Keeping a rendezvous

Twice a year, we make an invitation to gather for a series of sessions, sharing stories and ideas, making connections and getting to know each other.

Twice a year, we make an invitation to gather for a series of sessions, sharing stories and ideas, making connections and getting to know each other.

It’s a chance to step into the ongoing weave of conversation and practice that meets around this school, a gathering place for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. And in the northern autumn of 2026, the invitation is to gather around the voices of two thinkers whose example helped us find our bearings.

Distant neighbours

Ivan Illich and John Berger were both born in 1926. They had friends in common: Susan Sontag, Gustavo Esteva and, most curiously, the sisters of a Benedictine convent in Connecticut. But their work is rarely mentioned in the same breath, partly because they wrote in such different voices, and partly because they came from such different traditions.

One was a Catholic priest who got in trouble with the Vatican, who became a perceptive critic of the counterproductivity of modern institutions and the hidden assumptions which shape our ways of seeing the world. The other was a Marxist art critic and novelist who settled in the Haute Savoie, who brought his politics into dialogue with what he learned from his neighbours, the last generation of peasants in Western Europe.

Both offer clues for how to live beyond the failure of the logic of progress, sketching maps for imagination, conviviality and resistance in dark times. And both came to see themselves as storytellers, traffickers between the living and the dead. It is in that spirit that we meet them here.

What to expect

This won’t be an academic seminar, there’s no required reading, but an invitation to pull up a chair and be a part of the circle in which stories come alive.

Each week, we’ll land together and start with a talk where I’m braiding together the ways of inhabiting the world that emerge from the life and work of this pair of storytellers. Whether their names are new to you or old and familiar, I hope there will be surprise in the encounter, and perhaps also recognition, having things you’ve sensed put into words. That was my experience when I first began to read them.

We’ll open into a time for discussion and reflection, where I’m curious what other voices and names will come into the circle. Over time, Anna and I have learned that much of the power of these series lies in the connections that spark within the group: we’ve witnessed conversations that deepen over time into friendships and collaborations that none of us could have foreseen.

It works to show up quietly and listen – and there’s also room to lean forward and play a more active part, not least through the afterparty that follows the teaching session each week. You don’t need to be able to make it to every session, and there will be recordings available.

Finally, if your circumstances make the regular fee an obstacle, then get in touch, because we can generally offer you a place on a pay-what-you-can basis.

Dougald Hine

Sliding scale pricing options from $100 to $300. If your circumstances mean that the regular fee would be an obstacle, get in touch to arrange a reduced rate.