Dear Friend: A Space for Unhurried Time

At the entryway shelf of Dear Friend books sits a Jenny Holzer postcard piece that reads “words tend to be inadequate.” For a bookstore, such a direct refusal to language’s capacity feels wry and intriguing. Yet, behind this suggestion of language’s failure to capture a wholeness lies a moving recognition of language’s inherent fracturedness, a savoring of the loose but expansive connections language holds with the world. Such value shaped Dear Friends far beyond a bookstore into a wide-encompassing community for experimentation, gathering, and creation. Just a few years since its opening, Dear Friend emerged as a go-to spot for experiences that demand a particular kind of attention: whether it’s a poetry reading, a knitting workshop, a backyard movie night, or a book club. Here, time is rewired from the catalyzed fragments of contemporary life back into concrete, unhurried blocks built with curiosity and openness.

The editors at iidrr Magazine had the chance to speak with Anna Sergeeva, founder of Dear Friend, about vision, space, and sustaining a curation of time, before this well-cherished place closes at the end of this summer.

CC: Dear Friend opened in the summer of 2022. What was your founding vision? What were the essentials you imagined the store must have?

AS: I started working on Dear Friend in 2021, right after moving to New York from San Francisco. In San Francisco, my art practice was very much for, about, and with the community, so I saw Dear Friend as a kind of communal sculpture. I came here to do  my master's in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute.  The opportunity for this space came up simultaneously, and it melded my  interests, words in relation to community. Having the bar, the wine, the tea, is all part of making it a space beyond a transactional exchange.

The essentials include a no-laptop policy and no takeaway options. If you're coming here, you're being intentional with your time and intentional in this space — whether you're reading a book, sitting at the bar doing watercolors, knitting, bringing crafts, having conversations, or playing chess (we keep board games behind the bar). My inspiration was really about creating a third place with strict parameters that redirect attention.

CC: Were there particular spaces, organizations, or experiences that shaped or inspired the kind of space you wanted Dear Friend to be?

AS: I work with language as a medium more for reflection than intention. Looking back through my work, language was the guiding thread through all of it — partly because I'm an immigrant who didn't know English when I came to America, which gave me an outsider's reflection on what was happening around me. That, combined with loving books as a child, became a strong guiding principle.

I've been obsessed with the alphabet for the last ten years. I got interested in etymology first, because the root of a word tells you more about it than its definition does — it's not what a word is defined as, but the journey it took to become that. From there I started asking what words are made of, and since I was reading an alphabetic language, the alphabet is what words are made of. So then: what are the roots of all these forms? That led me into the intersection between image and letterform.

The book that came out of that research, Dear Friend Press's AQUABET, is a consolidation of everything I'd been thinking about the alphabet as the original artificial intelligence — and holding it responsible for the contemporary condition we're in: corrupt capitalism, environmental collapse, human violence, systemic oppression. The alphabet doesn't just spell things, it creates and perpetuates our world. People call for revolution, but the word itself reads "re," which means going backwards — we can revolve backwards, but we stay in the same cycle, because that's what the word calls for. The letters create the words, and the words create the reality.

It's difficult, though, because you're using the technology for the technology to see itself. I write about this in the book — there's the Audre Lorde line about the master's tools never dismantling the master's house. Written language, like the alphabet, is a technology, but we've internalized it so deeply that we think of it as consciousness rather than what it is: a technology, no different in kind from an iPhone or a computer. It becomes this interplay between the technology we make and the technology that, in turn, makes us. Books are an expression of that tension, too. There's a Jenny Holzer postcard piece right in front of the shelves as you walk in — it says "words tend to be inadequate," which I think is very true. I have a kind of distrust of language, which is also part of why the space was never just about books. I don't think the books are the point; I think they're the entryway.

CC: In just a few years, Dear Friend became a go-to venue for interdisciplinary events — readings woven together with music, performance, video, cinema. How did that expansion happen? Was it organic, driven by what the neighborhood and community wanted, or the result of intentional curation — or some blend of both?

AS: I don't think the interdisciplinary approach is necessarily specific to New York, but everyone here is doing seven different things — partly for money and survival, partly out of interest and opportunity. There are so many subcultures and so many things you can be doing that I think what happens at Dear Friend just mirrors the culture around it.

CC: And I think Dear Friend accelerates that — you get exposed to people doing all these different things, you become friends and collaborators, and it grows out even further from there.

AS: Yes. Slowing down and being present feels essential everywhere, but especially in New York — there's a philosophical dimension to that, but also a practical one. Chris and I were just talking about how many events we run: there's one every single day for the rest of July, and two on weekends. The initial idea evolved into a platform for people. When I first started programming events, almost all of them were generated by me or my direct friends, with the intention of setting a tone — "this is what we're interested in" — so people would approach us with that in mind. Now 99% of our events are community-generated. We have a form on our website where people can submit what they're interested in doing, and I filter to make sure it aligns with our values, but I try to keep it as open as possible — if you're doing something weird or skewed or interesting, this is the place to do it. Because we set that tone early, what came back to us was already aligned: poetry readings, movie series, spoken word, live music, and so on, echoing outward and continuing to draw in new ideas.

CC: As a poet myself, I've also found readings to be a singular, enigmatic, sometimes demanding form of public gathering — they ask for a willingness to sit with language, to surrender the need for explicit "understanding." What do you think most visitors are looking for when they come to Dear Friend, and what do you hope the space unlocks for people, as both a community and a portal? From your perspective, what do reading events create and make possible that other kinds of events often don't?

AS: There's a gamut, because writing poetry and reading poetry are very different. You can be a great writer but not a good performer, or the poetry itself might be just okay but the performer is so captivating — and everything in between. It's hard to standardize, but part of the opportunity in poetry is its musicality. On the page, a poem is a fixed statement, but read or performed aloud, you're also paying attention to the body, to the cadence, to the texture. As an audience member, you're witnessing not just the words but the whole experience, and that's human connection — like old Greek plays, where the catharsis comes from witnessing people in relation to each other. Poetry lends itself to vulnerability from the writer-performer, and when that's done well — authentically, eloquently — it touches people in very distinct ways.

I've also done a lot of research into language as a neurological experience. What consciousness seems to receive, even when you're speaking in logical, rational sentences, tends to arrive as poetic fragments — your mind catches onto a few words, a few fragments at a time, which is essentially poetry. So I think our consciousness receives language like poetry by default, regardless of the content being communicated.

CC: Totally — and I think in a poetry reading, that receptivity gets heightened, because you're listening, but it's rare that you grasp everything. You're voluntarily selecting fragments and making your own poetic response out of them. That's such a singular experience.

CC: The flourishing of reading events in the city, especially self-organized ones, is closely tied to spaces like Dear Friend that gather a particularly open, curious crowd. What were some of the most unforgettable moments at Dear Friend?

AS: Honestly, they just happen all the time. I had a baby a year ago, so my own life has shifted a bit, but just yesterday we were projecting movies in the backyard. My husband James is a producer and film distributor, and he's taken over organizing our cinema series. He was showing the original Muppet Movie from 1979 last night, which I'd never seen — it was really sweet to watch. There were kids there and a friend from the neighborhood I hadn't caught up with in a year. It’s perhaps a mundane moment, but also unforgettable. These organic encounters are what this place constantly allows to happen.

CC: That's really precious. Has the cinema series always been here, or did it start more recently?

AS: It's always been in the backyard — it's been a summer thing since our very first summer. The first year, someone new organized the films every week; I just asked friends, and they invited their friends, and that became the vibe. The second year, a few people reached out who turned out to be actual film curators interested in running a series, and I said yes, sure. So now we work with three or four curators with very different backgrounds each season, and they bring their own communities — so the crowd becomes a mix of their community, the broader art community, and whoever the film itself draws in.

CC: Dear Friend has always held open submissions for independent zines, publications, chapbooks, and artist books. Did you have a selection criteria and process, or was it more instinct and aesthetic recognition? What kind of work did you want Dear Friend to celebrate?

AS: It's more about vibe, honestly — the same as with the events. We set the tone ourselves early on, figuring it out in-house, and then what that attracts comes in. It's the same with the books: the bookshelf wall is all secondhand, but the front wall is a newsstand, and my hope for that was always for it to be community-generated and reflective of what people are writing about, thinking about, and producing — not just in Bed-Stuy or Brooklyn, but beyond. People submit their projects and I review submissions roughly once a week. Most of what's on the newsstand is on consignment: we keep it up for a few months, and if it's not moving or people aren't interested, we return it; if it is, we bring in more. It's built an interesting kind of thread over time.

I just love seeing what people are working on, even outside categories I'm personally researching or engaging with. Magazines and zines are unique because they're so collaborative — we do get single-author books, but a lot of what comes in is magazines, zines, and communal projects. As physical objects, zines and chapbooks are just more interesting than traditional book publishing — there's so much variety in size, paper, binding, and color. So maybe the baseline is an aesthetic interest, but really it's rooted in experimentation, authenticity, vulnerability, and communal creation.

CC: You have a master's degree in library and information science from Pratt, and I read that your research centers on origins and liminal spaces. That felt especially resonant, since Dear Friend echoes the idea of origins and functions as a liminal space itself — transitional, porous, uncanny. Did your academic background play into founding and running Dear Friend? Were there threads from your studies that surfaced in the practice of running the store?

AS: In the most basic sense — in library school, there's a class on knowledge organization, which covers the Dewey Decimal System, the famous one most libraries use. We looked at a variety of different knowledge organization systems, but none of them felt right for this space. I also find that in most bookstores, you walk in and everything is so stiffly categorized — the poetry section, the history section — that I tend to just go straight to poetry to see what pops up.

With both of those things in mind, when I was designing the shelving system, I thought of that wall as a body: organized by the chakras, from the crown near the door to the root at the far end, with each type of knowledge loosely associated with a chakra. It's not meant as a gimmick — it's meant to reach people a little more spiritually.

CC: That's really interesting. Do you do all the arranging yourself?

AS: Not anymore. I sourced the books myself for the first couple of years, and then about two and a half years ago I started working with Francisco and his team at Leaves, who have locations in Bushwick and Greenpoint — they source the books now. Working with them was like: here's my thinking, here's how it's organized, what do you think? They tell me what they're seeing — the kinds of books people in the community are buying — so it becomes a mix of what we brought originally and what they bring in. That whole wall has become a real collaboration with the Leaves team.

CC: Do you rearrange it over time?

AS: Yes, I'm always tinkering — it's like a big epistemological puzzle, figuring out different ways these threads could work. Some of it is about content, some of it is about how the books look together visually — making sure there's a rhythm, hardcover next to softcover, that kind of thing. It's the whole vibe.

CC: I feel like it would be fun if library studies actually explored that kind of arrangement, instead of just preset structures.

AS: It is different when it's a library rather than a bookstore, specifically — the vibration of this space feels more like a library, which is what enables that kind of play. I think it'd be cool, honestly. Maybe it's its own new discipline.

CC: I was really sad to hear Dear Friend will close by the end of this summer — though I understand the closure is part of a larger story about what it costs to sustain literary and art spaces in New York, especially with rising rent, location instability, and other structural obstacles. What was the most difficult part of operating Dear Friend? And what kind of support do you wish existed — whether from the city, the creative community, or elsewhere — to help art spaces survive and thrive here?

AS: I came into this with no experience or background running a space. So a lot of things got smushed together early on, where you'd wake up and think, wait, I'm in the center of a hurricane. I think my naive vigor really helped in the creation phase.

I do think cultivating a beginner's mind is valuable — of course there's real value in mastering a craft, but especially earlier in this journey (I don't know if you'd even call it a career), I just wanted to experiment, to learn, to see what my life's purpose was. There's an intersection between you and your interests, and what the world is seeking, and it's about finding that center. A beginner's mind is genuinely helpful for intuitively finding your way to that intersection.

What I found through this process, though, is that creating a space and operating a space are completely different things. I started this alone, without a real partner or collaborator, which was good in the sense that every decision was mine — this is what it should look like, feel like, these are the colored floors. But once it got to operations — sourcing books, finding wines, running the space day to day — that's a lot of different jobs. Working with Chris for the past two years has been great; around the same time I started working with Francisco on the books, I also started working with Chris. Basically, the job I used to do alone is now split across five different people, which is also where the operational costs come from.

There are the fixed costs you expect, but then it's like — I can't sustain doing five people's jobs myself. I'm not doing my own art practice. I wanted to have a baby. So you hire this person, pay that person, costs go up — and at the same time, our insurance went from about $200 a month to about $1,200 a month. Once all of that adds up, I realized I love the creation side, but not really the operations side, and unfortunately the numbers just don't work.

Maybe if I'd known all that beforehand, I wouldn't have done it exactly this way — but you never really know.

CC: Right — that's not the kind of guidance you can just receive on paper. But that's also the charm of going in with a beginner's mind.

AS: Exactly — by no means did I go into this thinking it would be my cash cow. It was more that I wanted to create a sustainable community space, which worked for a while, until it reached a point where it wasn't sustainable anymore. My personal life has also changed a lot over the last few years — I thought it was heading in one direction, and then realized it was actually heading in another. Having a baby, it became really important to me that she's raised in nature — that she can run around barefoot in the dirt, touch a chicken, hug a tree. We talked earlier about the alphabet and artificial intelligence; what interests me now is organic intelligence, and what the earth itself can teach. I think that's the truest and most radical education right now — placing yourself in relation to the earth, listening to it, experiencing time differently. The thing I'm proudest of, through this whole process, is that I can unequivocally say I tried my best. Because of that, I don't have regrets — just gratitude. It's been amazing to see what's happened here over these few years: weddings, engagement parties, surprise proposals, my own baby shower, birthday parties, book launches, a first film screening. And people still reach out and tell me, "I had a conversation here that led to this book," and here's the book. You drop a stone and you never know where the ripple will go.

CC: While the store is closing, it's exciting that Dear Friend Press is beginning — and congratulations on AQUABET as the press's first release. Can you share the scope of Dear Friend Press? Is it primarily a poetry press, or something more capacious? Do you imagine the press carrying forward the community and event life of the store in new ways — maybe finding new sites and forms of gathering? What comes next?

AS: For me personally, what comes next is moving upstate and  focusing on two things in my art practice. One is ceramics — I've become obsessed with it since my daughter was born. I'm building out our garage into a studio. I want to do firing outside, and we're right off a stream, so I'm looking at earth deposits and experimenting with a more regenerative practice. The other is the press. Like I mentioned, what interested me most about community-generated submissions was the experimentation inherent in them, and I want to continue that.

AQUABET is the first release of the press — a book I've been working on for about a decade. I'm proud of it as a physical object, but I'm also curious about building the press into a platform where people can share manuscripts, ideas, unpublished work, or published-and-lost work — a way of carrying the vibration of the space forward so people can take it with them.

CC: So there will still be open submissions?

AS: I think so. I'm assuming it'll follow a similar trajectory to the store — first it's me and my friends, setting a tone, and then people start to share their own work. So the first book is mine, the second will probably be a friend's, the third a friend's, the fourth a friend's, and the fifth someone new. It ripples outward.

On the printing side, I'm interested in a combination of approaches. For AQUABET, I worked with the printer in New Jersey — there are also beautiful printers internationally, in Estonia and Belgium, from what I've heard. Part of my interest is in creating a professional physical product, but the other part is about experimentation and self-production. I just bought a used Risograph printer, and I want to start producing physical items myself. I love the idea of a newsletter that isn't digital — something that gets mailed to people's homes. So that's one thread of the press: self-production and printing. The professional side is another thread.

My husband is also opening a video store — a Blockbuster-vibe place where you can rent or buy Blu-rays and VHS, called Video Visions Too. The news stand will move into that space.

CC: So there'll be a physical location. Are you thinking about running events there too?

AS: Eventually, sure. For now, I want to return to my own practice a bit more. I loved the communal aspect of Dear Friend, but I never really wanted to be a figurehead — I wanted to stay somewhat anonymous, in a good way, where my presence is felt subliminally. I wanted it to stay separate from me in that sense. Eventually, though, as you said — everything is organic.