Rețeaua Creativă — Reading Mentorship

„Mentorat pentru lectură” (Reading Mentorship) starts from something the writer Florin Iaru noticed: students end up answering every assignment „with ready-made phrases”. The project’s answer is not one more literature class but a chain: writers who train teachers, teachers who train students.

In the first stage, Dan Mircea Cipariu and Florin Iaru work with 10 teachers of Romanian language and literature — five from Bucharest, five from Constanța county — over 80 hours of workshops. The teachers do not observe; they write: a story told only in dialogue, a household object made to narrate, a poem built from 11 concrete words. Exercises designed so they can take them back to their own classes.

Then each teacher runs three workshops in her own school: 30 workshops and about 200 high-school students, with no grades and no aesthetic stakes — the process is what counts. The organisers’ idea is that the pleasure of writing follows the pleasure of reading, and each one pulls the other along.

The first edition (1 September – 30 November 2026) closes with a national creative writing competition with 10,000 lei in prizes for 15 texts, judged by Cătălina Bălan, Bogdan Ghiu and Andrei Novac, four public readings with guest writers, and two galas with a Mike Godoroja & Blue Spirit concert: at the Constanța Art Museum and in the Aula of the „Carol I” Central University Library.

The site keeps the whole network in view: the mentors and teachers, the programme, news from the workshops, the teachers’ own texts and, once judged, the students’ prize-winning texts.