The Art of Going
Eleven live events around the UK and beyond next month
Today we’re announcing the full details of the tour with which I’ll take this book out into the world (or a few corners of it) next month. There’s more in this post on each of these happenings and the history behind them – or if you want to cut to the chase, you can head for my Events page.
Still here? Then I want to tell you a story that starts with a couple of lines from a poem by Wendell Berry…
To get back before dark
is the art of going.
Lee Hoinacki remembers those lines from ‘Traveling at Home’ when he receives a letter from his old friend Ivan Illich, asking if he would come to Mexico to help with the preparation of a book that Illich is writing.
The time had been when these two men would travel thousands of miles around the world together, year after year, but Hoinacki can no longer imagine getting on another airplane. With each subsequent trip, the experience has become ‘more painful, more disorienting’ – from the body search, once reserved for suspected criminals, to the false promise of a ‘new start’ that the placeless arrivals hall seems to offer. Are there any good grounds, he wonders, on which to ‘violate the art of living’s maxim, “home before dark”’?
Yes, he answers, there is one: friendship could be the one good reason to travel farther than you can get back by nightfall. And so he books a ticket for the bus that the homebound farmworkers take, south from Illinois to Laredo and across the border.
These old man’s qualms seem out of time, no doubt, in a world where some are ready to insist that air travel is a human right, while others regard it as indefensible on the grounds of the carbon emissions alone. But I found myself thinking of that passage in Hoinacki’s marvellous, wandering book, Stumbling Towards Justice, as I began making preparations to take my own book out into the world.
Because, if I am going to be away from home for weeks at a time – if I’m going to miss bedtime reading, miss the jokes and quarrels that Alfie and I have on the walk to school, miss sharing the work of the household with Anna and leave her having to run the show on her own – then there needs to be a damned good reason for my absence. It can’t just be a circuit of selling and signing books, giving the same talk and looking at the same hotel walls in a different city, night after night.
So when I threw this open a few weeks ago and asked for your invitations, suggestions and wild ideas, it was Hoinacki’s principle that came to shape this tour. I am travelling to be with friends, old and new, to take At Work in the Ruins into conversation with people whose work has mattered to me, and some of those conversations will happen quietly on walks together, some will be caught on camera or microphone, while some will bring together a whole hall full of people for an evening.
I wish we could have gone to all the places from which invitations came in. There’s no hierarchy determining where this tour ended up going and there are dear friends who I will miss out on seeing. The resulting trip is shaped by the exigencies of attempting to bring together a thing with this many moving parts, in five weeks, from a cold start, and all while getting some Yuletide time offline. So deep thanks to the local organisers who are making these events happen – and my apologies to those who were disappointed. If we can make a success of this tour, and if my family agrees to it, then there will be further trips in the months and years ahead, with the chance to bring the stories and the lines of thought that I’m carrying into other conversations in other rooms.
With that in mind, then, a request – in many cases, the organisers of these events aren’t regular promoters with huge email lists, but people who feel there’s something that matters in my work and want to bring it to the places where they live. They are doing a great job of getting the word out there, but we would all be glad of your help. So it would be an act of kindness if you were to share the invitations that follow with folks in the parts of the world I’ll be visiting and spread them along networks where they are likely to be welcome.
Finally, I know that many of you reading this are an ocean or more away from anywhere I’ll be visiting next month. Maybe one day the pull of friendship will be strong enough to take me beyond Europe again. In the meantime, though, there will be news of more online events and gatherings coming up on the far side of this tour.
Thanks, as always, for your support – and keep reading for the story of where I’ll be heading, once I board the southbound sleeper train that leaves Stockholm on the evening of 4 February.
The full programme for the tour is here – or you can click on the headlines below to go straight to the booking links for each event.
5/2 • Frankfurt • with Julian Boehme
A few years ago, my Dark Mountain co-conspirators Charlotte Du Cann and Dougie Strang travelled to Germany for ‘a festival for wild organic theatre’ and came back speaking of the experience in tones of wonder. Julian Boehme, one of the organisers of Winterwerft Festival, took part in the Homeward Bound series I taught in 2021, which gave us the chance to get to know each other a little. So I was delighted to realise that my southward journey would fit with the timing of this year’s festival, allowing me to stop off in Frankfurt for a public conversation with Julian.
After Frankfurt, the journey continues to Brussels, London and the Isle of Skye. There will be more to report on those adventures in due course, but we pick up the thread of the public events a couple of days after the book’s official publication date…
11/2 • Glasgow • with Alastair McIntosh, Caroline Ross & Dougie Strang
In the spring of 2003, I read a book called Soil and Soul and, on reaching the final page, sat down and wrote to its author. His name was Alastair McIntosh and he was one of the people whose words helped me find my bearings when I walked away from what had looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I remember Alastair taking the stage at the first Dark Mountain festival in 2010, when I’d just endured a bruising ninety minutes going head to head with George Monbiot. He grasped my hand and whispered, ‘You’ve given me a lot to work with, Dougald,’ then went on to lift the packed hall to another state of mind and soul.
The weekend of that festival was also when I first met the writer, gardener and storyteller Dougie Strang, who became one of the fire-keepers of Dark Mountain and brought the project to Scotland as the organiser of the Carrying the Fire gatherings. And it was to one of those gatherings that
turned up a few years later – a story she tells in her latest post at – and found her way into the weave of friendships and collaborations that I've had the joy to be part of in these past few years. I write about Caroline's work making art without oil from 'found and ground' materials in one of the final chapters of At Work in the Ruins, where I am gathering stories of relationships between scientists and non-scientists in turning aside from the ‘big path’ of modernity.So truly, I couldn’t imagine a finer weave of friendship and mutual inspiration for the first public event after the book’s publication, nor a finer setting in which to gather than the former boatyard in Govan that is home to GalGael.
13/2 • Newcastle • with Martyn Hudson
(Booking link coming soon.)
It can’t have been many years after reading Alastair’s Soil and Soul that I first ran into Martyn Hudson. In those days, I was trying to join up the threads of the writers whose work had called to me and helped me find a way through the fog. Along with Ivan Illich, two other men of my grandfathers’ generation had played this role for me: John Berger and Alan Garner. One was best known as a Marxist art critic, the other as a children’s novelist, but neither description does justice to the man. The one person I could find who was writing about both these writers was Martyn, and that is how we came into correspondence, and eventually had the chance to meet.
These days, Martyn teaches at the University of Northumbria, and I’m delighted to be visiting there for an afternoon gathering with students and staff, followed by a public conversation. The evening event will take place at the NewBridge Project and will be my first visit there since the spring of 2018, when I held the opening workshop of their season of Deep Adaptation events. Since then, NewBridge has moved into new premises, next door to Shieldfield House, a modernist tower block built in the 1960s that is among the city’s tallest buildings. This seems a fitting setting in which to talk about one of the book’s themes, the failure of the promises of ‘modernity’ and where we go from here. So we’re calling this event At Work in the Ruins of Modernity.
14/2 • Leeds • with Lydia Catterall
Among the participants in that workshop in Newcastle five years ago was the writer and artist Lydia Catterall. In the years since, we have spoken regularly over Zoom, and I’ve come to cherish Lydia’s generosity of spirit and her way of holding questions, so I can’t wait to bring our conversations into public view as we talk about the book together in Leeds.
Once again, Lydia took part in one of the Homeward Bound series I taught during the pandemic – as did Jo James, the minister of Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel, a wonderful venue in the centre of the city which is hosting this event. Among its virtues, the chapel has a bar which will be open for us on the night, so this is one of those events where there will be a chance to hang out and chat after the more structured part of the evening is over.
15/2 • Sheffield
Near the end of the book, I tell the story of how I used to stand in the queue at the Marks & Spencer’s food store at Sheffield station, looking at the posters that declared ‘PLAN A: Because there is no Plan B’ (the slogan of a CSR campaign the company was running in those years), and wondering, for what is there no Plan B? For high street department stores and food outlets that sell very fine cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, like the ones I was queuing to pay for – or for liveable human existence? Or were we no longer making such distinctions?
Sheffield was home for much of my twenties, a city that will always be close to my heart, and the place I was living when Paul and I began work on what became the Dark Mountain manifesto. So this event feels like a homecoming – and I look forward to a warm South Yorkshire welcome at the Hideaway on Eyre Lane, where we’re being hosted by the ‘think and do tank’ Opus. Another friend from the fellowship that grew out of Homeward Bound, the artist Ian Nesbitt, is arranging to provide some simple food, a bowl of dal for everyone who comes, in collaboration with the Open Kitchen project.
17/2 • Dartington • with Satish Kumar
The Parting of the Ways: The end of climate politics as we know it & the choices that lie ahead
I remember sitting under the old chestnut tree on the lawn at Schumacher College, the first time Paul Kingsnorth and I taught there, the week he signed with Faber & Faber and I got the invitation to work for Sweden’s national theatre. Already, before I learned the full story of the Dartington Estate, I was discovering that this is a place where things happen. The more I’ve learned, the more extraordinary it gets. The modern history of Dartington starts with the poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore sending Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst to Devon to find the most beautiful site on which to establish an English version of the experiments in adult education he had been creating in India. Within twenty years, the 1945 Labour manifesto – arguably the most significant document in 20th century British politics – was being written in the old fireplace of what is now the White Hart pub in Dartington Hall.
So when I was asked to give an Earth Talk in the Great Hall at Dartington as part of this tour, I decided that this was the occasion to deliver my thoughts on the political implications of what I am saying in At Work in the Ruins. This is a story that begins in the era of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for the Future, but it will take us back to the origins of Green politics and its attempts to call industrial society into question, in order to frame the choices that have become starker during the time of Covid.
I won’t be presenting a manifesto – I’m more poet than policymaker – but I’m honoured to be offered this platform and also that Satish Kumar, the co-founder of Schumacher College, will introduce and moderate the event.
18/2 • Stroud • with Gail Bradbrook
There’s a story I tell in the book of a talk I gave at Stroud Valleys Artspace in October 2018. At the end of the evening, the organisers invited a local woman up onto the stage. ‘A few of us are organising a rebellion,’ she said, not words I had expected to hear that night. That was the first I heard of Extinction Rebellion and the first time I met Gail Bradbrook.
Five years on from the beginnings of XR, I’m glad to be returning to SVA for a Saturday afternoon event in which Gail and I will talk together about the new climate movements that emerged that year, the reflections on those movements that I offer in the book and where we find ourselves today.
20/2 • Norwich • with Ed Gillespie, Charlotte Du Cann & Rupert Read
Since the Covid spring of 2020, I’ve been hosting The Great Humbling podcast with the ‘recovering sustainability consultant’ Ed Gillespie. Over four series, this has involved the pair of us puzzling through the tangled narratives of these strange years and reflecting on the books, articles, films and encounters that have made us think. At this early evening event in Norwich – instigated by the philosopher and campaigner Rupert Read (author of Why Climate Breakdown Matters) – we are going to record a special episode of the podcast in front of a live audience. We’ll be joined as guests by Rupert himself and also by Charlotte Du Cann, co-director of the Dark Mountain Project.
I first met Charlotte when she came to report on the second Dark Mountain festival in 2011 for The Independent. Within a year or so, she had been drawn in and became first our art editor, then the producer of many of our books, the editor of the online edition and – following my departure in 2019 – co-director of the Dark Mountain Project as a whole. Charlotte is also a remarkable writer, most recently the author of After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time.
In a city that has been a hub of Green activism and climate research, this event is billed as ‘A Climate Conversation that goes where other such conversations do not reach’. I reckon we can live up to that billing.
21/2 • Brighton • with CJ Thorpe-Tracey
When we wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto, Paul and I thought we were starting a literary journal, a home for the kinds of writing and conversation that we couldn’t find anywhere else. And that’s part of what we did, but already by the manifesto’s launch in July 2009, there were clues that the project would branch in other directions – not least, the line-up of musicians who had offered to play at that launch.
It was that night in the barn at the back of a riverside pub, a couple of miles’ walk along the Thames towpath from Oxford, that I first heard Chris T-T play. As a singer-songwriter, he roused the crowds at many Dark Mountain events, and he has been a great friend and supporter of my writing over the years. When he retired from his music career and reemerged as the writer, speaker and radio-maker
, he told me that my willingness to leave behind the organisations and projects I had created was one of the examples that helped him make that decision, so I hope that Chris T-T fans won’t hold that against me.I’m delighted that he’s invited me to be the guest at his first Border Crossing Live event, building on the success of
newsletter which he has been writing for the past few years. I look forward to joining him in conversation at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton, which I last visited to see Alastair McIntosh speak, more than a decade ago.22/2 • London • with Phoebe Tickell
And so we circle back to London for a pair of events on my last full day in the UK. First at The Conduit, a workspace for ‘changemakers’, where Phoebe Tickell and I will home in on the troubling proposition around which the book circles: What if it’s time to stop talking about climate change?
Anna, Alfie and I got to know Phoebe when we spent two weeks as a ‘family-in-residence’ at Newspeak House, the London College of Political Technologists, in the summer of 2019. (This features in the book, too, when I tell the story of coming downstairs after putting Alfie to bed and finding the launch for Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism in full swing in the event space below.) Early in the pandemic, Phoebe and I began talking regularly over Zoom and I’ve found our conversations immensely generative. At one point, we even considered making a joint application for the position of Director of Emergence at the think tank Perspectiva.
Phoebe has been busy developing her Moral Imaginations project over the past couple of years, but we picked up the thread of our ongoing conversation recently and I’m looking forward to bringing this to an audience for the first time.
(This is a private event for Conduit members, but we have been allocated a limited number of tickets which are available to non-members here. Members should book through the Conduit site.)
22/2 • London • Somerset House
After The Conduit, it’s a short walk to Somerset House, which was the scene of the last project of my London years: a week-long ‘free school’ in honour of John Berger, Redrawing the Maps, which took place in the autumn of 2012. This is also where my publisher, Chelsea Green, has its offices – and so they are hosting an evening in the Paint Room bar that will be a celebration of At Work in the Ruins and a reflection on the conversations that it has begun to set in motion.
Like all the events on the tour, there will be a chance to hear me speak about the book – and, on this occasion, I’ll also share some stories of the encounters that this journey has led me into so far, the public conversations and the quieter meetings that I’ve had along the way. The bar is booked until 10.30pm, so we can stick around and raise a glass, old friends and new, in gratitude for the strange fortune through which this book has brought us together.
The next morning, I’ll begin the journey home. There will be stops in Paris and Hamburg before I get there and no doubt there will be further stories to be told about all of this.
But for now, it is time for me to send this out, as I look forward to seeing many of you next month and thank you once again for your help in sharing these invitations with those who might want to be in one or other of the rooms in which we’ll meet along the way.
DH