Alex Williams, herbalist

A little personal history

I grew up in the midwest, where the combination of forest, prairie, suburban lawns, freshwater lakes, and large swaths of corn and soy informed my sense of place. It’s hard to say precisely what initially informed my enduring connection to wild plants and ecosystems, but memory traces it back to childhood visits to my grandparents’ home, whose forested valley of a backyard provided a stark contrast to the tidy lawns that stretched across my suburban neighborhood. The wildness of this place piqued my curiosity and drew me into its lush and verdant hills and stream beds, which became my sanctuary when I visited, and my daydream during the car ride home.

As early as my teens I became interested in herbal preparations (for, perhaps different reasons than why I’m currently interested): Batches of dandelion wine that I would clandestinely ferment with friends in our parents’ basements to later share floating down the DuPage river. Later, in college, I would make many attempts at homemade absinthe and amaro.

Although my experiments with various herbal preparations continued into adulthood, I felt that I was pursuing a path that did not feel like my own. I began to question the ways our culture pressures us to obtain success and stability and wondered at the environmental harm this engenders. So I started to read. About ecology, about food, about what people call ‘the environment’, and about herbalism. Seeking to understand the many misguided values of our culture, I earned my Master’s degree in Sociology, and became a teacher.

During this time, I would return to my sanctuary in the forests surrounding Chicago, learning about the mushrooms and plants I encountered and how they weave webs of reciprocity through the forest’s soil to support and sustain the whole. I learned deeply from the forest, and started to ask myself, what webs of reciprocity can I weave to support and sustain myself and my community?

From this alchemy of woodland wandering, teaching in the city, and bartending to make ends meet, my practice as an herbalist quietly unfolded in the background. All the while, I learned to gather plants with humility and respect, and to prepare them as food or make them into medicines to support my health and the health of my community.

This practice eventually evolved into what is now First Curve Apothecary, which eventually grew to include the Greenspell Organization, an ecosystem of offerings grounded in the mission to reclaim the wild connection of body and self to the more-than-human world.