As the second season of «dears, write» comes to a close, we are delighted to share a polyphonic composition drawn from the many texts that emerged over the past months.*

Between September 2024 and May 2025, our monthly dears, write gatherings at the Dada Library were once again dedicated to reading and writing in the company of others. Over time, a vibrant and ever-shifting community took shape, with newcomers, passersby, and curious visitors joining a core of regulars at each meeting.

Beyond shared snacks and the pleasure of hearing new texts, what we value most is the opening and inhabiting of a non-transactional space, free from the need to perform, produce, or be efficient. The invitation is simple: to slow down, to step outside the rhythms of pressure and exposure, and to sink into presence, into listening, into writing, here, now, with and in the present situation.

We are now happy to share the texts that have emerged from this shared practice, and we warmly thank all the dear writers who joined us.

DEARS – Delphine, Nicole and Robert

_______

1.

Some losses happen, some are imposed, and some are wished for. All are stored in the body. What happens to grief when it is sung? 

2.  

even if the shadow be merciful 
we remain thirsty for the original 
but that twin longs to stay hidden 
its other grows too much 
for the eye to take-in 
before drinking wary animals 
circle the dark pool it makes 
night against shallow night 
impossible to say which is which 
the shadow a shield for it to hide 
within the nest it’s made 

3.

Sometimes I ghost my notebooks, I don’t take my meds and purposely want to feel and feel it all unfiltered. I let myself be a mess and reconcile with those parts of me in a masochistic act. Until I am too much and then I turn to pen and paper, regulate myself and my nervous system - I mean, feelings. I’m unable to deal with them because I never wanted to. I live life almost in apathy until I feel again too fast, too much, and I must empty myself again on flattened and smoothed fibre that can hold my ink through time. My feelings will be kept in time, but they won’t participate in the present. For in the present, they mess up the future.
I can only wish to never be dry ink and keep flowing, and have my own chosen interruptions. 

4. 

New Material (Family Material)

Black on white
every A and B and C are family:

Mother’s orderly riddles
elegant and raised by discipline

Father’s normographic slant
jailbird and prison guard at once 

And here I am, every letter vain and independent
wanting to be loved for being different

As and Bs and Cs 
bickering like odd Carabinieri in a puppet show

the rookie clown, irritating
the grey and jaded lone wolf with a habit

struggling to agree in distant dialects 

5. 

A person is breath and blood and bones, all becoming. 
Is becoming backwards a change or a reaffirmation? 

6.

It comes from acts of love and random acts of kindness. 

7.

Estás en trance,
entras
en múltiples realidades
entre
mundos y rumbos
gleichzeitig, gleichsam
same.

Swim in paradox
here poetry lives,
edges change,
boundaries blur.
Here trance is
transcended
with words, with worlds,
with enzymes and endings.

8.

When it came to you, I’m afraid it too, was written in the stars, 
or, rooted deeply across continents, woven between branches of Baobab trees,
bigger, older and wiser than us all. 
You came in a dream, 
and then it became less about me, 
and more about us,  
and how we would come to be. 

9.

The always thinking you should be somewhere else. Never right where, when, how, why etc. Not belonging to yourself. Cause belonging at the heart of you is what it’s really about.
Being young means fearing the future; being older means fearing the past… what might happen vs. what did. What might never happen vs. what never did. Anxiety and regret.
Trading one for the other.
Who you were and who you are now, what you never thought to appreciate until it was gone.
What we want to be doing most. Is it achievable, this time and place where we know, we feel this is exactly where we should be and nowhere else? This is precisely the book we should be writing?
Maybe we keep looking for constancy, for a state that lasts, instead of appreciating the movement. Maybe there is no lasting belonging if you’re someone who is experiencing constant becoming. The ought instead of the is. The adventure of change, of never standing still, of never really belonging anywhere, because what you crave is experience.
Maybe that is what drinking life to the fullest is, maybe that’s what we’ve always been doing. To live in this constant becoming, of always desiring, new, beyond. Pushing boundaries, not setting them.
Not for the world, but for ourselves, the constant searching and refusing to settle is the becoming. This is who we are. 

10.

Displacements are a common experience in human and non-human beings leading to layers of incestuous relationships. All is lost but a faint echo of discomfort. Bones litter our footsteps as a black sun rises to reflect on our circular wanderings. Silence can mean forgiveness in the darkest of galaxies. All voices together create the white noise of total eclipse. 

11. 

Today, but truthfully, every other day
If not everyday:
I think feelings as opposed to thinking words. 
This translates very poorly
As I will say things I don’t mean
I think I understand them as they come
Then it makes no sense to me

12.  

I can see vivid images only when away from the bright screens. 

13.

The crater… the despair.
The despair of…
It’s so hard to put into words. This is where one medium ends and another begins.
Where an arrangement of images, of bodies and worlds, a frame, a cut, an expression, a cry, a gasp, a face caked in mud, an anxious violin, a hovering bass triplet… where all of these pieces in community say what words never could. Create this… Beklemmung, this sense of tragedy in the body that is so much more than the word “tragedy”
– so much 
more than these seven letters, this concept, these goggles on your face that keep the core of it hidden from you.
“The horrors of war.”
As limited as it is futile… As non-sensical as it is empty. There are no words to describe this, though we try. No words to describe these events, though we try, what Arendt named the unthinkable, that for which there is no name. That which we fail to understand, and so we fall victim to its power.
They will not fear it until they understand it, and they will not understand it until they’ve used it. 

14.

Feelings are not a disease of adolescents alone. 

15. 

I’m not worried about my blue tones, the shades will bring me back to orange burnt, to Venice’s sunsets in the late summer. 

I have this sudden urge to talk in all the languages I half know - if you get me that’s nice for you, and I might ask you: what did I mean to say all this time? But then again, do all my sentences have to carry meaning?
Tonight I might speak like a popcorn. 

16.

Freedom just another word for no more brain to lose:
Denk mich müde, suche Ruh, klappe meine Ohren zu.
Hallo, ihr Gedanken mein, lasst das laute Trommeln sein!
  
Idries Shah: The way of the sufi
New York E. P. Dutton 1970
Be sure not to train yourself to music in case this holds back from even higher perception. 

17. 

I still feel blue, by the way. I thought I’d feel green by the end of March, but blue seems to have just begun, or anyway, it is lingering strongly. 

18.

Poetry satisfies my sense of touch. Is this a confession, a lie or a wish? 

19.

“There’s no wrong way to live life.”
“I don’t know, you could be a Nazi.”
Shit, I thought. He was always contradicting me with clearer anecdotes and bigger vocabulary. Now he was literally making me question my way of living. 

20. 

Human is animal with the arrogance of a species having lost touch with its own nature. Fear rules its thoughts, disguised as reason. And see how safe we made the world extinguishing birds and insects, terrorizing terrorist for good safety reasons. 

1., 3., 5., 12., 15., 17., 18. Jo Bahdo, 25.09.2024, 30.10.2024, 04.12.2024, 29.01.2025, 26.02.2025, 26.03.2025, 28.05.2025

2. Derek JG Williams, 28.05.25 

4. Marco Antonioni, 29.02.2024

12. Sofia Hidalgo, 04.12.2024

6., 8., 19. Jill Blocker, 26.02.2025, 26.03.2025

7. Laura Cincera, 27.03.2025

9., 13. Nicole Nickerson, 28.05.2025

10., 14., 16., 20., Chris Kuhn, 25.09.2024, 28.05.2025, 26.03.2025

*

The season 2 of «dears, write» took place in the Dada Library, from September 2024 to May 2025. The event series is initiated by DEARS – magazine for writing practices at the crossroads of poetry, art and experimental writing, and intends to activate a non-transactional space for writing as a way of relating.
The meetings unfold in three sequences: we first listen to a selection of texts read aloud, then dive into writing, and finally read passages of the texts just written in a spontaneous collective reading. 

At the first meeting (25.09.2024), we read poems from The book of a Hundred Hands by Cole Swensen, excerpts from Oppression by Juliàn Fuks (both in English), and passages from Blutbuch by Kim de L’Horizon (in German).  

At the second meeting (30.10.2024), we read passages from An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, and The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde (all in English). 

At the third meeting (04.12.2024), we read passages from Bitter Soil by Mahasweta Devi, Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti (both in English), and Sprache und Sein by Kübra Gümüsay (in German). 

At the fourth meeting (29.01.2025), we read poems from Hidden in the Cage We Forge of One Another by CA Conrad, passages from Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (both in English) and Gegenwart des Todes (Présence de la mort) by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (in German).

At the fifth meeting (26.02.2025), we read passages from States of the Body Produced by Love by Nisha Ramayya, How To Do Nothing by Jenny Oddell, and Linguistic Alter Ec(h)o by Oana Avasilichioaci (all in English).

The sixth meeting (26.03.2025) took place in collaboration with the BaseCamp Library – Hold the Sound. We read passages from books by Pauline Oliveiros: Software for People, Sonic Mediations, and Quantum Listening (all in English).

At the seventh meeting (23.04.2025), we read passages from Le Troisième corps by Hélène Cixous (in French), The Lonely City by Olivia Lang (proposed and read by Chris Kuhn), and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (both in English).

At the eight meeting (28.05.2025) we read passages from Reborn (early diairies 1947-1963) by Susan Sontag, Seasons by Etel Adnan and Stay true by Hua Hsu (all in English).

The second season of «dears, write» has been supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.