About
In a neighbourhood oak, Minsmere Woods, Suffolk (photo: Caroline Ross)
Hello and welcome to my new website! I am a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. I work as the co-director of the Dark Mountain Project - and in between tasks and deadlines explore the lexicon of the living world, mostly around the wooded, marshy, salt edge of East Anglia where I live.
I write about mythology and cultural shifts, and teach mycelial intelligence and radical kinship with the more-than-human world. My writing reflects on a world in turmoil and the ways we can face collapse, the beauty of relationships with time, creatures, plants and stones. I have written several books during a life with my hands on the keyboard and my eye on the time. The most recent chart a life travelling out and powering down. You can read about 52 Flowers That Shook My World and After Ithaca here.
Most of my earlier work and CV is kept on my former blog but you can find a selection of more current stories and articles here. Upcoming events and workshops can be found here.
Also last autumn (2023) I started a new Substack series of posts called The Red Tent. where my main current writing can be found. Do subscribe and find out all about this metaphysical practice for collapsing times.
A Short History
I was once a features journalist in London and lived a fashionable bohemian life. In 1991 I left the city and went to Mexico with a one-way ticket to investigate a deeper ancestral relationship with the Earth with my onetime fellow voyager, Mark Watson*. We were on the road for ten years, mostly travelling through the mountains and deserts of the Americas, but also crossing Australia, staying for different seasons in the South of France, Oxford, Greece and the borderlands of southeast Arizona.
Our work with people and places during these years, our inquiry into dreaming and plants, form the bedrock of all the writing, teaching and speaking I do today.
The front page, Southwold, Suffolk 2012
On our return to England in 2002, we put down roots in the sand and clay of the Suffolk coast and became community and cultural activists. I created several online platforms and publications that chronicled the lives of local groups responding to the climate crisis and fossil fuel dependency, including the Social Reporting Project and the Transition Free Press.
In 2011 I stumbled across the Dark Mountain Project around their Uncivilisation Festival fire in the Hampshire woods, writing an article for the Independent newspaper. Something cracked in that moment, as I realised these responses to ecological and social crisis I had been documenting entirely lacked a creative, Earth-centred frame. I joined the project as an art editor to help redesign their fifth annual anthology of uncivilised art and writing.
We are now working on our 27th edition and I am a co-director.
I also teach classes and workshops, edit texts and artwork, give talks and host conversations. Occasionally I get time to write, which remains my true love.
Aside from the Earth, Mark and a black cat who has no name.
Mark Watson (1962-2-24) died suddenly this February and is massively missed. A book about his work with plants The Plant Pamphlets will be published on 1st November.
Main website image: Jean Arnold – Kennecott with Diatom 1 (UT, copper), detail. Mixed media on board
