Poster design and photo by Ioana
Rural Relation Writing Club
Contributors: Ioana Lupascu
What stories take root in rural relations—and how might writing help us trace them?
A slow-growing series of writing workshops exploring rural life, memory, and imagination. Each session centres on a theme—kinship, grief, or harvest—and invites participants to write from personal experience, collective rituals, and everyday observations.
Gatherings follow a simple rhythm: we eat together, write through a series of gentle prompts, and share what we choose to. The space is informal, welcoming, and open to anyone curious about rural storytelling in all its forms and languages—no writing experience needed.
Initiated and organised by Ioana from Seasonal Neighbours in collaboration with Myvillages, the group grows from the belief that rural stories deserve time, attention, and collective care.
You can reach me at writing.rural.relations@gmail.com
A slow-growing series of writing workshops exploring rural life, memory, and imagination. Each session centres on a theme—kinship, grief, or harvest—and invites participants to write from personal experience, collective rituals, and everyday observations.
Gatherings follow a simple rhythm: we eat together, write through a series of gentle prompts, and share what we choose to. The space is informal, welcoming, and open to anyone curious about rural storytelling in all its forms and languages—no writing experience needed.
Initiated and organised by Ioana from Seasonal Neighbours in collaboration with Myvillages, the group grows from the belief that rural stories deserve time, attention, and collective care.
You can reach me at writing.rural.relations@gmail.com
✧ Rotterdam Writing Sessions Overview ✧
#1 — Neighbours
Theme: Kinship, feuds, friendships, and everyday ties
Date: 5 March 2025, 18.00 - 20.30
Dish: Pilaf with cabbage salad and dill
Focus: Explored the emotional and social bonds that shape proximity—how rural and urban neighbours relate, remember, and sometimes clash.
#2 — Rituals of Grief and Mourning
Theme: Loss, rituals, and shared memories
Date: 7 April 2025, 18.00 - 20.30
Dish: Tomato Pea Stew
Focus: Attuned to the quieter layers of grief—personal, collective, and environmental. Writing as a way to hold absence and remembrance.
#3 — Sowing
Theme: Seeds, soil, and the working hands
Date: 8 May 2025, 18.00 - 20.30
Dish: Roasted Paprika Stew
Focus: Looked at rural labour and the temporalities of sowing—what is planted, passed on, or left dormant.
#4 — Kitchens, Cooking & Labour
Theme: Recipes, routines, and relational care
Date: 4 June 2025, 18.00 - 20.30
Dish: Bean Salad
Focus: Thinking with food, preparation, and domestic work as sites of memory, connection, and artistic method.
#5 — Creatures of the Night: Soil, Fur, Feather
Theme: Ecologies shaped by farming, wildness, and cohabitation
Dish: TBC
Date: 2 July 2025, 18.00 - 20.30
Focus: Attuning to the lives that move alongside us—seen and unseen. From burrowing animals to night sounds, we’ll write through the traces of shared landscapes, feral relations, and more-than-human presence.
#6—Visitors: Those Who Come & Go
Theme: Hospitality, intrusion, welcome, and distance
Dish: TBC
Date: 6 August 2025, 18.00 - 20.30
Focus: Exploring the rhythms of arrival and departure—how visitors shape the spaces they enter, how we host or guard, and what movements tell us about belonging, care, and boundaries.