It turns out a Madison orchard can inspire more than just an apple pie. Chloe Benjamin — who lived in Madison for 15 years before recently moving back to her hometown of San Francisco — found the seed for her ambitious new novel, “Under Story,” at Door Creek Orchard in Cottage Grove. The property’s unusual geography, with its upper and lower orchards, helped spark a story focused on what lies above and below the surface. “It clicked in my head that this was a place I wanted to write about,” says Benjamin.
Though the novel opens at a remote research station in Antarctica, roughly half the story is set in Madison, where the protagonist grows up before becoming a mycologist. Benjamin immersed herself in local research, shadowing employees at a University of Wisconsin–Madison fungi lab, attending a mushroom conference at Governor Dodge State Park and working closely with the Griffith family at Door Creek Orchard to help shape the novel’s fictional setting.
The layered geography depicted in the story is mirrored in the novel’s science. Benjamin describes its central idea as a kind of split reality. “We see what is above ground and that is essentially only half the tree,” she says. “Everything below is kind of a mirror image [of] the roots.” “Under Story” is equal parts love story, ecological inquiry and speculative science; lucky for Madisonians, its foundation is planted in familiar ground…