Linda Conroy, MSS, MLSP, is a Bioregional Herbalist, Educator, and Community Organizer. Inspired by plants and the feminine, she is the founder of Moonwise Herbs, Midwest Women’s Herbal Conference, & Mycelium Mysteries. Linda has apprenticed with and studied with world-renowned herbalists and considers herself a lifelong learner. Her passion is herbal nourishment through Wild food/Wild medicine, Community, and Women’s Mysteries.
Zooming in for this interview from her farmstead in Wisconsin while she was on tornado watch, I wondered out loud whether we should reconvene at another time. Linda graciously offered to continue and said, “If I disappear, you’ll know why.”
Vivian K.:
OK, so you were just telling me where you live and where the annual Midwest Women’s Herbal Conference and Mycelium Mysteries events take place.
Linda Conroy:
Yes, I was saying I live about 30 minutes south of Madison, WI, close to the Illinois border.
And, we hold the [two annual events] in central Wisconsin – a couple hours north of here.
It’s in the woods, on a 200-acre camp facility.
VK:
How long have the conferences been going now?
LC:
I’ve personally been holding herbal events and smaller events for 30 years. But we started the herbal conference 13 years ago, which takes place every spring. Nine years ago, one of our featured speakers wasn’t able to come in the spring. So, we decided to have a mini-event in the fall. The mushroom conference just came about serendipitously when, around the same time, I was walking in the woods and couldn’t step anywhere without stepping on a mushroom. And it just dawned on me that we need a mushroom conference.
So, I went to my organizing team, and said that I really think we need to do a mushroom conference. Some of them were excited, and some of them thought that people were too mycophobic for this to be a popular event. But, I felt strongly that we needed to do this – and now we’re in our eighth year.
I started my journey as an herbalist about 30 years ago, and I have been teaching and running apprenticeship programs and these larger events. It definitely took me a while to get more mushroom-friendly. I had been slowly leaning into them, even before that. The herbal world is still mycophobic. The cross-pollination is just starting to happen. So, we really did something that was kind of unusual because it seemed like the herbal world and the mushroom world were “never the two shall meet,” except for just occasionally. That’s really changing now, which is exciting.
VK:
I was listening to a podcast that you were on, and you were talking about how biologically similar we are to mushrooms – much closer to them than we are to trees and plants. Do you think that in our disconnection from nature that maybe we’ve also lost that connection to ourselves?
LC:
No doubt about it. I’ve been foraging for my own food and teaching other people to do that for as long as I’ve been doing my herbal work. And it’s interesting because people are afraid of foraging, too. They’re afraid of going out into the wild, picking something and eating it. And they’re even more hesitant around mushrooms. In the herbal world, people were afraid of red berries, for example. Somewhere along the line, somebody told them that all red berries were poisonous. I hear this a lot. You’ve got all these myths that have been put into people’s brains to fear things. And, if you’re an educator like myself, you have to tease that apart with people and say, “Okay, wait a minute, we eat red raspberries.” Of course, with foraging mushrooms or plants, you really need to learn identification skills. You need to do what I call ‘dirt time,’ and I don’t think apps are a good tool for people who are just starting out.
VK:
Can you tell us about your herbal and mushroom and conferences? When do they happen, how do they differ, and what are some of the activities offered at each?
LC:
Sure, the herbal conference happens in the springtime – in about two weeks, actually. And the mushroom event is in the fall. Sometimes, we bring into the mushroom conference some activities that are plant-related, like seed saving. Otherwise, the fall event is very centered on mushrooms.
Both events are specifically designed with women in mind. In this country, it’s very traditional to hold herbal women’s conferences, but it’s far less common in the mushroom world. Women tend to do their healing work in a quieter way. So, when we invited speakers that were more from the mushroom realm to teach for us, the women really felt like their voices were being heard differently in this space compared to a co-gendered space. The experience helped them feel more comfortable and less intimidated by learning from other women. So, we’ve translated that tradition from the herbal world into the mushroom world, where it hasn’t been as prevalent. As far as I know, we’re the only women-centered mushroom conference in the world.
We called it ‘Mycelium Mysteries’ because I feel like we are very akin to mycelium. When you reached out to me looking for Cornelia Cho, that was very mycelial. That’s how women tend to network, whereas men network differently. I think it’s partially because of [social] conditioning, and some of it may be in our nature.
The other thing is that herbalism is a grassroots movement in this country. It was revitalized in the northern part of the US because there’s a whole history in the south with herbalism that’s very different than the northern and the western parts of the country. For example, in Southern Appalachia, they have retained a lot of their herbal traditions – they didn’t really lose their lineage so much. But, in the North and the South, we did, because we went in the direction of conventional medicine. So, herbalism mostly died down until the 1960s and early 70s when a lot of my teachers started revitalizing it alongside various other movements that were happening at that time. My teacher once told me that when she started out, there were only three books in the New York Public Library on herbalism.
As far as the mushroom world goes, the grassroots piece of it is coming mostly from academia, which is what has really spurred the interest of the general public.
VK:
I come from the academic world, but have such immense reverence for the thousands of years of wisdom that has gone into folk medicine. There is such a depth to it, compared to the short time that we’ve been practicing modern science.
LC:
I would love for you to come out to our mushroom conference, because I’m finding that the women who come from academic training especially love our conference. We really honor both worlds of wisdom without any ego – we just meld them together beautifully.
Are you familiar with a woman named Cardi Raper? She was a mushroom scientist. She did research and studied the reproductive nature of a particular fungus that reproduced in some interesting different ways. Her husband had a lab and he studied this mushroom before he died, and she was his assistant. She went back to school, got her PhD and started studying the same mushroom, and took over his lab. So, when I decided to do the mushroom conference the first year, I had some help with identifying a keynote speaker.
The second year, I said to myself, “I’m going to find the mushroom grandmother.” In the herbal world, we really honor our elders and our grandmothers, but I was having trouble because mushrooms don’t really have those elders in the way herbalism does. So, I did a search and found Cardi Raper’s name. She was in her early 90s when I contacted her. She had written a really beautiful book called Love, Sex & Mushrooms: Adventures of a Woman in Science – all about her lab work, but also her love for her husband and their work together. I didn’t know her, but I reached out to her cold and asked if she would come to the conference. She responded immediately, saying, “Yes, I’ll come.” She didn’t know me from anyone, had no idea what kind of conference she was being invited to, she’s totally academia-all-the-way. And she said yes without any hesitation! She had been doing this work for many, many decades at this point.
So, she came to the conference and refused to take the stipend we offered her. She did a beautiful keynote, sharing about her research and her work. She told me that she wasn’t really up for doing a workshop because, usually, our keynotes will also do workshops. And I asked if she would consider doing a Q&A instead, and she said yes.
So, one of the young women from our community who had admired her and knew of her work,
interviewed her, and the attendees asked some questions afterward. It was just so special. I’ll never forget she walked into our marketplace (where people sell handmade wares) in a tie-dye hat, and she was so joyful, so happy. She loved it. And she said to me, “This is gonna be my last speaking engagement.” I just felt like there was something so magical about that. And she died the next year. She truly was a mushroom grandmother.
VK:
Can you tell us a little bit about your intended audience at the mushroom event? Can you attend whether you’re a beginner, all the way up to advanced?
LC:
Yes, both.
We try to offer enough workshops that’ll be interesting to both beginners and intermediate people. I would say if you’re an advanced person, you may be there to build community.
We invited Suzanne Simard, who wrote ‘Finding the Mother Tree,’ to speak for us one year.
She’s one of the researchers who proved that trees and other elements, including mushrooms, are talking to each other. She is very prominent in the ecology world.
But, when I talk about serendipity… so, we had intentionally invited her to our herbal conference because it’s a lot bigger than our mushroom conference. But when we came close to the herbal conference, she contacted us and said, “My mother’s in hospice and there’s just no way I can travel to you right now because I want to be with her.” And of course, I understood. She agreed to stream into the event instead, with a couple of other ecologists there who helped facilitate a discussion with her and the audience. It was really nice, and she’s just larger than life on a screen. Then, she also came to our mushroom conference, and didn’t charge us any more for doing both things. So, it was just icing on the cake.
Anyway, she’s a very well-known scientist, and I’m sure she goes to lots of academic conferences. So, she came in, did a morning workshop and then a keynote on Friday night, and was going to leave on Saturday morning. And our conference runs through Sunday.
After she did her first workshop, she said that if she’d known how nurturing and nourishing this space was, she would have planned to stay for the whole weekend. I think that people who have a depth of knowledge, really come because they feel held in a certain way, and cared for and respected for what they’re sharing.
So, in answer to your question about what our audience looks like, I would say it is very broad, because different people are getting different things when they come to the event.
VK:
Is it true that you used to be a social worker in a past life? And, what started you down this path of herbalism so many decades ago?
I think that for many, there’s a moment of falling in love when a person decides to pursue this path. Was that true for you?
LC:
Yes, I am academically trained – I have a master’s degree in social work. I also have a master’s degree in law and social policy.
In my work, I almost always gravitated to medical social work. I worked with children with disabilities and their families. I worked with women who were in drug and alcohol recovery
and their children. I worked in the domestic violence field and with homeless women. I was also a case manager for people living with AIDS outside of Seattle for the Northwest AIDS Foundation.
When I was working at the AIDS Foundation, one of my coworkers at the time was living with HIV, and she was utilizing a lot of herbs to help her manage her condition. She started sharing her knowledge with me about some of the herbs she was using, and I couldn’t help but notice that she was healthier than any of my clients. So, I began just kind of tagging along and hanging out with her, and she started taking me foraging and teaching me about the plants.
This was over 30 years ago when I met her. And she is thriving today. She is a long-term survivor. She came to our herbal conference a couple of years ago. She’s a writer, and I invited her to read some of her poetry. She was my first herbal mentor. And I said, “Look what you did. There’s 400 women here. You were my teacher, and you inspired me and led me down this road.” I was the only person that she ever mentored that way. Then, I went on to study with some of her teachers, and then really just started falling in love with the plants and seeing their potential and their healing qualities. The relational piece was so important that she took me out foraging right away rather than having me learn about products in a package.
People will come to me asking if I’ll train them to work in the herbal industry, and I will say to them, that’s not what I do. I run an herbal apprenticeship program, but my program is focused on the relationship with plants.
I don’t want to frustrate people and have them feel like they’re in the wrong place.
VK:
Do people ever join the program after you say that?
LC:
Yeah. Some people get it, and some people walk away, and that’s fine. I just want people to know what we’re going to do here, because anytime I’ve had someone who didn’t, it has caused a lot of frustration – and I try to minimize the frustration, if you will.
[laughs]
Sometimes, people ask what I’m doing with my social work skills. Every single day, I apply them [laughs]. I’m just doing it differently. There’s such a burnout component to social work, so I feel like I can utilize those skills much more effectively in this role.
So, I started down this [herbalism] path when I was doing my social work. It’s almost like the herbs or the mushrooms grab you, and decide you’re going to be an ambassador for them.
When people come to me wanting to study with me, one of the concerns I have about that is that they don’t really understand what a big responsibility it is to step into this work. To support people in their healing and wellness journeys is a big responsibility, and you need to be disciplined enough to take it seriously. I’m grateful that I was introduced right away to the plants. I’m also very grateful there weren’t apps during the time I was learning, because I had to take my book, my senses, and my observation skills out into the field. In the Western world, everything is so accessible now, that going out into your backyard and just sitting with your plants or your mushrooms is not what most people are doing.
VK:
I think a huge part of what you’re offering, from the education to the herbs and wild foods you sell, is about health sovereignty. It really seems to be about service for you.
How important is it to you that your students come out of an apprenticeship or a workshop, able to carry these messages forward so they’re not lost?
LC:
It’s really important to me, for sure.
I don’t necessarily vet people for that, because most people in my programs are there to learn how to improve their own health. But, if they continue on with me longer term, I usually am looking for them to pass along what they’ve learned in their own work and to know that they’re not just wanting to capitalize on the industry. Some people who come to study with me will ask questions about monetization right away. Those questions are really not helpful when you’re in the learning stage because you really want to be open to what you are passionate about in this realm.
One of my interns was insistent that she was going to be a clinical herbalist, I think because she thought that’s where she could make the most money. After a couple years of studying with me, it turns out she is a botany whiz. She is so good at plant identification! That’s one of her heart spaces, and it’s such a pleasure to watch her. She went from being intimidated by the scientific aspects of botany, and relying on other people to show her where wild plants were before she would harvest them, and now she is so confident with both mushrooms and plants. Honestly, she’s not the best with people [laughs], but she’s great in that realm of plant identification.
So, my message, especially in the first year or two, is for students to find what their passion is, because there are just so many areas to contribute. I personally didn’t go into this thinking I was going to make a living this way. I make a very modest living, which is one of the reasons I enjoy living here in Wisconsin, because it is quite affordable. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do in a place like LA. For example, my friend (who is a mushroom grower, and the president of our Shiitake Growers Association here in Wisconsin) and I inoculated almost my whole property. And for the last few years, we have been teaching a class together called “Mushrooms from A to Z”. I teach the first half of the day, about how to prepare mushrooms optimally for health and nourishment. And then the second part of the day, she teaches five different approaches to cultivating mushrooms.
I have a permaculture background, and my dream is to have mycelium that reaches from corner to corner. Recently, I had the students look out at my property and visualize that. We also did a Morel mushroom slurry and poured it on the back of my property, where I’m putting in a forest garden. So, it was really fun. Both classes were so excited, not only about what we were actually doing, but about some of the regenerative philosophy. My friend Ingrid is a soil scientist, and we talked about the importance of mycelium to the health of soil, and how I brought back the sad-looking orchard that was here when I first moved in – and now it’s so vibrant. We could really see the difference in the trees that we planted with a lot of Wine Cap mushrooms around them. We also put in Red Clover and Comfrey under the trees, and are doing a lot of stacking to build the health of the soil.
And, of course, our gut health is so critically tied to soil health.
VK:
So critical.
I remember you talking about regenerative herbalism, and I wanted to ask you about what that means to you. Are you referring to the whole soil-to-human cycle of health?
LC:
Yes, that’s part of it.
I used to use the term ‘sustainable,’ but I don’t like that term anymore because it doesn’t feel active – there’s no emotion behind it. So, I really grabbed onto the term ‘regenerative’ because it means that you create systems that generate something positive beyond itself. Whether it be our own health and well-being or that of our land, plants, animals, and earth – we want to generate life. So much of what we do takes away life. We take away the mycelium and microbes from the farm fields. We even take out the nutrients in food and then try to put them back in, like with vitamin D and milk. Regenerative is where we actually let things be whole.
We can ask ourselves what nature did originally and try to recreate that – it’s called ‘biomimicry.’ I remember having a big Aha years ago. I used to think farm fields were so beautiful, just driving along these rolling fields. And then, I heard a discussion about how squirrels used to be able to go from Maine to Texas without touching the ground on the trees – just jumping from tree to tree. It was so shocking to hear that.
So, if you want to look at it from a health and an herbal standpoint, you have to complete that cycle. Regenerative herbalism means that you consider things like when you choose which plants, how you interact with them, and where they come from. How can I regenerate my gut flora, for example, and do that in a way that is going to contribute to the health of the soil, for example? I know this is going to sound a little out there, but when I do presentations on gut health, I often say to people that until we start composting our own manure, we will never have good gut health because we haven’t completed the cycle. If we only keep pooping in fresh water, it’s not gonna happen. There is a company in Milwaukee that produces a product called Milorganite and they’re processing and selling human manure as fertilizer.
VK:
You mentioned that relationships with plants is something that you’re working to foster in your students. Is there a particular herb or mushroom that you have a special connection with?
LC:
I have a couple herbs that I have a real strong affinity with. The first herb I ever foraged was Hypericum or St. John’s wort. I feel like it’s one of the plants that really grabbed me initially. I didn’t know it at the time, but here I am.
I would say that I also have a very strong affinity for Elder. Specifically, I really am drawn to the flowers of that plant. So many people focus on the berries, but, oh my gosh, the flowers! They are subtly fragrant, and just so lacy and beautiful.
My affinities are very much about how I feel when I’m with them and my relationship with them. Not so much about what their qualities, or how we “use” them. I’m trying to get away from that word “use” because it feels disrespectful. They are our ancestors, our kin. Robin Kimmerer, who wrote ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ describes them as our allies, who are here to care for us. But it’s hard to change that [transactional] language. I even find myself saying it, and I’m like, “Stop it! Don’t say that,” because I don’t want to use anybody or anything! I want to be in relationships.
One of the first mushrooms I learned to harvest was a Chanterelle mushroom, and I love those.
And, the mushroom that I work the most with because it’s so abundant around me is Maitake, or Hen of the Woods. They’re easy to cook with, very delicious, and healing. And, they’re abundant – I love abundance. That’s one of the incredible things about nature. As long as you have a respectful relationship with it, it will be regenerative and abundant.
I live on my farmstead by myself right now, and I can easily go out and harvest my own meals every single day on my property with very little effort. That’s another thing about being truly regenerative. You can’t be putting out more calories and energy than you get back.
There’s one thing I want to make sure that I share with you from the women’s perspective in the mushroom world. One of the presentations that we have every year is the “Herstory of Women & Mushrooms”.”At the turn of the century, late 1800s, early 1900s, women were not allowed into the medical and scientific fields. They would sneak in dressed as men to get into medical school – it was pretty intense. And so, there is this herstory of women not having access to academia. Women like Beatrix Potter, who was a mycologist, studied with someone in academia to learn how to gather, identify, and illustrate mushrooms accurately. And there are women who followed a similar path. So, one of the reasons for our women’s mushroom conference is to recognize that there still are some barriers,and to highlight women’s voices. Sometimes, people see this choice as being against men, but nobody’s against men. We’re just wanting to elevate and support women’s voices, and hold and nourish those voices in our space. And my hope is that we then go out in the world and share our [unique] perspective.
VK:
Yeah, beautifully said.
When is Mycelium Mysteries happening this year?
LC:
The mushroom conference is September 20th, 21st and 22nd, and it’s held in Almond, Wisconsin. There are a lot of mushrooms typically in the woods at that time of year, and we usually have a pretty nice ID table because the women who put the ID table together come from different parts of the Midwest which is quite biodiverse with its mushroom populations.
VK:
Well, thank you so much, Linda. I’m so glad that we met in this happenstance way. I think it was the mycelium connecting us!
LC:
Thank you, and hope to see you at the conference in September!
