The School for Rural Culture and Creativity

Our goal is to facilitate or support creative practices that foster community health, honor local wisdom, and strengthen our connection to the land. These practices fall under the following categories: artistic, agricultural, intellectual, and communal. The School aims to pursue these practices in an integrative fashion and not as niche activities. The arts have the power to engage the imagination, which can in turn help us understand and better care for our particular places. In his Jefferson Lectures entitled, “It all turns on affection”, Wendell Berry articulates the importance of this more expansive understanding of imagination:

“For humans to have a responsible relationship to the land, they must imagine themselves in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination, we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination, we recognize with sympathy, our fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. . . As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”