Magic Mirror: What’s Up with all the Mushrooms?

The feature where I share a glimpse into my fiction — welcome to Magic Mirror! I pin all my Magic Mirror entries on Pinterest. Feel free to browse my collections. They are sorted by book title.

Magic Mirror Presents: Mushrooms // The Tale of Mally Biddle

A reviewer once said, “I didn’t get the mushrooms” … or something like that. My reaction was, “you must not like mushrooms.”

Some things just go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Beauty and the Beast and garden roses. Mally Biddle and mushrooms. But perhaps I need to explain why I felt such a strong need to include the colorful fungus into my book.

People like to say “write what you know”, which has always irritated me. Are you saying write what I know? Well then I guess I can’t talk about sword fighting or hitchhiking or nearly getting killed by axe-swinging bandits. Cool. Got it.

Forgive me, I’m taking the helpful writing advise too literally and I know it. It isn’t required to have experienced everything that you write. I doubt I’d still be alive if I did, much like the rest of you. But it does help. When you have immersed yourself in something, the writing flows more quickly. You even may not realize it’s effecting you. There have been so many times when I’ve written some little thing into the story and only after the fact realized where it had come from, and usually from my own backyard of life.

But back to the mushrooms.

When I was working on Biddle, my family (brother and father mostly) became exceedingly excited about mushroom foraging. They bought books and talked about their research findings over dinner. It was infectious and for a young twenty something who’d only consumed the plastic sealed mushrooms in grocery stores, to see full color pictures of all these amazing varieties — different shapes, different colors, different flavors — well, I couldn’t help but long to try them, too.

Before I knew it, mushrooms had flooded my story. My main character became what my father most greatly desired, a mushroom hunter. She collected all sorts of delightful little toadstools: black bonnets, fairy caps, hunter’s horn (my version of horn of plenty), flat-footed ogre, all of my own invention. But I also included ones that are real: Death Angel, the blusher (turns pink when bruised), and old man of the woods. The mushroom that’s the most important in the book is the one called amanita, which I did a little fiddling with. Amanita is actually a genus with some 600 mushrooms, including some of the most toxic. Death Angel is one of them, but I so liked the word amanita that I made it its own little poisonous mushroom.

Other than having a good time coming up with mushrooms, they were important to the flow of the story. Mushrooms causes Mally to meet Ivan, the aristocrat that sneaks her into the castle. Mushrooms gets her in good graces with the cook, which leads to the highly important sleep tea.

So there. I’ve said my peace. Mushrooms are in the book because mushrooms were a part of my life during its creation. Not to mention I downright love them.

 

Excerpt from the book: Chapter 21

“Look what I have, Archie, old boy!” Lita exclaimed, swinging a small basket onto the table with a flourish. “Fairy caps! A bloke was selling them at the market. Who says I can’t find fairy caps now, eh?”

Archie seemed so stunned that he was momentarily speechless, whether due to the mushrooms or Lita’s sudden exuberant appearance, Mally couldn’t decide. Relishing her triumph, Lita picked up one of the white mushrooms in her basket and lifted it to her mouth.

That was when Mally had her first good look at it. The teacup went flying through the air to smash into pieces as she leapt from her chair and slapped the mushroom out of Lita’s hand. It fell to the floor and rolled.

“Mally!” Lita yelled angrily. “What was that for?”

“Those aren’t fairy caps,” said Mally, pointing at the mushroom that had come to rest beside one of the table legs. “That’s an amanita.”