Season 2 Overview

✧ Rural Relations Writing Club — Season 2 Overview ✧

#1 — Diasporic Attachments

Theme: Migration, rural belonging, remittances, memory, and lives stretched across homes

Date: 11 February 2026, 18.00–21.00

Dish: Pea stew with rice

Focus: We began by writing through the ways rural attachments travel across borders - through family, objects, money, phone calls, memories, return journeys, and the everyday negotiations of belonging between villages and cities.

#2 — Ecologies of Belief

Theme: Religion, gossip, social media, rumours, and everyday forms of knowledge

Date: 11 March 2026, 18.00–21.00Dish: Pilaf with a lot of green stuff & Cabbage Salad

Focus: We explored belief as a social practice and infrastructure: the ways religious rituals, gossip, phone conversations, social media, rumours, and informal forms of knowledge help people navigate uncertainty and maintain connections.

#3 — Editing: Over the Hills into Navel Gazing

Theme: Staying with a place, memory, language, and the unfinished text

Date: 8 April 2026, 18.00–21.00

Dish: Coconut Curry

Focus: We returned to our own writing, developing the material from the first two sessions and allowing texts to become more specific, personal, strange, or unresolved.

#4 — Editing: Knots in Time

Theme: Reading closely, feedback, tension, and staying with the text

Date: 6 May 2026, 18.00–21.30

Dish: Miso soup with udon

Focus: We began the collective editing process. Working in pairs, we read each other's drafts, identified what stayed with us, what felt unresolved, and where a text might open further. The session was less about fixing a text than learning how to listen to it.

#5 — Publication: Mock-up & Collective Design

Theme: Sequencing, visual language, and making the writing physical

Date: 26 June 2026, from 12.00

Dish: Tomato Stew with Tofu

Focus: We moved from editing into production, reading through the collected texts, deciding on their sequence, and working collectively with images, drawings, backgrounds, page interventions, and the cover. Together we made the physical mock-up for the publication.

#6 — Publication: RISO Printing & Binding

Theme: Printing, folding, binding, and making together

Date: 10 July 2026, 10.00–16.00

Location: Kiosk Rotterdam / Multi Tool Press

Dish: Miso Soup

Focus: We turned the mock-up into the final publication. Working with the RISO machine, we printed, collated, folded, bound, and assembled the copies together.