Hello!

I’m Charlotte Du Cann, a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. I work as a co-director of the Dark Mountain Project - and in between tasks and deadlines explore the lexicon of the living world, mostly around the wooded, marshy, salty edge of East Anglia where I live.

My writing reflects on a world in turmoil and the ways we can face collapse, the beauty of relationships with time, creatures, plants, stones, myth and memory. I have written several books during a life with my hands on the keyboard and my eye on the time. The most recent chart a life travelling out and powering down. You can read about 52 Flowers That Shook My World and After Ithaca here.

I was once a features journalist in London and lived a fashionable bohemian life. In 1991 I left the city and went to Mexico with a one-way ticket to investigate a deeper ancestral relationship with the Earth with my fellow voyager, Mark Watson. We were on the road for ten years, and when we returned to England, we began to make sense of our work with people and places during these years. These took different forms, from writing to activism, from workshops to performance, and now are a core thread of The Red Tent. You can read about these and a selection of essays on my website here.

Who is this for?

All folk are welcome to read these posts but my main intent for The Red Tent is to transmit what I have learned in the same way a dancer passes on the shape of a dance: by showing the moves made in my life as a writer and explorer of consciousness. An exercise class in perception if you like. It will make most sense to those who are keen to the troubles of our time, who also wish to break out from the fixed and mechanical thinking that has caused them, and allow other possibilities to reveal themselves. Those who know that to create a culture that can address these crises requires becoming a different kind of person: a fully human being in alliance with the intelligences of a multi-stranded non-human planet.

When will this happen?

This series will be running over the course of a year, starting at this Autumn Equinox (2023) This first set of posts will cover the basics of the inquiry, our ‘ground state calibration’. The second set about the practice of writing as a metaphysical tool. I’ll be posting twice a month. It would be great to be supported by paid subscriptions and some of the later and deeper posts will be for those subscribers. Benefits of being a paid subscriber include:

– Full access to the archive practices and resonant reads from the ‘Shelf’ (starting in 2024)

– Opportunities to meet fellow practitioners and share work

– Free copy of my book about plant medicine 52 Flowers That Shook My World (PDF)

– Discounted copy of my book about the mythos After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time.

Do get in touch if you would like any of these. All subscriptions are much appreciated and go towards funding further exploration and writing work.

Thanks for reading this and hope to see you soon!

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