As the third 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 2025 and May 2026, 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.

Tip toeing around. Feeling at home was staying as still as possible. Unchangeable like a doll 

2.  

I paint the shadows my hands cast on this paper. They look like a Nepali mountain range, like monstrous stalactite formations.

I lay down on the table, smell the crisps and clementines whilst someone makes a picture of my very weird posture. I consider changing my posture but also, no. Unruly is the prompt and that I shall be. People clap and cheer and others whisper to me if I know how long we are writing for. I don't. This chewing gum of a text is maybe losing flavour but I shall keep chewing.

They leave - the person that asked about time -  and I stay writing, obediently trying to trace the edge of unruly.

Where do rules start bending? When do they break? Boiling temperature, zero assoluto, where?

3.

I think – applause in the other room. 
What is safest? To hold or to let go? 

4. 

A precarious world is a world without teleology

I make you in your presence. Intention without interest. Together, we piece together our common skin, bit by bit, mosaics of each other.

Peace only once I know I have never existed and shall never exist. Peace in disappearance. Sheer, total belonging.

A means of externalization, of trying to make something visible that is happening on the inside. Show don’t tell.

Heavy as a heap of fresh dough slammed onto a wooden slab.

I see every little bit of you.

5. 

There is a need for unfinished female voices.

6.

My voice

I had not heard my voice in a long time...
It was lost among foreign idioms and unfamiliar accents;
It was lost in anxious compromises,
In wanderings and inquietudes...
And habits acquired under the threat of despair –
Meanwhile, my voice was forgotten.
 
I was afraid to let my voice run free,
Lest I collapse under its weight.
People heard it dusty, scratched, sometimes nonchalant.

But I could only hear its silence.

7.

When I think ‘in the blue’ I see an unmovable piece of furniture. Some sort of block. It cannot contain anything but itself and offers enough surface for a hand to rest. 

8.

Me and my mother, we made ourselves from a look alike organ.

9.

I’m feeling berries in my belly.

1,3,5,7,8,9, Jo Bahdo, 24.09.2025, 22.10.2025, 19.11.2025, 28.01.2026, 18.02.2026, 27.05.2026
2, Laura Cincera, 28.01.2026
4, Nicole Nickerson, 06.2026
6, Andra-Irina Vasile 28.1.2026

*

The season 3 of «dears, write» took place in the Dada Library, from September 2025 to May 2026. The event series is initiated by DEARS – a platform 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 (09.2025), we read passages from An das Wilde glauben by Nastassja Martin;Susie Scribbles: On Technology, Technë, and Writing Incarnate (Chapter 5 in her book Carnal Thoughts) by Vivian Sobchack:  and alfabet/alphabet, a memoir of a first language by Sadiqa de Meijer.

At the second meeting (10.2025), we read poems from Larry Levis and passages from Voice by Amanda Weidman.

At the third meeting (11.2025), we read passages from Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Allow me to dream a body with you by Sabina Holzer.

At the fourth meeting (01.2026), we read from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Ekke by Klara du Plessis.

At the fifth meeting (02.2026), we read from Mattering Voices, Studying Voice through New Materialisms edited by Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Anne Tarvainen, Milla Tiainen; Crush by Richard Siken and the Inside the room in the book A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women by Siri Hustvedt.

The sixth meeting (03.2026) we read poems by Viktor Tsoy from the compilation of his work music of waves and wind; passages from Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig and Molloy by Samuel Beckett.

At the seventh meeting (04.2026), we read Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong and Walzer für Niemand by Sophie Hunger.

At the eight meeting (05.2025) we read passages from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery; Poems by Emily Dickinson; and passages from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.