“Together, we will redraw the maps, steering by the wild stars and the wisdom of many times and places, cultivating the courage which it takes to come alive in times like these.”
Since making our first public invitation to a school called HOME in 2018, we’ve been learning what it means to bring our work together under this name. So far, this includes gathering people around our kitchen table, holding online series with participants in ten different timezones, welcoming writers, artists, thinkers and doers who come to live as part of our family for a while, and making the old shoe shop that we live above available for everything from concerts to committee meetings to distributing hundreds of boxes of biscuits.
Running through it all are the questions closest to our hearts: what does it mean to be drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture? How do we find our bearings and the work worth doing in the face of all the trouble that we know the world is in?
Who we are
Anna leads projects, a skill that has taken her from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries across the Middle East and supporting grassroots women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. You’ll find her running workshops on security and self-care for activists, or teaching methods for building meaningful projects. She’s the quiet radical laying the foundations of this school and keeping us grounded.
Dougald has been a founder of organisations including the Dark Mountain Project and Spacemakers. He is the author of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies. And he has been a visiting teacher at universities, art schools and architecture schools across Europe, as well as giving talks in church halls, community art spaces and the upstairs rooms of pubs.
The two of us met in 2011 in the middle of a Swedish forest, where Anna was helping organise Futureperfect festival and Dougald was one of the speakers. Over the years since, we’ve made a home together that has become a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared platform for our work. With HOME, we are learning what it means to make that a reality.
A place to call HOME
In January 2021, we moved into the old shoe shop in Östervåla, a small town thirty miles north of Uppsala. We are slowly settling into these new surroundings, learning about the place where we find ourselves, and bringing the buildings and the land into use.
We live above the shop, which we have turned into Skolunkan, a meeting place where we hold events which bring together guests from near and far with the friends we are making on our own doorstep. The name comes from the local nickname for Lundqvists Skor, which was the second oldest shoe shop in Sweden when it closed its doors in 2015.
So far, these events have included concerts, film screenings, a talk with an artist and an archaeologist, and an Icelandic kvöldvaka. We’ve also used the space for dinners, meetings for local groups, a workshop for Uppsala University, and as a distribution centre for hundreds of boxes of biscuits, as part of a fundraiser for Alfie’s class.
See how the place looked when we first arrived – or listen to this recording of a Zoom session we held in November, 2020, where we told the story of how we ended up here and answered questions about our hopes and intentions.
The school online
In May 2020, we made an invitation to something called Homeward Bound, an online extension of this school. In eight days, 86 people signed up for that first Zoom series, and over the weeks that followed we began a journey that has continued in various forms in the years since.
CHECK OUT OUR LATEST ONLINE SERIES
We’ve experimented here and there – not least, in the Climate Sessions, when we brought in three friends of this school as guest teachers – but the general protocols for these series were established early on. Each session starts with some time to land as a group, then a short talk from Dougald, followed by time for questions and reflections. After 75 minutes, we close the teaching session, but participants are invited to stay on for an afterparty, where we play with the possibilities of Zoom and get to meet each other in different combinations.
There’s no detailed pedagogy here, but there’s a process that we’ve learned to trust, and that has allowed us to stumble into possibilities for hospitality and conviviality that mark out the experience from most of the video calls you’re likely to spend time in.
The other place to follow our work online is WRITING HOME, the newsletter that Dougald publishes on Substack, where you’ll find new essays and letters, as well as recordings from live events like the Sunday Sessions.
Join us live
Paid subscribers to WRITING HOME are invited to live online events where we host conversations with friends of the school and people whose work is sparking our thinking.
Subscriptions cost $7/mth or $70/yr.
The Long Table
At the end of our first Homeward Bound series, it was clear that many participants wanted to keep in touch and go on meeting. We created the Assembly, a monthly online gathering for Homeward Bound alumni and out of this grew the Long Table, an ongoing fellowship open to anyone who has taken part in one of the online series that Dougald teaches.
In its early years, the two of us were responsible for hosting these sessions, but in 2023 the organising of the Long Table passed to a group of co-hosts made up of some of the most active members of the fellowship. We hold two themed sessions on the First Monday of each month, as well as a weekly Tuesday call, a Hospicing Café that gathers around the work introduced in Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity, and various other calls. All of this is organised through our Mighty Networks platform.
Membership of the Long Table is offered as a gift to anyone who has taken part in one of our past or present series, whenever they want to reconnect with the community around our school.
The Kitchen Table
From early on, we talked about HOME as “a school that starts from the conversations we bring together around our kitchen table”. Over time, the Kitchen Table fellowship has emerged as the frame for what happens when artists, writers, thinkers and doers come to spend time living with us as a family.
Sometimes guests come with a particular project to work on, like the theatre maker Luca Rutherford who spent a week with us in August 2018, collaborating on script development for her show, Luca Rutherford’s Political Party. Other times, people come to take a step back and reflect on the questions there isn’t time for in the busy-ness of their everyday work.
When it makes sense to do so, we’ll organise a public event in Skolunkan that creates a chance for guests to share their work with our local community. When Sarah Thomas came to stay in March 2023, we hosted an Icelandic kvöldvaka where she read from her book, The Raven’s Nest – and when the songwriter David Benjamin Blower and the artist Lydia Catterall visited us that summer, we put on a concert with David in the shoe shop.
Other guests around the Kitchen Table have included Vanessa Andreotti of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, Peter Jenkinson and Shelagh Wright, Christopher Brewster, Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar Lewis of The Uncertainty Experts, Caroline Ross and Theresa Emmerich Kamper.
The Kitchen Table is something more intimate than a residency programme. We don’t have a formal application process. Guests find their way here because they have connected with our work in one way or another, often through taking part in one of our online series.
Read The Kitchen Table, Dougald’s essay for Dark Mountain.
The Red House
At the back of the school is the Red House, built in 1924 as a combination of dwelling space, laundry and barn. We are slowly transforming this into a larger venue, along with accommodation for residential courses.
The first phase of work on the Red House took place in 2021-22, under the leadership of our carpenter and community-builder, Jack Richardson. Neighbours and members of the Long Table joined us in the work of repairing the roof, replacing cladding and laying a new floor in the great hall.
In 2024, we are marking the building’s centenary and looking back into the history of the red barns of Östervåla. Then it will be time to look towards the next hundred years and move on with the work of reimagining and restoring the building.
A brief history of HOME
In March 2018, we made the first public invitation in the name of HOME, calling it ‘a school for culturemakers’. Three months later, we rented a youth hostel in the village of Ängelsberg, Sweden and held our first residential course. Twenty-two guests travelled from near and far to be part of Finding Our Way Home.
That was an intense beginning and we took six months to step back and reflect, then in January 2019 we published The View From The Kitchen Table, a statement of intention for the next phase in our work. That year, Dougald handed on the last of his responsibilities at the Dark Mountain Project. We sold our terraced house in Västerås and began looking for a place to call HOME.
As part of that, we spent three months on the road in the summer of 2019. It took us from village halls and local cafés to the European Commission and the banks of the River Thames. You can read more about what happened along the way in What We Did This Summer.
We returned to Sweden and the slow process of finding a long-term place to call HOME. When the Covid-19 pandemic swept in, we created an online extension of our teaching house, Homeward Bound.
The first series began in May 2020, bringing together 80 participants from around the world over eight weeks, with 30 of them choosing to travel further with us as an ongoing community that gathers monthly. This grew into a core offering throughout 2020-21, a way for newcomers to get to know us a little better, and the entry point to an ongoing community.
In November 2020, we made another experiment, hosting a one-off four-week series on ‘the dark matter of climate change’ with guest teachers including Martin Shaw, Vanessa Andreotti, Alastair McIntosh and Lucy Neal.
We’re still learning about the surprising possibilities for fellowship and shared enquiry within the limitations of screens, cameras and keyboards, but we are also committed to creating a physical space for gathering and teaching. In late January 2021, we took our next step, moving into the old shoe shop in the small town of Östervåla, thirty miles northwest of Uppsala. We are slowly settling into our new surroundings, learning more about this place and its possibilities.
In 2022, we worked with the existing online community that had grown up through the Homeward Bound series and hosted occasional Front Porch Sessions for newcomers who wanted to learn about the school. We completed the renovation of Skolunkan, the old shoe shop, and hosted our first workshop there in October 2022 with a group of researchers from Uppsala University.
The start of 2023 saw the publication of Dougald’s book, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies. Following a three-week European speaking tour in February, we regrouped in Östervåla and made a fresh invitation to join us for new online series.
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