Issue 26: Dark Ocean

Dark Ocean is a 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 in 2023. The highly visual edition travels from the seabed to the horizon, from birth to death, in search of beauty, memory and the transformative power of the sea.

Our paper vessel sails out from the Atlantic, carried by currents across power lines and ghost nets, through storms and oil spills, plankton and giant squid, into the far Pacific, swimming by the foggy Californian shore, following in the wake of a Greenland shark, the song of a humpback whale, a floating coconut shell in the rising Indian Ocean, the nightmare of migrants in the Mediterranean, a dreaming of Doggerland under the North Sea, of a vanished ocean in the desert in Utah.

Browse extracts here

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Dark Mountain: Issue 25

Our twenty-fifth book is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.

Land is the ground beneath our feet, but it is so much more than that. 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, of rivers, mountains, lakes and trees; for the right to build a home, or to live without one; for the right to walk without fences and to sleep beneath the stars; for connection and imagination; to resist invasion.

This book gathers voices from around the world – from Cameroon to Mexico, from Portugal to Palestine, from Singapore to the leafy lanes of the Oxfordshire stockbroker-belt. 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? Does the land belong to us, or do we belong to the land? What happens when we expand our perception beyond the human?

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Our twenty-seventh issue is a book about animals.

The non-human, or more-than-human, has always been a central theme of Dark Mountain, but this is the first anthology we’ve devoted entirely to the animal world – to the ‘wild deerness’, or wilderness, the place where the wild ones live. This book takes its inspiration from medieval bestiaries, but unlike these ancient compendiums, our bestiary doesn’t claim to be anything like comprehensive or representative of all the major kingdoms, classes, species and sub-species. In fact, a Linnaean taxonomical approach is something this book strives to avoid. Instead, we present a kaleidoscopic view, like the multiple images seen through an insect’s compound eye, fragmentary pictures that are chaotic and unordered, but which, perhaps, approximate the incorrigible plurality of the world better than any abstract system can.

In these pages you will find a talking eel; a desert salamander who breathes through its skin; a mysterious time-travelling embroidered bird; a convocation of eagles; a finch carefully observing its human neighbours; the earthy, bloody life of a forest jaguar in Brazil; a turtle swimming through mythic time; feral dogs in the Galapagos; tamed horses, and wild boar, that stray between myth and reality; pigeons, as related to by a man experiencing homelessness; a prodigious cloud of thrips; a letter to a crow; snails; lampreys; the language of whales; the brood-song of a bee colony; bears encountered in dreaming practices and bears that are dangerously close and real; wombats; woodmouse; foxes; spiders; snakes; jellyfish; and five dancing salmon.

In Dark Mountain: Issue 29 we have tried to navigate the porous boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with all their wild and unpredictable ways of being in the world – ways we may not understand but can marvel at. We invite you to walk, crawl, slither, swim and fly through the wild deerness of these pages, and to give yourself the gift, in our darkening world, of imagining what it’s like to be anything other than human.

Our Latest Issue

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!

Our latest launch

Our twenty-eighth issue is a full-colour special issue on uncivilised art, celebrating the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world.

This spring a team of editors set out to create a collection of visual art that would act as a retrospective, a catalogue of the many genres our books have showcased since 2010: photography, illustration, graphic literature, calligraphy, painting, sculpture, land-based artworks, making, installation, ritual and performance. A collection of artwork that included written testimony, practice, interview, memoir and prose poem. We wanted it to be a celebration of the artists who hold out for a certain way of being in this collapsing world: true to the transformative power of creativity, to the love of the Earth, and the material of life itself.

What happens shift your attention away from the shiny surfaces of industrial culture, to a perception of the world co-created with all planetary beings who dwell in deep time? What happens when you follow the artists as they span dimensions, move through the land, disturbing and liberating our vision?

You find yourself in a book in the shape of a tree: leading from the forest canopy to the heartwood to the seeds of the future that lie on the leafy floor. You edge across branches that take you back in time to the illuminative script makers, or down into the underbelly of civilisation where women fall into holes, subvert road signs, throw paint, walk across mined and burning land. You descend into the roots, the core mycelial practices these artists hold in times of unravelling: collaborations with lichen, with microbes, with stalks of wheat, mountain slate, seaweed, horse and crow; in the studio which is a darkroom, and also a cliff, a river, a desk before a luminous window.

You look up…

You can read the full editorial ‘Thinking Like a Forest’ here. To order your copy see below.

Our Latest Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.

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Our online edition

The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy our newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our bi-annual books or our weekly online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available either in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 26-28) or as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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Our twenty-seventh book is a collection of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and artwork revolving around bodies, human, creaturely, plant and mineral. An anthology of the corporeal in times of crisis, collapse and change.

So much in our modern industrial culture encourages disembodiment – both from ourselves, as animal beings, and from the larger body of the Earth. The writing and artwork in this book explores the consequences of that detachment and the many different ways by which we might become re-embodied. Some contributors put their feet back on the ground through dance, while others put their bodies on the line during direct action protests. Connections are mapped between the spores of plants that predate dinosaurs and human autoimmune disease, and – as shown on our cover – between herbs and human healing. There are tales of bodies that do not conform to ‘healthy’ stereotypes, and how chronic sickness can be held up as a mirror to the ailments of the planet.

Also in this issue are stories of reabsorption in the world, whether through connections with mountains and waters, or the embodied ritual of becoming a tree. There are interspecies shapeshiftings and human-canine chimeras, posing questions of where bodies end and where they begin. Some of the pieces are visceral – peeling back the anatomies of Italian Renaissance Venuses, burying a road-killed mole in a nettle-fibre shroud, or plunging into the uncanny world of blood platelet donation – and, inevitably, death casts a shadow on this book. But its pages hum with life as well, from the palo verde beetle emerging from the Sonoran Desert, from crows, coyotes, jellyfish, mountain goats, mare’s tail, granite and trees, to the leafy guardian deity of the Amazon.

Bodies, far from being separate things – atomised, individual units existing in and of themselves – are connected, interpenetrating and curiously hard to define. Dark Mountain: Issue 27 celebrates that complexity, and how all of us are part of the body of the Earth.

You can read the full editorial here. To order your copy see below.

Our Spring Issue

Dark Mountain: Issue 27 (£18.99)

Our spring classic issue is a collection of writing and artwork on things bodily and broken, mended and mysterious, individual and collective, interrelated and entwined. Order from our website, or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 27 for only £12.99.

Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books

Our online edition

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 or the home for our online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available either in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 25-28) or as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!

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THIS LIMITED EDITION IS NOW SOLD OUT. A PDF version of Issue 9 is available here. Keep an eye out for our winter archive offer next month!

Our ninth issue takes the form of a classic Dark Mountain anthology, with new work from writers and artists around the world – stories and essays, poems, images and conversations – responding to the accelerating effects of climate change, mass extinction and societal dysfunction. ‘Humanity is going to be humbled one way or another,’ write the editors, ‘so we may as well begin the process ourselves.’

Humbleness comes from the Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’; so to be humble means to lay oneself low, but also to be grounded, to return to the solid and material. In their own ways, the art works, poems, stories and essays in this volume explore different ways of re-communion with the Earth. Here the certainties on which the edifices of civilisation teeter are replaced with the small, the unpretentious, the discomforting.

Familiar names – Em Strang avoiding the global news to bear witness to more immediate worlds, Adam Dinan and Tom Smith investigating microbial life – and established figures like Derrick Jensen can be found alongside new contributors and fresh perspectives: Nadia Lucia Peralta on the ecstatic loss of self at carnival time, Fern Leigh Albert recording life off-grid in Dartmoor with her camera, and Claire Liss considering the evolution of plant medicine.

As we enter dark times, these disparate voices challenge the grand narratives of recrimination and despair, so that the universe appears afresh as a collection of wonders – bewildering objects, transforming passions and moments of transcendent awe. With such humbling comes a simplicity, a singleness of vision and a return to a more honest appraisal of what it means to be human.

As with all Dark Mountain publications, this book is a beautiful physical object, designed and typeset by our friends at Bracketpress in Lancashire, with colour plates for artworks such as Rebecca Clark’s drawings, Rogan Brown’s papercut ‘time fossils’ and visionary New Zealand landscapes by Kate Williamson. Meanwhile walking artist, Monique Besten collects paper boats as she crosses the mountains to the Paris summit, performance artist Robert Leaver digs himself into various holes in earth snow, and rock, from Italy to Cape Cod, and storyteller-artists, Kahn & Selesnick relate one of their fantastical Tales from a Drowning World.

You can order you archive copy of Issue 9 from our online shop here. Available at a reduced price for our paid subscribers. See details below.

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PLEASE NOTE: THIS OFFER CLOSED AT THE END OF AUGUST BUT BOTH BOOKS ARE STILL ON SALE!

TWO CLASSIC DARK MOUNTAIN collections are now on offer in our store of uncivilised art and writing until the end of August. Do grab yourself a copy (or two), as they are likely to fly off our shelves fast!

First up is Issue 25 (£11.99), an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights.

This book gathers voices from around the world – from Cameroon to Mexico, from Portugal to Palestine, from Wales to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from Singapore to the leafy lanes of the Oxfordshire stockbroker-belt.

Some pieces take the form of dispatches about navigating difficult territories, while others take a longer view of history and deep time. 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? Does the land belong to us, or do we belong to the land? What happens when we expand our perception beyond the human?

Next is our twenty-second issue ARK (£12.99) – a work of creative salvage made in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective.

In its pages you’ll find an assemblage of stories gathered from the wreckage left by a flood that has already come; art and writing that reveal the beauty, resilience and strength found in being fully alive in a troubled time.

Most of all, it is a testament to the imagination of writers and artists, gleaners in a world that has lost its way, to show how we can build and regenerate an Earth-centred culture from what has been bequeathed us on a vanished tide.

Visit our online bookshop

Containing 30 short stories from writers around the world, original illustrations and audio versions, the last print copies of FABULA are on offer during this month. To introduce the book we republish its afterword and a dark folk story by Luke Winter, set in Northumberland in an uncertain future, about a mysterious battle between butterflies and ‘organic’ drones.

What do the birds say?

‘There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre’, writes Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five. ‘Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

‘And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”’

Perhaps there is nothing intelligent to say about 2020. To say ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ in a world that feels as fictional and as fantastical as Vonnegut’s novel – which ranges through space and time from the 1945 firebombing of Dresden to the alien planet Tralfamadore – is not to deny, or to mock, the seriousness of the crises we’re in. It is not to give up on reality, or to invite despair. But during the long, strange months of lockdown, when skies cleared of vapour trails and motorways became eerily silent, what many people commented on was the sound of birdsong. Once the omnipresent roar of human activity was suppressed, the quiet, insistent language of birds bubbled back into people’s consciousness. That reminder of the living world, still present underneath — and despite — everything that is burying it, increasingly seems to make more sense than the clamour of human noise: the frenzied rationalisations of political commentators who feel the ground shifting under their feet; the demagogic bellowing of populist leaders everywhere; the polarising narratives of social media. A fleeting moment of quietness — like the silence after a massacre — allowed us, briefly, to hear something else. Birdsong tells its own story.

Poo-tee-weet.

Luke Winter

Flux

BLUSTERING THROUGH THE WORLD of dark, massed wings scissored the silence apart. The moon’s light spilled from behind a cloud, illuminating the chopping of a hundred-thousand butterflies as they blew high over the sea.

In the Four Arms in Northumberland, Generous Pete, two feet deep in a miracle of compassion, is buying a round for Michael the flat-earther.

Steve, behind the bar, so far would have heard Flat Michael elucidate his peculiar take on his ideas enough times to count sheep to sleep, had he been counting. But Steve had not been counting. Hegave a half smile as he passed Flat Michael on Pete’s pity pint.

The bubbles in the lager fizzed, their hands wrapped round the pints, the night wrapped round the pub, and the butterflies approached.

Some said it had been the storm gusts disrupting the migration patterns. Others rehashed old superstitions. Michael stuck to the facts, they had been clear enough. Steve turned up the television that hung over the corner of the bar. ‘Said local landlord J. Superhans.’

‘That’s time gentlemen.’ Steve shouted, and pressed a button next to the glass washer marked ‘close’. A taxidermied squirrel span on a small podium between the spirits bottles. LED lights giddied around the podium’s base.

Flat Michael wanted a bell for last orders, which only made Steve more fond of the corpse. The face of the squirrel appeared from behind its broad, erect tail as the podium rotated.

‘An absinthe and a bucks fizz.’

‘Fuck off. Bar’s closed Michael.’

‘You’ve barely called it. H’way man.’ Michael’s weather reddened

face pointed up at him.

Up from his stool, Pete ferreted baccy into a skin. He unhooked his coat from below the bar and hoisted it back round himself. He laboured with the buttons until each slotted home, lipped his pony-tail into his hood, and his hood over his head. The coat sagged down until Pete was only a bristly chin, eight fingers and one rolled up fag.

He raised his hand to Steve and Flat Michael in benediction, turned and pulled at the door to the Four Arms. It opened like a greyhound’s cage, and through it gusted shapes of clustered, blustering black.

The door ajar, tenebrous shapes billowing from its open edge, Pete turned. He had his shoulder to the door, then his back to it. With a great punt he got it shut again.

Dancing, fizzling shadows now filled the pub. Glitches of light would appear; an eye of Michael, the top of a beer tap, a button off a jukebox.

‘Flutterflies’ mumbled Michael. He swiped his hands through the air in front of him, walking blindly towards where he knew the hatch to the bar lay. There was a brief cry, a fall, then Michael was fumbling backwards, smearing the air with his hands. ‘You think I was born yesterday Flat Michael?’ Shouted Steve from the floor in front of the drinks fridges.

With nothing else to do, Pete lit his fag. A shield of blue smoke began to press outward around him. Pete sucked harder. The orange cherry glowed. The baccy cracked and spat, and blue smoke plumed from Pete’s lips. The smoke grew around him, and no butterfly broached it.

‘Fags lads, roll yourselves fags,’ shouted Pete.

Flat Michael stumbled towards the sound of Pete’s voice, taking himself out over a chair. Sucking the fag between his lips, Pete used two hands to flurry tobacco into papers. Michael’s yelps grew nearer. The din of wings of butterflies did not eclipse the sound of a clipper lighter being flicked, and Steve cursing purple somewhere amongst it.

Pete licked a second roll-up shut and began puffing. Michael huffed into Pete’s shield, continuing to paw at the air in front of him, swapping butterflies for dense smoke. Pete passed Flat Michael the fag and began rolling a third.

Steve pushed against the seething wings, hands in front of his eyes and mouth. As he broached the blue bubble of smoke, he was passed a lit cigarette by Pete, who now dangled a fag from either end of his mouth like a carcinogenic vampire.

The surfaces of the Four Arms had dissolved. Everything was woozy with movement. Wings beat smoke and smoke tangled wings. The three men stood.

‘What’s this? I reckon we turn the heating off, seal the windows, leave them to it,’ coughed Michael.

‘You’ve to ring the council. They send pest control’ said Pete.

A butterfly chopped into the smoke towards him. Pete held out a finger. It landed and clung to it, as if it had found a branch amid a flood. The butterfly was little bigger than a fifty pence piece.

‘Don’t think the council’s much use at this hour,’ said Steve.

‘How long will they be outside?’

‘Dawn,’ said Pete, and blew a jet of blue smoke at the butterfly on his finger. It flopped off, and lolloped on sloppy wings away from the smoke.

‘We’re as well pulling the curtains over us and kipping here.

Outside’ll be mental. You won’t be able to get up main street. Your farm’s a million miles away in this Michael. I heard about it happening in Wiltshire and Stroud. Not here like.’

‘Has one of yous got a GPS Mag on yez?’ asked Steve.

‘I’ve not bothered with them.’

‘Aye I’m not daft.’

‘They reckon it’s them sending nature doolally,’ said Steve.

‘Whey of course it is. My pigeons when I raced them, you get to know them like yeh kids. You cannit just say all homing pigeons are the same. If you take one part of their DNA and plug it into some other creature, that’s not going to work,’ said Pete.

‘Aye, but they think of nature as a machine. They reckon we’re built from modules, and they can swap modules arounds like parts in motor,’ said Michael.

‘Whey is that working how they’d hoped?’ Pete passed round more rollups.

‘It’s not them that’s caused this they’re saying. They’re saying its bats again. But organic drones appear, and then these mad swarms start happening.’

‘They’re saying the birds have had their migration routes thrown off.’

‘Not just birds, where’s these butterflies from? I’ve never seen one like these here,’ said Flat Michael.

‘Aye man but they said that with 5G that it was sending the cats nuts. But that calmed down,’ said Pete.

‘It’s them Organic Delivery Drones. I’m not one for conspiracy theories but,’ Steve sucked at his fag.

‘GPS Mags fucking with migration patterns?’

‘Something is.’ Michael was squinting, either from disgust or asphyxiation.

‘They learn off each other. What one member of a species learns, the easier it becomes for the rest of them to pick up. Morphic resonance. They’ve done scientific studies. Rupert Sheldrake. Look it up,’ said Michael.

‘Well I wouldn’t be surprised if these butterflies are the late tail following someone’s drone delivery.’

‘Are they stupid?’

‘Drones were just robots eh? Before these mutant pigeons.’

‘Seagulls.’

‘Aye, whey, DNA from both. Strength of a seagull, direction of a homing pigeon,’ said Pete.

‘And no eyes,’ chimed Michael.

‘Have you heard about eagles eating them? I seen a video. People are scared the eagles might start genetic mutations and that now.’

Steve ignored Michael’s horror.

‘They didn’t change the name. You notice that? Drones they still call them.’

‘Whey Huel fed eyeless mutants doesn’t roll off the tongue,’ said Pete.

‘Aye it was the GPS Mags they marketed. How cheap and easy it was. Take your Mag out the case, press the button, and drones will drop off your order. Fossil fuel free. No mention of mutants.’

‘Mental.’

‘Someone in the village will have gotten one.’

‘H’way Steve. Crack out the Sambuca,’ said Michael.

Around the Four Arms, under the light of the moon, the blizzard of butterflies thickened. The deluge shimmered along decreasing stars.

In a research depot, at the roosts, a homing pigeon pondered with its head on a slant. A drone screeched. Despite its well-winged travels, this homing pigeon could not understand its neighbour’s tongue. The pigeon had heard the Glasgow patter of the Clydeside racers. It knew the Geordie gabble of the Tyne. It had heard the Scouse smur, the Cork craic, the Basque brogue, the Morroccan fizzle. But the drones spoke like no other bird. The drone screeched again, flurried its wings into roosting flaps, shat, and settled down. A mechanical tube whined, and the shit was sucked away.

From the bowels of the depot, from racks of rows, similar screeches rebounded as other drones settled in to be shut down. The lights in block 12C went out.

In fulfilment unit 12D, twenty-two thousand drones were about to be woken with LED light and a feed injection. Outside the sound-proofed hanger, you would hear a high-pitched boil as the programme booted them up. At any one time, one hundred thousand drones were operational. By year two of the phased deployment, a million active units were planned. If the researchers could find a way to mitigate the lice.

Fossil Free Delivery
Faster. More Accurate. Planet Friendly.
Zero Carbon. Maximum speed.
Nozama Corp

In a country lane of hawthorn hedges adjacent to the town of Wirral, Robin Stew nicked a bolt into his crossbow. He stared up to the drone’s feathered belly, and squinted. Even if it knew he was there, and Robin had been careful to ensure that no one knew anything of this escapade, the drone would not blink. No fight or flight reactions had been selected for their DNA. No sex organs. They’d edited the eyes out from their mutants too. The sockets remained in the skeletal system, but the face had a smooth slope of feathers, interrupted only by the beak.

The specimen upon which Robin’s crossbow was trained was one of the newer units. Its plumage hue had been dialled down from the twitter-cyan of the betas, to this naval-grey. Hawks had taken too many of the first birds. £85k each they cost Nozama Corp. Three times what Robin had been paid per year as a delivery driver. The crossbow cost £200. Robin’s kill count was seventy-six. It was about to go up one. His was the second highest count within the Merseyside

Avenger cell. With the gentlest squeeze he hugged the trigger towards his chest.

Above the Four Arms in Northumberland, a drone mobbed by butterflies made little progress. The butterflies pushed towards the point it inhabited, suffocating its space. A mass of wings squashed there, pushing against the bodies above them. The whole tangled mass, a flapping mess, falling towards the earth.

‘Activists protesting Nozama Corp’s use of
genetically modified delivery drones have
stormed a depot in Staffordshire. Protestors
claim that Nozama Corp’s creation and
treatment of the creatures is unethical. They
allege working conditions for the creatures
to equate to animal cruelty. Nozama Corp
denies the allegations and maintains that its
drones are not sentient. Four people have
been arrested.’

The drone’s ribcage shone like teeth. The cavity that had once been its chest was lined with butterflies. Cocoons dangled from its intercostal muscles. Laying beneath the carcass, amongst the grass, the surface of a GPS Mag reflected the leaden dawn, smooth but for the etching of Nozama Corp’s logo.

As morning broached the Four Arms, Pete’s snaffled snores returned Michael from his dreams. Rectangles of amber light hung across the wall. Paintings of hunting parties, caked in dust were fringed by roosting butterflies.

Michael turned onto his side. The curtain that covered him rustled and cracked. His left arm speared from under the covers and clutched an uncorked bottle of Sambuca. He tilted the bottle to his mouth. Liquid burst from the bottle’s neck, swamping his lips, and ran thick and sticky over his chin.

You can listen to an audio version of this story here

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Luke Winter likes to help stories happen. He has made his living as a writer since 2014 by busking stories-on-demand on a typewriter on the street across Europe and the US. How lives in Scotland and runs a small press at prancepress. This is the first time he has been published by Dark Mountain and that makes him very happy.

UPDATE: a limited number of these hardback collections were originally for sale but are now sold out. There are PDF versions available however which you can find in our online shop.