Dark Mountain 17 Available Now

I'm very pleased to announce that Issue 17 of Dark Mountain is available now.

I worked as a prose editor on this issue, as well as contributing a short piece of fiction and an interview with artist and author Obi Kaufmann (The California Field Atlas). You can read my piece, Inauguration Day, here.

May we each find work – real, good, regenerative – to do in these trying times.

My best always,

Neale

Manifesto on Deep Adaptation

The children will play games with balls of tanned hide and sticks they carved themselves, on fields mown with a scythe. They will run along cliffs over ocean coves. Their schooling will be listening to acorns to know when they are ready to fall. Their work will be to pry mussels from the rocks, and to roll up plastic turf to reveal the soil beneath.

Our work will be breaking up the stone streets with rusted pick-axes. We will build the rubble into dry-stone shrines, beside the oak and laurel saplings we plant. We will imagine the trees aged to one hundred years and more. We will measure our age by the number of times our hearts have been broken.