vi: Our Editor in the Field
Kyra Pollitt meets Mo Wilde Kyra Pollitt
You may know her as Monica Wilde— forager extraordinaire —but if you've been enjoying her first book, The Wilderness Cure (Simon & Schuster, reviewed in our June issue), you'll now feel you know her well enough to call her Mo. I caught up with her on Zoom, just as the whorl of publicity around the impending book launch (23rd June) was beginning to gather real momentum. The Wilderness Cure documents the year Mo spent surviving entirely on a wild food diet. Back in May, she had very kindly asked her publishers to send a proof copy to Herbology News and when we meet, in June, she has just read our review— the very first review her book has received. I asked her how it felt to be a published author: Well, I'd been thinking about writing something for years, and the idea came from the question people always ask when I'm teaching foraging, which I've been doing for some seventeen or eighteen years now. People always want to know if you could live just on wild food. So, when Claire Conrad approached me and asked if I'd like to write a book for a publishing house, my answer was "Hell, yes!". Mo tells me that, although a couple of authors in Canada have documented similar undertakings, the only other book on the shelf in the UK was written by John Lewis-Stempel (The Wild Life, Black Swan, 2010), whose venture was strongly underpinned by his ownership of a large estate from which to gather his sustenance. Mo felt it was time to test out whether this could be done the hard way. I wonder whether starting the challenge in November was perhaps imposing an unnecessary level of difficulty, and Mo concurs: I'd originally intended to start the challenge at a different time of year, but that would have meant waiting into the following year and, as we all emerged from the first Covid-19 lockdown, I was so profoundly disappointed in the human species— Gaia couldn't have sent a clearer message, but here was everyone just resuming 'business as usual'. Black Friday was the final straw. I felt I had to do something.
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