The Dark Mountain project is making waves on many a shore. We’re being discussed and debated all over the world, our little manifesto is being reviewed in major publications, and hundreds of people are mailing us all the time. So many, in fact, that we are having trouble replying to everything we receive. If you are one of those who has written to us and not yet had an answer, please be patient – we will get to you, hopefully in the next few days. We’re trying our best!

When you start a project like this, you have no idea where it might lead you, or whether it will connect with many other people. In this case, it has. Why? Judging from a lot of correspondence, one reason is that we are articulating something that others have been feeling but have not put into words; or, if they have, have not found a place where they can connect with others who understand those words. Our manifesto in particular seems to have struck a chord with many people who are sceptical about the mainstream narratives about the future being offered to us right now not only by the usual suspects – politicians, economists and the like – but also by those who claim to challenge those narratives: environmentalists, political radicals, self-proclaimed outsiders.

What has also resonated is our call for a cultural response to this predicament. I’ve personally had a number of people – people whose day job is to talk the language of economics, politics and science in order to attempt to, say, stop climate change or save rainforests – shuffle up to me and say, under their breath, that they’d really love to write some stories and would we like to publish them? There’s a palpable sense of relief amongst some people at almost being given permission to speak the language of tales, myths, stories – humanity – rather than the dead, corporate tongue which we are all supposed to use if we want to be taken ’seriously’.

Uncivilisation is our response to this. As Dougald explained in his last post, Uncivilisation is not a place or a time or a campaign goal; it is a process, of unpicking the myths by which we live, even those of us who think we are challenging them.

We talk in our manifesto of ‘Uncivilised writing’. We have talked a lot on this blog recently about what kind of writing that might be, and  Dougald and myself and many other Dark Mountaineers out there have begun developing an intriguing list of what kinds of writing we might be thinking about when we think about Uncivilisation. But Uncivilisation is not simply a process of reading the good stuff that is already out there. It is also, and more importantly, about creating a new cultural narrative, for now, with new work – work of our own.

Which brings me, via a long and winding road, to the point of this post. Next spring we will publish the first issue of the Dark Mountain journal; a showcase, we hope, for what this narrative can be and how it might be expressed. We want it to contain the best of Uncivilised writing and art. It will be a real, physical object, book-sized, beautifully designed, thought-provoking, challenging. We hope to launch it at a weekend-long Dark Mountain festival we are planning in a beautiful, mountainous location. There will be more on this here as things develop.

For now, though, the journal. We are seeking submissions now, and have already had a good number by email. If you are interested in submitting some work, or have an idea, drop us a line on info@dark-mountain.net. The deadline for the first issue of the journal is midnight on 31st December 2009.

But what are we looking for? A few people have asked us this question, and it is not especially easy to answer. The best answer I can currently give is ‘we will know it when we find it.’ If you have read our manifesto, the principles, read the last two blog posts about the kind of writing that currently interests us and looked at the submission guidelines on this website, you will have as good an idea as we do about the kind of thing that might make the pages of the journal. There is no blueprint, except that which is made by us, now, together.

Having said that, let me offer a few tentative, personal, pointers. Firstly, there are no strictures about whether the writing we publish is fiction, non-fiction, poetry or a combination of all three and something else besides. Personally I love poetry and would like to publish some, especially if it is by new voices. But it will need to be very good to make the grade. I would also love to provide a forum which might help revive what is, in Britain at least, the almost lost art of the political essay; a place in which those with something truly powerful to say are given the space and the flexibility to say it.

We would both, I think, also like to see short stories appearing in the journal. But we hope that people will take this description as loosely as it is intended. I’d like to see new forms, new approaches. I am not so interested in reading post-apocalyptic fiction about life after civilisation, unless it is startlingly original; something that’s very hard to achieve after a few hundred years of such writing.

What else? For starters, illustrations: photographs, illustrated stories, montages. We want the journal to be strikingly visual as well as strikingly literate. Perhaps most importantly of all, we would like to see things as yet undreamt of in our imagination: new forms, snippets, new approaches. We want to be publishing things that are not published elsewhere. We want this first issue of the Dark Mountain journal to be a bomb thrown into the complacent midst of the literary and political establishments.

Change is coming, and most people don’t want to see it; don’t want to think about it. We are going to make them look at it, and when they do they are going to see something that will draw their eye in and keep it there. We are going to demonstrate the importance of understanding and challenging the stories on which our civilisation is based. We want to surprise people; we want to surprise ourselves. Please, surprise us.

Posted by Paul. Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 12:17 pm.