Dark Mountain Issue 24: Eight Fires

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

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