Dougald Hine

Returning to a wider conversation

"Why don't you write more?" another writer asked me.

"Because there's no better feeling than the moment when it's finished, and nothing I'll try harder to avoid than sitting down to start."

That's true enough, but there's something else. Writing is so bound up with authority. You don't sign a contract with a dance move. We still live with the legacy of the book as magical object or implement of indoctrination, promising the final word.

What helps - the reason I write more these days - is spending time with artists and improvisers, people for whom words are a second language, and remembering that even the most carefully crafted text is only a contribution to a wider conversation, in which words are only one form of expression.

Books & pamphlets

  • Dark Mountain: Issue 3 (2012) edited with Paul Kingsnorth and Adrienne Odasso.
  • Despatches from the Invisible Revolution (2012) edited with Keith Kahn-Harris.
  • Dark Mountain: Issue 2 (2011) edited with Paul Kingsnorth.
  • Dark Mountain: Issue 1 (2010) edited with Paul Kingsnorth.
  • COMMONSense (2009) with Anne-Marie Culhane & Access Space.
  • Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009) with Paul Kingsnorth.

Articles & essays

Blog posts

I end up blogging on various sites, besides having gone through several of my own. My current personal blog is here, while in August 2010 I began exploring a line of thought about the unravelling of the western middle class lifestyle - and the limited sympathy we should give ourselves over this - under the heading of Collapsonomics! My old blog was Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job). This is a selection of my more substantial posts from there and elsewhere.