Charlotte Du Cann
Charlotte Du Cannn is a writer and editor in grassroots communications. She is editor-in-chief of the Transition Free Press. and from 2011-12 founded and edited the Transition Network's Social Reporting Project, based on the community Norwich blog, This Low Carbon Life. She was born in 1956 and worked as a journalist in London, specialising in design, lifestyle and the shift of cultural values. During the 90s she travelled and wrote books about medicine plants and modern dreamtime. Some of these experiences formed the stories in 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth (Two Ravens Press 2012). At present she works for the Dark Mountain Project and is editing a book about Transition and the Arts with author Lucy Neal. You can find a selection of her writings here. Contact: theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk.
Environment |
Jun 13, 2013
Flight of the Butterflies
In many ways dystopias are easier to write than a realist fiction that can look at the awesome forces that are out of kilter on the earth.
Food & Water |
Jun 7, 2013
ROOTS, SHOOTS AND SEEDS: The Spear Carriers
Roots, Shoots and Seeds is a book about the local community food movement, set around the wide arable fields of East Anglia, following the tracks of the crops that grow in these clay and sandy soils, from barley to flax, from rapeseed to potatoes.
Society |
May 1, 2013
Merry May Day and welcome to our new summer edition!
Merry May Day everyone! And welcome to our on-line summer edition. We’re 24 pages of full-on, full colour news and views. Great photographs, great articles, contributed by Transitioners and community activists working in the field. Ordinary people doing extraordinary stuff in all kinds of places: in the city, in the wild, in books, housing co-ops, small businesses, allotments, in the …
Society |
Apr 8, 2013
Considering Transition community events as cultural and creative acts
Our work comes from necessity, rather than theory: it’s grassroots, vernacular, based on gatherings, rooted in time and place. It doesn’t have a hero writer or diva centre stage, with an audience gazing passively upward, but takes place in a room full of participants, with an organising, often invisible, core. Everyone belongs in this space and time. Everyone has a voice.
Society |
Mar 25, 2013
We can work it out
So I tried to explain how it is in Transition that a lot of the learning and teaching we do is not that formal. As we sat by Nick’s fire with tea and hot cross buns, we talked about skill-share and seed-swaps, plant walks and bee talks, Trade Schools and Green Drinks, it struck me that there was a time when I didn’t know about any of this knowledge-sharing, workshop-giving world …
Society |
Mar 21, 2013
the darkness around us is deep
I don’t live in London anymore and it must have been years now since I walked past these stone fountains at Lancaster Gate. My parents ashes are scattered among the horse chestnut trees at the water’s edge and I have come to touch base in a hard winter, when it seems my world has come to a grinding halt. Your parents can give you good reasons for being here, so long as you …
Environment |
Feb 8, 2013
Exit from Fairyland
I have heard the thunderclap of a peacock butterfly as it flew past in the garden, and felt the shocking vibration of a hummingbird as it hovered between my eyes on the mountain. I have walked at night through a field of glow-worms, gone swimming in a sea of phosphorescence and wished upon a shooting star. I have seen a lady orchid gleam like a torch in the dark wood in France. I have heard …
Society |
Feb 1, 2013
Transition Free Press Issue #1 is here!
We are published today! 10,000 copies of our first Spring issue are now being distributed throughout the UK. Do check out your local hub and spread the word. It might just be the best £1 you’ve spent in a long while. If you or your intiative are not near a distributor, you can check out our on-line version...
Society |
Jan 17, 2013
Slow train to Hebden Bridge
This month is all about time. I have been running up against a major deadline with the new edition of the Transition Free Press and haven't had a minute spare to write any posts. Ironic then that this week's report should be an introduction to Playing for Time -a collaborative handbook about Transition and the Arts, authored by Lucy Neal. Last year we set off to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire to …
Society |
Jan 2, 2013
Holding this book in your hands
Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet, once said that a writer’s task in a world ruled by tyranny and abstractions, is to praise the real and the ordinary. The people in the room, the earth outside your door, the things you hold beloved in your hands. I’m remembering those words as I wrap this Dark Mountain anthology in its brown paper jacket and head out down the frosty lane …MORE ARTICLES +
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