It may seem as if things have gone a little quiet up here on the Mountain, but this is not the case. It’s just that the movement is taking place in the caves and the fissures, beneath the moss and deep in the pools where the water runs cold.

With your very generous help we have raised enough money for the first stage of the project – for which, an enormous thank-you. Our manifestos are currently being hand-finished at the printers, and we will be taking delivery of them soon. In the meantime, we are beavering away on getting the new website ready to go. It will be much bigger, brighter and more comprehensive than this one, and there will be a lot more on it also for people other than us to do.

So here’s the plan. Some time in June, perhaps around midsummer, we will launch the Project in its full glory. We will bring out new site online, we will send out manifestos and we will broadcast our message far and wide. Most of all, we will begin to seek collaborators, writing and ideas for the first issue of the Dark Mountain journal.

Then, we will hold ourselves a launch event. We’d like to invite all interested people to get together somewhere and celebrate the birth of this project and talk about what happens next. If you like the idea, then this means you. But in return for the invitation, we wonder if you can help us out.

Because we are looking for a venue. We don’t want to announce ourselves to the world from some London wine bar or metropolitan bookshop. We want somewhere unusual but accommodating.

Do you know anywhere that might be able to host us? Do you even own somewhere? Ideally it should not be a million miles away from either Oxford or London ( later events will spread outwards across this island, we promise, but we begin in the dark south east) – and it should fit, somehow, with what we are doing. It should be, in a word, uncivilised.

If you can help us, please leave a message below, or email us on info@dark-mountain.net

Posted by Paul Kingsnorth. Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 8:48 pm.