Welcome to Return To Wild 2026 Cycle 1
(March to June 2026)
This season of Return to Wild invites you into stories where history, lineage, and desire live inside women’s bodies.
We will walk with three novels that trace what is carried across generations, what is broken by power, and what remains fiercely alive beneath it all.
Through exile, dictatorship, silence, and longing, these books ask us not only to witness the lives of their characters, but to listen for how their stories echo inside our own.
Held under the theme Roots & Rupture: Women Remembering Home Through Fire, this cycle explores how women survive, resist, compromise, and love within systems that seek to shape or contain them.
Here, reading becomes a practice of remembering.
A way of returning to what is wild, honest, and ancestral within us.
THE ARC OF THE CYCLE
Across three books, we move through a shared journey:
Remembering — Salt Houses, Hala Alyan
We begin with exile and lineage, noticing how home travels in memory, food, language, and the body when land itself is lost.
Resisting — In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
We enter stories of courage and collective voice, witnessing how women awaken to injustice and risk everything to protect life and dignity.
Reckoning — The Mango Bride, Marivi Soliven
We sit with desire, ambition, and shadow, asking what survival costs inside corrupt systems and what it means to choose with integrity.
Threaded through all three is a central question:
What does it mean to return to what is most true and alive in us after rupture?
Returning to wild does not mean leaving the world behind.
It means remembering:
the ancestral threads that run through us,
the instinct that knows when to say yes and when to refuse,
the grief that keeps us human,
the love that keeps us tender; and
the courage that keeps us awake.
Wild -
is integrity.
is memory.
is the part of us that cannot be fully domesticated by silence or fear.
WHAT WE WILL READ
HOW WE GATHER
THIS CIRCLE IS FOR YOU IF YOU:
Over the season, we will read:
Salt Houses — Hala Alyan
A multigenerational story of Palestinian displacement, memory, and longing for home.
In the Time of the Butterflies — Julia Alvarez
The story of the Mirabal sisters and their resistance under dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.
The Mango Bride — Marivi Soliven
A Filipino novel exploring class, desire, and moral compromise during the Marcos (Sr.) era.
Three different histories.
One shared meditation on women, power, survival, and belonging.
Each book unfolds over four sessions, held in a gentle rhythm of inner work and shared witnessing.
Sessions 1 & 3 — Guided Inner Work
You receive a digital workbook with reflective prompts and invitations for slow reading and journaling.
Discussion continues in our private Whatsapp forum, where you can share insights and questions at your own pace.
Sessions 2 & 4 — Live Circles
We gather in real time to speak, listen, and make meaning together.
These are not lectures, but guided, collective conversations held with care, depth, and respect.
This structure allows you to move between solitude and community, reflection and dialogue.
feel drawn to stories of ancestry, memory, and belonging
sense that history lives in your body in ways you want to understand more deeply
are willing to sit with moral complexity rather than easy answers
prefer slow, thoughtful reading over rushing
long for a heart-centered literary community
You do not need to be a “serious reader” or an academic.
You only need curiosity, openness, and a willingness to listen.
WHAT YOU WILL GAIN
By the end of the cycle, you will have:
walked intimately with three powerful works of literature
reflected on your own lineage, inheritance, and desires
practiced listening deeply to story, self, and community
held space for grief, courage, and complexity
clarified what “returning to wild” means in your own life
More than a book club, this is a journey of remembering.
YOUR INVITATION
If you feel the pull of home, the weight of history, and the whisper of your own wild knowing, you are welcome here.
May these stories become mirrors.
May they become thresholds.
May they help you remember what is still alive and untamed within you.
I look forward to reading, listening, and remembering together.