It’s time to start thinking about the third Dark Mountain book. We’re finding a rhythm which works out at roughly one collection a year, the editing process woven in between festival organising and the day-to-day practicalities of running the wider project.
This time around, we’re very pleased to have Adrienne Odasso joining our editorial team. Her poetry featured in the first two collections, and she’s been a close supporter of the project. (Those who were at this year’s festival might remember the session she hosted with Em Strang, Susan Richardson and Paul Kingsnorth.)
The first two books did not have any specific theme beyond their engagement with the wider concerns of this Project. They were responses to the manifesto, and their content came from, and went in, any number of different, intriguing directions. This time around, though, we are going to do things a little differently. We are looking for contributions which head, broadly, in a similar direction – or which at least start from the same place.
Things have changed a lot since we published our manifesto, and are set to continue changing. For one thing, we’ve heard a lot over the past couple of years about ‘collapse’ – it seems like everyone’s talking about it, these days. It’s no longer necessary for us to explain that our way of living could fall apart, because it is happening all around us. Similarly, we have laid out, in our first two books, a good case for the inadequacies of the ways of being and seeing that we’ve taken for granted in this civilisation. We don’t need to do so much of this any more. We can move beyond.
What can we move to? In short, a deeper search for the new stories we called for in the manifesto. A deeper search for new kinds of writing, ways of looking and seeing, which take us beyond the orthodoxies of our times and into channels which broaden out into the oceans of possibility which lie ahead. The world is changing fast, and the time is ripe for new ways of seeing it. We want to publish them – to get them out into the world. They are badly needed.
In particular, this time around, we want to focus on the world beyond the human. We want to publish writing which strives to see the world not simply as the territory of our species, but as a canvas for all life. We want the kind of Uncivilised writing we called for in the manifesto. Writing and art which re-connects, re-grounds us in place and time, takes us out of our over-civilised skins, back to the bare bones of who we are. Writing and art which:
sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare – might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds.
… that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.
In calling for this kind of contribution, we are not calling, necessarily, for essays about ecocentric politics or for ‘nature writing’ in its traditional sense (though we’re not ruling these out, either.) We’re talking about something slightly beyond this. We’re talking about work which, in stepping away from our purely human-centred preoccupations, allows us – paradoxically – to explore once more who we really are.
We present, then, an invitation to you all:
We got lost somewhere along the way. Took a wrong turning, followed a bad map. Felt the exhilaration of a runaway child, gradually turning to fear as night approaches.
It is time to tell the stories of how this happened. The many different stories of how we found ourselves so far from home, how we almost forgot what it meant to be at home — in our own skins, in our animal bodies, in the landscapes of nature and of our own nature; in the places we came from, or the places we have found ourselves — and how we begin to find a way back.
There is no rewinding, of course; no perfect state to which one could dream of returning. Home is something humbler: the place you find yourself when the dream is over, the place you always were. In the old tales of heroic journeys, this is always the hardest part. The re-entry into the atmosphere; the return to the grounded reality you left behind, which has been going on without you. Harder and more uncomfortable than the adventures that have gone before.
We are not who we thought we were. We are something older, wilder, more untamed, more real. How do we find our way back home?
On to the practicalities:
As in the past, we’re looking for all kinds of writing and images, fiction and reportage, conversations, essays, poems, photographs, or anything else. We’re particularly open to work that’s not easily categorised, that straddles the boundaries of form, and to collaborations that bridge different worlds and ways of working.
While the first two books have featured some outstanding established writers — people like Naomi Klein, David Abram and Jay Griffiths — many of our favourite pieces have come from people we’d never heard of, and in some cases people who had never previously seen their work in print. We’re keen to see more of this, and to hear about writers you think we should approach for submissions. If there’s someone whose work makes you think of Dark Mountain, tell us about them and we’ll look at approaching them to contribute.
The book will be in English, but we are keen to hear more voices from beyond the Anglosphere – and we’d be very open to translations of work from other languages that resonates with or brings new frequencies to the themes of Dark Mountain.
Finally, we should say that we generally get overwhelmed by the volume and the quality of work which we receive, so please forgive us if we are slow to respond — it will be early in 2012 before we make the first round of editorial choices for the new book, but we will acknowledge receipt of your work as it comes. We are always careful to read everything and take time discussing and making decisions, and we do respond to every submission, whether or not it makes it into the book. (Last time around, we had about five times as much work submitted as we had space for, so the decision-making can be difficult!)
Please send us your work by the end of 2011. Email it as an attachment to info@dark-mountain.net with the subject header ‘DM3 Submission: your name.’
We look forward to reading it.
There is a beautiful quote from John Berger’s book “And our faces, my heart, brief as photos” on the notion of home:
“Home was the centre of the world because it was the place where a
vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a
path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The
horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible
roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was
nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This
nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the
starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial
journeys.”
He goes on to suggest that “The one hope of recreating a centre now is to make it the entire earth. Only worldwide solidarity can transcend modern homelessness.”
With this in mind, I think your invitation of “voices from beyond the Anglosphere” is a promising direction to take.
Living in Brixton, in which it feels as if representatives of the entire earth have converged, I sometimes wonder what it would feel like if we could all hear each other’s stories and feel ourselves at home together. (If we could hear the stories of other species or beings too, even more amazing.)
How do you describe an intuition, a presentiment, a feeling, which has never been described in our age in any of the mediums known and might in fact, despite all earnest efforts, elude description because of a resistance to look through the eyes of a child and come to an acceptance that one is lost and might just need non-human help? If the key lies outside religion, politics, poetry, art, culture, new-ageism, quartz crystal frequencies or any other human answer to our situation then perhaps it’s time to re-examine the Adam & Eve account and accept that the real issue might be very simple. To try to feel like a child who has become detached from a father and who has accepted that he or she is now totally lost and has absolutely not the slightest clue in which direction to walk in anymore might be a first step. For one to suggest that all one needs to do is find a breakthrough in human thinking will in my humble opinion might simply lead one to the discovery that the breakthrough circled one back to where one started from and ultimately end in tears again. The idea that if we don’t try walking in any direction then we’ll never find the way out doesn’t work for me anymore. It would be like trying to find the source of wind on one’s face. The Polish film director, Krzystof Kieslowski was interested in the questions that we don’t have and might never find the answers to and he tried to make films to try to describe this. Unfortunately, the brave man died from a heart attack before he managed to get very far in his efforts.
Alexandre Fabbri
KIESLOWSKI’S WORLD
Why not get Corey Anton involved? Professoranton on Youtube. I’m sure he could do something on man’s relationship with technology.
[...] we are still encouraging submissions for the third Dark Mountain book. Much of what I have seen over the last couple of months has convinced me more than ever of the [...]
[...] … this time around, we want to focus on the world beyond the human”, writes Hine on the Dark Mountain blog. “We want to publish writing which strives to see the world not simply as the territory of [...]