Dark Matter publishes writing and artwork created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological collapse. The journal is a home for dreams, visions, and communications with the nonhuman world, especially those that seek to heal our broken relationship to the earth. As most of the world goes on with business as usual, others are asking: “How shall we live in these times?” Dark Matter is a home for the voices of these others; we welcome writing in all forms and genres, and artwork in all mediums. In After•Words, writers offer responses to books, films, artwork, cultural events—not necessarily current ones—that they feel make an important contribution to our mission. Dreams and Visions features dreams, visions, nightmares or communications with nonhuman beings that respond in some way to this era of escalating danger and damage–and ideally provide clarity and/or guidance.

From editorial, Issue #1: The times are dark. But as Rebecca Solnit points out in her recent essay on Virginia Woolf’s darkness, dark and murky places are where magic happens: “…the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.” The dark matter that scientists say makes up eighty five percent of our universe, and about which they admit they know very little, is also, they say, its animating force. “To me,” Solnit continues, “the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” Writing of our planet’s mineral underworld in Orion (May 2012), Sandra Steingraber reports that “the biosphere extends a mile or so more into the dark heart of the planet.” And this deep and essentially unknowable life, which makes up more than half of all life on earth, she writes, may be “contributing to climate stability.” What we don’t know may yet save us…

Read: About the Editors