Dark Mountain: Issue 24 – Eight Fires

Description

Our twenty-fourth book is an ensemble exploration of the eight fire festivals of the year, based on Dark Mountain’s workshop series ‘How We Walk Through the Fire’.

Eight Fires is a collection of creative practices, testimony, tools, ceremony, stories, art and poetry, that revolve around the eight seasonal fires. It charts the building of a collaborative cultural practice over the cycle of the year, with six elemental themes, an invitation at winter solstice, and a gathering at the zenith of midsummer.

From its beginning,  the Dark Mountain Project set out to gather stories rooted in place and time that were not focused on the drive of progress, that did not place human beings at the centre off life. But the question remains: how do we do this in our practical lives beyond the page? When we are fatally entangled in a civilisation that restricts our being anything other than a consumer of resources and entertainment?

Eight Fires tells a story about re-forging an imaginative relationship with the Earth at a time of reckoning; about connecting deeply to the wild and feral places we live in in a culture fraught by forgetting and isolation. How we hosted fires in the winters of the far North, on the rooftops and riverbanks of European cities, at the edge of an Indian forest or Hebridean coastline, in the Indigenous lands of Australia and California.

It is a book made of wild winds, seaweed shelters, glass mushrooms, talking fire sticks, singing stones, moments of joy, grief and intense physical immersion in a sentient planet.

It’s about dancing with bears, listening to mountains, sleeping with trees; a reminder of how we can speak together around a fire when the animals and ancestors are standing behind us.

A map, a manual, a sketch book, a raggle-taggle lexicon, a collective love song to life in a collapsing world.

With 70 contributors, 50+ full-colour artworks, and countless more-than-human participants

Writers: Catherine Bush, Leonie Charlton, Heather Clapp, Laura Coleman, Kimberly Coburn, Charlotte Du Cann, Sharon English, Siana Fitzjohn, Joanna Gilar, Nick Hunt, Rebecca Hunter, Daniela Kato, Jayden McGinty, Kristin Moe, Nastassja Noell, Crónán Ó Doibhlin, Shalini Pattabiraman, Dougie Strang, Leslie VonHolten, Samantha Wallen, Rhyd Wildermuth.

Poets and Practitioners: Valerie Boissel, Lucy Cooper, Sarah DiViasmeni, Heather Clapp, Tamara Colchester, Anisa George, Fiona Glen, Michael Gregory, Joanna Hruby, Kasey Jueds, Jane Lovell, Claire Estelle Lubke, Lucy Neal, Ian Nesbitt, Louise Amelia Phelps, Erin Reschke, Paul Rankin, Elvire Roberts, Ceó Ruaírc, Sarah Royston, Phoebe Tickell, Matthew Shaw, Sophie Strand, Mark Watson, Michael Walsh, Sara Jolena Walcott.

Artists: Amory Abbott, Peter Cameron, Laura Coleman, Rebecca Clark, Katie Ione Craney, Faye Dobinson, Laura Dutton, David Ellingsen, Jess Farr, Catarina Fontoura, Jemima Hall, Geraldine van Heemstra, Tracy Hill, Tony Humbleyard, Basia Irland, Candace Jensen, Emily Joy,  Carrie LaChance, Meryl McMaster, Carey Mortimer, Lynette O’Kane, Kathryn Poole, Dan Porter, Rainey Strauss, Jordan Tierney,  Jessie Rose Vala, Caroline Ross, Forest Woodward, Cally Yeatman.

Editors: Anthea Lawson, Steve Wheeler. Poetry: Michael McLane. Assistant editors:  Catherine Bush, Lucy Cooper, Sharon English, Leslie VonHolten,  Art and Production: Charlotte Du Cann

Cover: Eight Fires (from set of 11) by Candace Jensen

Dark Mountain: Issue 24 is a full-colour softback, 256 pages long, printed on FSC-certified paper

ISBN 978-1-8384160-5-8