Midsummer greetings all! This month, we’re excited to share two ‘surf and turf’ offers from the Dark Mountain bookshop; our twin Issue 25 and Issue 26 anthologies from land and sea. You’ll also find the latest instalments in our online edition, this month’s featured mountaineer, plus news from the network.
This summer, expand your horizons with our latest bookshelf offers – two recent anthologies from land and sea.
Issue 26: Dark Ocean is a full-colour collection of essays, stories, artwork and poetry, praise song and meditation, based on a Dark Mountain residency aboard a boat called Merlin in the Outer Hebrides.
Our paper vessel sails out from the Atlantic, carried by currents across power lines and ghost nets, plankton and giant squid, into the far Pacific, following in the wake of a Greenland shark, a floating coconut shell in the rising Indian Ocean, the nightmare of migrants in the Mediterranean, and a dreaming of Doggerland under the North Sea.
Dip into its pages for a glimpse of the Dark Ocean, beginning with search and rescue operative Alexander McMaster’s harrowing piece, Paper Boats, followed by on selkies and shapeshifting coastlines, a re-imaginative charting of Cape Cod by Sarah B. Cahalan and a modern changeling story by M. Rose.
‘you sit at the mouth of the chesapeake bay, having a conversation with a selkie’ (M.Rose)
Issue 25 is a classic hardback anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.
Those who act in its defence are fighting for many things: for the right to access food and water; for the existence of other beings; for the right to build a home, or to live without one. The language of rights can be anthropocentric, couched in terms of ‘who owns what’ – but what happens when we flip such assumptions on their heads?
Step into Issue 25 with Damian Le Bas's story about how moving to the city severed him from his Romani language, and how urban landscapes gave him a hybrid tongue, followed by Susan Raffo's illuminating essay on the aliveness of the land and the language that it speaks.
‘Everything starts with the land, I remember again and again. Everything starts with the land, so how did this get lost?’ (Susan Raffo in ‘The Language of the Land’)
As with all Dark Mountain books, there are a limited number of copies available, so grab yours before they disappear!
Hidden forests and post-cautionary tales in this month’s edition
Our Midsummer online edition opened with an intriguing piece from Antonio Serrano Nieto, who took us deep inside the cork forests of southern Spain to a village that has survived for centuries by remaining outside the view of power; ‘We live in a world organised around exposure [ ] La Sauceda followed the opposite logic.’
In The Nameless Are In Me, we featured two visceral poems from our spring offer, Issue 21: 'Stansbury Swarm' by Joel Long and 'Nigredo of the Bull' by Finn Haunch. George Brooks followed with a story of a cataclysm brewing beneath the slopes of a unnamed volcano, a ‘post-cautionary’ tale from our other spring offer, Issue 4, in La Nephew and the Volcán.
Campaigner Anthea Lawson shared an extract from her timely new book, How Not to Save the World, delving into unconscious notions of ‘saving’ as part of ‘doing-good’ that are particular to people from a Christian cultural heritage; ‘It’s exceptionalism that puts us in the position of thinking that perhaps we can save others – rather than asking what they want and need’. Rounding up our Midsummer pieces, an extract from Issue 26 - Dark Ocean, one of our new bookshelf offers, in which C.C. O’Hanlon reflects on a life on the ebb tide, pirate utopias through time and a boatyard where every vessel feels like a haunting.
Neale Inglenook is a writer, a student of traditional hand skills, and a contributing editor to Dark Mountain. He was an artistic fellow at Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in 2022. He lives in the traditional homeland of the Pαnawάhpskewi or Penobscot people.
Check out some of Neale’s pieces for Dark Mountain’s online edition, including Last Days at Tor House, in which he prepares to take his family across country to re-root themselves in the forests of Maine. In The Axe in Winter, part of our Hands and Tools series edited by Neale, he reflects on converting the axe from a tool of empire to one of connection and care; ‘Many days, if you were watching me, you’d see me simply standing in the woods, holding the axe near the head, looking off into the brush or up into the canopy or at the clouds.’ More of Neale’s hands-on pieces are available to read here.
HOLY ANIMALS SACRED PLANTS; an exhibition in Cornwall and Surrey curated by Dark Mountain contributor Kate Walters
This exhibition brings together eleven artists whose practice has grown from shamanic encounter – with power animals, spirit teachers, breath, body memory and the living forces of plant and place.
Paintings, drawings, sculpture, installation, writing and performance explore what art can learn from deep relationship with the more-than-human world, sitting within the long lineage of creativity and spiritual inquiry that has shaped Penwith, from its ancient sacred sites to Colquhoun and Hepworth.
The show runs at Tremenheere Gallery, Cornwall (12th June-25th July) and New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, Surrey (2nd - 18th July), with supporting events and panel discussions at Tremenheere throughout.
Contributing artists: Helena Sophia Allan, Rachael Bice, Lucy Cooper, Jacky Fox, Mandy Lancaster, Christine Linfield, Danielle Napthen, Mydd Pharo, Sally Tripptree, Terese Tubman, Kate Walters.
Find out more here: tremenheere.co.uk/exhibition/holy-animals-sacred-plants
Dark Mountain: Issue 29 (£19.99)
Our Spring 2026 anthology is a hardback collection that steps outside the human bubble and puts animals at its heart. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 29 for only £14.99.
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The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 21, 22, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!
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