Join writer and mycologist Patricia Kaishian to learn about her insightful and revelatory new book, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us the making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. 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.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.

February 2026