Three Questions for 'Mason Goes Mushrooming' Author Melany Kahn 

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• Courtesy
• Mason Goes Mushrooming by Melany Kahn, illustrated by Ellen Korbonski, Green Writers Press, 32 pages. $17.95.

The protagonist of Melany Kahn's recently published picture book, Mason Goes Mushrooming, is modeled on Kahn's son Mason when he was about 8 years old. With his dog, the boy heads out through illustrator Ellen Korbonski's sweet seasonal scenes to find morels under the apple blossoms, a circle of bright yellow chanterelles after a July rain and distinctive black trumpet mushrooms hidden under crisp fall leaves.

Notably missing from these adventures is supervision, until Mason's parents help cook the mushrooms in simple recipes included in the book. While the first page of the tome clearly instructs readers not to eat any mushroom until it is identified by a knowledgeable adult, Kahn's message is that youngsters can successfully forage fungi if they master some basic information.

Kahn, 58, grew up in West Brattleboro with artist parents, Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn, who introduced her to mushrooming at a very early age. She and her husband, Bo Foard, a Brattleboro restaurant co-owner, still own her family's farmhouse and also have a home in West Chesterfield, N.H.

Kahn's résumé includes divorce mediation and teaching film, along with more than two decades of instructing kids and adults about foraging through schools, mushroom clubs and nature centers. Over the years, she searched for mushrooming storybooks to share but, she said, "there just weren't any that made mushroom hunting seem OK." Kahn resolved to remedy that.

Kahn talked with Seven Days about "carshrooming," how to build foraging confidence and why even winter can be a productive time for mushroom lovers.

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• Courtesy of Hazel Wagner
• Melany Kahn

SEVEN DAYS: Did you really start mushrooming at the age of 4?

MELANY KAHN: Foraging is a great example of an oral tradition in most countries. That's how it's usually passed on, and my parents were no exception.

My dad spent a summer in the 1950s in Martha's Vineyard and on Cape Cod living in a dune shack and being a bohemian artist. He got introduced to mushrooming by a fellow out there. My mother was very interested in the science of mushrooms. [My dad] liked to forage for anything, whether it was digging for steamers at the beach or finding wild ramps. He loved this idea of getting your food from your land.

We had an old Datsun, and my dad used to open the hatchback, and me and my sister would sit on the back with our feet dangling. I remember seeing the dirt road beneath my toes — definitely not something you would do anymore! We called it "carshrooming." My dad would drive very slowly down the road. If we saw one, he would stop.

SD: Without such mentoring, how do you recommend people start foraging for mushrooms safely?

MK: What I like to tell people who are just starting out is, you don't have to know every mushroom in the woods in order to safely begin to mushroom hunt. You do have to know a couple of mushrooms that you don't want to get involved with, just like you should know what poison ivy looks like if you're going to hike.

When I was developing Mason Goes Mushrooming, I had to pick four beginner mushrooms by season. Essentially, they don't have poisonous look-alikes. They're only associated with certain trees. They only come out certain times a year.

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• Courtesy
• Mason Foard with a basket of black trumpet mushrooms in 2004

SD: Winter is not peak mushroom time. What can people do to prepare for the season?

MK: A few weeks ago, I went over to Taylor Farm in Londonderry, and we did an afternoon of foraging for a Thanksgiving centerpiece. We foraged for moss and the mushrooms that are on the trees in winter, primarily turkey tails and artist's conk, and we made these gorgeous centerpieces.

It's a year-round activity as far as I'm concerned if you're just going out to look for and study mushrooms, whether it's to make art or dye something or to look into their medicinal qualities. And there's actually a winter oyster mushroom that can be pretty ubiquitous.

I'm doing an event at Northshire [Bookstore] on January 21. My friend Jon down at Slipstream [Farm] is selling unbelievably beautiful mushrooms that he's grown. I'll bring [them] for an ID session; they might as well be wild mushrooms.

Some of the books and things I'm diving into this time of year are Eugenia Bone's Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook. David Fischer [with coauthor Alan E. Bessette] has a beautiful book called Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America. The North American Mycological Association is a terrific resource. My favorite book is Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. He's a fantastic writer. The ideas in it are so stimulating.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.