“Departure.
The journey has begun.
There is no turning back — it’s far too late for that.
They told us it will take forty days and forty nights.
To cross The Deep.
I came with nothing.”

The Deep is a novella in eight-hundred lines recounting a voyage of forty days and forty nights from the point of view of two narrators in sections of ten lines per narrator per twenty-four hour period. It was written collaboratively over forty consecutive days in the winter of 2024 as the nights lengthened towards the solstice in the wetland landscape of southwest Finland. What used to be islands now rise as wooded hillocks from flat fields and the shadows of geese move against the sky.

The Deep is the eighth chapter of the constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths and was printed in the summer of 2025 in a limited edition of three copies. Two copies will be sent out into the world to be read while the third will remain in our studio in North Karelia as a reference and anchor. When a reader finishes the book, it is their task to give or mail it to a new reader. It is our hope that the two copies will circulate slowly over the coming months and years in a quiet eulogy to the inter-library loan system. The book is free to read. The only cost is to mail it to the next reader. If for any reason you will struggle to pay the postage, please contact us and we will do our best to help. In the first pages of the print publication is a readers’ log. Please add your name (or pseudonym), location and the date you begin to read. If the log pages fill up, please add a loose paper insert. If you choose, you may also take a picture of the log and send it to us at info[at]oncewewereislands.com.

To request a copy of the book please fill out the contact form here, and we will add you to the list of readers. Copies will be circulated in order of signing-up.

The text has also been translated by Aslan into the Queer constructed language Damiá under the title Pier and appears in its own online edition as a downloadable PDF.