science.

Equal parts lyrical memoir, academic exploration, and a love letter to the vastness of identity, Forest Euphoria introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. In this richly observant and insightful study, Kaishian presents myriad examples of nature defying human dichotomies. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes, and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Forest Euphoria aims to illuminate that nature is filled with lessons stemming from the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized, so long as we have the curiosity to learn.

Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is a research scientist, author, speaker, and educator who specializes in the biodiversity of fungi, ecology, and exploring how scientific disciplines are informed by our sociopolitical landscape. She is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum, as well as teaching faculty with the Bard Prison Initiative. She is a co-founder of the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists. She has been featured in the documentary Queer Planet and her publication, The science underground: mycology as a queer discipline, appears in the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory & Technoscience.

Taha Ebrahimi is the author and illustrator of Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide (Sasquatch Books, 2024). She serves as a member of the council for Historic Seattle and has been named “Seattle’s Coolest Street Tree Expert” by The Stranger.

Elliott Bay Book Company