Speaking
Introducing Dark Mountain: Issue 16 - REFUGE at Poetry in Aldeburgh festival, 2018
I am by trade a writer and editor but I also really enjoy speaking, and give talks and performances based on my work with myth, culture-making and the more-than-human world.
Alongside talking about the Dark Mountain project at conferences, launches and festivals, I’ve been invited to speak with audiences about different aspects of this collaborative work, ranging from the relationship between activism and art at Falmouth University to myth and the climate emergency for the Yorkshire Festival of Story and Under Her Eye at the British Library to a radical approach to time at the Kairos Club. I’ve also spoken online for conferences and webinars, inc;luding platforms such as Advaya and Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Most recently I’ve given a keynote presentation at Potsdam University in a conference on ‘Myth, Ritual and Practice in an Age of Ecological Catastrophe’.
Some of the female Underworld myths I’ve been working with in recent years have also become performances. Having stepped out as the Cailleach on Rannoch Moor at Samhain and along the banks of the Thames at Spring Equinox as part of the travelling troupe, the Kairos Collective, Inanna took the stage in Divesting for Beginners at the Reading Festival of the Dark. Psyche appeared at the storytelling event Human//Nature//Stories as we all then jumped the leap day fire in Spitalfields, just before lockdown.
In 2019 I travelled with my fellow Dark Mountaineer Dougie Strang to Winterwerft in Frankfurt and Glasgow’s Unfix Festival to perform The Red Thread as part of our Dance Down the Dark Mountain, an exploration of the Cretan Labyrinth and Ariadne’s dancing floor. We also hosted dramaturgical conversations as part of those programmes.
Hosting conversations
Speaking with people has been a core part of my work as a writer. New ideas and connections can emerge when two or more people share a common space, and the role of the interviewer in making that happen in a creative dynamic way is one of the many skills I teach as part of a writer’s ‘tech’. In the last decade I’ve interviewed some key thinkers within regenerative culture ranging from the ‘griefwalker' Steven Jenkinson to the poet and ecological storyteller Sophie Strand. You can read recent conversations in this thread here. I’ve also hosted dialogues between artists and writers such as this one, On the Art of Mourning and Celebration.
As a teacher, I’ve hosted wider conversations with a similar intent within most of the teaching and events I have produced, holding space for different voices to be heard and other paths of thought and expression explored together.
‘Conversations in the Dark’ which were part of the Dance Down the Mountain double bill have also taken place in the twilight canteen at Dartington, in a yurt on the Welsh mountains, in a community centre in Macclesfield. Hosting a circle where people bring other than human voices into the room is an intrinsic part of a ‘firekeeping’ culture where the deeper, more instinctual, ancestral natures of people can come to the fore.
As a curator to foster these kinds of encounter, I have also organised larger events, such as Dark Mountain’s Base Camp at Embercombe in Devon, and in the Camp in the North in Cumbria as well as gatherings on line.
