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First Annual
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Festival Events - detailed descriptions
Xa Kako Dile: will open and close the festival with a cultural ceremony that reminds us to honor and respect the land for all that it provides.
They will also present Seed to Soup: ReIndigenizing Our Palates and Bodies. Our Initiative emphasizes the importance of Indigenous food sovereignty, traditional food systems, and cultural practices. This concept promotes the idea of reconnecting with local food sources, understanding the significance of traditional ingredients, and integrating Indigenous culinary practices into modern diets. This journey of food from seeds to its final form of soup, highlighting the importance of sustainable practices, biodiversity, and the cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples. It can also reflect a broader movement toward recognizing and valuing Indigenous knowledge and practices in agriculture and food preparation of all of us. We hope to spark interest in everyone. To exploring specific aspects, such as recipes, educational resources, or the cultural significance of certain ingredients, from ALL of our Indigenous regions. Xa Kako Dile: is an Indigenous women-led and directed non-profit organization on ancestral Northern Pomo land in Northern California. Our focus is on uplifting and empowering Indigenous communities through farming using traditional ecological knowledge (TEK); offering healing retreats for Indigenous women to conserve cultural traditions and language; providing education for the community on food sovereignty, herbal medicine, acorn and seaweed harvesting and other TEK practices; and providing gathering spaces for trainings, ceremonies and a living laboratory to support local tribes. 
Forty years at the everyday whim of mushrooms has taken Eric Schramm, proprietor of Mendocino Mushrooms, on a journey of understanding and wonder for the earth, mushrooms, our lives and connections.
Join Eric for stories from his voyage of connections and discovery. |
Don’t miss a conversation with Eugenia Bone, author of Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms, as she discusses her latest book Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience.
Eugenia will be signing copies of her new book which will be available for purchase at the festival.
She is the author or co-author of nine books on food and biology, including the category staple Mycophilia, and most recently, Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience (October, 2024). She has been nominated for or won a variety of awards, including a James Beard Award. Eugenia is featured in the documentary directed by Louie Schwartzberg, Fantastic Fungi (2019), and in the Netflix children’s show about food, Waffles + Mochi (the mushroom episode) produced by Michele Obama’s Higher Ground Productions
Black to the Land: Black folks and mushroom foraging. In this presentation by Zappa Montag, co-founder of Black to the Land, we will look at the growing excitement and enthusiasm for foraging of mushrooms and others edibles among Black folks in the US, how social media has contributed to this growth, and how we can demystify foraging, and build cross cultural bonds through actively engaging in such activities here in Mendocino County.
Black to the Land is a community-based non-profit organization dedicated to instilling ecological principles in the development of a generation of Black Earth stewards, healers, activists, and visionaries. We are committed to fostering environmental awareness and sustainable practices as we embark on impactful projects designed to empower and uplift communities.
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Try it and See: The Story Behind the Discovery of Mushroom Dye
See the heart-warming tribute to the Mendocino pioneers and friends who discovered the wonders of making color from mushrooms. Through the recollections of Dorothy Beebee, an artist and friend to Miriam Rice -- who laid the foundation for mushroom dyes with the publication of the first mushroom dye book in the 1970’s -- Dorothy retells the excitement of their discoveries, the trials of publication, and her hopes for the future of mushroom dyes. |
Q&A Panel Discussion
After the film, engage in a discussion with Myra Beebee, one of the film's producers, and her pioneering mother, Dorothy Beebee, and Felicia Rice, artist and daughter of Miriam Rice.
After the film, engage in a discussion with Myra Beebee, one of the film's producers, and her pioneering mother, Dorothy Beebee, and Felicia Rice, artist and daughter of Miriam Rice.
Dorothy Beebee began as a scientific illustrator in the 1960's, and soon discovered a love for weaving and natural dyes. Her introduction to mushroom dyes began 50 years ago when she met Miriam C Rice and illustrated the first book written by Miriam on mushroom dyes, "Let's Try Mushrooms for Color." The little book began a lifetime of friendship, travel, discovery, and teaching the next generation about the world of color beneath our feet. She now enjoys aiding her children Martin and Myra in their own artistic endeavors. |
Myra Beebee has been experimenting with natural dyes for almost 30 years, beginning with her first dye using mushrooms under the guidance of her mother, Dorothy Beebee. For the last few years, she’s used her YouTube channel to create natural dye tutorials with her brother Martin. When she isn’t dyeing, she’s an avid knitter. She lives in Sonoma County with her husband, three grown children, a very old dog, and one nap loving cat. |
Felicia Rice is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. In 1977 she set Moving Parts Press in motion. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and digital technologies to produce artists’ books, prints, and broadsides in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. She is the daughter of mushroom dye pioneer Miriam Rice and is the current director of the International Mushroom Dye Institute, the non-profit organization founded in 1985 by her mother with a close circle of friends, including Dorothy Beebee, the subject of the new film, Try It & See. |
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Mushroom Dye Workshop
In this hands-on workshop, Wilder Herbertson will show you the ropes for making dye from mushrooms and successfully dyeing silk handkerchiefs. Using two species of mushroom (Phaeolus schweinitzii and Hypomyces lactiflorum/lobster), we will get to produce four colors by manipulating pH and the mordant used. Wilder will discuss the many variables that impact the dye color, general basic tenets of mushroom and lichen dyeing, and answer questions from the group. Each participant will take home one silk handkerchief per color, which they will be invited to manipulate with clips, rubber bands, etc. to form patterns. 
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Wilder Herbertson: Human Becoming
My passion is for co-creating experiences, skills, knowledge, and lifestyle amendments that serve our individual and collective re-membering (coming back into an embodied relationship with) and understanding of our connection with, responsibilities toward, and reliance on this truly awesome earth. While I grew up eating of the earth, mushrooms didn’t enter my life until 2018. The first time I identified, cooked, and ate my own mushroom find, I was immediately consumed by this passion. I’ve been an active member of the Sonoma Mycological Association since September 2018, and of the Mendocino Coast Mushroom Club since 2022. |
While foraging edible mushrooms for the kitchen was my doorway into the fungal queendom, my interest quickly expanded to fungal ecological roles as a whole, dyeing fiber with mushrooms and lichens, and some cloning and growing of mushrooms at home. Eventually, I couldn’t keep the joy I find in these practices to myself and I began offering guided plant or mushroom hikes and ancestral skill practice workshops. I have been teaching mushroom dyeing since 2021 and I am honored to be invited to share this forest magic with you!
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Propagation Workshop
The Forest People
Radically Sustainable Mushroom Cultivation We grow mushrooms for Mendocino! All organic practices and lots of love and care make our mushrooms beautiful, healthy and delicious. We have a dedicated mushroom house where we are able to grow mushrooms year-round. With a background in regenerative farming technologies, we’ve custom built our operation with whole systems awareness. We never use harmful chemicals or pesticides and only use organic practices. We are ‘Certified Renegade’ through the Mendocino Organic Network. |
Join Lama Nasser-Gammett, of The Forest People, in this hands-on workshop to prepare your own oyster mushroom grow bag.
From straw pasteurization to inoculation to care and feeding, you will learn the steps needed to grow your own mushrooms. All materials will be provided. Part of the workshop will be outdoors, so be sure to dress for the weather. 
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Redwood Time Sewing Circle - Embroidery with Mushroom-dyed Threads
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Bring your sewing skills and your imagination and help stitch the mycorrhizal network into The Larry Spring Museum's Redwood Time project.
We will have a selection of mushroom-dyed threads that participants can stitch onto the Redwood Time fabric model in a representation of the connection between fungi and the redwood forest. This is open to people of all ages and skill levels; if you can’t sew, we will teach you some basic stitches. |
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Drawing with mushroom inks in Redwood Time
Bring your curiosity and creativity and explore drawing with mushroom inks on patches to adorn The Larry Spring Museum's Redwood Time fabric model of the C.R. Johnson Memorial Tree with expanded timelines.
Using a variety of pens and brushes and mushroom inks, we will create simple symbols or more complex drawings that might mark a concept of time, an historical event or trajectory, or a time of personal or collective significance to expand before, beyond, and between the singular narrative that was marked within the tree’s rings in the 1940s. |
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Redwood Time is a community collaboration initiated by The Larry Spring Museum in Fort Bragg, and artist Anne Beck.
Redwood Time is a communal re-envisioning of the monumental Redwood Round on Fort Bragg’s Main Street. Cut from the ‘largest Redwood tree known to have grown in Mendocino County’, the round functions as roadside spectacle, as tourist attraction, and as a monument to the timber industry and the (un)settler town that grew around it. What do we see when we look at the round today? What do we hope to see tomorrow? In the spirit of exploring these questions, we have created a 1:1 scale fabric maquette of the 18’ wide Redwood Round. Through unfolding events considering a multiplicity of histories, species, natural philosophies, and concepts of time itself, we will adorn this round with a new timeline. This is a community endeavor, and we hope you all will join us! |
Anne Beck is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and landlooker living in the hills of Northern California. Her creative practice arises from a deep curiosity and wonder for worlds inside and out. She sees art-making as a contemplative tool for metabolizing history and experience, expanding awareness and understanding, and for opening new channels of being. Her work takes form as paintings, textiles, artist books, collaborative installations, and social practice inquiries - all with a keen interest in material research and storytelling.
Beck’s studio and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Biblioteca de Mexico in Mexico City, Ex-convento San Juan Bautista in Tiripetio, Mexico, and Dream Farm Commons in Oakland, California. Her artist books are held in special collections including Yale, Columbia, UCLA, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. |
The Larry Spring Museum celebrates Larry Spring’s DIY Spirit of Amateur Inquiry as a means to open up his collection to new creative possibilities. We imagine the Museum as a constellation of art and science wonders where community engages through collaborative action.
The Museum is committed to building a more creative and inter-connected Downtown Fort Bragg through the following initiatives:
- Sustaining Larry Spring’s collection as a unique piece of Fort Bragg’s history.
- Opening up the collection to new possibilities by engaging with an inclusive range of artists, makers and other creative beings.
- Collaborating with local, regional and national cultural institutions to create dynamic accessible programming.
Make Foraging Buddies with the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens
It is always more fun to explore with a buddy! Let’s see what amazing friends and creatures we can make to take along with us on adventures. Maybe your friend is a ladybug, a superhero or even a mushroom! We will use some art supplies and items found in nature to turn pocket size rocks into super cool sidekicks.
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Each year, more than 100,000 people experience the wonder of nature at Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in all its seasons. This nonprofit botanical escape is a place to play, to contemplate, to learn, to relax, to touch, to smell, to feel, to enjoy, to be inspired, and to experience the simple joy and beauty of life.
Take a guided tour of the MCBG Mushroom Collection! The Gardens is home to more than 160 species of wild mushrooms during fall and winter. They also offer mushroom identification workshops with local naturalist and mycologist (and MCMC Club Member), Mario Abreu. |
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Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of the Western Slope and one of the originators of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, will share poetry and stories from his eclectic life's history and emcee readings by some of Mendocino County's finest poets.
Retired in 2016 after five terms as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner, Art Goodtimes has won numerous awards for his political activism including from the Dept. of Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, the Colorado Weed Managers Association and Club 20 of Grand Junction. In his political capacity, he served on several dozen boards and commissions on the local, regional, state and national levels. He co-founded the Sheep Mountain Alliance, Telluride’s local environmental group. A former newspaper editor, he had a 40+ year run writing weekly and monthly op-ed columns for print and online publications including the Telluride Times, the San Miguel Journal, the Telluride Times-Journal, the Watch, the Daily Planet, the MontroseMirror.com, and Colorado Poets Center. I currently write a monthly op-ed column “Looking South from Lone Cone” for the Cortez-based print publiccation the Four Corners Free Press. Art studied to be a Roman Catholic priest for seven years, and has continued to marry people as a Universal Life minister. A former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, he currently co-directs the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry project, is poetry editor for Fungi magazine (fungimag.com), and co-hosts the Sage Green Journal online literary anthology (sagegreenjournal.org). Former president and current Trustee Emeritus, he was founder of the Institute’s Prospect Basin Fen Project and its Ute Reconciliation and Indigenous Peoples Day projects and remains on their advisory boards. Director of the Institute's Telluride Mushroom Festival for its first 25 years, he remains as Cultural Director and Poet-in-Residence. His poetry books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press, Sedona, 2013). He was co-editor of the anthology MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press, CA, 2016). Turn Star Press of Telluride brought out a limited edition chapbook in 2019 that he co-authored called Telluride Valley Floor. Art’s latest book is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Fruita, CO, 2019). 
Blake More, Point Arena Poet Laureate, is a teaching artist of multiple paths including performance, video, media arts, painting cars and teaching. She is a longtime Mendocino Area Coordinator and poetry teacher with California Poets in the Schools. She hosts the monthly Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz event in Point Arena. She also hosts Be More Now on KZYX&Z FM Mendocino County Public Broadcasting and Cartwheels on the Sky on KGUA FM Gualala. Her most recent book is Dystopia Unplugged: Please Talk Back. Learn more at bmoreyou.net.
Larry Felson Larry Felson moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s, where he was introduced to the realms of revolutionary politics and poetry. Along the way, he earned a BA and MA from San Francisco State University, where he received the Academy of American Poets Award, became a social justice activist, worked on the docks and shipyards, was a taxi driver, taught creative writing at Westmoor Adult School and the Oakland Juvenile Hall, and conducted writing workshops with Poetry in the Schools. He taught English at Oakland High School for several years, and creative writing and Greek Literature at the Hellenic International School of the Arts in Paros, Greece.
He moved from Oakland to the Mendocino coast 7 years ago where he now resides, surrounded by birds, trees, ocean, cliffs, and open space. “Living here, Pegasus arrives almost every day and night, and insists on taking me for a ride to places I’ve never been, where I discover new flora and fauna, real and imagined, and explore dimensions of reality, feeling, and thought beyond the limits of the ‘possible’ in the ‘known’ world. His most recent publications are Dawn Out of Order (2022), and The Engine of Light (2024). |
Devreaux Baker-MA/Counseling, BS/Education- is a poet, therapist, and teacher. She is the first Poet Laureate of Mendocino County and a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. Her poetry collections include Hungry Ghosts, Red Willow People, Out of the Bones of Earth, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, and Light at the Edge. She has facilitated workshops and taught poetry and creative writing in many venues including public schools K-12 and directed national and international poetry workshops. Much of Baker’s work explores spirit of place and the healing power that is inherent in a reciprocal relationship with nature. Baker is the mother of three and lives on the Mendocino coast with her partner, the musician Barry Schrager. Website: www.devreauxbaker.org
Frej Barty, Mendocino County Youth Poet Laureate, is an aspiring filmmaker, cinematographer, and general multi-hyphenate storyteller who hates that neologism. Defined by finding and giving hope, he is an all around nerd with a love for anything analog— from the Mendocino High School Radio Station KAKX to pinball to his Mendocino County Youth Poet Laureateship. The bio just keeps shifting, though, because he is still finding a voice and a way of living.
Kirk Lumpkin is a poet, spoken word & performance artist, lyricist, environmentalist activist, and California state certified Naturalist; author of the poetry books, In Deep and Co-Hearing and three poetry/music CDs, The Word-Music Continuum, Sound Poems, and the soon to be released Wild Flowers of Collaboration. Before retiring to Mendocino County Kirk worked for over 20 plus years for the Ecology Center in Berkeley and was according to the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review “ . . . an important part of the Bay Area (and beyond) poetry scene for years, hosting readings in San Francisco and Berkeley, helping to facilitate the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival [with Poetry Flash & former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Hass], and hosting open mikes at Burning Man.…” Kirk and his wife, Lyn Talkovsky, currently live on a dirt road near Willits, California where he serves on the Board of the Willits Environmental Center.
Joe Smith
Joe Smith's poems, stories, essays and translations have appeared in dozens of journals. His most recent book Sappho’s Island, published by Littoral Press in 2022, follows Chopsticks, published by Pygmy Forest Press. Smith believes that poetry hails from some Dodge City of the heart—before the Marshal arrives, when it’s still a wild frontier town. He is firmly convinced that if Hänsel and Gretel had dropped poems instead of pumpernickel along the path through the forest, they could easily have found their way back home from the gumdrop cottage of the witch. Much of his life has been passed abroad, in Germany, Greece, and Japan. Smith has worked at a variety of jobs, including taking care of a defunct monastery on an Aegean island, moving mummies for a travelling exhibit of Egyptian art, picking tobacco, and teaching English at the Fort Bragg branch of College of the Redwoods. Over the past thirty years he’s been steaming open letters posted by the plants, animals and minerals of the Mendocino coast to read the vital messages hidden inside. |
Ongoing Activities & Exhibits
Mushroom Dye Exhibit & Demonstration
See the rainbow of color available from mushrooms at the exhibit Mushrooms | Color | Art & Craft.
This exhibit, sponsored by International Mushroom Dye Institute (IMDI), features mushroom-dyed works by contemporary artists and makers, including science illustrator Dorothy Beebee who worked closely with dye pioneer Miriam C. Rice to unlock the full spectrum of color from mushrooms.
It accompanies a showing of the new film, Try It and See: The Story Behind Mushroom Dyes.
Dorothy and Myra Beebee and Felicia Rice will be on hand to answer your questions about mushroom dyeing and about the film, Try it and See.
This exhibit, sponsored by International Mushroom Dye Institute (IMDI), features mushroom-dyed works by contemporary artists and makers, including science illustrator Dorothy Beebee who worked closely with dye pioneer Miriam C. Rice to unlock the full spectrum of color from mushrooms.
It accompanies a showing of the new film, Try It and See: The Story Behind Mushroom Dyes.
Dorothy and Myra Beebee and Felicia Rice will be on hand to answer your questions about mushroom dyeing and about the film, Try it and See.
Exhibit is provided courtesy of Felicia Rice and the IMDI.
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Felicia Rice is the current director of the International Mushroom Dye Institute, the non-profit organization founded in 1985 by her mother, Miriam C. Rice, with a close circle of friends, including Dorothy Beebee, the subject of the new film, Try It & See.
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Spore Printing Table
Stop by the Spore Printing Table and try your hand at making a print. You'll learn more about spores and have a cool print to take home.
Prints take some time to develop (hours), so stop by early or plan to pick up your print the next day.
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Mushroom Display Table
Check out the Mushroom Table for a display of fresh, wild mushrooms collected each morning during the festival forays. Test your identification skills and see if you can put a name to each mushroom. 
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Morning Forays in Jackson Demonstration State Forest
Join Robert Douglas, the State Forest Biologist for Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF), and other JDSF personnel and MCMC members on guided forays to look at and collect mushrooms.
These forays are open to the public - no festival ticket is required.
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- Mushroom permits are not required, unless you wish to pick mushrooms. All permits are issued via US mail, so plan accordingly.
