Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms (Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education) 3031449762, 9783031449765

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GENDER AND EDUCATION

Women Writing Socially in Academia Dispatches from Writing Rooms Edited by Joana Pais Zozimo Kate Sotejeff-Wilson · Wendy Baldwin

Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education Series Editor

Yvette Taylor School of Education University of Strathclyde Glasgow, UK

This series provides a comprehensive space for an increasingly diverse, complex and changing area of interdisciplinary social science research: gender and education. Gender studies continues to respond to controversies, backlashes, shutdowns, as well as to new openings, imaginations and reconfigurations, including to traditional disciplines, and what counts as knowledge, experience and voice. Series authors differently plot emerging and enduring definitions and debates, monitoring and intervening in critical complexities of gender and education across global contexts. This series adopts feminist approaches and orientations and attends to key theoretical and methodological debates, ensuring a continued conversation and relevance within the well-established, interdisciplinary field of gender and education. It combines renewed and revitalised feminist research methods and concepts with emergent and salient public policy issues, asking what futures feminists, and future feminisms, can be brought into being through education. These issues include education across the lifecourse, from early years, through (post)compulsory education, to lifelong learning. Authors have focused on intersectional inequalities including race, class, sexuality, age and disability; policy and practice across educational landscapes; global activism and the ‘public university’; belonging in higher education; outdoor learning and community education; initial teacher education; queer pupils, students and teachers; femininity, masculinity and gender stereotypes - and much more. The series recognises the necessity of probing beyond the boundaries of specific territorial-legislative domains to develop a more international, intersectional focus. In doing so, it hopes to provide insightful reflection on continued critical challenges to and through feminism within (and beyond) the academy.

Joana Pais Zozimo Kate Sotejeff-Wilson  •  Wendy Baldwin Editors

Women Writing Socially in Academia Dispatches from Writing Rooms

Editors Joana Pais Zozimo Lancaster University Management School Lancaster, UK

Kate Sotejeff-Wilson Ridge Writing Retreats Jyväskylä, Finland

Wendy Baldwin Linguaverse Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain

ISSN 2524-6445     ISSN 2524-6453 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education ISBN 978-3-031-44976-5    ISBN 978-3-031-44977-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Cienpies Design / Alamy Stock Vector This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Foreword: Women Writing Socially

Women’s enjoyment in writing socially has been a lifeline in my academic journey. When, in 1997, as a doctoral student and early-career academic, I planned the first writing retreat for academic women in Aotearoa New Zealand, I had no idea how important such retreats would become for me and for others. Last year (2022), we celebrated 25 years of the “mother” retreats—week-long residential events for academic women from all over the country, as well as Australia and elsewhere. Since 1998, we have held two, then three, of these retreats each year in the same venue. Miraculously, we lost only one retreat due to Covid-19 and, even then, one of the participants ran an online version for those who were keen. Over those years, some women have come once and not returned, some have “disappeared” into child-bearing and rearing for a while before resurfacing. Many women have returned over and over again, claiming the retreats as the backbone of their academic writing practice. Time away from work and life cares, time to be nourished by good food, rural surroundings and the sight of snow-capped mountains, time for solitude. And, perhaps most importantly, time for writing sociality in all its complexities and pleasures. For it is undoubtedly complex, touching as writing does on intense affects such as excitement, fear, and shame, as well as ticklish issues of vulnerability and intellectual property: this mix requires careful attention from both retreat facilitator/s and participants. From the outset, I was both retreat facilitator and participant. My strong hunch—informed by reading and thinking about feminist pedagogy—was that taking the dual role would make the retreat culture v

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more vibrant for everyone and the organizing work more sustainable for me. I also thought it would signal some important dimensions of the “project” of becoming a better—happier, more productive, more skilled— academic writer: that this project is a life work, which goes on as long as we want to (or have to) write. That it is sometimes difficult work, in which companionship can provide comfort and resources. And that we can learn a great deal from listening to our peers as well as reading/listening to experts. After almost three decades of retreat facilitation within Aotearoa and beyond, I still hold this view. Every writing retreat I facilitate is also my writing retreat, where I continue on the bumpy road of finding worthwhile things to write about and aspiring towards a thoughtful yet lively voice with which to say them. Without those writing retreats, I would not have written some of the work I cherish the most. Without that ongoing yet ever-renewing community of women, I may not have remained in academic life. The sociality of writing retreats is refreshingly different from that of academic departments: the shared focus on a particular activity, the container of clearly marked-out time, the care around confidentiality, the deliberately cultivated mutual appreciation. From the outset, the retreats were for women. Again, this was shaped by feminist pedagogy’s insight that women-only spaces provide opportunities for collective respite from certain, sometimes exhausting or depressing, features of living in a sexist society and working in patriarchal institutions. But not only that. I carried childhood memories of my mother going off on weekend-long, women-only, spiritual retreats with others from our parish. It was strange and somewhat wondrous that she would step away from her usual role of caring for our large family to do so. It felt special, significant, a mark of the importance of her spiritual life. (I never thought about her need for rest.) I wanted the retreats to offer a similar message: that we value our writing work enough to put aside the normal fabric of our lives to do it. In the early years especially, the retreat’s women-­ only boundary was sometimes challenged from the outside and, within the group, we debated it many times. Frankly, we never came up with good enough reasons to change it. Over time, I facilitated other academic writing retreats in Aotearoa and beyond for both women and men but found— as contributors to this book remark—that, going by the numbers who show up, women have a distinctive preference for writing socially. And quite possibly, just like my mother, a distinctive need for rest from the incessant demands of what, for academic women, is the double shift. We

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know that, mostly, women in paid work still carry the unpaid work of caring for home, kith, and kin. All of this is to say that the burgeoning phenomenon of (academic) women writing socially—that this book attests to and fosters through stirring stories of practice and helpful suggestions for activities—is one we want to see continuing to flourish. Academic women’s lives are not getting easier: they are intensifying in terms of student demands, productivity expectations, and administrivia. Nor are our private lives, with their myriad care responsibilities—especially in the face of occurrences like Covid-19 or, as we’ve had in Aotearoa recently, serial extreme weather events impacting on homes, schools, transport, and so on. These disruptions, which may augur our future lives amidst intensifying climate change, have a disproportional impact on women with caring responsibilities. Particularly for our concerns here, they have a disproportional impact on women carers’ ability to keep writing. One of the strengths of this book is the chapters that address the many ways in which women are supporting others to keep writing together here and there, now and then, despite those impacts. Threaded throughout the book is reference to the dedicated work of Rowena Murray, who has taken her well-established model of structured writing retreats to the world by teaching others how to facilitate these retreats. In several chapters we see how women who have attended Rowena’s training have then, sometimes tentatively, embarked on developing their own practice with wonderfully creative results that sometimes spill over into engagement with the wider public. I found these examples inspiring as I know other readers will too. Long live women writing socially! Critical Studies in Education, Waipapa Taumata Rau [email protected] University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Barbara M. Grant

Contents

1 Introduction:  From Our Writing Rooms to Yours  1 Joana Pais Zozimo, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, and Wendy Baldwin Part I Physical Support and Wellbeing  11 2 Look  Out!: Navigating Multiple Spaces to Sustain the Benefits of Writing Retreats 13 Rowena Murray 3 Thoughts on folklore 33 Lucy R. Hinnie 4 Don’t  Starve: Change the Recipe 41 Jess Kelley 5 Retreat  in Daily Life: Integrating Writing into Work and Life 45 Kate Sotejeff-Wilson

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Part II Cognitive and Affective Connections  65 6 Some  Kind of Writer: The Writer Spectrum, and a (Not-­ Magic) Formula for Skill Development 67 Sarah S. Haas 7 Coaching  Interventions in Writing Retreats: A Creativity Boost 97 Natalie Lancer 8 Adapting  the Structured Model, Developing Researchers, and Facilitating Your Own Productivity as a Writer109 Jo Garrick 9 Different  Layers of Togetherness: Virtual Writing Sessions During and After Covid-19117 Katarina Damčević Part III Social Interactions and Relations 129 10 Transferring  Social Writing Practices to Our Communities in Finnish Universities131 Camilla Lindholm and Johanna Isosävi 11 Becoming  a Facilitator: Finding My Own Delivery Style Through Opportunities and Challenges159 Marcella Sutcliffe 12 Linguistic  Care Work in Proximal Zones: Towards Allied Author–Editor Critical Agency173 Theresa Truax-Gischler 13 Meetings  at the Textface: What Academics and Language Professionals Gain When They Team Up and Adopt a Social Writing Approach to Academic Text Production203 Wendy Baldwin Index223

Notes on Contributors

Wendy  Baldwin  is an independent authors’ editor and translator who helps scholars in the social sciences and humanities, particularly those who are multilanguage scholars, get their work submitted for publication. She also teaches academic writing and English for academic purposes in higher education settings and regularly runs structured writing retreats and coworking sessions for academic text producers. Her academic training is in linguistics, and as a PhD candidate, her research focused on human sentence processing. She is a member of MET, SENSE, and EASE—professional associations in Europe that have a strong focus on academic editing, translation, writing, and publication. Katarina Damčević  is a writing retreat facilitator and event coordinator at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She defended her PhD thesis at the same university in 2023 titled “Semiotics of Hate Speech and Contested Symbols: The ‘Za dom spremni’ Ustaša Salute in Contemporary Croatia”. She researches hate speech and controversial symbols in (post)conflict societies, and academic writing, with emphasis on social writing and writing retreat facilitation, writing groups and peer feedback, and writing and emotional wellbeing. Jo  Garrick is Research Support Officer at Leeds University Business School, UK, and manages a small team responsible for planning and organising the training and development programme for early and midcareer researchers. She also manages a network of seventeen research-led universities in the north of England through the Northern Advanced Research Training Initiative (NARTI). Jo is a trained writing retreat facilixi

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tator and organises online, in-person, and residential retreats for academic researchers in the Business School and the wider network. Sarah Haas  has been working with writers of all kinds for over 30 years, teaching in Japan, Korea, the UK, Denmark, Ireland, the USA, South Africa, Mozambique, and the Benelux countries. She completed her doctoral studies at Aston University, Birmingham, England, focusing on the writing process, writers, and how they develop the skills necessary to manage larger writing projects. It was during this time that she became familiar with the work of Rowena Murray, and attended several retreats. Sarah works as Teaching Fellow in English Studies and Science Education at Ghent and Copenhagen Universities, respectively, alongside running her consultancy business, Writer Development. Here, she offers retreats and workshops, and conducts research—with and for writers—that is aimed at designing research-based tools to help writers develop their skills, productivity, self-efficacy, and identities as writers. Lucy R. Hinnie  is an independent scholar and digital humanist. From 2023 to 2024 she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she also completed her PhD in 2019. From 2019 to 2021, she lived as a white settler scholar on Treaty Six Territory and the Homeland of the Métis at the University of Saskatchewan, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English. She was Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library from 2021 to 2023. Her scholarship includes work on late medieval and early modern literature, queer theory, medieval feminist criticism, and open knowledge. She is the founder of #remoteretreat on Twitter but can now be found on Bluesky (@yclepit). Johanna Isosävi  works as University Lecturer in French at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research areas include politeness, relational work, and address forms, and her studies focus specifically on cross-cultural pragmatics (French/Finnish). With co-author Camilla Lindholm, she has published two books in Finnish: Väitöksen jälkeen: opas akateemiselle uralle (After the PhD: An Academic Career Guide, 2021, Art House) and Yhteisöllisen kirjoittamisen opas (A Guide to Social Writing, 2023, Art House). Jess Kelley  is a writing coach, retreat facilitator, and non-fiction editor, working with people who have interesting ideas, burning passions, and/or expert knowledge to share. The people she works with include medical researchers, rebel poets, maritime lawyers, sailing instructors, anthropolo-

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gists, entrepreneurs, AI consultants, artists, TV show producers, activists, and Michelin-star chefs. Jess lives between Australia and Europe, and currently hosts regular online writing retreats. Dr Natalie Lancer  is a Chartered Coaching Psychologist and supervisor. She is the Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Coaching Psychology and the host of their podcast “The Coaching Psychology Pod”. Her research focuses on the impact of coaching programmes on doctoral students. Natalie is a master’s and doctoral supervisor at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling. In 2016, she co-authored Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring with David Clutterbuck. She is an accredited member of the Association for Coaching, and is a regular keynote speaker. Camilla  Lindholm is Professor of Nordic Languages at Tampere University. Her main research areas are interaction in institutional settings, asymmetric interaction involving participants with communication impairment, easy language, and linguistic accessibility. With co-author Johanna Isosävi, she has published two books in Finnish: Väitöksen jälkeen: opas akateemiselle uralle (After the PhD: An Academic Career Guide, 2021, Art House) and Yhteisöllisen kirjoittamisen opas (A Guide to Social Writing, 2023, Art House). Rowena Murray,  formerly Professor in the School of Education at the University of the West of Scotland, UK, is now Adjunct Professor at Strathclyde Business School and freelance through her company, Anchorage Educational Services. She is an internationally recognized expert and author on academic writing and on running writing retreats. Dr Joana  Pais Zozimo holds a PhD in Education from Lancaster University, UK, an MA in African Studies, and a BA in International Relations from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. As a qualitative social scientist, her expertise intersects at the fields of educational research, evaluation theory and practice, interdisciplinary partnerships, development studies, and collaborative learning. Her work has been across the UK, in Portugal, Spain, and various African countries, including Mozambique, where she lived and worked. Her experience of academic writing led to a professional qualification as a writing retreat facilitator with a profound interest in health and wellbeing approaches to writing in supporting her peers in the classroom, in writing groups, and through online tutorials for postgraduate students and wider audiences.

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Kate Sotejeff-Wilson  translates from Finnish, German, and Polish and edits in English for academics at KSW Translations, runs Ridge Writing Retreats, and chairs Nordic Editors and Translators. Her recent translations include Kimmo Katajala’s “Atlas of Vyborg” (Atlas Art 2020) from Finnish and Regina Töpfer’s “history of (in)fertility” from German (Palgrave Macmillan 2022). Born in Wales, she did research for her history PhD (UCL 2005) in London, Berlin, Poznań, and Warsaw, and is now also a Finn. Marcella Sutcliffe  is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Life Member at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. Her Writing Retreats at Chapelgarth offer postgraduate students, postdocs, and academics in general a restorative, rural haven, where women and men may escape the pressures of work and home to devote time to writing. Theresa  Truax-Gischler is a developmental and substantive authors’ editor in the narrative social sciences and humanities helping multiliterate, multilingual academic scholars publish their monographs and articles with university presses. Her academic training is in anthropology, history, and Near Eastern languages and literatures. An enthusiast of cross-cultural knowledge production and multimodal, co-constructed translanguaging, Theresa spends part of her life learning how to be a more effective disability ally. She lives in the Netherlands.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 13.1

Fig. 13.2

Writers talking and listening. (Image credit: Dr Maureen Michael)23 The writer spectrum 74 A not-magic formula for writer development. (Illustration by Eduardo Shima) 89 The ideas cycle 99 Cue card 102 Supportive networks part 1 104 Emotions word cloud (Source: author) 121 Lockdown writers, Chapelgarth. (Illustration credit: Izzy Budd. Poem credit: Ceci Sutcliffe) 166 Illustration of a 90-minute co-working block, typical text production tasks for the academic and the LP, and the three stages of the structured session: goal-setting, text production work, and check-in 208 Overlap and complementarity between my three academic partners (A; white circles) and myself (LP; grey circles), along five dimensions: community of practice, academic discipline, language (native language with the primary additional language in parentheses), career stage, and location 210

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: From Our Writing Rooms to Yours Joana Pais Zozimo, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, and Wendy Baldwin

In the spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic shattered their ability to invite others to write with them in their usual spaces, a group of structured writing retreat facilitators turned to the Facebook group that had been launched barely two months prior. Feeling unmoored amid all the uncertainty of the moment and needing to write, they started to write

J. P. Zozimo (*) Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Sotejeff-Wilson Ridge Writing Retreats, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] W. Baldwin Linguaverse, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_1

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together online. Social writing—that is, writing with others—was already a lifeline for these facilitators, who understood the power and value that lies in, as Barbara Grant put it in her Foreword, making “time for writing sociality in all its complexities and pleasures.” They caught up, laughed, and shared struggles, fears, achievements, and hopes—whatever was important in coping with the moment. They also discussed ways to foster writing and community with the many academic writers who were facing terrible uncertainty, increased isolation, and, for many women academics, an increase in responsibility and affective labour. This book was born out of those conversations. Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms offers a multifaceted perspective on social writing in a volatile, uncertain, and complex world, with contributions from writing retreat facilitators writing from Europe, North America, and Australasia. All contributors are women, as most writing retreat facilitators and attendees are, and gendered reality is at the book’s core. Social writing counters gendered norms of writing, particularly in academia. It creates a collective space, led by women, but not only for women. The structure is flat, accommodating, and inclusive; it is interdisciplinary and intersectional, and includes voices and identities that are marginalized in “mainstream” academia. The contributions show how social writing provides a structure that is grounding but also flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, particularly for women whose work and lives were pushed into online spaces by Covid-19. Themes include gender dynamics in social writing; materiality and emotion in writing spaces; isolation and community; resilience, safety, exploration; writers’ journeys; what stays unsaid and unwritten; and balancing the personal and professional. This book focuses on personal experiences of women from both the edges and the centre of higher education and gives voice to topics delegated to the margins: bodies, movement/immobility, and wellbeing; pregnancy, motherhood, and work-life balance; anxiety and mental health; care, hospitality, and affective labour; modes of linguistic expression; alternative family and queer-led spaces. Our book purposefully entwines these polyphonic voices to tell a story of writing retreat as a space for leadership, empowerment, and joy. The book showcases perspectives on facilitating retreats and other structured writing models based on or inspired by Murray’s social writing framework (Murray 2015):  in-person or online; before, during, or after Covid-19

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lockdowns; supporting writers at all career stages in contexts across Europe, in academia, and beyond. It integrates conceptions of social writing into our practice of writing, facilitating, and combining these two roles. As we write, our diverse identities intersect. Gender is a key factor in how, why, what, when, and where we write—and who we write with. The contributors to this book draw on their experience working with a range of writers, from peer-led doctoral student groups to meetings of academics with decades of publication history. Most of us are based in higher education institutions, and we are situated in a range of disciplines, from education to theology. Many of the writing groups we facilitate are multilingual and intercultural, if not intercontinental. While theory and research are present, the book’s focus is on exploring, reflecting on, and sharing purpose and practice through a qualitative and narrative lens, a perspective that has been—often necessarily—downplayed in much of the research literature on structured and social writing in higher education. The book meets the need to enable women’s capacity, especially in academic settings, to structure their own writing practice and that of others in the community. It expands current perspectives on social writing beyond its core context in English-speaking countries to multilingual contexts from Spain and the Netherlands to Finland and Estonia, identifying fruitful areas for future interdisciplinary research, nexuses of social and academic practice, and strategies for situated social learning through a feminist lens, bringing women from the margins to the centre. This is all the more crucial now, when the average woman academic with children is losing an hour of research and writing time every day due to the exacerbating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic (Gewin 2021), the impact of which will be felt for decades. The structure of social writing is flexible—like a net, rather than a grille. As the contributors to this volume show, it can stretch and adapt to enable, rather than restrict, writers’ individual and collective circumstances. From the cloister to Twitter, from the kitchen table to the office, writers have adapted the structured model, together, to work for rather than against their wellbeing, to both write well and be well. The contributions span all stages in the lifecycle of social writing, from the tensions and crises that forced us to change how we write, alone and socially, to the ways we found to resolve these issues, including practical applications that can be taken into other contexts. Many contributors explore how the forced transition from in-person to online working had an immediate impact on the rooms we write in and on our writing. The

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authors share creative solutions: they analyse and reflect on what works, and why, in facilitating social writing practice and community under pressure and in the face of rapidly evolving realities. The chapters are interspersed with practical applications: ready-to-use, tried-and-tested exercises, sketches, and tips for groups and individuals to get their writing started, move it forward, or approach it in a new way. Contributors share proposals for applying the insights and experiences of these writers in other contexts to promote physical, cognitive, and social wellbeing, connection, and empowerment. The three sections the chapters are grouped into echo the three components of Rowena Murray’s Social Writing Framework as developed in Writing in Social Spaces (2015) and in her chapter in The Positioning and Making of Female Professors: Pushing Career Advancement Open (2019). “The framework shows the writing process as a social process. It represents writing in terms of potential relationships with and between concepts, places, people and objects. Its purpose was to bring all these elements and relationships into our understanding of ‘writing’. Writing is not just about text, but about creating writing-oriented contexts” (2019, 96). Because a writing-oriented context needs to acknowledge the whole person writing the text, the framework’s components naturally overlap and intersect. The framework “unifies the identities of writer, researcher, academic, professional, person, partner, parent, athlete etc.—it does not separate out these roles” because “all parts of me are involved in my writing” (Murray 2015, 129). In a framework based on the whole person and potential relationships involved in writing, it is important to acknowledge that “affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (Ahmed 2010, 199). Therefore, in this book, we make the “affective” aspects of social writing explicit in the second component. Despite the connected nature of social writing, dividing the framework into three components is still useful: in relating a particular experience of facilitating social and academic writing, each chapter speaks to one predominant component. The three components of the social writing framework provide the titles for the three sections of the book. The authors in Part I, “Physical Support and Wellbeing,” explore the physical component of social writing and how they construct environments that sustain wellbeing. In Part II, “Cognitive and Affective Connections,” the contributors address the cognitive component, showing how they help writers transfer goals into targets and find solutions. They also address the affective

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dimension of writing: how writers feel about their writing is as important as how they think about it. In Part III, “Social Interactions and Relations,” the focus is primarily on the social component, that is, on forging relationships and interactions in conversation with other writers. Part I centres the physical and wellbeing aspects of social writing and brings in dispatches from three continents. All four authors in this section face the challenge of bringing bodily realities into writing. In Chap. 2, “Look Out! Navigating Multiple Spaces to Sustain the Benefits of Writing Retreats,” Rowena Murray, writing from Scotland, discusses fear and anxiety, and safety and power. Murray shows how the Writing Meeting works for writers to navigate the gendered spaces of academia as a practical way of creating protected space for writing in less accommodating academic contexts. Why is it that mainly women attend writing retreats? Murray reflects on many conversations about the naming, format, leadership, purpose, and values of writing retreats and how these spaces, and the writers in them, may be viewed from other spaces. Murray proposes that we make uncoupling from and linking back to other spaces an active, managed process. In Chap. 3, “Thoughts on folklore,” Lucy Hinnie, writing between Canada and Scotland, introduces her term “compassionate productivity” to describe navigating remote retreat in times of strife. Hinnie introduced #remoteretreat on Twitter in 2018, adapting the structured writing retreat model for a virtual world much earlier than most. She addresses two questions: what can we do when “remote” is no longer optional? How can we equip ourselves to thrive in challenging times? In a culture of productivity, Hinnie seeks to reframe writing not so much as a measure of worth but as a practice of care. In Chap. 4, “Don’t Starve: Change the Recipe,” Jess Kelley, writing from Australia, writes about transitions: writing, pregnancy, and new motherhood. She shares a personal recipe from her writing facilitator’s cookbook. Before that, she explains how she created her recipe by sustaining structured writing retreats in a time of intense personal, professional, and global transitions. Kelley describes the resistance and enthusiasm around the move from offline to online writing, and the need for parents to integrate their writing with childcare. She makes explicit the personal life challenges writers deal with behind the public face at work and on screen. The online retreats can provide surprisingly intimate spaces and have become a norm—is it time for a parent retreat?

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In Chap. 5, “Retreat in Daily Life: Integrating Writing into Work and Life,” Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, writing from Finland, brings a multilingual, queer, and pastoral theological perspective to concepts of retreat, work-­ life balance, and affective labour. Writers face multiple challenges to carve out rooms of their own. Sotejeff-Wilson shares her experience of creating space that counters the cis male straight dominance of academic culture to embrace diverse genders, sexualities, and languages. Surprisingly, a Christian concept helps here: the retreat in daily life. Rather than the ultimate “getting away to focus inwards” of an Ignatian silent retreat, for most, it is more realistic to have brief daily input over a sustained period. A small, regular community can maintain the “retreat” aspect of writing in rooms we make our own. Part II, on the cognitive and affective aspects of social writing, analyses how the social writing model works both within and adjacent to academic institutions. The authors of the four chapters suggest that structured writing sessions mutually benefit academics and improve outcomes in text production outside an institutional setting. In doing so, the contributors of these chapters tapped into their real-life situated contexts to critically reflect on their roles and identities, in some cases overlapping facilitation or co-facilitation and writing. In Chap. 6, “Some Kind of Writer: The Writer Spectrum, and a (Not-­ Magic) Formula for Development,” Sarah Haas explains her model for skill development in reluctant or covert writers. In her work at Ghent and Copenhagen universities and in the US, she has gathered data on how writers feel about their writing. In conversations with PhD writers in STEM disciplines, she found what are sometimes seen as intrinsic gender-­ related traits and the idea that “writing is either in you or it’s not.” She suggests ways to demystify the writing process. In Chap. 7, “Coaching Interventions in Writing Retreats: A Creativity Boost,” Natalie Lancer, writing from London, England, presents her method of coaching interventions in social writing. She brings her experience as a chartered psychologist to encourage writers to feel more confident about their work. Through her boost exercises, she has been supporting networks of writers in unlocking their creativity during the writing process. In Chap. 8, “Adapting the Structured Model, Developing Researchers, and Facilitating Your Own Productivity as a Writer,” Jo Garrick, writing from England, explains how the Northern Advanced Research Training Initiative and Leeds University Business School build writer capacity

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within and between institutions. Garrick gives a depicted account on achieving productivity as a facilitator, a researcher development, and retreat audience. Chapter 9, “Different Layers of Togetherness: Virtual Writing Sessions During and After Covid-19,” describes Katarina Damčević’s personal experiences of facilitating virtual structured writing retreats, group, and one-on-one writing sessions in Estonia and how notions of wellbeing, collaboration, and support emerged during her virtual writing retreats. Being isolated but simultaneously connected has opened space for exploring different ways of facilitating, collaborating, and creating support networks for graduate students and researchers. The chapters in Part III show what can happen when women from different backgrounds and located in different places relative to the academic centre enter structured writing spaces and engage in conversation about ways to write, ways to lead, and ways to (be) empower(ed). The contributors are women who engage with academic writers located at a remove from the hegemonic Anglosphere core of academia, being from institutions outside the Anglosphere or members of communities of practice outside of but aligned with the academy. In each case, structured and socially supported writing has been a mechanism that has allowed them and their co-participants to approach and engage more directly with the core and simultaneously keep a foothold in their own local, personal, and professional context. In Chap. 10, “Transferring Social Writing Practices to Our Communities in Finnish Universities,” Camilla Lindholm and Johanna Isosävi describe their work in bringing structured and social writing into the Finnish university context as a legitimate academic activity and how they met the needs of writers at different levels, including two master’s courses, where the practice of social writing is integrated into each course’s curriculum. They document their processes, the feedback they received, and how the  Covid-19 pandemic opened alternative ways for scholars to write socially even when circumstances shut people outside their regular writing places. In Chap. 11, “Becoming a Facilitator: Finding My Own Delivery Style Through Opportunities and Challenges,” Marcella Sutcliffe describes her journey from solitary academic writer to writing retreat facilitator, and how harnessing her family home and local community in the  north of England gave her and her retreaters new ways to share ideas and create community among themselves and with the wider public. In her quest to

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help other academic women  find time and space to write and connect, Sutcliffe uncovered her skill as a convener and a writer. In Chap. 12, “Linguistic Care Work in Proximal Zones: Towards Allied Author–Editor Critical Agency,” Theresa Truax-Gischler gives an autoethnographic account of how the lockdown period in 2020  in the Netherlands required new ways of engaging in multimodal communication with her nonspeaking daughter and how insights into linguistic agency and linguistic care work in the personal arena were fruitfully applied to the professional arena. Lockdown similarly spurred her to co-work online with a microgroup of multilingual and transnational women scholars. This shared space was a way for the authors and editors to form alliances and share their myriad ways of expressing and creating meaning. In going beyond the surface of what constitutes normative academic communication, scholars develop the critical agency that lets them navigate a hegemonic and monolingual research and publication paradigm. Lastly, in Chap. 13, “Meetings at the Textface: What Academics and Language Professionals Gain When They Team Up and Adopt a Social Writing Approach to Academic Text Production,” Wendy Baldwin presents an adaptation of the structured writing model that allows academics and language professionals to work on their respective academic text output side by side and over the long term. Writing from Spain, she shows how pairing up members of these related communities of practice opens up fertile terrain for cross-pollination, where near-peers can share approaches to and understandings of academic writing and benefit from opportunities for incidental learning. Writing socially empowers us as women in academia, and we hope this book will do the same for our readers. The practices discussed in the chapters have the potential to reshape our conceptual approach to social writing in the future. The authors of the chapters in Part I take an intersectional and integrated approach to writing that works with, rather than against, daily life. Writers bring their bodies and whole selves to their writing. As Murray puts it, “Writing Meetings will not create systemic change, but they can provide alternative spaces.” Hinnie shows that an “intersectional, inclusive” model of productivity is possible. Kelley stresses the balance between the “feast” of in-person retreats and “regular nutrition” of shorter online social writing sessions. Sotejeff-Wilson concludes, “it’s the community that helps you grow.”

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The authors of the chapters in Part II illustrate that moving forward on our writing journeys knows no borders. This is important because in the current writing culture, women, in particular, but all writers, in general, avoid sharing their fears, vulnerabilities, and challenges. The chapters in Part II describe different writing models in action and reinforce the key message that structured social writing is far from being a one-off model to compensate for a “deficit.” A social and holistic writing mindset tends to generate more reflection, depth, authenticity, and transparency in writers—overall an interior journey towards their truth. As for the affective component of the section, the narratives manifest an explicit realization of the self and one’s identity as a writer (“real or not so real,” using Haas’s words) that can sustain, transform, and craft some writers’ practice. This is a mindful approach to writing, using Lancer’s creativity boost exercises, Garrick’s building writing capacity in an institutional setting, or, in Damčević’s words, “the world of writing together.” The authors of the chapters in Part III show how dynamic social writing can be. Baldwin shows that writing regularly together can give academics and language professionals “boosts from a near-peer partner”; Truax-Gischler finds “heterogeneous proximal zones of mutual care” in writing socially; Sutcliffe develops creative new ways for women in academia to connect; Lindholm and Isosävi emphasize the aspect of “leadership in social writing.” It is our hope that this volume will help academic—and academy-­ adjacent—writers in a number of ways. Fundamentally, we want more writers to have the option to write socially and more facilitators to create spaces for this to happen. Given the realities of the hegemonic, neoliberal university and the wide range of often high-stakes writing that is required (Thompson 2023), social writing for academic purposes in its myriad forms gives writers access to (near-) peer-led spaces, structures, and support that focus on this critical and institutionally under-supported task. Writers situated outside the academic core—for example, women; gender-nonconforming, trans and queer people; writers on the periphery of academia due to race, class, or disability; those just starting out in academia—may have even greater need of these co-created writing spaces and whole-writer support. As multilingual facilitators representing a range of intersecting identities and disciplines, we are attuned to the way that social writing travels beyond geographies, cultures, backgrounds, disciplinary contexts, and languages. Multilingual writers need spaces that play to the strengths of

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the languages in which they think and write best. Facilitators can actively create multilingual writing spaces that counterbalance the dominance of English in academic publishing. Writing, facilitation, and conversation don’t have to be (only) in English; facilitators can encourage writers to call on the whole breadth of their linguistic and expressive ability and harness it for the purposes at hand (Sotejeff-Wilson 2023, 98). On a more radical level, we want writers to find joy in writing. By writing within a protected community on terms that are their own, writers, in general, and women, in particular, become empowered, build resilience, and reconnect with their purpose for writing. They can dare to enjoy their writing practice, dare to bring happiness to their writing ecosystems, and dare to humanize academia and other academic networks (Pais Zozimo 2022). Finally, it is our hope that the experiences related across the volume will inspire writers to create a form of social writing that works for them. Structured social writing that integrates writers’ local, personal, and professional contexts is a lasting model that has a wealth of benefits. As the contributions to this volume show, the social writing framework is robust enough to accommodate new ways of writing socially. Creating a space and community to write together gives writers strength for themselves and to challenge unequal power structures, wherever they write.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Gewin, Virginia. 2021. Pandemic Burnout Is Rampant in Academia. Nature 591 (7850): 489–491. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-­021-­00663-­2. Murray, Rowena. 2015. Writing in Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing. London: Routledge. Murray, Rowena, and Denise Mifsud, Eds. 2019. The Positioning and Making of Female Professors. Pushing Career Advancement Open. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-­3-­030-­26187-­0. Pais Zozimo, J. 2022. Healthy Writing Retreats: Dare to Enjoy Your Writing and Joy Will Abound! Bear With Me and Try it Out. RECIRCULATE. https:// recirculate.global/the-­flow/recirculate-­writing-­retreats/. Sotejeff-Wilson, Kate. 2023. Ole lasna: kasvokkaisten kirjoitusretriitien ilot ja haasteet [Be Present: Challenges and Joys of In-Person Retreats]. In Opas yhteisölliseen kirjoittamiseen [A Guide to Social Writing], ed. Johanna Isosävi and Camilla Lindholm, 97–99. Helsinki: Art House. Thompson, Pat. 2023. Academic Writing—It’s a Lot. Patter (blog). July 10. https://patthomson.net/2023/07/10/academic-­writing-­its-­a-­lot/. Accessed 10 July 2023.

PART I

Physical Support and Wellbeing

CHAPTER 2

Look Out!: Navigating Multiple Spaces to Sustain the Benefits of Writing Retreats Rowena Murray

‘Why is it mostly women who attend writing retreats?’ This chapter begins with reflections on this question—the naming, format, leadership, purpose and benefits of structured writing retreats (Murray and Newton 2009). Conversations about this issue prompt participants to look out from the retreat space to other spaces, knowing that on return to other spaces, gender inequality will still be there and writing will be difficult to prioritise over other tasks and roles. To ease the transition from retreat to work and life, this chapter offers the Writing Meeting. Like retreats, these Writing Meetings will not create systemic change, but they can provide alternative spaces. This chapter offers a new form of the Writing Meeting framework and argues that it can be used to sustain the benefits of writing retreats over the career lifecycle. In addition to paragraphs where I explore these conversations and offer practical suggestions, this chapter includes ‘asides’, which I have right-­ justified to signal that the content is different from the rest of the text. I use these asides to illustrate, counterpoint or personalise a point, like this:

R. Murray (*) Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_2

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Also because … … of moments when My/your world view collides with the bigger picture. Sometimes, the slippage seems extreme. We are out of sync. Out of answers. Time to recalibrate Myself, my writing direction and my aims. Decide what kind of person I want to be. Why? Am I not one already? In the bigger picture? In their picture? Bring reflection, analysis, discussion to this moment or Frame this moment in the bigger picture Find a framework That will work. See it now.

I used this format in The Joy of Writing (Michael and Murray 2019), a book I wrote with Maureen Michael, who also created an image for this chapter. I use the asides as a space to say more directly what I think than I do in the rest of the chapter, to pose questions rather than offer answers and visually to represent my perspective that a writing retreat—and perhaps writing itself—still sits in the margins, and perhaps there is benefit in that. I include questions in these asides, as I do not have all the answers, and there are many possible answers to these questions. Also, answers may change over time. So, I offer these as food for thought.

The Recurring Question At almost every writing retreat, in my experience, someone asks if the gender balance at retreats is usually 90% women and 10% men, and since it is, there is often a conversation about why it is. Everyone has a theory. In generalised, anonymized terms, here are the most popular answers:

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• ‘It’s because men are not comfortable admitting they “need” this’. • ‘They don’t need it anyway—they get on without it’. • ‘Women are more comfortable talking about their writing-in-progress’. • ‘Women are more comfortable sharing’. • ‘Not all women’. • ‘Women support each other more’. • ‘The idea of a “community of writers” will not appeal to men’. • ‘More women attend because writing retreats are mainly run by women’. • ‘It’s the word “retreat”—more men would attend if you called it “boot camp” ’. • ‘Women need this more because they do most of the domestic labour’. • ‘When we are catered for, we don’t have to think about it, so we focus on writing’. • ‘If they know it’s a “mainly women attend” thing, men won’t attend’. Researching this issue involved surveying participants about the gender question: they suggested that the answer lies, in part, in discriminatory workplaces: ‘some women can counter some discriminatory practices, some of the time, at writing retreats’ (Murray and Kempenaar 2018). It’s all about the spaces we write in. Moving between them is a skill. How do we learn this skill? How to maintain it?

These conversations generally address the naming, format, leadership, purpose and value of structured writing retreats. These interesting, reflective conversations reveal not only the creativity and perspectives of participants but also different levels of awareness in any given group of how many workplaces exclude, impinge on or marginalise the act of writing. In fact, it is difficult to know how anyone does their writing, so rare is the discussion of how to make space for it in many workplaces. These conversations raise awareness of constraints on writing in many workplaces—but perhaps it is more intense than ‘awareness’, since they also surface emotions that this contrast can evoke. There may be anger. Frustration. Despair. There is also concern about how retreats, and people who attend

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them, are viewed from other spaces. This often seems to trigger anxiety, which, for high-stakes academic writing, is disruptive. What are they thinking about me? That I can’t write on my own? That I’m off on a junket? If only they knew. But they do!

Facilitators of writing retreats can also have these moments: I once heard an experienced academic attending one of my retreats say to another participant: ‘I thought these retreats were all about sitting at Rowena’s feet … gleaning the wisdom, but it’s not like that at all’.

This is only one insight, which I accidentally overheard as I bent down behind the sofa where they sat to plug in a charger, but who knows what people say about participants and, it seems, about people who facilitate writing retreats? Anecdote v research. Personal v professional. Emotional v intellectual work. What engineers these oppositions? Who holds them up?

Before I ran my first retreat, someone spread the rumour that participants would ‘play sardines’ (a children’s party game where as many people as possible hide in a cupboard, hence crammed in like sardines) as an icebreaker—hard to imagine anything more off-putting for potential first-­ time participants. And me. And perhaps that was the point of the rumour. Or maybe it was just a joke. I have to say, this feels just like the threat of violence. Or at least a rewriting of what we do at retreats. And of my role in creating and running them. And of their larger purpose. To enable writing. To help.

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These anecdotes characterise ‘outsider’ views—views that those who do not write in these spaces have of those who do. Most of the time, it is easy to ignore them. But they can influence thinking, and this raises questions about how those who want to run or attend writing retreats should interact with them: how to respond to these views? Or is it better not to respond? Just carry on with the work, knowing that retreats can work and feeling relieved that these people do not attend them? We are outsiders, Off-campus, Off-grid, Offline

Therefore, while it is interesting and healthy to reflect regularly on the naming, format, leadership, purpose and value of writing retreats—and other spaces where writing is possible—that is not all this is. These female/ male gender balance conversations are, partly, about genuinely trying to puzzle out a small part of the bigger picture of gender discrimination, but they are also a reminder of well-established, long-standing barriers to writing. Awareness of how these productive writing spaces are viewed may itself work as a barrier, or a distraction, in spite of the fact that they bring benefits to workplaces—such as reputational value to universities—in terms of publications, completed doctorates and more. I see these conversations as a call for something else—not just a one-off writing retreat, a retreat from discriminatory environments, but a way to take the format, purpose and values of these writing spaces back into other spaces.

Look Out! Looking out from writing retreat to other places could involve preparing, strategically and tactically, to continue writing in other spaces. Or these conversations could disrupt the flow and concentration that retreats create. Or they could be opportunities to navigate the gap between writing spaces and other spaces—the move from writing space to another place. Whenever we retreat, we have to return.

While writing retreats help participants to manage writing-related anxiety, this anxiety can return in other spaces. Clearly, there is a need to find

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ways to write in other spaces, to take productivity from one space to another. It cannot be that writing only happens in preferred spaces; it is possible to develop the capacity to protect writing in other places. It’s not just about changing writing behaviours; it is also about confronting the people and practices that keep writing out of other spaces. When I say confronting, I do not mean face-to-face confrontation. I mean coming to terms with the constraints; I mean not capitulating. This can also prompt thinking about people working and living in the other spaces. This is a personal negotiation. It concerns or involves other people. Perhaps there are ways of working through this. The Structured Writing Retreat is a framework based on sound principles, some adapted from other fields, creating a few new concepts. That framework has its timings, breaks, goalsetting, monitoring, self-efficacy, unplugging, behaviour change, quick discussions, community of writing practice and facilitator role, and there is evidence of benefits for individuals and institutions. The framework allows writers to have clarity, which enables thinking and writing. It helps writers to manage competing demands—and writing is often competing with other tasks. So, there is a framework for writing that works. What is needed now is a framework for looking beyond writing spaces. Rather than aspiring to be constantly motivated, clear, coherent, self-­ contained and productive, perhaps this framework can be used to get writing back on track, stay on track or jump tracks—which is what writing in other spaces might feel like.

Navigating Multiple Spaces: Using the Writing Meeting Like the Structured Writing Retreat, the Writing Meeting takes established theory and applies it to thinking about writing as not only confined to preferred spaces. While the Structured Writing Retreat is a framework for writing in writing-specific spaces, the Writing Meeting is a framework for making other spaces writing specific. Managing negotiations between writing spaces is the focus of this section. I propose the Writing Meeting as a framework for managing the move between different writing spaces. This is exactly what it was designed for. It was initially designed to help people manage the transition from retreat back to work, to the hundred emails and other demands of work and life

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(Murray et al. 2008). Then, with funding from the Nuffield Foundation, a research team ran a study to see if it worked and showed benefits for academics who met for an hour every two weeks for eight weeks (Murray and Thow 2014). More recently, the framework was used to help those making another transition—from practitioner to academic (Hardy et al. 2022). Our research suggests that this framework can help with the transition between a setting where writing has been intensive to settings where writing might be close to impossible. Without this transition, there is a risk of a misconception that productive writing can only happen at writing retreats. The Writing Meeting is an adaptation of a one-to-one motivational interview. Known as the Exercise Consultation (Miller and Rollnick 2012), it was designed to get people to be more active, stop smoking or work towards other health goals. At first, we called out adaptation the Writing Consultation, but some participants felt this term was associated with medical settings. In healthcare contexts, a clinician works with a patient; in a Writing Meeting, writers (academics, researchers, professionals, students who want to write) work as peers. This section explains how to run Writing Meetings, how to use the template (end of chapter) and why each step matters. When you look at the template, you will see that there are five steps. Working through these in pairs, as peers, takes about an hour at the first meeting, less at subsequent meetings. Using the template starts with the roles ‘writer’ and ‘prompter’ (not novice-and-expert or writer-and-advisor). This is a mutual process: two people take turns to be writer and prompter. Both play both roles. Both have time to talk about their writing. In the next section I use asides to suggest ways to make this process work. I also share comments from people who used the framework and illustrate what people wrote in the template. Key point: It’s not about giving or receiving feedback or advice. This is not a review. Not for discussion with Line Managers.

Choose your Writing Meeting partner carefully—someone with whom you can agree a shared purpose:

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• We want to solve the problem of making time to write more, and this will help with that. • Let’s try it and see what happens. • Let’s do it for eight weeks, as the research suggests, and see what happens.

How to Use the Writing Meeting Template This section includes notes on the five steps in the Writing Meeting Process, with explanations, rationales and brief examples of participants’ comments. This can be in-person and/or online: if online peers can use screen share and/or email to fill in the template for each other. Guidance for Prompter Decide who will be prompter and who will be writer. The prompter’s role is to say the prompts to their colleague in the ‘writer’ role, then write the writer’s answers on the template. The purpose of this is to leave the personal in the writer role free to think and talk. About playing the prompter role, some said: ‘You feel like you should suggest something, but it’s a relief not to have to’. ‘The fact that it’s mutual, peer-to-peer is different…’. ‘I just wrote down the writer’s exact words—I didn’t have to find my own’.

Step 1: Stages of Change This is a way of deciding how ready each of us is for change—how ready we are to change how we write. The prompter ticks one of the boxes on the writer’s template. Some said: ‘I have been writing for some time (6 months or more), though I’m in a bit of a dip right now’. ‘I know I can write. I want to write. But I can’t be bothered’.

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Then the prompter asks the writer what benefits they experience when they write, and they list these on the writer’s template. The rationale for this step is that it prompts the writer to think about their motivation so as to identify what will be motivating for them. The rationale for then prompting the writer to identify drawbacks of not writing—for them—is what is called ‘decisional balance’, again, and importantly, this means for the individual—in his or her view. What are the benefits of writing for you, the writer? ‘Career progression—can’t get that without publications’. ‘Satisfaction of being published’. ‘Not having other people use my work without acknowledging it’. What are the drawbacks of not writing? ‘Being out of control with my career plan’. ‘Frustration. Despair. Feeling demoralised’. ‘Not learning from peer review of my work’. ‘I have things I want to say’.

Step 2: Anticipating Barriers to Writing This is where prompters might feel the urge to make suggestions or talk about barriers they see to writing or what they do to overcome them. The idea is to prompt—only prompt—the writer to come up with solutions that will work for them. This may be different from other conversations about barriers to writing, but it is a key shift: it lets the writer come up with ideas that suit them, that might actually work for them and dismiss those that don’t or won’t. You might need a bigger box for this or use smaller writing/font. Some said: So many. You name it. Marking. More marking. No time allocated for writing.

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Step 3: Set Writing Goals This is about prompting the person in the ‘writer’ role to set writing goals that are realistic, manageable, etc. Long term and short term—realistic, feasible. For this step, as for the others, the prompter uses the words of the template. Step 4: Avoiding Barriers This step is where the writer can anticipate risks to achieving their writing goals. It involves writers not only defining specific barriers they think are likely to stop them achieving their writing goals but also taking time to come up with workarounds for them. Recurring question: ‘Why are we doing all of these steps?’ ‘Isn’t step 2 the same as step 4?’

Step 5: Action Plan—To Be Filled in by the Writer The prompter passes the template they’ve been writing on to the writer, and the writer writes the actions they will take, with dates and times to do them and where they will do them. Finally, writer and prompter agree a date and place or online meeting to review progress with actions. People always ask, are goals and actions not the same thing? No. Goals are intentions. ‘Actions’ define what the writer will do to achieve their goals. Not intentions: things he or she will actually do.

Then writer and prompter swap roles: prompter becomes writer, and writer becomes prompter. Using a new template, the prompter writes down the writer’s answers, and they go through all the steps again for this writer. The template guides you through each step, so you can try it now (Fig. 2.1).

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Fig. 2.1  Writers talking and listening. (Image credit: Dr Maureen Michael)

Just Another Workaround or a Change Process? The Writing Meeting is a space where writers can bring their values into structured conversations about writing to discuss writing in terms of their intrinsic motivation. This is not to say that extrinsic motivation or external drivers—and targets—are moved to the margin, but the exact opposite: this framework helps participants to work out how to write in the real contexts of their work and lives. If this is a change process, it has to have meaning and ‘fit’ in their lives. The Writing Meetings can be used to achieve this. Making time for writing is not just about retreating from spaces, times, roles, seasons where we do not write. It’s about deliberately moving to other spaces.

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This is not just for novice writers or practitioners transitioning to academics. It’s also for academics, researchers, PhD students. They know how to write but face barriers.

There will always be barriers to writing. Some resist the imposition of publication targets. For some, the extrinsic drivers are overwhelming. Or meaningless. They can dismantle intrinsic motivation to write. This may be a lifelong or working-life-long struggle. It is in such contexts of what seems like endless struggles to write that the Writing Meeting can help.

Peers in Pairs Writing need not always be a solitary act; it can occur in social groupings, such as peer pairs in Writing Meetings. This is a way to actively construct the writing self. Some feel that setting their own writing goals feels selfish—perhaps this is because the goals are not in context. But considering other people is part of goalsetting. It’s part of setting goals within specific social settings. Then there is what in earlier forms of the Writing Meeting was called ‘relapse prevention’—anticipating barriers to achieving goals: setting goals in real settings. As with writing retreats, having a framework to exercise these processes seems to be key. Just as the framework of Structured Writing Retreat creates structure and motivation for writing, while seemingly quickly solving many writing ‘problems’, so the Writing Meeting is a device for connecting writing with writers’ values, making their writing goals real, in relation to their work, life and the other people implicated in their writing plans and practices. So, it’s not just about ‘looking out’ from one space to another—from a writing retreat to other settings. It’s about being on the ‘look out’ for people you can write with and, now, for someone you can do Writing Meetings with. It’s about feeling that someone is ‘looking out’ for you, in the sense that they listen to you talking about your writing and celebrate your writing achievements with you. As a writing retreat facilitator, it’s also about being the ‘look out’ who protects writers from interruptions and distractions, offering Writing Meetings as a framework to sustain a writing retreat’s benefits. What the Writing Meeting adds is the capacity to ‘look out’ for yourself. This capacity can be nurtured or, as people regularly tell me, they forget how. Of course, it’s not that they forget how to write or even how

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to make time for writing; it’s just that other tasks and roles impinge on writing all the time, and this can be wearing. So, Writing Meetings are for the long term. And your Writing Meeting ‘buddy’ may already be someone you have known for a while, although you might not have structured your writing discussions in this way, to this extent. It’s something to try now. That this framework, or something like it, is needed is confirmed by many papers about writing retreats published in academic journals over the years, most ending with a call to institutions to provide more training and support for writing and writers. For example: University executive committees can use the trends evident in these descriptive data to support the development of, and investment in, institutional-­ wide [sic] strategic and operational plans to support academics during writing for publication; these plans should include targeted investment in academic staff time and resources to foster interdisciplinary connections, nationally and internationally, through continuing professional development activities. (Grant et al. 2020, p. 620)

These researchers call for further research on ‘how staff negotiates the professional academic writing landscape’ (p. 620, emphasis Grant et al.). The Writing Meeting is one way to do this negotiation. It is possible to negotiate the move between spaces where writing is possible and spaces where it is impossible. By creating conversations about writing that include writers’ values, the Writing Meeting works on intrinsic motivation (while managing extrinsic motivation). Prompting structured conversations about the benefits of writing and drawbacks of not writing—for each individual—can sustain the motivation to write. Anticipating barriers to writing and creating ways of working around them involves confronting real, concrete, social and sometimes physical reasons for not writing.

Sustainability Two writers completed and published what they aimed to while using the Writing Meeting framework to keep them writing in the course of a year. It worked, and they achieved their goals. They had no more use for the Writing Meeting. It had served its purpose: as one of them put it, ‘We’ve outgrown the Writing Meeting’.

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However, our conversation revealed that their success was with one form of writing—edited books—but not journal articles. One of this peer pair was reluctant to work on writing for journals, knowing how difficult, competitive and time-consuming it can be, though they recognised it as a component of academic career progression. Could the Writing Meeting still be/have been helpful to this writer, enabling their transition to producing another form of writing—writing for journals? Or will they decide not to write for journals? This raises the question—which we have not yet explored in our research—of whether, as writers take on new challenges, the Writing Meeting could help them to navigate new barriers: new writing, new boss, new baby, new job, new partner/no partner, new application for promotion—there are many changes that require writers to navigate new barriers and affordances, and the Writing Meeting can help them to work through them. Perhaps not always with the same peer. In this way it can sustain the processes that not only enable but also sustain writing. Much of the literature on the idea of sustaining the benefits of witing retreats and groups addresses the need for institutional and individual initiatives (Davenport 2022; Olszewska and Lock 2016; Quynn and Stewart 2021; Rodas et al. 2021; Simpson 2013; Warnick et al. 2010). There is always the question of whether institutions could do more to support this way of working and sustain its benefits. There is debate about the extent to which individuals can sustain this on their own—why should they?— and whether institutions should do more to embed these established practices in academic work, meaning teaching, learning and research. Yet the sustainability literature also acknowledges that writing retreats and groups may be seen as transgressive, rather than integrative, which means they could be difficult to integrate. Nor is embedding writing retreats and groups in curricula and workloads likely to be unproblematic; there may be benefits in self-selecting, voluntary groupings. Voluntary or required? Embedded academic work and study or in the margin? Under the radar or on the radar? There is no reason why it cannot be both. These debates can feature in Writing Meeting peer-to-peer conversations, and in this way, it offers a means to navigate debates and sustain writing. The Writing Meeting is just a framework, but it keeps writers focused on real problems—gender being but one of them—and makes writers work out real solutions. Look out!—it’s time for change! And this is a way to sustain change.

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Going Forward I’ll still be writing in groups—online, with people from all over the world— in my free online writing groups and at residential structured writing retreats, where the regular breaks, walks, snacks, good food and conversations all add up to the joy of writing. I will keep offering my Training for Retreat Facilitators course so that more people can benefit. The trend for universities to send cohorts of people to this course—often at the behest of a Research Director or Associate Dean (Research) from each Faculty or Division—bodes well, though it might just be a post-pandemic moment. I will create new ways to disseminate knowledge of academic writing, such as ebooks. My emphasis is on continuing to help PhD students, researchers and academic staff, while re-inventing a few of the things I do. Finally, more research is needed to challenge the dominance of metrics: how can we measure the value of writing retreats and other groupings without reducing it simply to numbers of submissions and publications, and thereby to build the case for funds and resources, including dedicated writing spaces? Secondly, we are nowhere near done with the ‘gender’ question: are writing spaces enabling women’s career progression? 

Writing Meeting Template Writing Meeting Template Date of meeting: … Name of writer: …



Name of prompter: …

Guidance for Prompter

The aim is to prompt reflection on writing by asking the writer questions. The prompter fills in steps 1–4 for the writer. The writer fills in step 5. • Sit in a quiet place. • Adopt an open body position. • Keep good eye contact with the writer and actively listen. • Attend, reflect and paraphrase for the writer. • Have an open, honest discussion. • Only do step 1 at your first meeting. • For subsequent meetings:

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1. Review step 5 from previous meeting—were short-term goals met? 2. Complete steps 3–5. Step 1: Stage of Change (for First Meeting) Once you are both settled, ask the writer to identify what stage they are in at this time in their writing. Ask, ‘Which of these sounds most like you, right now?’ o Contemplation: ‘I want to write’. o Preparation: ‘I have done some writing, but not enough’. o Action: ‘I have been writing, but only recently (less than 6 months)’. o Maintenance: ‘I have been writing regularly for some time (6 months or more)’. Prompter asks the writer what benefits they experience when they write and drawbacks when they do not write. List these here. What are benefits of writing for you?



What are drawbacks of not writing?

Step 2: Anticipating Barriers to Writing

Do you anticipate any barriers to your writing?

If so, how will you overcome them?

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Step 3: Set Realistic, Acceptable, Manageable and Achievable Goals What is/are your long-term goal(s) for writing?

What is your next realistic short-term sub-goal(s) for writing? e.g., Write 500 to 800 words. Finish revisions from reviewer (you must make short goal achievable!)



Step 4: Avoiding Barriers

Are there times when there are risks that will stop you achieving your sub-goal ?

What can you do to avoid that?

The prompter now reviews and reflects with the writer on steps 1–4.

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Step 5: Action Plan (to Be Filled in by the Writer) Check that these writing goals are specific, in real time, realistic, acceptable, manageable and achievable. Remember: devise achievable goals. Actions I will take in order to achieve the short-term goals from STEP 3 Actions are sub-goals. Specifically, what you will do, e.g., number of minutes and words for the writing task, use verbs too (explain, describe, analyse, evaluate, produce …). Action (sub-goal)

When

Where

Date and place of next writing meeting ______________________________

References Davenport, E. 2022. The Writing Social: Identifying with Academic Writing Practices Amongst Undergraduate Students. Investigations in University Teaching and Learning 13: 1–7. Grant, M.J., R.R. Lotto, and I.D. Jones. 2020. What We Can Learn from Elite Academic Staff Publication Portfolios: A Social Network Analysis. Aslib Journal of Information Management 72 (4): 605–624. Hardy, A., R. Murray, M. Thow, and M. Smith. 2022. ‘So Maybe I’m Not Such an Imposter’: Becoming an Academic After a Life as a Teacher-Practitioner. Higher Education Research and Development. https://doi.org/10.108 0/07294360.2020.1835835.

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Michael, M., and Murray, R. 2019. The Joy of Writing: A Collaboration of Image and Text. Lochwinnoch: Anchorage Educational Services (available from Anchorage Educational Services and Room for Writing). Miller, W.R., and S.  Rollnick. 2012. Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change. 3rd ed. London: Guildford Press. Murray, R., and L. Kempenaar. 2018. Why Do Women Attend Writing Retreats? Gender and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2018.1557321. Murray, R., and M. Newton. 2009. Writing Retreat as Structured Intervention: Margin or Mainstream? Higher Education Research and Development 28 (5): 527–539. Murray, R., and M. Thow. 2014. Peer-Formativity: A Framework for Academic Writing. Higher Education Research and Development 33 (6): 1166–1179. Murray, R., M. Thow, S. Moore, and M. Murphy. 2008. The Writing Consultation: Developing Academic Writing Practices. Journal of Further and Higher Education 32 (2): 119–128. Olszewska, K., and J.  Lock. 2016. Examining Success and Sustainability of Academic Writing: A Case Study of Two Writing-Group Models. Canadian Journal of Higher Education 46 (4): 132–145. Quynn, K., and C.  Stewart. 2021. Sustainable Writing for Graduate Students: Writing Retreats Offer Vital Support. Journal of Further and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2021.1875200. Rodas, E.L., L. Colombo, M.D. Calle, and G. Cordero. 2021. Looking at Faculty Writing Groups from Within: Some Insights for Their Sustainability and Future Implementations. International Journal for Academic Development. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2021.1976189. Simpson, S. 2013. Building for Sustainability: Dissertation Boot Camp as a Nexus of Graduate Writing Support. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 10 (2): 1–8. Warnick, C., E. Cooney, and S. Lackey. 2010. Beyond the Budget: Sustainability and Writing Studios. Journal of Basic Writing 29 (2): 74–96.

CHAPTER 3

Thoughts on folklore Lucy R. Hinnie

120  days after the first UK lockdown came into force in 2020, Taylor Swift released her album folklore. folklore presents an idealised image of artistry and creative flow in an arboreal dreamscape. Swift embraces the role of storyteller, weaving auditory fairy tales, with the album’s opening track proclaiming: I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit Been saying “yes” instead of “no”

folklore became the best-selling album of the year, followed in December by evermore, another lockdown-inspired masterpiece. By this point, the UK was entering a third lockdown. I don’t think I was alone in cursing Taylor Swift. So why mention her at all? The narrative cultivated by works such as folklore is that creativity thrives in adversity, escape fuels output, and the exile of the artist is a catalyst for greatness. The propagation of this narrative is damaging. If Taylor Swift

L. R. Hinnie (*) York, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_3

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can do this, why can’t I finish my dissertation/novel/essay? Why can’t I say ‘yes instead of no’? What am I doing wrong? Why am I failing? The line between artistry and academia is often fraught. The latter is often seen as mechanical, logical, while the former is that famous ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (Wordsworth 1800). Creativity is not traditionally associated with the ivory tower. These preconceptions bleed over into attitudes towards writing: artists should be able to tune into their organic flow, their spontaneity, while academics, a different category altogether, should mechanically and rigorously produce pages upon pages of worthy output. Truthfully, just as the drive to produce output lies within us all, so too do the anxieties and fears around our own worth as writers, irrespective of how we categorise ourselves. The movement towards writing retreat models in an academic context is a site where these anxieties can be combatted for those who seek to produce more, or in a different way. This is never more so than in times of strife, be they personal, professional or pandemic.

#remoteretreat As part of my own writing practice, I developed the #remoteretreat model, which took the principles of Rowena Murray’s writing retreats (Murray and Newton 2009) and distributed them for free, via a community of like-­ minded individuals on Twitter. This happened in 2018, before the days of PCR tests and bubbles. #remoteretreat is a Twitter-based event, in which participants gather virtually on social media to write together and work to Murray’s retreat principles. Using the timetable format and retreat conventions laid out by Murray, participants check in at allotted times and support one another to facilitate blocks of non-interrupted writing. Though there is a paradox in doing this via social media, the collective accountability and focus this offers are exceptionally helpful, particularly to those who struggle to maintain a ‘typical’ research or writing routine, for whatever reason. Participants range from undergraduate students to mid- and late-career researchers, and mutual praise and accountability are a crucial part of the process, expressed through positive reinforcement and entertaining gifs. #remoteretreat continues to engage a wide community of writers, from postgraduate students to academics further along their career path. The use of social media is egalitarian, insofar as it is free and generally accessible

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to those writing, as well as allowing for participation from multiple countries, fields and perspectives. The collective accountability and encouragement of a group replicate well in this format, and events continue even now, five years later. While the impact of the pandemic may have shifted all manner of writing retreats into an online format, the flexibility and accessibility of the #remoteretreat model has endured, and its flexibility and spontaneity continue to be appealing for participants. But when things closed down and we needed the retreat model the most, that is when it became most difficult to sustain, in terms of the time and emotional energy needed to successfully commit to, engage in and complete a retreat. Speaking as both facilitator and participant, when the basic day-to-day life becomes untenable, our productivity is the first casualty. The possibility of participating in a retreat becomes unlikely at best, and impossible at worst. This is where #remoteretreat shines, offering a transformative experience in its flexibility and accessibility, creating community in a completely virtual space. Participants with caring responsibilities are able to slip out of sessions when needed, and no money changes hands for venue hire or other facilities. Collective accountability and encouragement are enormously beneficial, and most importantly, it is not punitive: compassion is inherent in this communal approach. The traditional emphasis of a standard in-person academic writing retreat is primarily word count. In achieving this quantifiable outcome, writers gain self-worth, a sense of structure and wellbeing, and a drive to push ahead. In contrast, when writers are unable to simply make the time to write, a quantifiable goal can become self-limiting and intimidating. When writers do not have the bandwidth or capacity to remove themselves from the everyday minutiae, feelings of listlessness and a lack of motivation can arise. The attendant negativity and hopeless comparisons (I’m looking at you, Taylor) become a vicious cycle. I do not have the answers, or the catchy melodic wisdom of folklore. What I do have is a proposal for the cultivation of a new methodology: compassionate productivity. What endures with #remoteretreat is the flexibility it offers participants, opening up the retreat model to anyone who wishes to participate, irrespective of their individual circumstances. Compassionate productivity takes that modular approach and moves it into the realm of the individual. It recognises that while the usual emphasis of a retreat is on quantifiable output, there is also vast scope and space for compassion in our perception of productivity.

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Compassionate Productivity The idea of compassion as connection drives this reframing of productivity into something communal, seeking to separate criticism of the self from the joy of writing. This new model of compassionate productivity is intersectional and inclusive: it speaks to the person, irrespective of their race, gender, class, sexuality or ability. It places the satisfaction of the self above the demands of external stakeholders. It utilises the framework of #remoteretreat in a flexible and bespoke context and suggests ways in which we can not only enable but also enhance writing as an act of self-care. It is intersectional because it belongs to the individual: they make the model and embrace their own method. Every participant can take the bare bones of the retreat and mould it to what suits their needs best, whether it is to start later, finish earlier, in order to accommodate caring commitments, work, or self-­ care. The framework and its usability are infinitely adaptable. There is no wrong way to participate. What compassionate productivity suggests is that writing has the radical potential to become something more than a tool for measurable outcomes. By reframing writing as a practice of care, rather than a measure of worth, the tools of #remoteretreat can empower and liberate writers from a cycle of self-abnegation and frustration. There are five principles underpinning the idea of compassionate productivity. Rowena Murray speaks about the need for containment in a successful retreat model. This containment carries over into a compassionate practice and takes a number of specific forms in the guide below.

Compassion in Practice, for the Anxious Writer Division ringfencing ideas and projects There is much written scholarship on the theory of executive dysfunction in times of stress, such as bereavement, and compassionate productivity encourages a simple and single-task approach to writing. Ringfence ideas and projects into manageable chunks.

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prioritising An enduring memory of the pandemic was the paring down of our day-to-­ day lives into what was essential, what was desirable and what was feasible. In order to be kind to yourself, prioritising what is important can yield great rewards. crafting domestic boundaries These boundaries do not have to be drastic, and there are many points in our lives where they are impossible to draw. But for ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, permit yourself to disengage fully from domestic tasks. They can wait. Space making time Carving out time is the most challenging part of implementing your own practice. In trying times, think about low-hanging fruit and small goals. Can you spend 20 minutes on a paragraph or do a 5-minute blitz on that opening sentence? It doesn’t need to be more than this. physical space Whether it’s a desk, dining table, or bed, be comfortable. A small ritual indicating it is time for writing can be useful: a pair of gloves, a particular pen, a notable scent, a specific drink are all things that have worked for people I’ve met through writing. Lists reclaim listing, get granular Let us move away from lists being a source of shame. Embrace ‘have done lists’, and do so with pride. Celebrate the small things, remember that those low-hanging fruit are just as important as the big goals. You got dressed and wrote a sentence? That’s incredible, and not just in times of strife. Stand proud. Tailoring adapt the model In a dream world, you would have access to the rigour and focus of a writing retreat as and when you required it. In the real world, be flexible.

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Use a section here, an idea there: start at 10 am, 1 pm, 10 pm, even 1 am. If it works for you, then it works. Community find your people Seek accountability from those around you, and don’t be afraid to explain the parameters of compassion. Reach out to those who are in the same boat and can extend kindness and empathy. set boundaries What would you like them to ask you, what would you like to share? Consider formats other than word count, though if that works for you, please do continue. reject toxic productivity Comparison is the thief of joy, and our digital spaces are rife with the productivity of those around us. You do not have to engage with this. Remember that you are on your own path, steering your own ship. And what a ship it is!

Conclusion We live now in a state of hybridity, adjusting to the changes that years of disruption have wrought. Taylor Swift’s Midnights arrived in late 2022, ushering in a new aesthetic and a new era from our erstwhile fairy tale raconteur. Meanwhile, I take these steps to compassionate productivity with me in my work. They are not always easy—the tale of writing this very chapter, for instance, highlights the challenges that every writer still faces in showing up for themselves and for their work. Regardless, these small incursions into the fear of writing, these actions that stand up to the voice in one’s head that says ‘you cannot’, the small acts of care we can show ourselves when things are stacked against us—they count. I hope that they help you too.

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References Murray, Rowena. 2015. Containment. In Writing In Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach To Academic Writing. London: Routledge. Rowena Murray & Mary Newton. 2009. Writing retreat as structured intervention: margin or mainstream?, Higher Education Research & Development, 28:5, 541–553. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360903154126 Swift, Taylor. 2020. The 1. folklore. Republic Records. Wordsworth, William. 1800. Preface. Lyrical Ballads. London: T.  N. Longman and O.  Rees. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads_(1800)/ Volume_1/Preface. Accessed 24 March 2023.

CHAPTER 4

Don’t Starve: Change the Recipe Jess Kelley

During one of the last in-person structured writing retreats I ran before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, a young mother attended with both her newborn and the baby’s grandfather in tow. These extra guests waited in the hall during the two and half days of writing, while mum would pop outside to nurse and cuddle her baby as needed. I was mildly bothered by the interruptions, though (I hope) I didn’t show it. At the close of the retreat, we discussed possible improvements for future events. One question, which I had heard a few times before, was: Would you consider running retreats online?

A new-to-me question was: Would a parent retreat be possible?

J. Kelley (*) The Write Kelley, Rocky River, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_4

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My response to the first question was firm: It just wouldn’t work. There’s a magic to writing together, being in the same room, that I believed we just couldn’t capture online. My answer to the second was more entrepreneurial, suggesting that I would be happy to run a parents’ retreat with childcare if we could get the numbers. Six months later, the global pandemic obliterated travel, gatherings were restricted, and life as we know it was turned upside down. And I discovered I was pregnant. I was living in Scotland when the UK went into lockdown. The retreats I had scheduled were soon cancelled, and my personal, professional, and financial situation felt heavy with question marks. Then, one major client asked me to deliver an online retreat, then another, and my whole business model adapted to suit the times. My early imagining of an online retreat was of digital faces staring from behind muted microphones, coolly impersonal. No chatter, no hugs or shaking hands, no serendipitous moments or spontaneous idea sharing. Ooft, was I wrong. It turns out that online writing sessions have their own flavour, and it’s delightful. I adapted them heavily of course. Instead of multi-day events every few months, I hosted a couple of hours twice a week. We still stretched together, but just for a few minutes before and after our writing, instead of a midday yoga session. We spent time troubleshooting whatever challenges we were facing in our writing (or sometimes our personal lives). We perhaps missed the coffee break moments, the hallway conversations, the quiet grins glimpsed across the writing room, the lunchtime laughter and the evening farewells. But instead we enjoyed more frequent connections with a regular group, surprisingly intimate chats, and a space where we encouraged, supported, advised, questioned, commiserated, laughed, groaned and, of course, wrote. Wrote a lot. As I practised this new model, I was both grateful to continue earning in a time when jobs and lives were being so disrupted, and relieved to not have to travel. Tiring at the best of times, travelling for work would have been difficult to manage as my pregnancy progressed. And our online mini retreats were a blessing after my son was born, too—my personal and professional transitions were happily in sync. I would give my boy a big feed, hand him over to his dad with a whispered “good luck,” hide my unbrushed hair in a bun, tug off my slept-in

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dressing gown, and enjoy a rare cup of hot tea in front of my Zoom screen with my writing group. The regularity of our sessions gave structure to those hazy sleep-­ deprived days. I cherished the social contact and conversations that weren’t in baby talk. As is typical of structured writing retreats, our group was mostly women, many with birth stories and advice to share. The support and warmth that I received from my writers, my clients—my friends— helped me so much in those early days of new motherhood. We all got something out of those sessions we spent together, beyond moving our manuscripts forward. And we certainly couldn’t have had that, if I’d stuck rigidly to my “no online retreats” policy. The push to try something new was one positive from the pandemic, at least. Once travel restrictions eased, I moved back to Australia after a decade of living away. I left the majority of my clients in Europe, and I gave birth to my second child. My online retreats went on hiatus for a while, but I have returned to hosting regular public sessions. They have again become a welcome island of structure and human connection, in the sea of wildness and isolation that motherhood can be. I haven’t run an in-person retreat for a long time, but I think about it often. Of course I’d need to make some changes from the old format: I’d need childcare, an adapted agenda, a more permissive stance on interruptions, extra snacks for those of us breastfeeding and permanently ravenous… I guess it’s time to organize that parents’ retreat. Until then, I share a page from my facilitator cookbook: my personal recipe for online retreats. After all, in-person retreats may be an indulgent feast for a writer to partake of, but online sessions have become regular nutrition to keep us strong.

Jess’s “Write with Me (Online)” Recipe 1. First, gather your usual group of eager writers, plus any additional people who may not have previously been able to participate because of budget, distance, or schedule conflicts. 2. Next, create an online space to meet—for this recipe, I have used Zoom with great success.

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3. Extract the key ingredients of an in-person retreat, and arrange them to fit the new space. The elements I take from my traditional recipe include: goal-setting, one-on-one conversations, stretches, writing warm-ups and writer coaching. Every facilitator’s recipe will look a little bit different. 4. Next, add a measured dash of regularity. The members of my writing group can connect to sessions on the same days and times; it’s in their calendars and part of their schedules. 5. Throw in a tight pinch of brevity. The online sessions are brief, just a couple of hours at a time. No need to book days off work, find carers for pets or children, or factor in commutes. 6. Stir in a large dollop of affordability. Now—if a fee is charged at all—participants are only paying for their facilitator’s time and expertise (and Zoom subscription fee), not meals, venue hire, accommodation, transport, etc. 7. Add three (or four) spoons of flexibility. Each session can be adapted to the individual’s needs: the time is theirs to use in the way that is most effective for them. Someone who is usually working on, for example, a thesis may sometimes use their sessions to write a personal email, or a blog article, or catch up on other work (even non-writing work). 8. Pour in a long squeeze of personality. From session to session, advice and suggestions are exchanged, frustrations are vented, in-­ jokes arise, and personal lives and situations are shared. Personalities can shine even through the screens, and strong bonds form between group members. 9. Shake in a few drops of a social forum. A Facebook or chat group allows participants to connect between sessions, share resources, follow up on discussions, ask questions, request feedback on writing, and cement friendships beyond the retreat setting. 10. And of course, season with accountability (“positive peer pressure” helps to keep everyone on track) and expert guidance (the facilitator steers conversations, shares and elicits tips and resources, announces timings, and generally keeps things moving). 11. Combine everything together, mix well, and serve with love.

CHAPTER 5

Retreat in Daily Life: Integrating Writing into Work and Life Kate Sotejeff-Wilson

Context of Crisis In January 2020, at the Writers’ House (Kirjailijatalo) in Jyväskylä, Central Finland, I led my first full-structured writing retreat since training as a facilitator with Rowena Murray in March 2019. I wrote about how it went (Sotejeff-Wilson 2020a). Little did I know that a few weeks later, we’d all be staying far more locally than we’d planned. Physical writing retreats suddenly became impossible. I’d established a routine of writing in the local library on Wednesday mornings with a friend, early-career researcher Chloe Wells. We moved to Zoom. I invited a few more people. We’d found a way to integrate our writing retreats into our daily life under extreme circumstances. From the first, I knew I’d have to fight hard to keep the “retreat” aspect of something that had worked so well because it was entirely offline. Could we still “get away from it all” and write in an online environment where

K. Sotejeff-Wilson (*) Ridge Writing Retreats, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_5

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the whole world was just a click away? Could we have enough time offline and away from our screens when being online and on screen was the only way to write together? Could we maintain community without being physically present to each other? As a facilitator, could I do all that for myself as well as my retreaters? Could we balance our writing and the “rest” of our lives with the chaos all around us?

Calm in the Chaos At the other end of 2020, when I drafted this, the struggle was still real. Yet Chloe, my stalwart writing companion, was now Dr Wells. She’d defended her PhD, and though I couldn’t attend in person, I could watch her defence online; other members of our Ridge Writers Group were cheering her on. Not everyone has stayed on target like this in the last few years, for very good reasons. Inger Mewburn (2020), better known on the internet as The Thesis Whisperer, explains why: one reason is the fear of impacting others. Like Japanese visitors to theme parks, we’ve been asking each other to “cream inside your heart” instead of expressing how it all feels. One of the first things to do with chaos like this is to write about it. Before you can get back to what you wanted to work on, you need to write through whatever is stopping you (Jensen 2017). In Finland, everyone was invited to do just that, to chronicle their experiences of the KoronaKevät (“Coronavirus Spring”) for the Finnish Literature Society. This sort of writing, whether just for yourself or for others to read, can help you create some calm in the chaos when everything is too far or too close (Sotejeff-Wilso 2020c) by carving out space for you to write again (Sword 2017). Now we are coming out of the eye of that particular storm where meeting to write in person was not possible. But social writing online is here to stay.

Carving Out a Corner It isn’t only up to each writer to create a writing room of their own, especially for writers who are used to going out to work. Having a whole room to yourself isn’t possible in a studio apartment or a houseful of children or flatmates. Some writers have found the transition to working at home very difficult, especially the ones who have caring responsibilities. In spring 2020, one author sent me an article to edit that was “written in between playing Barbies with my kindergartner”; one writer said he couldn’t come to my retreats online because he had to look after the kids. He was the

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exception rather than the rule: it’s a fact that most carers are women. But gender isn’t the only factor barring the door to a room of one’s own, from the outside or the inside. Other writers faced a different challenge; living alone, they really needed the company of meeting online, to talk to other human beings and see their faces. Some writers don’t have a good enough internet connection to meet online, at least not with video; one writer on my last retreat was moving countries and was able to join us from among the packing boxes on audio only. Some writers have made a conscious choice not to be on social media, or they live in parts of the world where the bandwidth just isn’t available. I’ve been thinking about access and representation a lot, reading Pragya Agarwal’s Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Agarwal 2020) and Julie Sedivy’s Memory Speaks (Sedivy 2021). Carving out a corner for others is central to the facilitator’s role. As a facilitator, I believe that making sure that many of the other writers who come to your retreats are different from you, that the retreat is accessible to different kinds of writers, is important. As part of the process of writing this book, I have become more aware that people who have young children really need time and space away to write. On my retreats, with an average of ten participants, there is usually no more than one man—trans or cisgendered. But most men who do attend have childcare issues too. With my retreaters I have discussed the possibility of providing childcare at a retreat or for writers who come to share childcare provision locally (we have not tried it onsite). This year, one woman got her mum to babysit her toddler for long enough that she could join us in the spa after writing; one couple left their four children with a childminder at home, and both came to write. By being out myself as a queer woman married to a nonbinary person, I try to make a queer-positive space that includes people of all sexualities and genders. This seems to be reflected in who comes to write. Language and multilingualism play a huge part in this making space accessible. I facilitate in Finnish and English (like a flight attendant!), but on most of my retreats people are writing in half a dozen languages. This procedure of using more than one language at once, according to what is useful for the speaker and listeners who are themselves multilingual, is called translanguaging, and while developed for language classrooms, it has improved increasingly useful for writers (Canagarajah 2019). I consciously try to model this, aware of the colonizing role of English (Peterson 2019, 2022) that is reflected even in writing advice I otherwise admire: Belcher (2019) even advises authors with names that sound “non-US” to change them when submitting to peer-reviewed journals!

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Every retreat is different, and one of the key themes emerging from the one at which I drafted this is when to stop (Szymborska 2021). How can you turn your office back into your home, and when do you need to turn the computer off and write by hand, or stop writing altogether and get outside? Carving out a corner for yourself, the physical and mental space to write, is not easy, but knowing when to leave your corner and reconnect is important too. There are lots of ways to help yourself do this so you can concentrate (Sotejeff-Wilson 2020d, see the Chronicles at the end of this chapter for some ideas).

Christian Concepts As I shared ideas with other writers and facilitators about how to create a calm space to write in, yet again, I envied the nuns. Some of the earliest women writers were religious sisters, from the Buddhist women who wrote the Therı ̄gāthā (Hallisey 2015) to Christians like Julian of Norwich (Julian 2015)—the anchorite who is the first identifiable woman writer in English—and the Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen (Hildegard and Atherton 2001). Time and space to write were built into these women’s lives; they all had a cell of their own. In the convent, there’s a rhythm. There are times to gather and times to be alone, times to work and times to rest, times to be noisy and times to be quiet. Labour is shared so meals appear and disappear, beds get made, laundry gets done; yes, you help do it, but you don’t have to do it all, and everyone contributes something. You talk about how to share the work, and while those conversations aren’t easy and involve a lot of hard listening, you build community in the process. I’ve lived in a convent, as a Dominican novice, so I know what it’s like. And while Benedictine writers like the Digital Nun (Wybourne OSB 2020) today rightly caution us against making a direct comparison between enforced lockdown and choosing to live as a nun, for some, restrictions can be liberating. Convent life is absolutely not for everyone—it wasn’t for me either—but a looser form of community with a clear structure can support your writing. Before writers started using the verb “retreat” in English, it more often referred to “retracting” a sentence (from 1443, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, though it no longer has this meaning) and then to “withdrawing” (from 1460) or admitting defeat in battle. From the 1500s it meant withdrawing to a place of safety or privacy, and from 1625 it also meant to “re-treat,” to return to a text and rework it (on how to do that, one of the best is Haag 2021).

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A retreat is thus a conscious choice to step back so you have time to reflect, perhaps pray, and think. It means going into a room of one’s own. To quote the Oxford English Dictionary in full on this sense of the word “retreat”: A place providing privacy or seclusion for the purposes of prayer, study, or meditation, or for rest and relaxation; a quiet or secluded dwelling or residence, spec. (in later use) a second or further home. Formerly also: †a private chamber (obsolete).

The earliest Christian hermits went into the desert to do this. Women did, too, though their sayings were collected and written down much less and much later than the desert fathers—how many of the forgotten desert mothers (Swan 2022) have you ever heard of? Later on, a retreat started to mean trying this for a short period to capture the experience of being in a hermit’s cell or a convent. You could withdraw from ordinary life, perhaps just for a day, see how it feels, and imagine what it would be like to live like this all the time. Withdrawing and focusing like this supports you when you re-engage with the rest of the world. It gives you energy and resources. But while Christian nuns make vows for life, Buddhist nuns don’t. You can be a Buddhist nun for a bit and then go back to life outside the convent walls. Even Christian religious orders aren’t all enclosed contemplatives, like the Benedictines. There are active sisters—like the Dominicans—and brothers—like the Jesuits, including Pope Francis— who are very much engaged in the world around them. The concept of retreat in daily life comes from this active religious tradition. The founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, developed a system of spiritual exercises, which you do with a spiritual director. This Ignatian format includes silent retreats for a week or more at a time, the ultimate getting away to focus inwards. I’ve done this at St Beuno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre in Wales. You have a room of your own, you don’t talk to anyone except your director once a day, and you eat your meals with others, but in silence. Interestingly, you can really get to know other people in a different way by sharing space with them without talking. (I noticed this again when I started writing with others online with our mics off, but we’ll get to that.) The Jesuits soon realized that most people do not have the time, money, or other resources to go away for eight days at a time. Many would-be-­ retreaters need to be in the city and cannot retreat to a rural idyll (Garnett 2013). But the retreat leaders and spiritual directors could still offer

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people brief daily input over a sustained period of weeks or months to keep them on track. This is called a retreat in daily life. The ecumenical Retreat Association (Retreat Association UK 2020) explains how it works. Reading their short guide, you might be surprised how similar some of it is to some new ways of writing together online. It is very flexible, and there are lots of different models: you can meet weekly or fortnightly for nine months (long enough for your “baby” to be born); you can meet for a week, mornings and evenings on a one-to-one basis, and as a whole group at each end of the week; you can work on your individual interests or share a common concern. The point is to connect a regular practice with the realities of your daily life. For some writers, the spiritual aspect of this is more important than for others. As bell hooks knew, writing can be a spiritual practice of “remembered rapture” (hooks 1999). As Gillan Chu (2022) showed for the London School of Economics, ritual helps. And as a recent Nobelist for literature showed, there is a tenderness to narrating (Tokarczuk 2020). Writers on structured writing retreats can practice this together.

Cyborg Community Three years on from my first in-person retreat, I have established a model that works very well in my context. I drafted this chapter in one two-day retreat Writing in a Winter Wonderland (December 2021), revised it on another two-day retreat, Write up to Christmas (December 2022), and proofread it during a Write on Wednesday Zoom session in 2023. While we absolutely aren’t digital nuns, my Ridge Writers Group is a small, regular writing community. We meet on Zoom to write on Wednesday mornings. When we started, we did what we used to do in person and met from nine till noon (sharing for 15 minutes, writing for an hour, 30 minutes break, writing for a second hour, closing for 15  minutes). Later, as we worked out how to meet online and reduce fatigue, we changed to 90 minutes of writing and a quick stretch break halfway through. In 2023 we moved back to writing for just one hour, with staying online to chat as optional. This is less of a time commitment, which means more people can attend. Not everyone comes every week; over a hundred people on my mailing list know they can join us, but on a typical Wednesday a handful of us are writing. We’ve been doing this since March 2020, so what started as a temporary arrangement has become permanent. People come when they can, but if they can’t come for a while, that’s fine; they know we’re there for later. If they publish something they want others to see or find a

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resource other writers might find useful, they put a link in our Facebook group. We don’t share our texts-in-progress, because we’re not a writer’s workshop—Ursula le Guin’s Steering the Craft (Le Guin 2015) is the place to start if you want to set one up. Every three months we meet for all-day retreats. In 2020, I facilitated two days online in May, four days in September, and four days in November and December. In 2021 we did four online days in March and four in June, after which I offered retreats in person again too (see below). Hence the cyborg—this community meets online and off. We’re integrated with our electronic devices, but not exclusively wedded to them. We’ve settled into a pattern of two consecutive Thursdays and Fridays; writers can come for just one day, or all four days within the fortnight. (The all-days are basically the Wednesday mornings, doubled: we write for four hours, with a 30-minute coffee break and a 90-minute lunch break, and half an hour of sharing at each end of the day.) In the weeks we have all-day retreats, we don’t write on Wednesdays. New writers can join us for an all-day, and after that, they know some of the group and how it works, so they are welcome to drop in on a Wednesday morning. The maximum group size is twelve but six is my ideal number—small enough to really talk but big enough to share and learn from each other. Every time so far, some people have wanted to come for all the days to really get their teeth into a bigger project or put themselves back on track. Every time so far, one or two new writers have joined us for a day to test it, as they’ve never done a structured writing retreat before, online or off. You’ll have noticed by now that I talk about online rather than virtual retreats. This is because I believe that even online, real things are happening, and a good writing retreat means being as present to each other as we can. Paradoxically, this means being silent in order to listen (Jacobs 1985) and going away from each other in order to be together. It also means setting some ground rules and giving people some resources (both in advance and while we are together). My group has got into the habit of writing online with our cameras and mics off. When we turn our cameras and mics back on, we’re showing that we’re ready to engage with each other, to talk about our writing process, and to listen. This combats Zoom fatigue, which is real, not least for academics and others who spend hours on end online teaching and in meetings. It also combats the temptation to be absent on Zoom by turning your mic and camera off and actually doing something else at the same time, failing to engage at all, which is a real issue for people attending lectures and webinars online. My retreaters have said things like “I have to go to this

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university webinar now to show my face, we turn the cameras on for a few seconds at the beginning but I won’t really be there, then I’ll come back and write with you all” or “our group was really engaged when we met for seminars in person, but now it’s all online we can’t be bothered.” I’m trying very hard to create a different online space where that can’t happen. By the turn of 2022–2023, many of the writers I work with are only starting to realize how traumatic being constantly online was during 2020 and 2021. At the retreat I’m editing this for, one participant said, “I got really skilled at doing Zoom at the time, and I didn’t think it had affected me, but now the feelings are coming up after the event.” Another compared their aversion to online meetings to post-traumatic stress disorder and avoided them at all costs. Yet many still find meeting online more accessible (see below on Tohtoriverkosto). We make a point of talking about our bodies which are doing the writing. When facilitating, I ask: Did you go outside yet? What moving did you do? Has anyone tried having a nap at lunchtime? What are you having for dinner, and just as importantly, who’s cooking it? We start each session by writing one sentence (the biggest step? see Moran 2019) into the chat “In the next hour I’m going to write…” and end it briefly talking about where our writing went. Of course it doesn’t always go as planned, and we share strategies for this. I’ve started collecting these on the all-day retreats and sending the participants’ words back to them afterwards. One writer said she printed this out and put it on the wall near her desk. I’ve included some of them in the Chronicles below. While we miss the unstructured encounter of chatting over meals or on a walk on offline retreats, we’ve found that the collective energy makes it work (Sotejeff-Wilson 2020e). When we started writing together online, I didn’t know how long it was going to last, but I wanted it to be sustainable in the new form of daily life in which we found ourselves. This meant sacrificing the 90-minute writing slots of a Rowena Murray style retreat (that initially felt like just too much time to stay focused in a new online format) but keeping the breaks just as long. Later on, we found we were more used to doing things online and could have the 90 minutes back, with a stretch break halfway. It also meant committing to a practice that was regular enough to be worth doing but flexible enough to fit round other work and the rest of life. A Wednesday morning or a full retreat reminds me—us—how my writing life could be all the time if I wanted it to, in a structured community, which creates space to be productive and creative in good company and with plenty of rest. I think we’ve got the balance right for us, but the context you’re working in may be very different.

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Writing together this regularly for this long is transformative; one of my favourite things about it is bringing people at different stages together. On a typical retreat there might be a seasoned playwright and a budding novelist, a mature graduate student, a doctoral candidate, an early-career researcher, and a professor. There aren’t many spaces where they can talk on an equal footing and genuinely get ideas from each other, or where they can get to know each other’s work over a longer period. As a facilitator, I couldn’t have kept going for this long without writing in some other sessions led by someone else. In many traditions, the spiritual director—or the yoga teacher, or whoever—has their own teacher or peer support group to sustain their personal practice so that they can sustain others. For me, this is the Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET) virtual co-writing group, which currently meets on Skype three times a week, hosted by Wendy Baldwin, Theresa Truax-Gischler, and Mary Savage. They’re a cameras-on-if-you-like-and-emoji-sprinkled group producing some stellar, serious content, working from all over Europe and North America.

Constant Change In November 2021, I did my first in-person retreat in a long while. There, I met people whose faces I’d only seen on Zoom, week after week for the last eighteen months. We knew each other and each other’s writing. I’m now back to regular in-person retreats (two consecutive days every three months since February 2022), but I’m still doing some online. The Finnish PhD network, Tohtoriverkosto, wants all-day online retreats because it’s easy for people to tune in from all over Finland. Meeting in person would require several hours of travel and expenses for room hire, food, and so on, which isn’t possible for people on a budget. Some are quite isolated, writing alongside fulltime work in another field or juggling caring responsibilities. In a context where many students and staff live in a different town from the university where they are registered, and distances are large, this space is still needed. Others meet up locally for coffee so they find it easy to hop onto Zoom and continue the conversation. I facilitate a structured writing retreat day every three months for Tohtoriverkosto, and I don’t think this will change, unless some of the retreaters train themselves to run it. Offshoots from this PhD writing group include training on how to get your book published, and their first in-person retreat day in September 2022. But even though more in-­person retreat days are planned for this group, the online ones remain far more popular.

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I still do the online sessions, little and often—on a Wednesday facilitated by me, 90 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday facilitated by MET members. And in the week I wrote this draft I spent 90  minutes talking to colleagues on Zoom about how to set up their own retreats. Online or off, the Ridge writers who use the structured writing retreat model together are consistent about our practice. We’ve navigated massive change in our lives and work and kept the bits that would only have been born out of a crisis situation, but now work for us. The writing itself is consistent. We’re flexible and strong enough to keep changing. And we are in this for the long haul. Over years, retreaters have got pregnant, had babies, and come back to the writing. They’ve moved their parents into care homes and divorced and moved house and come back to the writing. They’ve finished PhDs and postdocs and research projects, and started new ones. They’ve helped each other through revisions and resubmissions. They’ve trained as retreat facilitators themselves and published books about it in other languages (Isosävi and Lindholm 2023). Sometimes all you can manage is half an hour on Zoom with the mute on. But it’s enough to keep going. The community is constant.

Confidence to Contribute In her training, Rowena Murray stressed that a facilitator on a structured writing retreat has to be writing too, and at first, I was unsure about how much writing I could really get done when facilitating a retreat. Yet writing regularly with others has transformed my own work. One of my key motivations for facilitating structured writing retreats was to improve as a translator—a good translator is a good writer in the language they translate into—and as an editor—how can I edit what others write if I don’t keep up to date with the process myself? In 2020, after years of translating and editing for other academics, I dipped my toes back into academia myself as a theologian. Based on a small research project I did in the new year, I published my first popular article in Finnish (Sotejeff-Wilson 2020b) and presented at two theology conferences that autumn, in Helsinki in person but distanced, and in Durham online. I wrote everything for this— questionnaires, research diary, abstracts, presentations, articles—with my Ridge Writers Group, on Wednesday mornings, and on all-day retreats I was facilitating. In 2022, I wrote three articles and book chapters, including this one, plus two presentations at academic conferences, all on my own retreats.

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Immannuel Kant’s questions (Williams 2023; Saarinen 2020) came up in my 2020 research project and have accompanied me ever since: “What can I know, what must I do, what may I hope?” Writing with others is helping me to keep asking, and answering, those questions.

Cultivating the Cloister When I started thinking about the roots of the “retreat” part of structured writing retreats, I was concerned with the need for a room of one’s own, carving out a corner to create in, and moving from chaos to calm. Now I realize that it’s not just about the cell—it’s the community which helps you grow. So maybe we should be thinking about a garden, rather than a room? Fertilizing, pruning, and weeding are all very much part of writing. The book that gave me this image was Kate Clanchy’s How to Grow Your Own Poem (Clanchy 2020). I started working through it in a notebook with a pencil because some of my retreaters had said how important it is to get offline and write by hand. Since then, on in-person retreats, we’ve shared related books like Laura Lindstedt’s and Sinikka Vuola’s experimentation with 101 writing styles to try (Lindstedt and Vuola 2022). But the cloister is not sealed off from the world. People go out and in. Clanchy’s work has since shattered the calm of the cloister. Writers of colour challenged her in an important debate about racism and how we represent the people we write about. As a result, Clanchy had to change publisher and rewrite her award-winning, controversial book Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me (Hinsliff 2022). As was the case for some writing communities like the Society of Authors after the Clanchy controversy (Chandler 2022), together, we can choose who to let into our writing rooms, and who needs to leave. We can choose who we want to write with us, and who we want to share our writing with (Bhanot and Tiang 2022). Our choices are not always conscious or well grounded. We need to discuss why we do this and how. The negotiation can be exhausting, but it is worth it. We have to be ready to defend what we write—and ready to change it. A cloister is both open and closed. It provides structure and space. You can be there on your own, in silence, or with others, talking. It’s a garden that grows. It’s enclosed, to keep out distraction, but open to the sky, to let the light, fresh air, and rain in. It’s a place to meet, before you withdraw into your own space or out into the noisy street. It’s a good place to write.

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Chronicles of the Conversation

Writing Advice from the Ridge Writers Group I write these up and after each online retreat send them to all the writers who were there (I don’t do it for in-person ones, as the interaction is more embodied and I don’t want to be typing while people are talking). Write into Autumn September 2020 Over four days online, together we wrote: children’s stories, theatre performance pieces, an edited research volume about migration, a business plan for a new entrepreneurship venture, the lecture for a PhD defence, book reviews, a journal, research articles, and much more…. Here is what we said about what helps us write. How to give and receive feedback—what feedback would l like to give myself about my writing? What feedback do I try to give others about their writing? • Tell me the absolute truth: an insecure writer still needs to know • Insert changes and suggestions for me to approve or reject • Always find something positive to say even if there is a lot to improve • You can leave bits for a colleague to work on, you don’t have to do it all yourself • Say it’s not perfect but you are doing OK • You don’t need to use all the ideas in one piece—save some for another day • Try to write shorter sentences How to limit your availability and make headspace to write • Put an out-of-office on to protect your writing space (e.g. for the whole retreat) • Check emails only at the beginning, middle and end of the day • Delay replying—make people wait a few hours at least. If you answer in five minutes, they will expect you to be always available at the drop of a hat. • If this feels too scary, just close Outlook for an hour, the length of one writing slot. Probably nobody will die in that time! (continued)

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(continued) How to keep going when your motivation is low or a project has dragged on • Start with something easy and manageable that you can do in an hour • Do it together—arrange to meet others to write for a fixed time (writing meeting or retreat) • Save distracting tasks for the breaks—housework gets you away from the screen • Make your surroundings nice—clean your desk, make the interior your style • Change your Zoom background to match your work—a theatre for a theatre piece, something childlike when writing for children, a photo of the place your research is set in? • Treat yourself—have a treat lined up for the end of the writing day • Structure your day—having a timetable with breaks helps, agreeing on a time to write with others will free up your evenings to spend for yourself or with loved ones. And you will get just as much written. How to start again when you get stuck • Leave the last session behind—if that one didn’t work, let it go. Start fresh with a new goal for the new session • Move to another text altogether—if you are waiting for feedback on one thing, start another • Write down how you feel in another document—e.g. the letter you will NOT send to your reviewer, a journal about everything else that’s going on, how you feel about writing before you start doing it • Step back and plan—write down all the other things you have to do and when you want to do them, leave those things in your plan for later When to go back to paper and get off-screen. Most of us are not digital natives so we started writing on screen at university, but we can edit on screen: when do we prefer to write on paper? (continued)

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(continued) • Draft, brainstorm and plan by hand • Write poems by hand • Do free writing by hand • Write outdoors by hand • Write by hand to overcome writer’s block • Take handwritten notes at a conference or lectures—but you may need to go online as part of a class • The hand-to-brain connection is stronger than the touch-typeto-brain one, so try writing by hand to find out what you think/feel or to learn something better (e.g. a new language) Writing in a Winter Wonderland December 2020 On four days in November and December 2020, we wrote grant applications, book chapters, articles, short stories, novels, conference reports, poems, and more. Thank you for sharing your strategies and thoughts about writing in our winter wonderland; I wrote them down for us. Think ahead: where do you want to be at the end of today? • To have an introduction I can share • To stop and have an evening off (which I haven’t been doing) • To finish writing this report today (so I can do another essay tomorrow) • To submit an essay and stop to separate work from life (which has got blurred) • To feel relieved, like I did what I have to do • I’m going to start by making a plan of attack! When you’re tired • Change chair • Change room • Get up and move • Have a nap for 20 mins • If you can’t change anything else, change your Zoom background! (continued)

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(continued) Fuel your writing • Order take-away for dinner and put some wine in the fridge to celebrate when you reach the end of the retreat • Pop out to the baker’s or take-away in the lunch hour and combine eating with moving • Cook the day before and heat it up • Get someone else to take care of all that! Shut out the world • Put an out-of-office on • Listen to music to cut out the sounds • Just close all the tabs, stop reading and only write; doing this can be a real breakthrough Be kind to yourself • If you can’t do it all, do what you can now. Sometimes it won’t feel like much, until much later • “Wow this is amazing!” “Gosh that’s terrible!” When we think about what we write, we all feel both—which do you usually feel first? Knowing this will help you work with what you’ve written • Even if you know this feeling good about your text won’t last, enjoy it while it lasts—you’re really getting somewhere Keep going when you’re stuck • Start with bullet points, then turn them into sentences • Don’t read it back too soon • Don’t think about who’s going to read it—be selfish, once you have enough under your fingernails you can scrape it out and see if it’s any good (continued)

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(continued) • Put the hours in—do 20 mins with pomodoro, do an hour on retreat—and once you’ve started it will be ok • If you can’t write it, write about it—get the feelings down on paper somewhere else so the space is clear for the main writing • Keep going and you will move from “I think I can” to “I knew I could” like the train in the children’s story https://youtu. be/8EhpqcXoxGI Know when to stop • If you want to keep writing all day, you need long breaks • If you don’t normally take a half-hour break doing this might help you move forward with your text • The boundaries between work and life are getting blurred, as a researcher or entrepreneur it is difficult to stop as there is always more to do; this structure helps us to put the boundaries back in • If you’ve got one sentence of the next part, stop there: you’ve got something to start with when you pick it up again Notice where you are in the day • Write in the morning by hand, edit and type in the afternoon • As soon as it gets dark it will be hard to be productive, so the last session shouldn’t be producing new text, it needs to be gentler • Start in the morning with getting text down, some call it the bare bones, others call this the scruffy version • In the afternoon do the less creative/intense things like revising, shorter and more administrative writing • But you might only start waking up when it gets dark, so this order might not work for you—not least because on this retreat, we were in different time zones, but mostly because everyone is different

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References Agarwal, Pragya. 2020. Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, Bloomsbury Sigma Series. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Sigma. Belcher, Wendy Laura. 2019. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing. 2nd ed. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Bhanot, Kavita, and Jeremy Tiang, eds. 2022. Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. London: Tilted Axis Press. Canagarajah, A.  Suresh. 2019. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Chandler, Mark. 2022. Ex-Society of Authors President Pullman Calls for External Review of Organisation. The Bookseller. 22 September 2022. https://www. thebookseller.com/news/ex-­s ociety-­o f-­a uthors-­p resident-­p ullman-­ calls-­for-­external-­review-­of-­organisation. Chu, Gillian. 2022. Research Rituals—Finding the Value of Writing Accountability Groups. Impact of Social Sciences (Blog). 17 June 2022. https://blogs.lse.ac. uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/06/17/research-­r ituals-­f inding-­t he-­ value-­of-­writing-­accountability-­groups/. Clanchy, Kate. 2020. How to Grow Your Own Poem. London: Picador. Garnett, Jane, ed. 2013. Rescripting Religion in the City: Migration and Religious Identity in the Modern Metropolis. Burlington: Ashgate. Haag, Pamela. 2021. Revise: The Scholar-Writer’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hallisey, Charles, ed. 2015. Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, Murty Classical Library of India 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hildegard, and Mark Atherton. 2001. Selected Writings. London; New  York: Penguin Classics. Hinsliff, Gaby. 2022. The Book That Tore Publishing Apart: “Harm Has Been Done, and Now Everyone’s Afraid”. The Guardian, 18 June 2022, sec. Books. https://www.theguar dian.com/books/2022/jun/18/the-­b ook-­ that-­tore-­publishing-­apart-­harm-­has-­been-­done-­and-­now-­everyones-­afraid. hooks, bell. 1999. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt. Isosävi, Johanna, and Camilla Lindholm. 2023. Yhteisöllisen Kirjoittamisen Opas. Helsinki: Art House. Jacobs, Michael. 1985. Swift to Hear: Facilitating Skills in Listening and Responding, New Library of Pastoral Care. London: SPCK. Jensen, Joli. 2017. Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics, Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Julian. 2015. Revelations of Divine Love. Oxford World’s Classics (Owc). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Le Guin, Ursula K. 2015. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, First Mariner Books edition. Boston; New York: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lindstedt, Laura, and Sinikka Vuola. 2022. 101 Tapaa Tappaa Aviomies: Menetelmällinen Murhamysteeri. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Siltala. Mewburn, Inger. 2020. While You Scream inside Your Heart, Please Keep Working. The Thesis Whisperer. 1 December 2020. https://thesiswhisperer. com/2020/12/02/please-­k eep-­d oing-­y our-­w ork-­w hile-­y ou-­s cream-­ inside-­your-­heart-­a-­guide-­for-­research-­project-­management-­during-­covid/. Moran, Joe. 2019. First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life. New York: Penguin Books. Peterson, Elizabeth. 2019. Making Sense of “Bad English”: An Introduction to Language Attitudes and Ideologies. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/ 10.4324/9780429328343 ———. 2022. The English Language in Finland: Tool of Modernity or Tool of Coloniality? Helsinki University Press, August. https://doi.org/10.33134/ HUP-­17-­11. Retreat Association UK. 2020. Retreats in Daily Life. Retreat Association UK. https://www.retreats.org.uk/_files/ugd/f09b80_d0652f855b5443b48 a1fbe7ecb5a2104.pdf. Saarinen, Risto. 2020. Oppi Toivosta. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Sedivy, Julie. 2021. Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sotejeff-Wilson, Kate. 2020a. Think Globally, Write Locally—and Save the Planet? Ridge Writing Retreats. 2 March 2020. https://ridgewritingretreats. com/2020/02/03/think-­globally-­write-­locally/. ———. 2020b. Ystävällinen Muukalainen? Kertomuksia Jyväskylän Seurakunnasta | Fides. 13 March 2020. https://fides.katolinen.fi/ystavallinen-­muukalainen-­ kertomuksia-­jyvaskylan-­seurakunnasta/. ——— 2020c. Too Far, Too Close? Write. Ridge Writing Retreats (Blog). 24 March 2020. https://ridgewritingretreats.com/2020/03/24/too-­far-­too-­ close-­write/. ———. 2020d. Here Comes the Science Bit—Concentrate! Ridge Writing Retreats (Blog). 7 April 2020. https://ridgewritingretreats.com/2020/04/07/ here-­comes-­the-­science-­bit-­concentrate/. ———. 2020e. The Collective Energy Makes It Work. Ridge Writing Retreats (Blog). 1 July 2020. https://ridgewritingretreats.com/2020/07/01/the-­ collective-­energy-­makes-­it-­work/. Swan, Laura. 2022. The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women. 2nd ed. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Sword, Helen. 2017. Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write. Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press.

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Szymborska, Wisława. 2021. How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers (1st ed.). Translated by Clare Cavanagh. New  York: New Directions Publishing. Tokarczuk, Olga. 2020. Czuły Narrator [The Tender Narrator]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Williams, Garrath. 2023. Kant’s Account of Reason. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Spring 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2023/entries/kant-­reason/. Wybourne OSB, Catherine. 2020. Learning from Lockdown. Digital Nun (Blog). 28 July 2020. https://www.ibenedictines.org/2020/07/28/learning-­from-­ lockdown/.

PART II

Cognitive and Affective Connections

CHAPTER 6

Some Kind of Writer: The Writer Spectrum, and a (Not-Magic) Formula for Skill Development Sarah S. Haas

Introduction But I’m not a writer, though. 

“But I’m not a writer, though,” I heard one participant say as we were sitting down to another 3-Michelin-star-calibre dinner at an unassuming converted farm in Denmark in the early 2010s. I was running one of my Writer Development courses—which intersperses writing workshops with structured writing retreats (Murray and Newton 2009) and writers’ groups—for eight women all hailing from STEM disciplines. We had just finished a pre-dinner workshop on a flexible model of the writing process (Haas 2009). One of the main messages of the workshop is that all writers

S. S. Haas (*) Department of Science Education, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_6

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are different, therefore we all manage the process of writing differently— it’s up to each writer to figure out what works best. “I wasn’t coded with the writing gene,” the participant, Lone, continued, “so I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.” The entire table took up this conversation. We collectively reassured Lone that she was, in fact, a writer (“You’re writing, aren’t you? What else could you be?”) and that she could most certainly get better. Other participants told of their own progress at “skilling up” their writing, and of “growing into” the writer role. One participant, who had previously mentioned that her children were currently into Grimm’s Fairy Tales, laughed, “it’s not like [writing] is a magic gift bestowed upon you [by the good fairies] at birth.” There was a lively discussion about how nice it would be if there were a magic potion you could drink to instantly become a fabulous writer. Then the main course was served, and the conversation turned instead to how fabulous the food was. The next day, the topic was revisited. Lone told us: I do feel a lot better…I guess I am some kind of writer, because I have to write…[but] I don’t think I’m a real writer. Maybe I’ll get a little bit better at it…but no one has ever actually told me how to do that. It does actually seem like there is some secret magic potion that not everybody gets.

Thus, the dinner conversation had ended up being a nice “spontaneous coaching moment” (Natalie Lancer, this volume) where the social writing situation opened a space for the group to collectively bolster Lone into at least a start at self-efficacy. It left me, however, with the feeling that I needed more information and better answers regarding the myths that (1) writing skill is genetically coded and thus improvement is completely beyond our control, and (2) some of the many people-who-write are “real” writers, while some are not. The writers-are-born-and-the-rest-of-us-are-out-of-luck argument is not unfamiliar to any writing retreat facilitator. We hear it all the time. We who study, teach, research, and guide writers and writing do understand that some people seem to have been born with pens in their hands. We also know, however, that writing, just like any other skill, can be developed and improved (Murray 2017: 108), even if you weren’t “coded with the writing gene.” Nevertheless, the explicitly stated belief that the gift of writing is either bestowed at birth or it’s not continues to permeate laypersons’ narratives on writers and writing. Permeating the subtext of those

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narratives is a more tacit belief that there are strict but unstated rules regarding what kind of person-who-writes can be called a writer, or at least a “real” writer. Regardless of how engrained these narratives are, neither of these beliefs is true. Nor are they particularly helpful. As Lindvig (2010) observes about identity, “if people can identify themselves as something, they can then begin to improve at being that, by pinpoint[ing] where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there” (translation by Lindvig, personal communication). This can certainly be applied to writers: if people-who-write see themselves as writers, they are then well-positioned to develop, and to improve their writing skill, should they choose to. This does assume that information regarding how that improvement actually happens be demystified and made readily available. Therefore, what would be more helpful than myths, no matter how beloved, is a principled overview of the writer that can include all people-who-write, accompanied by an overview of what it is that writers need to improve their writing skills. Thus, the inter-related questions brought forth by the group-support dynamic (Murray 2014) at the dinner conversation were the following: 1. If some people hold a tacit image of a real writer, what constellation of qualities delineate such a writer? If a writer can be “some kind of writer … but not a real writer,” what qualities do other kinds of writers possess? 2. If improving the craft of writing is possible, but the recipe for improvement seems to be a well-kept secret to some magic potion, what are the ingredients of the formula? These questions, the methods employed to systematically address them, and some proposed answers will be examined in turn in the next sections.

Writer Identity I’m some kind of writer, but not a real writer.

Identity, in general, and more specifically writer identity are complex and much-studied topics. While a full discussion of all the intricacies is beyond the scope of this chapter, I draw on the work of Ivanič (1998) and Lindvig (2010) to situate my questions. Much of the research that has been done on writer identity looks at the identity a writer portrays, in a text, to the

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readers of those texts (Ivanič 1998). Another facet to writer identity, demonstrated in the dinner conversation at the farmhouse in Denmark, concerns how and whether people-who-write view themselves as writers. This facet cannot so easily be gleaned from texts written for readers. It might better be found using Lindvig’s definition of identity as “the compilation of the stories we tell about ourselves that make sense to ourselves and others” (2022 personal communication). In this case, the stories of interest are the ones that writers tell about being writers. The story that made sense to Lone, for example, was that she was not a writer. From this we can assume that she had some picture in her mind of what a writer is and that she did not fit into that picture. Her not-a-writer story didn’t make sense to everyone in the group, however. At least one other participant indicated that a story that made sense to her was that all people-who-write are, by definition, writers: “You’re writing, aren’t you? What else could you be [besides a writer]?” This alternative possibility eventually made enough sense to Lone that she adjusted her story to describe herself as some kind of writer. That she be considered a “real” writer, however, still did not make sense to her. This suggests that she maintained a set of parameters that would define a real writer existing among other kinds of writers. Ivanič takes the social constructivist view that identity “is the result of affiliation to particular beliefs and possibilities which are available to [people] in their social context” (1998, page 12, emphasis added). If stories about real writers only make sense when it’s a certain kind of writer, it seems we need to first uncover the limiting beliefs, and then widen the available possibilities. The purpose of expanding the possibilities is to give all people-who-write the invitation to identify as “real” writers, thereby putting them into position to develop as writers, if they choose to do so. Towards an Inclusive Definition of Writer At the dinner conversation, Lone had identified herself as “some kind of writer, but not a real writer.” This sparked the idea that collecting the stories writers tell (about being writers) that make sense to themselves and others could give us some insight into 1. An overview of the myriad possibilities for different kinds of writer (as expressed by writers), and 2. A picture of the tacit stereotype of the real writer that is held by some

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With enough stories from enough writers, a definition of “writer” might be derived—a definition that would embrace all people-who-write, not just a certain kind. An inclusive definition would, ideally, empower writers to claim the title, and encourage them to go forth and develop their skills. The Informants Three sets of writers kindly provided their stories. The first set consists of research writers: professors, postdocs, PhD students, master’s students, and undergraduates writing their bachelor’s theses. The second set consists of first-year undergraduate students, and the third, creative writers. Although all the participants in the structured writing retreat described in the introduction were women, the average ratio of women or nonbinary people to men on the retreats I facilitate is around 60:40. While immersed in the data, I found no discernible differences, regarding the questions for which I was seeking answers, between women’s, men’s, and nonbinary voices. As such, any claims made here are gender non-specific. For the purpose of voicing under-represented genders in academia, however, I have chosen data extracts exclusively from women or nonbinary writers. Data from Research Writers in Social Writing Contexts To get insights into the some-kind-of-writer vs real-writer facet of writer identity, I needed access not to the stories writers write for readers, but to the stories that writers tell to themselves and others about being writers. I sought answers in data that had been accumulating for 15+ years of social writing-related work: Since 2006, I have been working with faculty members, early career researchers, postgraduates, undergraduates, and creative writers; I have led or been a “start-up leader” (Haas 2014) for writers’ groups and have run Writer Developmenttm workshops and courses. These approximately 2500 writers I’ve met in social writing contexts come from a wide range of disciplines, from 9 different universities in 6 different countries. Some of the participants of the writers’ groups and retreats kept writers’ logs, which include reflections and general thoughts about writers and

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writing. I have explicit permission from 1432 writers to use, for the purposes of writing research, the logs they shared with me. In addition to the reflective writing from participants, I audio-recorded discussions in writers’ groups, and on retreats, as well as the debriefs at the end of the structured writing retreats. While I had explicit permission from all participants for all audio recordings, there were a few who were uncomfortable that the recordings be used for research, and I occasionally forgot to ask specifically for research-related permission. These recordings were eliminated. Along with the logs and audio recordings, I consulted my own notes taken during writers’ group meetings and on retreats. Finally, if I had permission to do so, I considered emails from writers who sometimes sent further thoughts and reflections after the courses had finished. Thus, the data collected from writers in social writing situations include • reflective logs from 1432 research writers • audio recordings of meetings from 25 writers’ groups • my own notes from 86 Writer Development courses • audio recordings of group discussions and debriefs from 59 Writer Developmenttm courses. Data from Undergraduates in a Classroom Context After analysing data from research writers who had participated in writers’ groups and structured writing retreats, I consulted the reflective writing of first-year undergraduates in humanities to whom I had been teaching the writing skills component of an English language proficiency course. There were two reasons for seeking this additional information: First, I wanted to cross-check my findings to see if what emerged from the stories of research writers in social writing contexts was transferable and applicable to less experienced writers in a classroom context. Secondly, although I had generated what I thought was a useful typology of the qualities of a writer, there were relatively few data to be found regarding what a “real” writer was. I knew I could get this information from the undergraduates, as the first lecture of the course always includes reflective writing prompts on what it means to be a writer, and who students think of as “real” writers. Thus, the reflective writing of the 800 undergraduates, all of whom had given written consent for their writing to be used for research purposes, was consulted in order to warrant the results from the research writers.

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I found six separate descriptive continua (bands) that can be used to define writers, but because I was the only one coding the data and because the bands are amalgamations of the voices of many different writers, I felt it necessary to cross-check the bands with writers outside the original data sets, to see if the descriptors might resonate with them. I recruited 15 writer friends (8 creative writers and 7 academic writers) and asked them to comment on the results of my analysis.

Image 6.1

Content Analysis To hear what story the data were telling without imposing pre-determined categories, I took an inductive approach to qualitative content analysis, using Cho and Lee’s (2014: 15) overview as a rough guide. I reduced the data by going through the writers’ logs, recordings, emails, and notes, isolating anything that was related to being a writer or to different kinds of writer. Each discrete extract was entered (transcribed or copied) into separate lines on a spreadsheet, and subsequently categorized through several rounds of coding.

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The Writer Spectrum: Real Writers and Writer Stereotypes The data confirmed that stories writers tell about themselves do indeed include many different kinds of writer. I found six distinct bands—parallel axes containing continua of possibilities to which different writers can affiliate. These affiliations need not be mutually exclusive or static: It is possible—even likely—that writers plot themselves at more than one place on each band or that they can be at one place on a band at one time and at another place on the same band at another time. Given infinite permutations of traits comprising different kinds of writer, writer identity might usefully be viewed as a dynamic constellation of qualities plotted on a 6-band spectrum (Fig. 6.1). The six bands are as follows: 1. Whether or not writing is part of a job 2. How obvious is the writing part of a job 3. Whether or not the writer chose the writing part of their job 4. How the writer generally feels about writing 5. How active the writer is 6. How skilled the writer is

Professional Writer

Hobby Writer

Private Writer

Overt Writer

Covert Writer

Secret Writer

Accidental Writer

Deliberate Writer

Phlegmatic Writer

Passionate Writer

Dormant Writer

Active Writer

Extraordinarily Skilled Writer

Reluctant Writer

Reasonably skilled (Good-enough) Writer

Fig. 6.1  The writer spectrum

Unskilled Writer

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Each of the bands will be described in turn, with representative examples from the data given. Using the explanations of each band on the writer spectrum, I will gradually build up a full picture of the stereotype of the real writer synthesized from the data. Please note that the headings are purposefully posed as questions, in order to encourage readers to reflect on their own position(s) on each of the bands as they read. Band 1: Is Writing Part of Your Job? • Professional writers write as part of their jobs. For some professional writers like journalists and novelists, writing takes up the lion’s share of their professional tasks; for others, writing might not be their main job, but they do have to do some writing. Police officers, for example, have to do a lot of writing as part of a job that involves many things besides writing. For the purposes of this band on the writer spectrum, students are also considered professional writers— their job is to be a student, and if they have to write as part of their studies, they are then professional writers. • Private writers write purely for themselves. The writing might not necessarily be something they would actively hide from others (like a diary), but they simply do not write for a reader. One of the writers, for example, reported, “I write a story for myself every day. No one ever reads them. They’re for me. It’s not like I’d care if anyone saw them, really, but I don’t need anyone to read them. It is the writing part that is important.” Ruth, a poet, observed, “my poetry is most definitely private writing. I don’t show it to anyone.” • Hobby writers’ writing is not done as part of any job; there is no pay involved. Like private writing, it is generally done for the writers’ own enjoyment or purposes. The difference between a hobby writer and a private writer is that hobby writers will distribute their writing to readers. Carol, who is also a professional writer, writes and sends out a yearly Christmas poem; Mary writes stories about her childhood and gives them to her children; Jade writes a blog so her friends can follow her on her travels; Verle writes Harry Potter fan fiction; CB writes essays about various things of interest and distributes them to friends and family.

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The writers who tested the spectrum observed that the descriptors on the bands are not mutually exclusive: any writer can be in any, or in all, of the positions at any given time. There were writers who identified as both professional writers and hobby writers or private writers. One scientist in IT, for example, writes fantasy stories for fun. Several of the undergraduate writers are avid fan fiction writers. In the reflective writing from the undergraduates, the stereotype of a real writer came through quite solidly as professional writer. “Real” writers make a living with their writing, albeit sometimes a meagre one. A real writer is also a certain kind of professional writer: an overt writer. Band 2: How Obvious Is It that You Write? • Overt writers are usually professional writers who are widely thought of as writers. It is obvious, to the writer themselves and to the wider world, that they write. Novelist, poets, and journalists are all overt writers. Everyone recognizes these jobs as writing-related, and the people as writers. Increasingly, some hobby writers, such as bloggers and fan fiction writers, are also seen as proper writers, thus making their way into the overt area of the writer spectrum. • Covert writers are professional writers, but their writing duties are not often associated with the job or are not obvious to those outside of the profession. Science writers often fall into the covert area. As one science writer observed, “People don’t realize how much writing I do. I never imagined…how much writing I’d have to do. [The] image of a scientist is in a lab, not at a typewriter.” Lawyers have to do a lot of writing, as do teachers. The writing parts of their jobs are not  kept secret, necessarily, but neither does “writer” immediately come to mind. Whether writing is overt or covert can depend on the audience: A professor noted, “the more I publish, the more obvious the writing part of my job becomes. As people see my name on papers, the more they think of me as a writer.” It can depend on the writer as well: One PhD student in the sciences observed: “It surprises me that some people are surprised that scientists are writers. I grew up reading Nature magazine, and I wanted to become a scientist so I could write for Nature. I love being a PhD student,

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because I get to be a writer who writes about science. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.” • Secret writers, as opposed to covert writers, deliberately keep hidden the fact that they write. These writers might be professional writers, hobby writers, or private writers. They might get paid for their writing or distribute their writing to readers, but no one knows it’s them. Novelists writing under a pseudonym are a classic example, but not the only example. An academic who regularly posts slash fiction in online forums and tells no one about it but her closest friends is also a secret writer. The reasons writers choose to remain secret can vary. Making it public could jeopardize their day jobs (as reported by the slash fiction writer), or simply because they don’t want anyone to know they are writers: “If I told people about my stories, then they would want to read them. And it’s no one’s business but mine.”  enre: What Do Writers Write? G Whether a writer is overt or covert is often related to the genre they are writing. The overt genres are things like novels (and the various sub-­ genres therein), short stories, essays, and poetry; newspaper and magazine articles and editorials. On the other hand, law briefs, lesson plans, textbooks, academic journal articles, business memos, and job applications— even though they have to be written by someone—are more covert genres, and the writers thus more covert writers. The overt quality of the genre might contribute greatly to whether or not someone is seen as a writer. Wibke, who has published numerous articles, and at least one book, tells of her mother’s advice: “Wibke, you’re a really good writer. You should write a book.” Wibke pointed out that she had in fact published a book and had another one in the making. To this her mother replied, “Yeah, but I mean a real book [a novel].” Building on our stereotype: real writers are overt, professional writers of overt genres. They most likely chose that job (and genre) on purpose. Band 3: Did You Purposely Choose Writing? • Deliberate writers, whether overt or covert, chose their profession specifically because it involves writing. Journalists are, of course,

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deliberate, overt writers, but the lawyer who chose the profession because she knew there was a lot of writing involved is also a deliberate writer: “I wanted to write, but knew I wasn’t a creative writer, so I chose something I knew I could do.” Students who choose to study literature because it will involve writing as well as reading are also deliberate writers. Researchers who choose a research career because they love the topic and they love to write about it are deliberate writers. • Accidental writers, on the other hand, might fall unwittingly into writing. They might have had something else entirely in mind, but also ended up writing, possibly unexpectedly. Accidental writers are often covert writers. The scientist who got into science because she wanted to be in the lab, but finds herself writing articles about what happens in the lab, is an accidental writer. Whether a writer is deliberate or accidental can be dependent on the writer and their own images of what their chosen professions will be: One science writer might be deliberate (like the Nature writer); another science writer might be accidental (like the one who wanted to be in the lab). Building up our stereotype further, real writers are deliberate, overt, professional writers of overt genres—and they love writing. Band 4: How Enthusiastic Are You About Writing? • Passionate writers love writing. According to one writer, all parts of the writing process give enjoyment: “I love to write. I feel so alive when I’m writing. The nicest times are when things flow, but even the frustrating times are invigorating.” Any kind of writer can be a passionate writer. A copywriter who loves writing press releases is a passionate writer; some private writers are passionate writers—they write because it helps them breath—they carry around notebooks all the time. Passion might depend on the writing context: professional writers might be passionate about the specific writing they do for work, but never think of writing at any other time. • Phlegmatic writers are usually professionals who are likely accidental writers (although deliberate writers can also be phlegmatic). They are pragmatists. They write because it’s part of what they do for

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money. They don’t love it, but they don’t necessarily hate it, either. They just get on with it because it’s part of the job. • Reluctant writers don’t like writing. They wish they didn’t have to do it; they avoid it if at all possible. In extreme cases, they might change jobs or fields of study to get away from it. There are cases of reluctant writers who did deliberately chose careers that involved writing—most often because someone in a position of authority told them they should do it because they would be good at it. However, reluctant writers are often accidental writers who fell into writing when they thought they’d be doing something they actually liked. Reluctance is caused by different things: simply not enjoying putting thoughts into words; feeling the time could be better spent doing something else; or feelings of writing-skill inadequacy. Like the writerly qualities on the other bands in the spectrum, writers’ levels of enthusiasm are not static. Writers can be passionate about some kinds of writing, and reluctant about others. They can be passionate at some times, phlegmatic at others, and sometimes they might “avoid writing like hell.” I ntrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Discussions on motivation for writing often go hand in hand with feelings about writing: The image of the passionate writer is that they need no extrinsic motivation at all, ever. Even passionate writers, however, report “need[ing] a deadline in order to get anything done.” Reluctant writers are almost exclusively extrinsically motivated, and phlegmatic writers might have a combination of the intrinsic motivation that comes with professional pride, and the extrinsic motivation of it being part of what they do for a pay check. Very little extrinsic motivation was found in the stories of the private writers, except for one who liked “being able to buy a new notebook after [they’d] filled one up.” There were no professional writers in the study who reported functioning on intrinsic motivation alone. This contrasts the stereotype of a real writer. Real writers are deliberate, overt, professional writers of overt genres. They are in love with writing, and they never need any kind of extrinsic motivation (such as money or deadlines) to keep them writing. They write all the time.

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Band 5: How Active Are You as a Writer? A band that did not appear in the data from the academic writers, but was not inconspicuous in the reflective writing of the undergraduates was the active/dormant band on the spectrum. • Active writers are currently writing on something. In the extreme, active writers are always writing on something. One PhD writer reported that she “felt like a writer for a whole month a few years ago, because that’s all [she] did.” • Dormant writers are currently not working on any writing projects, either because they don’t have any writing projects to work on, or because they’re stuck on a project. They might be dormant for small bits of time, or they might have been dormant for years, due to lack of inspiration or what they perceive to be writer’s block. • Not-yet activated writers, according to the undergraduates,  are people who could be writers. They have a great idea for a novel in their heads, for example, but they just haven’t written it. Continuing with our developing stereotype: real writers are deliberate, overt, professional writers of overt genres. They love writing, and never need any kind of instrumental motivation. Although a tortured writer with writer’s block sometimes enters into the romantic picture, real writers usually write all the time, and they effortlessly produce text that keeps you up reading all night. Band 6: How Skilled Are You at Writing? • Extraordinarily skilled writers are those who were in fact coded with the writing gene and have chosen to practice and develop the gift they were given. They perform acrobatics with words that leave you dizzy; they produce texts that give you goosebumps. Readers wonder how they do it. Other writers wish they could do it. There are proportionally very few extraordinarily skilled writers in existence. I personally know one (1). • Reasonably skilled or good enough writers are writers who produce text that is easy enough to read. It gets done whatever job it needs to get done for any intended reader. The writing might not be breath-taking, but it doesn’t make the readers want to poke sticks in

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their eyes, either (Haas 2018). Many people on the writer spectrum are reasonably skilled. They are good enough. • Unskilled writers are not (yet) good at producing text that is engaging for a reader. Readers might have trouble, or become frustrated, reading the writing of unskilled writers. Writers might fall on the unskilled end of the band because they haven’t had enough practice, or not enough guidance, or if they choose (either consciously or unconsciously) to remain unskilled. Note that writers mention skill gradations that fall in between extraordinarily skilled and reasonably skilled (“highly skilled,” for example), and in between reasonably skilled and unskilled (“getting there,” for example). Like all the other bands, writers’ positions on the skill band are not static. Some writers might be highly skilled in one genre, but fairly unskilled in another. A writer who had been a skilled business writer for years embarked on a PhD in law and found that she simply couldn’t write the things she needed to write. She “had to go back to the drawing board…[and] learn [a new] kind of writing.” Furthermore, the standard for “good enough” can change from situation to situation. The undergraduates found that what was good enough in high school was not good enough in university; skill that is good enough for a business memo might not get your short story published. I think it is particularly important to make it clear to participants on our retreats that unskilled writers are still writers. This skill band, along with the enthusiasm band, has the most danger of bringing forth negative feelings about self in writers. Self-loathing can surface in writers if they feel they aren’t good enough, or feel guilty about not liking writing enough. In Chap. 3 of this volume, Lucy Hinnie mentions that the focus of writing retreats is often quantifiable outcomes, but there is scope for compassion. Perhaps letting writers who aren’t that good (yet), and those who don’t really like writing all that much know that they are proper writers, regardless, is perhaps one of the ways we can cultivate compassion on retreats.  ood and Bad Writers G Quite a few of the writers used the terms “good writer” or “bad writer.” Interestingly, when talking solely about texts that were either pleasant or unpleasant to read, writers used the terms “good writing” and “bad writing.” A “bad writer” was seen not only as someone who might produce

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unengaging text, but also as someone who might have to work hard to produce good enough text: I have to spend so much time getting my writing so that it’s not difficult to read. I guess I’m a bad writer.

Good writers, on the other hand, don’t only produce engaging text, they are seen to do so with very little effort: “I guess good writers don’t have to struggle this much.” Every highly skilled writer, even extraordinarily skilled writers, know that this is preposterous. What highly skilled writers produce will certainly be better-quality text than what writers with less skill produce. However, no one comes up with good writing without effort somewhere along the way. The one extraordinarily skilled writer I know observes: when I sit down to write, it does just kind of flow out. I know I’m lucky. But by the time I sit down, I’ve already done a lot of work in my head, so it comes out pretty easily. Then comes the work of re-writing. That takes a lot of time.

All writing requires effort. The highly skilled writers just “suffer a little bit less.” There is thus an important distinction to be made between good or bad, skilled or unskilled writers. Skilled writers produce text that is engaging, while unskilled writers produce less-engaging text. The important thing is, however, that “unskilled” suggests that writers are not doomed to remain unskilled—they can move along the skill band and become reasonably skilled, or even highly skilled. “Bad” writer seems to imply a fixed fate of eternal lack of ability. While I maintain that it is more useful to think of writers as skilled or unskilled when it comes to how engaging their texts are, there is also such a thing as good and bad writers. Bad writers are unskilled writers with thinking problems: Bad writers, even after having been given information or guidance, make no effort to improve their skills, saying, “that’s just the way I write. I can’t change it.” They might claim that making adjustments to their writing will “take away from the writing, because what comes out naturally [in the first draft] is ‘pure.’” They might think that good writing happens when a certain amount of time has been spent on it: “I get the [reviewers’] point…but it’s not like I’m going to change anything. I’ve already spent [a lot of

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time] on this.” Good writers, on the other hand, strive to improve and develop. They know that no matter how skilled they are, they will always be able to find ways to develop further. They also know that any advice they get about their writing, even from a less-skilled writer, is worth consideration: I know I’m a good writer—at some kinds of writing I’m a really good writer. I sometimes challenge myself to write a different genre, and then I’m not as good as I thought I was. That’s humbling…I always listen to any feedback. I might end up disagreeing with it, and maybe disregarding it, but I always listen.

Having gone through the six bands of the writer spectrum, and having gleaned, from the stories writers tell, the tacit constellation of qualities that form the stereotypical “real” writer I can now offer a full picture. Before moving on to the next paragraph, however, I encourage readers to briefly reflect and do some scribbling.

Image 6.2

The Tacit Stereotype of a “Real” Writer Made Explicit Real writers are deliberate, professional, extraordinarily skilled writers of overt genres. They love writing, never needing any kind of external motivators. Real writers are writing all the time, effortlessly turning out wonderful text that they never have to re-write. This describes no writer who has ever lived. Ever.

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The image of writer given above is an amalgamation of all the stereotypes put forth by all informants who offered their ideas regarding real writers. As such it is probably not the image held by any one informant. It is, however, important, because it is not unlikely that existing stereotypes are equally unrealistic. Even if we tone down the definition a bit—for example, a real writer is someone who is a highly skilled, passionate, professional writer—it’s still a limited definition. These people most certainly exist (the lucky bastards), but the accidental, reasonably skilled, phlegmatic, or reluctant writers in the world far outnumber the highly skilled passionate ones. It is important to emphasize that people who plot themselves on the spectrum as reluctant, moderately skilled, or covert writers are still writers, contrary to the tacit belief found in the data. Lone held an unstated image of a real writer in her head that ruled out many people-who-write, herself included. This was not helpful to her. Perhaps if she, and others like her, had access to an inclusive model in which they could find a place for themselves as some kind of writer, they would be less likely to reject the idea of being a writer. While it would certainly not make the job of developing writing skills effortless, simply being introduced to the wide array of writers the spectrum affords—and embraces as proper writers—might at least make it seem possible. To test whether the model resonated enough for writers to comfortably place themselves on the spectrum, I recruited 15 of my writer friends. They were asked if 1) they could position themselves on any or all of the bands of the spectrum, and 2) if they had any thoughts, suggestions, or observations. The overt/covert/secret band required a bit of explanation, but once the definitions were given, all writers quite quickly and easily plotted themselves—sometimes in several places—on each of the six bands. The feedback was positive, indicating that the spectrum might have potential to serve its intended purpose: One writer observed, I especially like that it’s not normative. I can be an unskilled writer, but still be a writer. I can objectively find where I am on here without judging myself.

A former teacher of writing noted, This would be the start of every writing class: Give the students the spectrum, have them find out what kind of writer they are right now, and take

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time to think of what kind they might like to be. From the starting point of everyone being a writer, you can get somewhere.

Using the Spectrum in Social Writing Taking the advice of the writing teacher quoted above, I’ve used the spectrum to start a “What kind of writer are you?” conversation on (ten so far) structured writing retreats. Participants have been introduced to the spectrum, given definitions for the terms on the bands, and given as prompts the questions corresponding to each of the bands: 1. Is writing part of your job? 2. How obvious/visible that you write? 3. Did you deliberately choose to write/the writing parts of your job? 4. How do you feel about writing?/How enthusiastic are you about writing? 5. How active are you as a writer? 6. How would you describe your skill level? Following Rowena Murrray (this volume), the activity is on a simple handout containing the spectrum on one side, and the prompts on the reverse. In all cases, I have given no specific instructions about whether participants should work individually, or chat with each other; in all cases, the questions have started lively discussions that, according to one participant, “made us super-aware from the beginning that we are all writers, and that we are all in it together even if we’re all really different kinds of writer.” Another participant suggested that she might revisit the spectrum from time to time to “see if there were any changes.” Writers revisiting this handout from time to time, using the prompts to plot themselves on the spectrum, perhaps in a Writing Meeting (Murray, this volume), might be a way to keep the social support feeling of retreats alive when back in the real world. The most satisfying outcome of piloting the writer spectrum as part of the Writer Development courses is the clear—and almost immediate— value for some writers of being considered a real writer, or having words to describe themselves as writers. Henrietta commented, “I feel seen. I feel validated. Relieved somehow.” Axel, a physicist with a big grin on their face, observed, “I’m a professional writer!”

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Returning to the conversation at the farmhouse: with the help of supportive co-participants in a social writing setting, Lone fairly quickly adjusted her story about herself from “not a writer,” to “some kind of writer.” It is my hope that the writer spectrum model might be deliberately used to help facilitate such shifts; that writers might easily be able to plot themselves on it, and subsequently tell stories that makes sense to themselves and others about what kind of writer they are, rather than whether or not they are writers. I hope these conversations among writers on retreats can be starting points for expanding “the beliefs and possibilities that are available to [writers]” (Ivanič 1998: 12) so that they can claim “writer” as part of their identity, and thereby, with information, guidance, and support from each other, find ways to develop. Having found some tentative answers to the first of the questions precipitated by Lone’s comments (What kinds of writers are there, and what image do people have of a “real” writer?), I returned to the same data sets to try to address the next question: what is the (seemingly secret) formula for developing writing skills? Maybe I’ll get a little bit better at it…but no one has ever actually told me how to do that. It does actually seem like there is some secret magic potion that not everybody gets.

Towards Demystifying Writing Skill Development Developing as a writer involves more than simply getting better at producing better text. The data revealed that writers can develop not only their written product, but also (as evidenced by use of the writer spectrum) the writer-as-person, along with improving the process of getting writing done. A full treatment of all three aspects of writer development that were uncovered in the data (person, process, and product) is beyond the scope of this chapter; I will focus here mainly on the development of text-­ production skills, as that was Lone’s original question at our dinner conversation at the retreat in Denmark. Lone is not alone in feeling that developing writing skill seems to happen via magic potion, and that not everyone is privy to the formula thereof. Her belief, and frustration, has been echoed by others on retreats. They observe that as PhD writers, they were assumed to have “already mastered” writing and were mostly left to their own devices as far as figuring out “how to handle the writing part.” Unfortunately, agreement that “no

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one ever [tells us] how to [write]” was found in abundance in the data from research writers, as well as from the undergraduates. Fortunately, what also appeared were paths to insight: there were many specific questions from writers regarding how they might improve their skills; there was information detailing how some writers had managed to “skill up” their writing; even misgivings and misunderstandings regarding development pointed to what is needed. This information can be put to good use to demystify writing skill development. We can make explicit, and accessible to everyone, that seemingly mysterious magic formula. Growth vs Fixed Mindset: The Need for Explicit Writing Practice and Pedagogy Dweck’s (2000, 2006, 2008) work on growth mindset vs fixed mindset is highly relevant for developing writers. As summarized by Mills and Mills (2018: 1045): [people] who have a fixed view…believe that [intelligence and] abilities are permanent. They view set-backs and the need for effort as evidence of lack of ability. [People] with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and abilities are malleable. Intelligence grows with challenge.

Examples of fixed mindsets are Lone’s belief that if you are “not coded with the writing gene…there is nothing [you] can do about it,” and the writer who thought she was a “bad writer” because she had to work at it. If writers are left to their own devices to “figure out the writing part,” it is no wonder that there is a fixed mindset or myth floating around about a writers’ magic potion. If writers feel that no one has ever told them that they can develop, or how they can develop, yet they see some people succeeding (by some hidden means) while they feel they are not, it is not entirely unreasonable of them to conclude that they “just don’t have it.” Encouragingly, this is not the case with all writers. There is evidence in the data of growth mindsets as well. Growth mindset for writers was beautifully summarized by PhD writer Shannon: With thanks to my sports-obsessed family, I’ve always found it helpful to think about writing as a muscle, or a collection of muscles: everyone is born with them and the more you work these muscles, the stronger they grow.

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Not only does this challenge the belief that you either “have it” or you don’t, but it also challenges the idea of writing as one single, static thing.

It seems that if more writers had access to the muscle metaphor, as well as to concrete information about how to work the writing muscles, there would be fewer writers in the world sitting around miserable because they thought they were doomed to a fate of having to do a lot of writing, and never being able to get any better at it. Explicitly teaching growth mindset has had some success (Nordin and Broeckelman-Post 2019), and since there are continual calls for pedagogy for PhD writers (Cotterall 2011), and the need to make writing practice explicit (Davenport 2022), perhaps one good place to start is by directly stating to writers what teachers and facilitators of writing retreats might take for granted as obvious (but clearly isn’t): that any writer can develop; that other writers have developed; that there is nothing magic or secret about how to go about it. If we first state this in a clear, inviting, and inclusive way, and then give writers an overview of that not-magic formula, we might have taken a step in the right direction. Informants and Data Analysis The same data sets from research writers and undergraduate writers that were used to derive the writer spectrum were used again, this time I isolated data containing anything about developing writing skill. This included questions, misinformation, misgivings, worries, any statements of specific techniques used, or evaluations of how they worked out. The data were treated in the same way as before: the isolated bits were copied into a spreadsheet and coded until categories emerged. The categories were then synthesized into a model providing an overview. To double-­ check my analysis and synthesized model, I consulted with seven writers and six people who teach/research writers and writing. The writers checked for resonance, and the teacher/researchers added, to mine, their own approaches and insights regarding the misgivings, misinformation, worries, and questions.

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Results: The Ingredients of the Not-Magic Formula The data analysis did not uncover anything that is not already known about how writers can develop their skills. However, by gathering it all in one place and providing (what I hope is) a coherent visual model, by basing the model on data—including success stories—from writers, rather than solely on “little snippets of theoretical advice here and there [coming from] writing teachers”—perhaps the proposed formula might have some clout, or at least feel a little less secret, and serve as a starting point for writers. In a perfect world, it might even start to feel like a magic recipe in a good way (see Jesse Kelley, this volume) rather than in a frustrating way. The illustration below (Fig. 6.2) is an overview containing all categories found in the data, visualized as the tools and ingredients necessary for developing writing skills. It is a formula for development that is not at all magic. The sections that follow, starting at the upper left (natural capacity) and moving clockwise around the cauldron, are synthesized summaries of the data categories, along with any relevant advice from fellow writers, writing teachers, or writing retreat facilitators.

Fig. 6.2  A not-magic formula for writer development. (Illustration by Eduardo Shima)

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Natural Capacity Everyone is born with the natural capacity to learn things, including writing. Natural capacity is often confused with talent. The term “talent” carries with it a messiness that I will avoid by positioning it as a subcategory of natural capacity. Talent can be seen as the natural capacity to become really good at something. We don’t have any control over how much talent we have—it is actually coded in our DNA. Most of us who write as part of our jobs don’t have off-the-charts talent for writing. We all do, however, have the ability to learn and develop and improve. We might not become as skilful as someone who was coded with more talent, but we can all move from our starting point. And more importantly, most of us can become reasonably skilled—good enough—at writing. Motivation By merit of being sentient, we all have some kind of inner motivation to engage in the things we engage in. In the myths about writers and writing, true writers are constantly hit by inspiration, and all their motivation to write comes from within. Extrinsic motivation (things like pay-checks, imposed projects, and deadlines) is seen as somehow inferior to the burning heart of a writer. In reality, a great deal of writing (even from passionate, highly skilled writers) gets done thanks to external factors, particularly deadlines. There is nothing wrong with that. For almost every writer, there is some combination of internal and external motivating factors at work. Tools of the Trade When engaging in any skill, the skills-person will need proper tools of the trade. Writers these days might use an array of electronic gadgetry, and apps to go with them. Some also find that they still like the sound and feel of a pen scratching across a piece of paper. If this is you, part of your writing process should include writing on paper. It won’t be “a waste of time” if it helps you get your writing done. Explore. Find out what tools you prefer, and then use them. Do so without guilt.

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Knowledge To develop, writers benefit by gaining some knowledge from outside sources. From those who know more than they do, writers  can gain both theoretical knowledge and practical guidance. Theory As with any academic discipline, much research has been conducted on the subject of developing writing skills. Cognitive Psychology, Academic Literacies, Composition Studies, Text Analysis, and Readability Studies, to name a few, have all contributed to the knowledge on writers and writing. If you are one who likes to dig into the theory of the skills you are learning, dig into these. Guidance Most writers benefit from having a guide. A teacher. A Mentor. A Coach. A Guru. A Yoda. There are people around who know how to help writers develop. You might want to find one of these people—or find the courses they teach, or things they’ve written. Do be careful in how you assess guru potential, though. Based on the (ridiculous) saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” people often think that the only one who can help them get better at writing is someone who is a famous writer, or a very good writer. This is not true. While famous writers or good writers might also be good writing guides, teaching is a completely separate skill to writing (or anything else). A better saying would be, “Those who can, can’t necessarily teach.” Or, “those who can teach, can teach.” Find someone who understands how to guide writers. There are plenty of courses and books around offering advice and tools. Some writers have reported that one-to-one guidance is the best way for them to be able to put theoretical information and tools into practice. Time Developing writing skill is not going to happen overnight. Just like learning any other skill, learning how to effectively tame our unruly thoughts and put them into tidy words on a page takes time. Years, not days, weeks, or months (although if you keep at it for a couple of months, you will most certainly notice improvement). It can be frustrating that the whole process of development is so slow that we can often not see or feel our

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progress. If this happens, find something you wrote a year ago and read it. Can you see how you could make it a bit better? Good. That means you have progressed. If you really want to see progress, look at something you’ve written five years ago. If it makes you cringe just a little bit, then you know you’ve developed. The same goes with self-efficacy and identity. Do you feel more able to get writing done now than you did a couple of years ago? Do you feel a little bit more like a writer? This is also development. Perseverance Along with realizing that improving at writing is going to take time, writers need to persevere. It’s easy to become frustrated, because it seems like it should be easy to write down something that you know really well in your head. But it’s not. Writing is hard, even if you know the content or the language really well. Writers need to push through the frustration, and keep going, even when they don’t feel like it. They also need to understand that part of being a writer is failing at being a writer. Every writer has failed. Every writer has had a rejection, or some hurtful feedback. Writers have to persevere in the face of failure. It is not pleasant, but we use these opportunities to develop. We also need to persevere in the face of success. This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. Sometimes when a writer has written something that has been well-received, or they have had some good feedback, it can be easy to think either (1) that it is going to be easy from here on out (it won’t be) or (2) that the one good piece of writing was a fluke, and they will not ever be able to replicate it (of course they will). (Deliberate) Practice Following the paragraphs on time and perseverance, it might be stating the obvious to say that writing takes practice. Translating our thoughts into words doesn’t happen automagically. It takes way more practice than we want it to take (10,000 hours according to a study by Ericsson et al. 1993). Even for overt, deliberate, passionate writers who have all kinds of talent, getting the words right on the page is work. The good news is that it does get easier. Improving writing skill is not a Sisyphean battle. When you’ve done a lot of writing, putting thoughts into words might still challenge your brain, but it won’t be as hard as it was when you first started. If you do enough writing of the same genre, it

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can even become downright easy. Also, the more you write, the more you will have the feeling that you can write (self-efficacy), and writing will become a lot more comfortable. Please note that in order to improve, the practice has to be mindful, deliberate practice, and in a perfect world, your Yoda would be there to assist (Young 2020; Ericsson et al. 1993). The idea that you become an expert at something simply by doing it for 10,000 hours is a pipe dream, and a misrepresentation of Ericson and their colleagues’ work. It’s possible to write all day every day and never get any better at it if you write in ignorant bliss and never make any changes to what you’re doing. It is not necessary for every writer to improve, but if you do want to, you have to write with the purpose of improving your writing. Read analytically. Notice what you like and don’t like in other peoples’ writing. Apply it to yours. Be analytical about your own writing. Think of ways to improve it. Get a critical friend to give you feedback, and then listen to what they have to say. (Continued Quest for Further Knowledge and Skill) This category is in brackets because it is not necessary for everyone to continue developing as writers for as long as they live. Professional writers “just doing [a] job,” who are reasonably skilled at the writing they need to do, should not feel guilty if they decide not to put a lot of time and effort into trying to become highly skilled. Writers who are imposing their writing on readers, however, should most definitely strive to develop to at least the reasonably skilled level (see note on bad writers in the previous section). The Not-Magic Formula for Writing Skill Development Thus is the recipe for developing writing skills: Take whatever natural ability you have (for writing as well as for learning); add some motivation (both intrinsic and extrinsic are valid). Discover what tools of the trade are pleasing to you; add some theoretical knowledge; get a guide if you need to. Throw all these things into the cauldron of a good long time, cook slowly and consistently over the fire of perseverance. Stir constantly with hard work (keep up the deliberate practice, and keep gaining knowledge). Let it bubble, let it brew. This formula is guaranteed to work. For best results, however, you should have other writers, partners in crime, hovering over the cauldron

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with you. Together, you can help each other do all these things. You all will—at the very least—get better at writing than you are now. You will almost assuredly become reasonably good. You might even become very good.

Conclusion One of my all-time favourite quotes about research in general, and models in particular, is from Box (1979): “All models are wrong… the only question of interest is ‘is the model illuminating and useful?’” The writer spectrum and the not-magic formula might be wrong models: I’ve used data from what seemed to be a huge pool of writers, but it’s actually not. Perhaps if I surveyed 2000 more writers—writers of different genres, for example—the data could point to something else. This is not problematic. It is not my wish to be universally right, but rather to have these models serve as starting points for people in social writing situations to have conversations with each other about how they can see themselves as writers; about how they can develop their skills. Even if writers look at the models and say, “nope, actually, that’s all wrong, here’s how I see it,” the models serve the purpose of opening spaces for writers to have supportive conversations with each other. If Lone and writers like her were to see the models and feel some sense of relief, reassurance, or validation, the models could help serve a purpose for capacity building other than goals (Jo Garrick, this volume): Conversations with other writers in social settings, using the models as points of departure, could give writers a start at building the capacity to situate themselves as proper writers, even if they aren’t that good at it, yet, and to help each other realize that getting better at the skill of writing is certainly within their reach. If these supportive conversations contribute not only to capacity building, but doing so with a sense of solidarity and community among writers, the models would have accomplished their mission of being both illuminating and useful. Acknowledgements  Credit needs to be given to those, along with the most generous writers already mentioned, who have offered substantial help with this chapter: Eduardo Shima, the patient artist who drew through several permutations of not-magic formula illustrations to get it to look like I wanted. Sean Burns, the outstanding, and outstandingly kind research librarian; Katrine Lindvig, expert on identity, generous with her time and knowledge. Endless yet always insufficient

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thanks to Ruthie Johnson, Rowena Murray, and Carol Varner, my  own writing gurus and Yodas who are generous with time, ideas, encouragement, critical friendship, and friendship-friendship. Finally, I would like to give heartfelt thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, which handed me the gift of time. The conversation relayed in the beginning of the chapter occurred sometime between 2009 and 2013. It wasn’t until 2019–2022, during various lockdowns, that I had time to look and listen to the story the data had to tell.

References Box, G.E.P. 1979. Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building. In Robustness in Statistics, ed. R.L.  Launer and G.N.  Wilkinson, 201–236. Academic Press. Cho, J.Y., and E.H.  Lee. 2014. Reducing Confusion About Grounded Theory and Qualitative Content Analysis: Similarities and Differences. Qualitative Report 19 (32). Cotterall, S. 2011. Doctoral Students Writing: Where’s the Pedagogy? Teaching in Higher Education 16 (4): 413–425. Davenport, E. 2022. The Writing Social: Identifying with Academic Writing Practices Amongst Undergraduate Students. Investigations in University Teaching and Learning 13. Dweck, C.S. 2000. Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. ———. 2006. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New  York, NY: Random House. ———. 2008. Brainology Transforming Students’ Motivation to Learn. Independent School 67 (2): 110–119. Ericsson, K.A., R.T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Römer. 1993. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 100 (3): 363. Haas, S. 2009. Writers’ Groups for MA ESOL Students: Collaboratively Constructing a Model of the Writing Process. English Language Teacher Education and Development Journal 2: 23–29. ———. 2014. Pick-n-Mix: A Typology of Writers’ Groups in Use. In Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond, 30–48. Routledge. ———. 2018. ‘This Essay Makes Me Want to Poke Sticks in My Eyes!’ Developing a Reader Engagement Framework to Help Emerging Writers Understand Why Readers Might (Not) Want to Read Texts. Journal of Academic Writing 8 (2): 137–149. Ivanič, R. 1998. Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. John Benjamins.

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Lindvig, K. 2010. Joker En Postmoderne Udforskning af vindenskabelig Identitet. Master’s thesis, Roskilde University, Denmark. Mills, I.M., and B.S. Mills. 2018. Insufficient Evidence: Mindset Intervention in Developmental College Math. Social Psychology of Education 21 (5): 1045–1059. Murray, R. 2014. Writing in Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing. Routledge. ———. 2017. Ebook: How to Write a Thesis. 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). Murray, R., and M. Newton. 2009. Writing Retreat as Structured Intervention: Margin or Mainstream? Higher Education Research and Development 28 (5): 541–553. Nordin, K., and M.A.  Broeckelman-Post. 2019. Can I Get Better? Exploring Mindset Theory in the Introductory Communication Course. Communication Education 68 (1): 44–60. Young, J.R. 2020. Researcher Behind ‘10,000-Hour rule’ Says Good Teaching Matters, Not Just Practice. Edsurge podcast. Accessed April 2023. https:// www.edsurge.com/news/2020-­05-­05-­researcher-­behind-­10-­000-­hour-­r ule-­ says-­good-­teaching-­matters-­not-­just-­practice.

CHAPTER 7

Coaching Interventions in Writing Retreats: A Creativity Boost Natalie Lancer

Introduction The structured writing retreats I run, called Study Hubs, bring together coaching and writing in a virtual environment. Most people who attend are doctoral students, but master’s students, established academics, and the occasional creative writer also attend. Most attendees are women, and it would be interesting for research to further explore why this is the case. We meet approximately once a month for a structured, all-day session (9 am to 3:30 pm), divided into 25-minute working sprints with 10-minute breaks and a lunch hour. Writers have told me that they look forward to these meetings as a time to focus and move their writing along. Most writers attend each month and new members are warmly welcomed. It is perhaps the warmth of the group that creates this light and fun writing haven. Meeting online is effective as writers can join from far and wide and dip in and out as their schedule permits—people often need to attend an

N. Lancer (*) London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_7

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additional meeting or take their dog for a walk at one point in the day. The common plight of moving forward on our writing journeys knows no borders, and it is fascinating to hear about the similarities and differences in writers’ writing and life experiences across the world. Coaching seems to be implicitly happening, perhaps unbeknownst to writers in many physical retreats, in those pep talks in the corridor or discussions over dinner. As a Chartered Coaching Psychologist, I am keen to bring coaching into structured writing retreats explicitly. Coaches create clarity so people can think for themselves and make better decisions through structured, purposeful “learning conversations” (Clutterbuck, 2023, p. 60). I have adapted my skills and knowledge to the writing retreat environment in a practical way, to give people “permission” and space to be creative with their ideas, to foster motivation and confidence in their academic writing, and to create psychological safety so that they can air any concerns or fears, enabling them to move forward in their work. Each writer has a 20-minute one-to-one coaching session with me during the day (or in the week of the Study Hub) and also participates in group coaching at the beginning of the day and after lunch. The group coaching entails leading the writers through creative exercises designed to elicit insights and “aha” moments. Although most of these exercises are initially reflected on alone, it feels that there is an emancipatory shift in the group as a whole when writers share their insights. One of these shifts is that writers realize they are not alone on their writing journeys, which, for me, is what makes this social writing. Writers encourage each other and commiserate when their writing or current circumstances are difficult. Friendships are built up over time and some writers meet between Study Hubs to write together informally. In academia, I believe our playful creativity can become stifled. I find people often lose the joy in their academic work: their work becomes task oriented rather than creative. These exercises reconnect people to their research and writing with levity and joy, helping them remember what they offer in their own work. Writers have told me that they find the exercises deeply reflective and reflexive, with the result that their writing becomes more vibrant. These exercises allow writers to tap into creative pathways and allow new perspectives on their work to surface. One writer said, “They move you out of ‘head down’ mode into ‘head up’ mode.” In this chapter, I share and expand on a selection of these playful exercises which I have developed in the hope that these will give writers

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permission, and a way forward, to think creatively about their work. I also hope that these exercises will spark ideas for retreat facilitators to use in their sessions. I have written the following exercises—the ideas cycle, cue cards, and supportive networks—in an interactive style, imitating the way I facilitate group coaching at Study Hubs. This includes inviting the writer to sketch diagrams, fill in tables, and reflect on key questions. I often share my insights about my own process to demonstrate that is safe and liberating to share how we do things, and I encourage other facilitators of structured writing retreats and social writing groups to do the same.

The Ideas Cycle We start by thinking playfully about how ideas work. The aim of this exercise is to give you, as a writer, some control over your process rather than feeling at the mercy of it. In Fig. 7.1, we can see my sketch of the ideas cycle. Yours may be different to this—but this represents a starting point so you can jump in and think about your own cycle, changing it up, skipping sections, and circling back on yourself as you see fit. Owning your process is freeing, as once you understand it, you can actively choose to change it.

Revising/ developing

Exit

Reviewing (yourself/ others)

Reading

Ideas Cycle

Thinking

Safety net Writing / experimenting with ideas

Fig. 7.1  The ideas cycle

Jump in

Planning

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What to Do Refer to Fig. 7.1 and circle where you are right now, as a snapshot in time, on the diagram. Remember you might be at various stages at the same time on the same piece of work, or you might be attending to more than one piece of work and be at different stages with them. Now draw your own version of the ideas cycle. It’s useful to give each position on the cycle a name, even if the label is not fully accurate, as it helps you define where you are and what you want to do next, which will free you up to take action. Consider how it is different to my version above. Circle where you are now in your own diagram. Is this where you want to be? Draw an arrow from where you are to where you want to be. Ask yourself the following questions: • Are you dwelling on a section of the cycle? • Do you need to spend more time there? • Do you need to extricate yourself from that part and fly across to a different part? • What would happen if you moved positions today? • What could you work on now to enable you to move? If you don’t know where to start in your work, pick a place on the cycle and allow yourself to dwell there for a week or so. Make yourself stay there, even if this feels difficult, so you can start making inroads and putting down some roots on this project. If you are feeling stuck in your work, it might be useful to allow yourself to go to a different part of the cycle. Most academic writing is iterative—you will come back to each part eventually. Therefore, it does not matter what order you do it in—it all needs doing in the end! My Thoughts on the Ideas Cycle As academic writers, we are always in an ideas cycle. For me, it entails reading, followed by thinking and planning. Thinking jumps out at me when I read or listen to different articles, books, podcasts, and videos. Planning is the taming of these ideas so they are in a manageable form for another human being to understand—in fact, even for me to understand. Sometimes, I dispense with planning altogether and go straight into writing, experimenting with what I want to say.

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In the review stage of the cycle, not only do we review our work, but inevitably, in academia, each writer has many other readers: the supervisor on an academic programme and the examiner at the end of it, or a colleague, a journal reviewer, and a proofreader. Whatever feedback I get, I spend some time considering whether I agree with it and how to develop my work. This is the revising/developing part of the cycle. In order to revise and develop the work, I might read further, plan more, write something, and so on—in other words, move around the cycle again. We could find ourselves endlessly on this cycle which can result in us feeling bogged down. When we begin to wonder how to get out of this cycle, I suggest we are at the stage when we need to jump off! And it is a jump! This jumping off could mean handing in a thesis, putting a line under a chapter, or resubmitting an article. It takes courage to say to the gatekeepers, such as a supervisor or reviewers, that you have done all the work you are going to do on this piece and it is time for you to turn your attention to something else. This exercise encourages writers to think conceptually about how they work. Writers who engaged with this exercise on my Study Hubs gained clarity and ownership about their creative process, realizing that all the messy components of reading, thinking, writing, reading more, rethinking, and combining sections of writing are all part of getting the work done. Retreat facilitators could consider asking their writers to map out their creative process and thus help them own their process. The next exercise focuses on taking a pragmatic approach to academic reading.

Cue Cards All writers need to read! When you are reading a book or a paper, do you ever feel unfocused? I know when it takes me more than an hour to read a paper, I have lost focus, and my mind has wandered. Sometimes it is useful to have a set of questions to answer about your reading material to tether you down. I use the cue card to give me focus. What to Do Next time you read a book or a paper, read the questions in Fig. 7.2 to alert you what to look out for. You can choose to answer the questions in various formats. As well as printing out the cue card and filling it in by hand, you could answer the questions as annotations or notes on your

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Cue card Paper/book citation: How did this paper/book deepen your understanding of your field?

Did something really strike you about this paper/book?

Which aspects of this article are most relevant for you?

Is it relevant because it helps your argument for why you are doing your study? Either as something to rail against or as something in the right direction?

If it is a similar study, how did they diverge from what you are going to do and what is the significance of that for your work, e.g., they covered this, but I will cover that….?

Is it a landmark study in your opinion? Explain why.

Is the author a key player in your field? Or someone people have overlooked and you are giving more prominence too?

Is there an angle on this topic/study they have missed that you don’t want to miss?

Fig. 7.2  Cue card

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electronic articles. Alternatively, you could make an electronic version of the cue card, delete the questions after answering them and voilà—you have a ready-made paragraph about each paper or book. Make sure to cite the paper or book at the top of the cue card. I invite you to adapt the cue card for your own use. Consider if you can make the questions more relevant for your work and if there are any you can dispense with. You may prefer a less structured format, where you simply ask yourself (if and) why the study is important, what the main points are and how it fits in with your work. My Thoughts on the Cue Card Exercise I use the cue card exercise in different ways. I print out copies of the cue card and staple them to the front of articles or slot blank versions into books at a useful chapter or page. I also write the answers on index cards and use these to physically build up my argument, rearranging the cards several times. I then type these up to form an outline of my chapter. Writers could consider whether the cue card is a useful tool and how they might adapt this to their own writing and retreat facilitators can adapt it for their writers. This exercise helped my writers gain clarity on what they got out of each reading, retain key points, and choose what they could usefully read next. It helped them construct arguments in a more direct way and prevented them from feeling lost in a multitude of readings.

Supportive Networks Our final exercise for this chapter takes us in a relational direction. Academic writing can be intense and you need to be fearless in drawing on your support network. As retreat facilitators, we can help people consider who they can draw on for support. I like to think of the people supporting me as “Team Natalie.” Fill in your own name in Fig. 7.3. How does it feel to have “Team [your name]”? What to Do In your role as a writer, think about who are the people on your team. Who make up your supportive network, the people who do or could help you get your academic writing done? Without thinking too much about it, jot down five people in your supportive network in the circles in Fig. 7.3.

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Fig. 7.3  Supportive networks part 1

Who are the important people in your life academically, professionally, and personally? Write the names of the friends, family, work acquaintances, and university personnel who might have some bearing on helping you get your academic writing done. It could be a babysitter who you can call on to look after young children, if you have them, or perhaps your partner. You might write down the librarian or academic support team at university. Write down five people or groups who are in Team __________ Are the people you have noted down clear on how they can best support you? Have you met and had conversations with them explicitly about this? There are some people you will pay to support you, such as a babysitter or a writing coach; some that are free by dint of you being at an institution, such as the services of an academic writing centre; and others that are reciprocal—maybe you and a peer can proofread each other’s work? Ultimately, people enjoy helping each other; it’s important to ask for help rather than assuming people can’t or don’t want to. We are going to look at your supportive network in more detail because there might be people you have forgotten about who can help you. For example, you might have some friends who you think have no interest in your academic writing and actually they do—they would enjoy discussing it with you. Or it might be there are people who would look after your child, if you have one, who you had not considered, such as a friend. The same people may fulfil more than one function. Think as broadly as you can to include, for example, family, friends, peers, community members,

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academic staff, coaches, and social media (I have found that the academic Twitter community are highly supportive). Have a look at the supporting function column in Table 7.1. As you read the list, write down the name of someone who fulfils that function, or could fulfil that function in your life in the name column in the table. Consider how these people have helped you in the past and how they can help you now and in the future. Write the answers in the final two columns of Table 7.1. Looking at your completed table, answer the following questions: • Does anything surprise you when you look at the extent of your support network? • Are there any gaps? If so, what could you do to fill those gaps? • Do you rely on only one or two people for support? Does this matter? You might be quite happy with this state of affairs, or you might feel like you would prefer to have a broader base. • Do you wish to expand your support network in any way? You could plug into an existing group or start up an interest group, for your topic or method, on social media or in person. Maybe you can cultivate some new relationships in your cohort or at conferences? • Are there untapped resources in your supportive network? • Can you add different elements to existing relationships? Maybe you haven’t given some people the opportunity to fulfil a certain role for you and if they only knew what you needed, they would happily do it! • Have you forgotten about some people who could potentially help you? • Do you need to have a key conversation with someone, so that they are clear about how they can help you or how you can help each other? • If this exercise has made you realize how extensive your support network is, have you expressed gratitude to these people and considered how you can help them? My Thoughts on the Supportive Networks Exercise When filling in the first part of the supportive networks exercise, one writer could only think of four people. After completing the second part of the exercise (Fig. 7.4), they ended up with ten people. This itself made the writer feel more supported and less anxious. Taking a proactive approach to cultivating a supportive network is time well-spent. Academic

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Table 7.1  Supportive networks part 2 Supporting function

On whom can you always rely when you are in some sort of turmoil? Who buoys you up when you are down? To whom do you enjoy chatting when you have the need to talk about your work, or maybe something completely different to give you a refreshing break? With whom can you discuss interesting concepts? Who makes you feel competent and valued? Who gives you constructive feedback? i.e., Who are those critical friends who you know give you honest feedback with the kindest of intentions? Who is always a valuable source of information? There might be an administrator in your group who always seems to know about pockets of funding, for example. Who will challenge you to take stock of your personal and professional goals? On whom can you depend in a crisis? Whom do you feel close to – perhaps a friend or a partner who stops you feeling isolated? With whom can you share bad news, for example, when a colleague says something that hurts? With whom can you share good news and your wins without feeling awkward and that you are blowing your own trumpet? Who or what introduces you to new ideas and new interests? It might be a social media group, a newsletter, or even a periodical. Who introduces you to new people or who is happy to introduce to their contacts to help you move forward on a project/ambition? Whom do you feel comfortable asking for help from? Who is or could be your mentor? Do you want to make this a formal relationship (are they happy to do this?) or would you draw on their support informally?

Name How have they helped you in the past?

How can they help you now and in the future?

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writing can be draining and retreat facilitators can help writers work out how they can make it as comfortable as possible for themselves, which in turn will help the writers get their work done whilst extending and deepening their relationships.

Conclusion I invite retreat facilitators to reflect on what engaging with these exercises, as a writer, has brought forth in you and how you may adapt these for your writers. Writers at my retreats find these sorts of exercises motivating and thought-provoking. Such exercises provide an uplifting and empowering way of engaging with academic work and to date I have produced over 150. The one-to-one coaching conversations I have with writers help inform the creation of these exercises, which I will continue to develop for use at my retreats. Study Hubs (online writing retreats with coaching) are a popular form of structured writing retreat and I have many more planned. Furthermore, I think this model of social writing, with the use of one-to-one coaching and group coaching, is particularly effective and I encourage other researchers to explore this phenomenon.

Reference Clutterbuck, D. 2023. Coaching and Mentoring: A Journey Through the Models, Theories, Frameworks and Narratives of David Clutterbuck. Oxford: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Adapting the Structured Model, Developing Researchers, and Facilitating Your Own Productivity as a Writer Jo Garrick

Since joining Leeds University Business School (LUBS) as a Research Support Officer in 2007, my role has gradually moved towards supporting academic and early career researchers, including PhD students, with their training and development needs. My role also involves managing a network of 16 university business and management schools through the Northern Advanced Research Training Initiative (NARTI). The training programme focuses mainly on offering courses and workshops in advanced methods, publishing in quality and specialist subject journals, and professional skills development. The Research Excellence Framework (REF), various accreditation processes, and other assessment and performance indicators that research-­ intensive universities in the UK are required to engage with compel them to continually place strong emphasis on submitting work to high-impact

J. Garrick (*) Leeds University Business School, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_8

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journals or being successful in large-scale grant applications. Less emphasis, however, is placed on providing the time and space for researchers to develop these. I knew that my role was essential in changing this, so I explored opportunities to support researchers in achieving their writing goals. After organising and participating in several structured writing retreats and realising the benefits of writing in social spaces, I joined the retreat facilitation training course with Professor Rowena Murray in May 2018. For the next two years, I scheduled writing retreats for academic and early career researchers from LUBS and from universities in the NARTI network, following the ‘Murray Method’. This involved a late afternoon-­ early evening goal-setting and writing session on day one then two full days of focused writing in a structured format with regular breaks and a longer break for lunch. These retreats were open to LUBS and NARTI researchers at all stages in their career, so it was good for early stage researchers to be able to write in the same space as senior lecturers and professors, as it demonstrated that writing was a universal challenge and that anyone could benefit from attending a retreat. Retreats took place in physical spaces, both on and off campus, with the group ranging in size from 10 to 20 participants. On several occasions, we were able to run these as residential retreats at Bagden Hall in Huddersfield and the Midland Hotel in Morecambe. Longer breaks during lunch encouraged networking, provided an opportunity for attendees to share writing challenges and strategies, and facilitated potential research collaborations. Some participants had never joined writing retreats or written with others in this way, so it was interesting to see how they interacted with the structured model. Some participants had to travel quite a distance to attend these retreats, so whether they had joined a retreat before or were doing so for the first time, it was a positive indication that they recognised the value of the writing retreat. Many participants also said that writing retreats are non-existent in their universities. Surprisingly, feedback did not always focus on the output achieved; instead it was on the participant’s experience and having the time and space to focus on their writing with fewer distractions. As a facilitator, this means a lot to me. I understand that words are required to write a paper or a grant application, but for me, the real magic is in being able to facilitate a retreat that allows writers to take what they need from the

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experience. This could be a finished chapter, or a short article, or it could be a clear mind and a supportive group. Off-campus retreats were popular, as participants could be fully away from their home and work commitments. But I was mindful that those not engaging may have wished to join but are prevented from doing so because of caring responsibilities or workload. From a point of accessibility and inclusivity, it was important for me to provide balance: I could help researchers to switch off and keep them from nipping back to the office or joining a meeting, but I also appreciated that others needed more locally organised retreats. For both the LUBS and NARTI retreats, I noticed that the participants consisted mainly of women. This had also been my experience attending previous retreats and it raised a very interesting question: Why don’t more men engage in writing retreats when research has proven that they work by improving writing productivity and increasing output? The ratio of men to women participants in my retreats has been approximately 1:5 (in-person, full-day retreats), 2:5 (in-person, off-campus, full-day retreats), and 1:4 (online full-day retreats). This indicates that more men are joining the off-campus retreats than the online or on-campus retreats, and I aim to understand more about this through research that is being undertaken in the hope that we can encourage more men to participate. A male colleague has undertaken the facilitator training with Rowena Murray and is now actively engaged in leading retreats and applying for funding to support these. The NARTI network would provide a good sample for studying this gender imbalance, as it includes researchers at all stages of their academic studies and research careers and can provide us with the data that we need to be able to support a more gender-balanced model. Our aim is to seek external funding to support our study and to hopefully see higher levels of engagement emerging from this. We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails. (Dolly Parton, Tweet, 7 January 2020)

Feedback from some suggested that two-and-a-bit or full-day retreats weren’t always easy to commit to, given individuals’ commitments to workload, caring responsibilities, and managing part-time work and study, so I started to introduce one-day retreats to provide a more condensed version of the longer retreat. From this, the ‘mirrored retreat’ emerged,

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where a full writing day was effectively split into two and separated by a lunch break. The morning session began with an introduction and goal-­ setting exercise, followed by focused writing, a break, and a quick ‘check­in’ before lunch. The afternoon session mirrored this to give anyone joining after lunch the opportunity to introduce themselves and set their goals. The aim of the mirrored retreat was to ‘adjust the sails’ and offer a shorter version of the structured model—by allowing participants to join for the full day or just half a day, we offered flexibility and support for their other commitments. For a while, things were going well in terms of facilitating different retreat formats. Longer retreats enabled participants to work on tasks where more focused time and immersion was needed—for example, a grant application or a thesis or book chapter. Ensuring that participants took scheduled breaks, longer retreats provided sufficient focused writing time and the opportunity to break the writing sessions down into specific tasks. Shorter retreats worked well for participants who were juggling writing with work or personal commitments. For those with a relatively short piece of work to tackle, like an introduction or a quick-fire response to reviewer comments, and for those who found it too much to commit to long writing days, this was the happy medium. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. (Henry Stanley Haskins (1940)*)

But when we found ourselves in unchartered territory—the global pandemic—the sails had to be adjusted again. I couldn’t organise retreats in physical spaces, so I was left with a choice: switch to the online environment or not run them at all. Actually, there was no choice, as I love facilitating retreats and supporting fellow writers, so I would have facilitated a writing retreat in a cave with a flashlight. After a very rocky introduction to meetings in Zoom and Teams, I scheduled regular and shorter online retreats for LUBS and NARTI researchers. I discovered that Zoom fatigue was an actual thing and could be counter-productive to what we were trying to achieve, so regular breaks were more important now for physical and mental wellbeing. It became apparent that retreats, even online, were still in high demand. For LUBS researchers, I scheduled full-day retreats using the same timings as before on alternate Fridays and followed the mirrored format. Participants could join at a time that suited them best, work around other

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commitments, and still have the opportunity to catch up with colleagues during breaks, lunch, and check-ins. During the regular online retreats, we also identified ways of supporting each other and helping nurture social interaction in a virtual space. Participants who were co-authoring papers or co-working on a grant submission asked to be moved into break-­ out rooms, the perfect way for them to be able to collaborate but still follow the structured format and be part of the wider group. I strongly encouraged the participants to sign up for as many retreats as possible, as research has shown that the concept of ‘repeat retreat’ is highly effective. By scheduling these into their diaries, and hopefully treating them in the same way as they would other meetings, they had committed themselves to showing up. I also mentioned that when the feeling of panic and overwhelm comes over us when a writing deadline is looming, we can just switch our thought immediately to a positive place, as we have assigned ourselves to a retreat and the work will be done then. The regular online retreats attracted around 6–10 participants who joined all sessions, or as many as they could, and over time it felt less like a facilitated retreat and more like a writing group. It would be difficult to experience this with retreats organised through NARTI, as they don’t occur regularly enough, but this is something we’d like to change in the future. Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche. (Julia Cameron 1999, p. 15)

I continue to facilitate online mirrored retreats fortnightly for LUBS researchers, and the sessions provide an opportunity for us to check in with each other, discuss writing progress and challenges. I am also starting to understand just how crucial the regular online retreats were during the pandemic. Colleagues have mentioned that these were the only times they would see or speak to another person if they were living alone or isolating. For some, the retreats kept their writing on track when they faced difficulty. For others, writing as a group improved their mindset and wellbeing. While I still mainly organise online retreats, I am also exploring opportunities to facilitate face-to-face day retreats and longer residential retreats. My experience of facilitating writing retreats prior to and during the pandemic has enabled me to recognise the importance of running a combination of in-person and online retreats, on different days of the week and for different durations, to make retreats more accessible.

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My personal writing projects involve creative writing, and I always encourage participants to try new ways to start writing and keep going. Methods that have worked for me include the Pomodoro technique—25 minutes of writing followed by 5-minute break. The aim is to do as many of these as possible and break the writing session into shorter and more manageable chunks. I’m also a huge believer in the power of Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. This involves stream-of-consciousness freewriting by hand, which can often lead to unknotting tricky pieces of writing or situations and allowing writing to happen freely. These are all quite simple methods, but they can be powerful in sustaining writing practice as well as approaches to and feelings about writing. They are also easy methods for participants to adapt and adopt if they are considering starting a new writing group or facilitating retreats. There are opportunities to explore this further through identifying where writing groups and ‘buddy systems’ may exist or be emerging within the NARTI network. The Writing Meeting Framework, developed by Murray et  al. in 2021, proved to be successful when early career researchers in NARTI engaged with it as part of a study. The results showed that self-efficacy—measured in relation to starting to write, setting goals, overcoming distractions, and sharing writing for feedback and support—significantly improved when meeting regularly with one other person. The results from the study will enable us to adopt a similar ongoing system with NARTI researchers and share more widely with other universities. By continuing to organise and adapt writing retreats, my colleagues and I aim to engage further with universities to highlight the benefits of the structured model, writing in social spaces, and the research that underpins this. We are currently applying for external funding to support the formation of a European Network of Academic and Social Writing Practice and Research. The network, which will be sustained through the collaboration of academic and professional retreat facilitators, will equip generations of researchers at all levels with the tools to achieve their writing goals and produce high-quality output. Together the Magic Happens. (Coca-Cola ad campaign in Brazil, December 2020)

After joining and facilitating many retreats over the years, I’ve discovered that there are even more benefits than just getting words on the page,

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feeling more productive and sharing the space with wonderfully like-­ minded and supportive people. These retreats and the conversations that emerge enable me to gain direct insight into participants’ training and development needs, and in my capacity as a manager of the training network, this is extremely valuable. From this, I have organised additional training and development courses that support writing process and productivity. Over the past few years, NARTI has been successful in receiving small amounts of external funding to support the development of an Early Career Researcher retreat series, which has enabled me to organise more online and in-person retreats and to integrate key academic and professional training courses within it. Courses include focused paper development workshops and publishing sessions with globally recognised academics, and sessions on how researchers can strengthen the networks and re-set their writing with professionals. It is often easy to overlook personal needs when organising and supporting a large network of researchers, but I do take my own writing development very seriously. It is important that personal writing goals are considered when participating in and facilitating retreats. Writing with others in a shared space has enabled me to focus and protect my time more effectively. During retreats, I still focus on the ‘day job’ and I am far more productive as I have structure and discipline to take regular breaks. I don’t take seeing a few friendly faces for granted either. Writing retreats have transformed my personal and professional life in ways I would never have imagined. I often think back to the very first retreat I joined, and my hands froze over my laptop when the facilitator said ‘go’. I thought I was ready, but I suddenly doubted myself as I stared at the terrifying blank page. But after a few moments something started to happen. Tap, Tap, Tap. I looked up and the other participants were tapping away, and I thought, I need to do that too! And I did. I didn’t stop tapping for two-and-a-bit days and ended up writing over 13,000 (not a typo) words. My first experience on retreat sparked something in me and I was hooked. Together, the magic really did happen.

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References Cameron, Julia. 1999. The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. New York: Penguin Putnam. Coca-Cola. 2020. The Story of Orlando, a Retired Grandfather Who Decides to Work Again to Help His Family Financially. As Christmas Is Near, He Tries to Become a Shopping Mall Santa. But He Faces Prejudice and Gives Up. But the Magic Happens. And He Becomes the Santa of the Coca-Cola Caravan. (2.15 minutes) [Television Advertisement]. Haskins, Henry S. 1940. Meditations in Wall Street. New  York: William Morrow & Co. Parton, D. 2020. We Cannot Direct the Wind, But We Can Adjust the Sails. Twitter, 08:00 p.m., 7 January. https://twitter.com/DollyParton/status/ 1214607743329406977?lang=en. Accessed 11 November 2022.

CHAPTER 9

Different Layers of Togetherness: Virtual Writing Sessions During and After Covid-19 Katarina Damčević

A Period of Increased Creativity According to the literary scholar and semiotician Juri Lotman, for new meanings to be created, culture needs to be unstable (consider, for instance, historical movements and protests that brought about change in cultures and societies). Creativity, in this sense, relates to the idea of constant tension in communication that leads to some degree of misunderstandings, consequently resulting in new interpretations and insights (see Lotman, 2009, 2013). An example that demonstrates this is to imagine two interlocutors with identical upbringing, memories, competencies, and habits, who understand each other perfectly. As promising as this may sound to some in theory, in practice our imaginary friends would understand each other well, but they would have nothing to talk about (Lotman 2009: 4), which consequently means that the generation of new meanings simply would not take place—we learn from difference and certain levels of discomfort that often accompany it.

K. Damčević (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_9

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Periods of destabilization and cultural explosions are necessary for the development of cultures (Lotman 2009). Cultural explosions can be observed as catalysts for cultural progress that can influence only certain cultural processes (for instance, language, fashion, social movements), while some explosions influence all cultural layers. The Covid-19 pandemic is an example of the latter type of explosion, during which we have witnessed a rapid increase in information and the development of new habits, behaviours, and narratives. As pointed out by Timo Maran, a professor of ecosemiotics and environmental humanities, the various shifts and twists that the coronavirus has been triggering have challenged the conventional ways of doing things and opened up space for cultural renewal (Maran 2020).1 Being interested and enthusiastic about writing, I started working with my mentor Djuddah A.J. Leijen, in 2015, which has been an ongoing collaboration and learning process ever since. Together with our team that includes a group of Estonian and international writers and researchers, I have been engaged in various social and structured writing activities over the years, including MA thesis boot camps, writing workshops, writing retreats, projects, and the university course Communicating Science (see resource list). In 2018 I started facilitating structured writing retreats for doctoral students, initially with Roger M.A. Yallop, who has been an inspiration in the process. By the year 2020 I was facilitating retreats on a regular basis through the collaboration with the Graduate School, my own interests revolving primarily around writing groups and peer feedback and writing and emotional wellbeing.

The Transition: From Traditional Structured Writing Retreats to Lockdowns With the onset of the pandemic, I remember collecting as much as I could from colleagues and senior scholars while simultaneously feeling curiosity and anxiety about teaching online. For many of us (and without prior 1  This, of course, is only one side of the coin, and I am aware of the privileged position, timing, and some luck that allowed me to observe this historical event from multiple perspectives. The view I have introduced here is only one of many that we employ to make sense of things and a reminder that life is never black and white. My aim is not to downplay the loss of livelihood, lives, and numerous other tragedies that the pandemic has resulted in, and I think that no words could even begin to describe that kind of devastation.

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experience in online teaching), this happened virtually overnight, and to say that it was a challenge would be an understatement. However, it was a moment of creativity as well, which soon extended onto the question of how to facilitate writing in these overwhelming circumstances. How is it possible to facilitate a writing retreat with no possibility of retreating? One of the most important features of writing retreats is precisely the possibility of working in a space that does not come with the burden of various existing associations (e.g., family- and work-related obligations). Moreover, not everyone necessarily has an office to work in, and their home is not always a supportive space for writing. Whether we like it or not, our homes, as well as other spaces we spend a lot of time in, are imbued with various meanings we assign them. Those associations of meanings can both facilitate and hinder our writing process; therefore, having an alternative space to write becomes that much more important. Writing together in shared spaces was one of the activities we had to put on hold because of the pandemic. In alternative circumstances, staying at home while focusing solely on writing would probably present itself as an ideal scenario (and often a luxury for a lot of scholars). In reality, the circumstances brought about by the pandemic and the subsequent measures forced us to come up with new models of behaviour, a process made significantly more challenging due to the consistent overload of information. Already a challenging endeavour for many to begin with, maintaining writing habits became even more arduous along with a significantly heightened degree of worry related to family, health, and work.

Social Writing as a Means of Breaking Taboos In her book Writing in Social Spaces (2014), Rowena Murray approaches writing as a social act and emphasizes the importance of the feeling that “we’re all in this together.” This has certainly been the central aspect of structured writing retreats for me and many of my colleagues I have had the pleasure of talking to and collaborating with. Doctoral students often feel insecure and even ashamed when they are struggling with their writing; these feelings are usually exacerbated by the academic environment in which certain topics largely remain taboo: rejection, feelings of inadequacy, unrealistic expectations, external pressure, and isolation are only some of them. Among the biggest dangers is the dynamic in which predominantly successes are shared while perceived failures are hidden out of sight. This is not only extremely unhealthy but also completely unrealistic;

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the ups and downs are an inherent part of any research process, and sharing experiences—from small victories to ongoing struggles—should be explicitly encouraged. I remember when one of my colleagues—a senior and established scholar—told me once about still suffering from anxiety related to his writing. My first thought was “Why don’t you talk about this more often?” followed by a disconcerting thought that those feelings do not seem to go away, regardless of the stage of a person’s career. However, I do maintain that this does not have to be the case, and I have experienced alternatives thanks to several inspiring colleagues, and I have been attempting to contribute to the creation of those alternatives through structured writing retreats and related activities. Why primarily through writing? Because writing can reflect wider attitudes, habits, and deep-seated customs in academia, some which are less healthy than others. While talking to my fellow peers in writing retreats, often during an individual consultation, there were several times when I heard statements such as “Really, you too?! I have the impression that I’m the only one struggling since nobody talks about that at my department” or “It helps so much knowing that others experience these feelings, I feel less alone.” Surely, these issues will not disappear overnight nor are taboos easily broken; they should, however, be challenged, and alternatives should be sought out (see Cameron et al. 2009). I can state from experience that seemingly small steps—such as sharing your struggles with your social writing group or during structured writing retreats (see resource list)— can cause a ripple effect and extend much further than deemed possible. Certainly, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought an additional challenge to an already tricky process, and that feeling of “we’re all in this together” becomes much harder to realize in practice while physical distancing remains one of the prevalent measures against the pandemic. So, when I was writing a short introduction about virtual writing retreats for our Graduate School website, a colleague asked me to explain how “togetherness” works if a person is alone with their computer. People can be together in many ways, and while it may not be the ideal scenario, at least there is one. And virtual writing retreats and sessions are there precisely to foster a sense of togetherness and community, even when someone is in another part of the world or going through a lockdown. As Nicole Janz emphasizes, writing together on Zoom can battle loneliness and help maintain writing habits (Janz, 2020) (Fig. 9.1).

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Fig. 9.1 Emotions word cloud (Source: author)

Emotions Word Cloud (source: Katarina Damčević) Motivated by Rowena Murray’s suggestion during one of the structured writing retreats for PhD students that took place in 2020, I included a brief exercise related to expressing different feelings and emotions that writing triggers. These are dynamic and often also conflicting. The purpose of getting them out in the open is to show that they are an inseparable part of the writing process and that everyone experiences them to some degree, regardless of the stage of their careers. More importantly, to provide support and guidance in confronting rather than ignoring those emotions by demystifying them through opening a space for dialogue and sharing experiences.

One-day Online Structured Writing Sessions As was the case across the globe, the early days of the pandemic in Estonia were overwhelming and ultimately confusing. The persistent dynamic of the “life goes on” attitude coupled with the problematic “publish or perish” agenda in academia certainly did not make things any easier. At the same time and with so many work activities being cancelled or postponed, the somewhat perverse version of stability that the pandemic brought opened space for maintaining (or establishing) writing habits. That is where Thursdays came in. After discussing different options with my mentor Djuddah, we came up with a rather simple scenario:

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writing together once a week via Zoom and sharing this with the doctoral students from our Communicating Science course as well as other university colleagues. It was only necessary to register in advance to participate and that was it! The Zoom sessions (and yes, we have grown quite tired of Zoom in the meantime!) lasted from 9 am to 4 pm and followed a concrete structure: we started by sharing goals for the day, followed by two writing sessions and a coffee/tea break in between. There was an hour-­ long break for lunch, followed by another two writing sessions, and a concluding reflection on our goals and further steps. Within days, we had more and more people joining, and not only those that were in some way affiliated to the University of Tartu. Since we shared the announcement weekly on social media as well, several colleagues joined us from abroad, from countries such as India, Serbia, and the USA. This ability to connect widely, share each other’s stories and struggles, and ultimately be together, has been inspiring, motivating, and supportive. In face-to-face writing retreats the term typing pools is often used to refer to writing with other people in a shared space. Being aware of other colleagues’ writing—being in the same boat—facilitates writing considerably. This was a consistent element that I noticed in online structured writing sessions, especially when most participants had their cameras turned on. We were together: writing, chatting during breaks, complaining, and sharing advice. Workwise, it was a lifesaver. One-day writing sessions are also a very balanced way to work on writing and dedicate a specific day to do so; whether to re-establish a writing routine or simply in need of some company, the format does not disappoint, on the contrary. More and more doctoral students who have been taking part in the sessions have mentioned how helpful they are for their writing but also in keeping their anxiety in check after seeing that they are a part of a supportive community. In the beginning of 2021, I continued to facilitate the one-day writing sessions on a weekly basis to get more doctoral students involved, as well as to further explore this online dynamic. This has, of course, evolved in the meantime. Namely, during 2021 I usually facilitated structured writing sessions from 9 am until 1 pm, which included small breaks between sessions, the goal-setting session in the beginning, and reflection on goals and further steps at the end of the session. In 2022 and as more options for in-person facilitation became possible, the online sessions became less frequent and took place once or twice a month. The interest in the sessions remains to this day, and they

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are still proving to be an invaluable activity for promoting social writing and peer support.

Virtual Structured Writing Retreats As mentioned in the first section of this text, University of Tartu’s doctoral students and their supervisors can participate in writing retreats free of charge. This is relevant to acknowledge for many reasons; from limited (or non-existing) funding for scholars to participate in writing retreats, a lack of programmes and writing centres/initiatives dedicated to facilitating the writing process, to a level of scepticism that is still present when it comes to the need for such activities—be it in-person or online—despite shared participants’ experiences and research justifying the need as well as documenting benefits (see, e.g., Moore 2003; Murray and Newton 2009). With the state of emergency in Estonia ending mid-May in 2020, precautions remained necessary, and the question of our June writing retreat for both Tallinn and Tartu doctoral students came into question. Cancelling was not an option as it was clear that such events were needed more than ever, so thinking about how to maintain the writing retreat dynamic online while not making it overwhelming for participants became a priority. While the retreat was held online, for one year or so in 2020–2021 the University’s Graduate School was able to fund some of the participants’ stays in a local hotel since for some, working from home carried additional challenges (taking care of family members and children, a lack of a private working space). With around 25 participants, the retreat lasted for four days, and it followed the usual structure, which in addition to the structured writing sessions included the following: . A brief goal-setting session each morning; 1 2. Optional 30-minute workshops for participants: these can include various topics, from peer feedback, genre analysis, writing groups, writing and emotional wellbeing, to collaborative writing and reference management systems, among others; 3. Optional one-on-one 30-minute consultations with participants: participants can choose to discuss their writing process with an instructor and receive feedback on the draft they are working on.

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Since it was a longer event that contained more activities, I was able to test out some of the Zoom features that are not that necessary in the one-­ day writing session, and it was encouraging to see that it was possible to adjust the activities to the online format easily. For instance, in the face-to-­ face retreats the optional workshops are held in the main classroom so that participants could choose whether to take part or continue writing in another designated space. This dynamic worked well online, thanks to Zoom breakout rooms. Namely, since the participants registered in advance for their desired workshop, I was able to assign them to a separate room without interrupting those who were working on their writing in the main room. The one-on-one 30-minute consultations were another activity that saw the benefits of breakout rooms. To make the consultation as productive as possible, participants are encouraged to share parts of texts they are currently working on. Now, here I rely on a concrete recipe based on the Communicating Science course and the research conducted by Djuddah A.J.  Leijen and Roger M.A.  Yallop (see Yallop and Leijen 2020; Yallop 2020). Namely, I ask students to include a cover letter in the draft they would like to receive feedback on (see resource list). The purpose of the cover letter is to briefly explain what they are working on, what is the stage of their work, what are some struggles they are experiencing, and what they would like to receive feedback on (preferably focusing on global rather than local issues). The relevance of being able to self-reflect on one’s own writing and present it to a reviewer/supervisor/writing group cannot be overestimated. Even in the virtual environment, the one-on-­ one consultations were a fruitful interaction, thanks to the user-friendly breakout rooms. I noticed it was somewhat even less distracting than the consultation sessions in face-to-face retreats simply because of a considerable decrease of additional external stimuli, which was also pointed out by a few participants. In the closing discussion of the June 2020 retreat, more participants pointed out that they felt less distracted than in the traditional face-to-face retreats and that they found the virtual version productive. The aspect of having everything in one place (so to say) seemed to have appealed to a number of participants. The social aspect presented itself as the most challenging one since the participants understandably missed the opportunity to interact with each other during breaks. A solution for this came quickly when a colleague suggested using the breakout rooms for coffee breaks as well, where smaller groups would be able to interact. I loved that idea and

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saw it in practice when I participated in the online training for structured writing retreat facilitators led by Rowena Murray in September 2020. Rowena included several short time slots for breaks and discussions, each time combining a different group of people (not more than four). This worked out wonderfully since it allowed us to meet the rest of the participants and share ideas, experiences, and feedback. I applied it to the next online retreat I was conducting, and though it takes time to get used to for most of the participants, it ended up being a useful addition and an exercise in community building.

Virtual Writing Drop-ins (Micro-groups or One-on-one) While the structure behind this format is not that different from the previous ones, it is worth mentioning. In addition to the one-day writing sessions, this one is my favourite for a very simple reason: it is less tiring. Yes, “Zoom fatigue” is a thing, and as one can imagine, staring at your monitor for 3–4 days during longer virtual retreats can be straining, especially since we are only in the initial stage of discovering the various effects working online has on the brain and our overall wellbeing (see, e.g., Sklar 2020; Lee 2020). In the same way as face-to-face writing retreats do not necessarily suit everyone, virtual writing retreats and one-day writing sessions with more unfamiliar faces may not be everybody’s cup of tea. There can be many reasons for this; from simply preferring smaller groups to being self-­ conscious online—the latter aspect has been addressed as a concrete concern of our largely virtual lives during the pandemic (Dunphy-Lelii 2020). I started taking part in one-on-one virtual writing sessions during spring 2020, after experiencing the benefits of the longer, one-day writing sessions. Not a lot of planning goes into this micro version; often all that was necessary was to agree with a friend/colleague a bit in advance, and we would take about two hours to write together and catch up. Long story short, it was (and still is) beyond helpful. There were many occasions when I felt discouraged, anxious, or both, and this sometimes-spontaneous writing drop-in helped me get back to my writing dynamic and, more importantly, reassured me that I was not alone.

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The Future of Virtual Structured Writing Retreats While I do think they are extremely beneficial, I do not think that virtual writing retreats and sessions are—or should be—a substitute to face-to-­ face retreats. However, they can certainly be a valuable addition to the practice, and it is worth exploring how the virtual format can help facilitate the writing process and help build writing communities that extend physical boundaries. The latter aspect is of particular interest here since we do not need to think about virtual writing retreats solely in relation to the pandemic. Hopefully we are closer to seeing the light at the end of that tunnel, but the virtual format of teaching and learning, as well as other types of remote work, is likely here to stay, at least to some degree. Consequently, this becomes a question not only of creativity as I mentioned earlier but also of adjustment. The question that remains important as ever is how we are going to use the tools at our disposal and how this can benefit our peers, students, and pupils. At the time of finishing this text, in 2023, academic writers have made the switch to (mostly) in-person work, and the question of what happens to writing socially online comes to the fore. In the past few years, I have witnessed students, colleagues, senior staff members, and the like maintain at least some version of writing socially online. Consistent feedback related to similar activities has been that it fosters support, community, and much-­ needed flexibility (e.g., for young parents in doctoral and postdoctoral programmes) and as such, helps keeping track with one’s writing, especially when life throws a curveball. Some of my plans in 2023 are to keep the online structured writing sessions going on a weekly basis, by occasionally incorporating optional workshops that participants can attend in breakout rooms. Often during writing sessions, we do not have a lot of time to go in-depth with a specific dimension of writing, and workshops are a practical way to solve this and complement the sessions. Another long-term goal which I am gradually working on is the development of writing programmes for students at my home university in Rijeka (Croatia), which will include both in-person and online activities, such as writing retreats, Zoom writing sessions, and thesis boot camps. Overall, I see myself still writing socially online and learning more about approaches and methodologies in different contexts, such as in Croatia and Estonia, as well as contributing to their further development through ongoing collaborations.

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Surely, more research needs to be conducted for us to further explore the various facets of online teaching and learning, and structured writing retreats specifically. While certainly a challenge, I find it inspiring, and I think that we will be able to open more doors into the world of writing together. Hopefully, these initial thoughts about virtual writing retreats and sessions will bring about more questions that might in turn lead us to more discoveries and explosions of creativity. Resources List University of Tartu Communicating Science course website: https:// communicatingscience.ut.ee/ Two step-by-step guides for running writing groups: https://communicatingscience.ut.ee/science-­writing/how-­to-­run-­a-­writing-­group-­meeting/, https://samf.ku.dk/pcs/english/materials/Writing_Groups_2015.pdf Guide to writing a cover letter: https://communicatingscience.ut.ee/ resources/how-­to-­write-­a-­good-­cover-­letter/

References Cameron, Jenny, Karen Nairn, and Jane Higgins. 2009. Demystifying Academic Writing: Reflections on Emotions, Know-How and Academic Identity. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 33 (2): 269–284. https://doi. org/10.1080/03098260902734943. Dunphy, L. Sarah. 2020. The Weirdness of Watching Yourself on Zoom. Scientific American, 1 August. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-­ weirdness-­of-­watching-­yourself-­on-­zoom/. Accessed 20 August 2022. Janz, Nicole. 2020. Why Virtual Writing Retreats Make You Happier and More Productive. Medium, 5 November. https://medium.com/the-­brave-­writer/ w h y -­v i r t u a l -­w r i t i n g -­r e t r e a t s -­m a k e -­y o u -­h a p p i e r -­a n d -­m o r e -­ productive-­7649b883f298. Accessed 20 August 2022. Lee, Jena. 2020. A Neuropsychological Exploration of Zoom Fatigue. Psychiatric Times, 17 November. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/psychological-­ exploration-­zoom-­fatigue. Accessed 25 August 2022. Lotman, M.  Juri. 2009 [1992]. Culture and Explosion. Edited by Marina Grishakova. De Gruyter Mouton. ———. 2013. The Unpredictable Workings of Culture. Bibliotheca Lotmaniana. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press.

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Maran, Timo. 2020. Virus and Cultural Creativity. Cambridge Blog, 15 May. http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/05/virus-­and-­cultural-­creativity/. Accessed 20 November 2020. Moore, Sarah. 2003. Writers’ Retreats for Academics: Exploring and Increasing the Motivation to Write. Journal of Further and Higher Education 27 (3): 333–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877032000098734. Murray, Rowena, and Mary Newton. 2009. Writing Retreat as Structured Intervention: Margin or Mainstream? Higher Education Research and Development 28 (5): 541–553. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360903154126. Sklar, Julia. 2020. ‘Zoom Fatigue’ Is Taxing the Brain: Here’s Why That Happens.” National Geographic, 24 April. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavirus-­zoom-­fatigue-­is-­taxing-­the-­brain-­here-­is-­why-­ that-­happens/. Accessed 25 November 2020. Yallop, M.  A. Roger. 2020. The Affect and Effect of Asynchronous Written Artefacts (Cover Letters, Drafts, and Feedback Letters) within L2 English Doctorate Writing Groups. PhD diss., University of Tartu. Yallop, Roger, and Djuddah A. J. Leijen. 2020. Using Author-Devised Cover Letters Instead of Instructor-Devised Rubrics to Generate Useful Written Peer Feedback Comments. Journal of Academic Writing 10 (1). https://publications.coventry.ac.uk/index.php/joaw/article/view/632.

PART III

Social Interactions and Relations

CHAPTER 10

Transferring Social Writing Practices to Our Communities in Finnish Universities Camilla Lindholm and Johanna Isosävi

Introduction Studies over the past two decades have identified a range of problems in the academic world caused by the neoliberalization of academia. Higher education is currently characterized by competing market forces, stressing individual and measurable performance, which might have negative effects on the wellbeing of doctoral students and faculty. One characteristic of academia in the neoliberal era is fragmentation, as noted by Rowland (2002). In his influential work, Rowland identified several primary fractures within academia. First, diverse assumptions exist regarding the nature of higher education, debating whether the purpose of higher education is to create wealth for the global economy or to enable social

C. Lindholm (*) • J. Isosävi University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_10

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transformations or critiques. Second, today’s academy involves distance between teachers and learners, academic faculty and managers, and teaching and research. Given the increasing amounts of external research funding and different systems that reward research and teaching, academics tend to feel a tension between these two aspects of their work, as well as pressure to succeed in both. The final fracture outlined by Rowland deals with the fragmentation of research itself, caused by an increase in the total volume of global knowledge. The Finnish university system has also been subjected to neoliberalization. Higher education reforms in Finland took place in 2009–2010, with the introduction of a new University Act and funding scheme. From 1 January 2010, Finnish universities became either independent corporations governed by public law or foundations governed by private law. This reform led to an increasing neoliberalization of Finnish universities. (For an overview, see Lund 2020.) However, while public universities have needed to adopt a more corporate approach in the Anglophone world, this development continues in the Nordic countries (Poutanen 2022). Changes in university policies and their impacts on the everyday life of university instructors have also been observed in the Finnish context. Jauhiainen et al. (2009) analysed essays written by teachers who enrolled in a university pedagogy course at a Finnish university in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The essays indicated that teachers felt pressured by a culture of efficiency coming from above and that teaching was considered a waste of time for individuals with ambitions for an academic career. In addition, the data demonstrated that many academics longed for more collaboration and support, while simultaneously committing to individual rather than collective solutions to deal with the lack of resources they experienced. The results demonstrated that teachers talked about their work orienting towards an efficiency policy and with a flavour of nostalgia when comparing the current situation to an earlier academy. Thus, universities in Finland are now subjected to increasing competitive pressures, which lead to increased control, exacted from the institutions within which they work to the individual academics themselves. In turn, academic scholars feel that they have less control over their own working conditions. The centralized power structures in academia lead to a feeling of alienation and disempowerment among academics (Poutanen 2022). As noted by Poutanen (2022, 13), when the experiences of Finnish academics increasingly align themselves with data from the UK, questions relating to academic alienation become more relevant for Finnish scholars.

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Furthermore, the neoliberal university seems to invite scholars to primarily focus on issues related to their own individual careers (Poutanen 2022, 14). Being active in the dominantly English-language world of higher education, the authors of this chapter, both linguists and specialists in languages other than English, were influenced by ideas from the Anglophone world (above all, the US and UK) when looking for support in navigating the academy. The literature on academic career development as well as the international support provided on social media presented social writing as both a path to successful academic career development and a means to improve one’s wellbeing in the competitive academic context. We learnt about this model by participating in structured writing retreats facilitated by retreat facilitators trained by Rowena Murray, participated in Murray’s training for writing retreat facilitators ourselves, and began promoting social writing in our own contexts at two Finnish universities. Previously, only sporadic initiatives to encourage social writing had appeared in Finnish academia, such as collegial writing sessions using the Shut Up and Write model and writing retreats targeted at specific researchers, such as members of particular research projects. In addition, a few writing groups have been organized by PhD students or staff members in specific disciplines. Currently, interest in social writing in academia in Finland appears to be increasing. For example, our Facebook group Kirjoitan vaikka ei ole aikaa (I write although I don’t have time), bringing together academic writers at different stages of their careers, has over 560 members (as of April 2023). As a further indication of the increased interest in social academic writing in Finland, our Finnish-language book on social writing was published in spring 2023 (Isosävi and Lindholm 2023). In this article, we describe how we have transferred the practices of social writing to our Finnish university communities. First, we have used social writing in our courses for master’s students working on their theses. Second, we have launched weekly writing groups for PhD students and members of the faculty, and we have organized structured writing retreats. Here, we summarize the feedback we received from students and participants. Finally, we reflect on the leadership of social writing arising through the facilitator role.

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Social Writing as a Part of Teaching of Master’s Students We have introduced the practices of structured social writing in our seminars and courses on academic writing for master’s students. To our knowledge, the literature on social writing primarily concentrates on social writing targeted to faculty members and on structured writing retreats, whereas a dearth of research exists on weekly writing groups targeted to master’s students. Camilla has used a stage-wise model to integrate social writing into her seminars for master’s students. Initially, she used minor writing assignments in her seminars to help students get started with their writing. These assignments were then combined with drafting research plans and master’s theses. After using these assignments for a couple of years, Camilla introduced social writing in her seminars. The social writing sessions were situated between discussions related to research plans in the late autumn semester and the presentations of the master’s theses during the spring semester. Camilla and the students wrote together, and, because they were connected via Zoom, students were encouraged to use the chat function in Zoom to contact Camilla if they had questions about their work. The sessions aimed to teach students how to set realistic goals for their writing and to utilize group support to get started with difficult tasks. In her course on academic writing for French students working on their master’s theses, Johanna has reserved the last two 90-minute sessions of the course for social writing. The sessions work in the same manner as writing groups and the structured writing retreat model developed by Rowena Murray (e.g., 2015). First, students share their feelings on that day towards their own writing projects. Then, a short, free writing exercise follows, and students set their writing goals for the session. The majority of the time is reserved for writing, followed by a winding-down period, during which feelings are shared and the group discusses if the writing goals were attained. The Covid-19 pandemic changed university teaching and increased the amount of distance teaching. Johanna’s course on academic writing in French was organized via Zoom in 2021 (12 participants), but, during the following academic year in 2022 (seven participants), the course took place in a classroom. Johanna asked for feedback from both courses, all of which were positive. For instance, almost all of the students from the 2021 course agreed fully or partially with the following sentence: “Writing

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together with others in the course helped me advance in my master’s thesis.” For many participants, writing together with others was a new and positive experience, although some wished that social writing would have taken place on campus instead via Zoom. All of the quotations used in this chapter that were originally written in Finnish or French were translated by the authors. I felt that social writing was meaningful, and it was nice that the course offered a possibility to experience it for the first time. Writing your own work at the same time with others was really nice and encouraging. Social writing was a nice experience, and it would certainly have been even better if we could have been together on campus. In this course, I learnt that writing is like a craft that improves through practice and together. Social writing was a nice addition to the course and helped working a lot.

The feedback on social writing from the 2022 course which took place in a classroom setting was positive, although one student admitted that they were sceptical at first: I was a little sceptical and I admit that I regarded it [social writing] as useless, but the experience was nevertheless positive. Time spent together was time spent really efficiently. I must say that I don’t have any trouble concentrating on my writing when alone, so I probably would have achieved equally as much during the same time alone at home. However, I would like to try this online. For me, it may work better than [it did] in the classroom.

It is possible that the student above first thought that social writing was meant only for people who have difficulties writing and, therefore, they were sceptical. This student stated that they wanted to try social writing online and thought that it may work better for them. Although Johanna’s experience of offering social writing for master’s students both online and in the classroom was positive, she prefers organizing social writing in the classroom. Meeting in the classroom helps students get to know one another; for instance, they can go for coffee after class. This also helps in the creation of micro groups (see below), defined by Murray (2015) as small groups typically consisting of two to five members, and organized by individuals inspired by their own experiences of participating in social writing.

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Feedback from students who wrote together in the classroom revealed positive experiences: “It provides motivation to write and encourages me to continue writing and I felt motivation and inspiration during the class. Organizing social writing often is definitely recommendable.” One student considered the classes involving social writing as the best during the course on academic writing: The last two classes were in my opinion definitely the best classes of the course. Everybody could really advance their own work, and everybody had the possibility to advance their work according to their own goals. Classes consisting of social writing should also definitely be organized in future, and I will utilize them myself during my free time with other students.

A Finnish expert of academic writing, Kimmo Svinhufvud (2010), who has written guide books for writing a master’s and a doctoral thesis, has stated rather well on his blog Gradutakuu (A master’s thesis guaranteed) that seminars have their place but that “occasionally it would be a more reasonable use of time and resources to gather together to write, instead of always gathering to talk about writing.” Another advantage of incorporating social writing into master’s courses is that students observe a model of social writing, and instructors can encourage them to form micro groups where students can continue writing their theses together and receive peer support while doing so. As illustrated above, some students said that they wanted to continue social writing after the course. Three master’s students from Johanna’s course shared their experiences of forming a micro group after trying social writing in the classroom. The students said that they thought that writing a master’s thesis was a little difficult both when it came to starting to write and to proceeding with writing. During the social writing sessions during the academic writing course, they felt that the “general atmosphere and surrounding motivation took writing to the next level: especially setting goals and sharing them with others helped to begin writing and it felt that the thesis was proceeding easily, as if on its own.” The students created a WhatsApp group to keep in touch, and they booked a two-hour time slot in the working space in the university library twice a week. They find the social aspects of writing and the interaction especially important: At the beginning, we have small talk, after which we start to discuss our theses: how we are feeling at the moment and what are our goals for the

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session. Then follows the most intensive writing phase, where everybody concentrates on their writing and advancing their own work. Yet, we take small breaks and discuss problems that might occur when writing. Our two-­ hour sessions always end with lunch together at the university canteen.

The structure of the students’ micro groups, which meet for writing (the students used the term “writing meeting”) approximates the one used during the social writing sessions in the classroom, except that there is no facilitator, and the students have lunch together after writing. This represents an advantage not only in the context of the pandemic, but any time students need to finish their theses and can benefit from peer support. The students described many advantages related to writing their master’s theses together in a micro group, emphasizing the social aspects: The advantages we gain from writing meetings build especially on the opportunity of combining writing with a social event. Most of all, we feel that it is very helpful that we are not alone when writing. We are able to ask for help from each other, to reflect together on difficult issues, to share ideas and help each other when needed. Although each of us works on a different research topic and writes their own work, we have a common goal that connects us—writing. Learning social writing has itself brought us a lot of joy, but we have also noticed that we have learnt from each other during our writing meetings. We have gotten to know each other and each other’s research topics better and how each of us works and proceeds with their own study. All of this certainly also benefits us when we ourselves develop as writers and researchers.

Students’ experiences show that the value of social writing stems from the presence of other people and the discussions (cf. Murray 2015). Writing a master’s thesis can be challenging, but students receive help from each other when discussing the process alongside social writing. The learning experience amongst students in their micro group was versatile and also related to their identity as writers: it helped them to develop as writers.

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Our Writing Groups for PhD Students and Faculty Members In what follows, we describe how we started our writing groups and the participants in these groups. We also present, based on questionnaires, how the participating PhD students and faculty members described their reasons for participating in the social writing group, and the impact of the writing group on them. How We Started Writing Groups Both of us became interested in social writing and starting writing groups during the Covid-19 pandemic. When searching for support for her research during the pandemic, Camilla participated in various writing retreats and learnt about the structured writing model. In collaboration with a colleague, Camilla arranged a hybrid structured writing retreat for ten people in December 2020. The feedback collected following the retreat indicated that many of the participants were interested in joining a weekly writing group. Inspired by this feedback, Camilla decided to start a social writing group in her own department. In January 2021, Camilla sent an email to the mailing list of her department, asking recipients to indicate their interest in joining the writing group. Immediately, Camilla received approximately 15 responses from interested individuals, including a response from a person who declared her strong interest in social writing and welcomed this initiative to the community. However, this person had not mentioned her interest to anyone previously, so the initiation of the activity in their community was coincidental. The group has met weekly since January 2021, gathering between five and ten participants to write together. Johanna had considered starting a writing group for a long time, especially after she participated in training for writing retreat facilitators provided by Rowena Murray in autumn 2021. But she hesitated and was unsure about who she could ask to participate. On the one hand, she was drawn to organizing something small, safe, and friendly, amongst familiar colleagues, but, on the other hand, she wondered if she dared to send an open invitation. Since Johanna could not decide, she initially did nothing. But, like in life in general, the consequence of not acting was that nothing happened and she remained at square one. Why did she hesitate? Because she did not know how people would react, and she did not have a

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permanent position at the university. What would people think if she started a writing group? Johanna knew from the literature that even today not everybody understands what writing groups are, and some may have a negative perception of them. As mentioned previously, Camilla and Johanna started a support group for academic writing on Facebook at the end of 2021. We called the group Kirjoitan vaikka ei ole aikaa (I write although I don’t have time), referring to the frequently reported reason for not writing: a lack of time. A member of the group contacted Johanna to ask whether she had a writing group or if she had plans to start one. After Johanna received that much-needed push, she immediately began planning a writing group. First, she contacted her immediate supervisor and the head of the department, both women, who gave her the green light and supported her idea. Johanna advertised the group during a big meeting of the entire department and via various email lists, and a colleague advertised the group via email lists in her department. Johanna briefly described what the writing group was all about. New writing group for doctoral students, post-docs, and staff members! What? Setting goals and working together on individual projects. When? Fridays from 9.00 to 10.30 am via Zoom. Why? Makes time for writing, makes writing social, and enhances wellbeing.

Johanna had no idea how many people would be interested. What if nobody was interested or if too many people wanted to join? Although Johanna did not consider the last option likely, she added in the advert “limited number of places available.” She was relieved to receive about 20 inquiries regarding her writing group. The group started, and the participants voted to name the group Pen Drivers. Participants The vast majority of the participants in both Camilla’s and Johanna’s writing groups and in the support group on Facebook appear to be women. It is well-documented in the literature that women prefer participating in social writing groups and retreats. Murray and Kempenaar (2020) investigated why writing retreats are attractive to women, and their results indicated that structured writing retreats provide alternative structures for academic work, constituting a space in which women affected by structures of inequality in academia can develop processes and performance.

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American writing coach Cathy Mazak builds her business idea in her writing guide Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing (2022) on the idea that women and nonbinary researchers suffer from inequalities related to promotion and publication. Furthermore, even today, women may take on more caring responsibilities for children and home than men (e.g., Richard et al. 2015). Another reason women constituted the majority in our writing groups may be that women dominate the humanities and social sciences within which we work. Apart from the assumed gender, the career phase constitutes a feature of the participants in our social writing groups. The majority of the participants are doctoral researchers working on their doctoral dissertations. Other participants are faculty in teaching-oriented positions, such as lecturers and university instructors with more than 50% of their time devoted to teaching. However, professors, the most senior academics, rarely participate in our writing groups. This suggests that professors prefer writing alone. There are several potential reasons for this. First, professors have extensive experience in writing and might, therefore, not need the support provided from the group to start writing. Second, one can hypothesize that professors can say no to the competing tasks of teaching and administration more easily because of their seniority. Third, professors, situated at the top of the hierarchy, may want to avoid sharing their challenges with faculty who hold less prestigious positions (cf. section “Reflections on the Leadership of Social Writing,” on the democracy of social writing). However, the reason for the low participation rates of professors has not been addressed in the literature and remains a question for future research. Reasons for Joining a Writing Group Johanna asked participants about their reasons for joining a writing group before the group started, for which she received 16 responses. Individuals who registered for the group mentioned the time, productivity, and the joy of writing. Challenges related to the use of time were not restricted to a certain career phase. Although PhD students may have sufficient time available in their schedules for writing, problems arise for them in attempting to maintain writing routines. One PhD student described their reason for joining the group as an aim “to have more structure in my doctoral studies and to have my dissertation completed some day.” In Finland, it is possible to only work part-time on a PhD, without funding, which was

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pointed out as a problem in one response: “I work on my PhD thesis alongside work and I’ve had problems writing regularly.” Faculty members in teaching-oriented positions also struggled with time, primarily with difficulties in finding the time to write: “I would like to set aside some time for writing, because it is difficult for me as a university instructor whose main work is teaching (90%), to gain time for that.” Furthermore, some responses described challenges related to working during a less optimal time of day (A time, Zerubavel 1999; soaring time, Mazak 2020): “Working in a group would bring positive pressure to write quite early (I’m a night owl and a late riser).” Participants were also willing to learn new skills related to time management: I have a habit of doing research when I have long, uninterrupted periods available, that is, often on teaching-free days. I would like to learn to also work when I have short free periods so that I can progress more quickly with my research.

To use the terminology of Murray (2015), some participants seemed willing to learn “snack writing” and how to utilize short snippets of time to keep moving their writing projects forward. Another aim mentioned by the individuals who enrolled in the writing group was improving their productivity: “I want to enjoy the benefits of social writing. A weekly writing session in the calendar surely also increases my productivity.” However, improving productivity in the sense of the publish-or-perish pressure (Richard et  al. 2015) was combined with a desire for discovering the joy of writing, which would come from other writers in the group—“Mostly I seek a peer group and peer support and feeding the joy of writing”—and from sharing: “Sharing experiences would make the writing process more fun and inspiring.” That is, participating in writing groups can increase the pleasure of writing, and writing should not be regarded only as productivity, but also as pleasure, which was also reported by Dwyer et al. (2012) in a study of writing groups and early career researchers. Finally, responses also included the desire to participate in the writing group as beneficial to teaching: I hope that the writing group would help me better understand why it is difficult for me (and my students) to make time for writing and why I (and my students) have a tendency to escape from writing.

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I would like to develop my skill to promote students’ writing as a facilitator of a research seminar. Many students seemingly suffer from writing their theses.

Participants hoped that participating in a writing group could help them understand not only their own problems, but also those of their students related to writing, and help them better facilitate research seminars. Impact of Participation in a Writing Group We collected feedback from our participants regarding the perceived impact of the writing group they attended. After the spring term, Johanna asked members of the writing group about their experiences to determine whether they corresponded to the participants’ reasons for joining the writing group. She received nine responses, mostly from active participants, given that the number of participants in weekly sessions varied from half a dozen to a dozen. The questionnaire Johanna distributed included questions on their experience as well as on the group’s impact on participants’ writing habits and the writers’ perceived identities. She was also interested in hearing from those who stopped attending sessions about their reasons for dropping out of the group. Was there something in the group’s activities they did not like? Did a regular obstacle emerge on Friday mornings? Or did these individuals experience difficulties in prioritizing their writing and strategically disengaging from competing tasks? As demonstrated by Murray (2015), writers need to temporarily disengage from other tasks in order to engage with their writing. This involves physical, cognitive, and social disengagement. Physical disengagement means that the writer reserves a time for writing in their calendar and looks for a space to write. Cognitive disengagement refers to how the writer psychologically disengages from other tasks. Social disengagement means disengaging from expectations from other people in order to prioritize writing, although others may react negatively to this disengagement. Some challenges related to disengagement appeared in the responses to the questionnaire that preceded the launch of the writing group. One registered person was uncertain of their participation: “I hope that my other work generally enables my participation.” However, it was difficult to receive responses from individuals who abandoned the group. Johanna

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received only one reply from a person who participated less and less during the course of the spring term: “In the beginning, I participated rather regularly, but when lectures went hybrid, commuting and organization completely took over my attention on Friday mornings.”

In Finland, the first period (seven weeks) of the spring term in 2022 included online teaching due to the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the second period (seven weeks) involved a return to in-person teaching. New teaching routines have probably made it even more difficult for the participant to disengage from other tasks and engage with their writing. However, they could have found an alternative time for teaching preparations, and they also seemed to think that they had given up too easily. They stated that participation felt “meaningful” (cf. Saarelainen et al. 2021 on the experience of meaningfulness during the Covid-19 pandemic), but, “when there was a rush with other things, I gave up participating in the group a little too easily.” Yet, they felt that participation in the beginning had an impact on their writing: “Now, I have gained an understanding of the point of writing in the group, but I wasn’t able to take advantage of it enough.” Strategic disengagement from other competing tasks is a challenge, where support from the organization is needed (see also Murray 2015; Kornhaber et al. 2016). Those who regularly participated in the writing group reported an experience which was “very positive with visible results” or “very pleasant and utterly productive.” The meetings of the writing group were also important for those who had the time to write: Although I have relatively speaking much time for writing, I found that the meetings of the writing group were important. It felt that in the meetings permission was granted to put aside other things and concentrate only on your own writing. The atmosphere was even devout in some way.

Participants reported that the impact of the writing group on their time management was significant. Participation in the group enabled writing altogether: “I have given myself some time to do some writing that I would never have given myself otherwise, because of a lack of time.” The writing group thus enabled strategic disengagement from other

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competing tasks. Participation also helped individuals to finish projects and getting back to writing. It helped me to carve out the time I needed to finish a project on time. Also, it helped me to get back on track with my writing after some normal setbacks (e.g., kids getting ill) that I have now learnt always occur.

Participation in the writing group taught the writers to define more accurate writing goals (see section “Facilitating Virtual and Structured Hybrid Writing Retreats”) and plan their writing, an important cognitive dimension to social writing (Murray 2015). A challenge related to structured writing retreats lies in the new skills and habits learnt, which perhaps survive for a short time in the everyday academic life of participants, but do not necessarily result in permanent changes to their writing habits (see, e.g., Murray and Cunningham 2011). However, the feedback received after participation in a writing group for one semester demonstrates that change is possible. Participants reported, for instance, having adopted a habit to plan their writing for 10 or 15 minutes before the group session: “I have adopted this kind of planning every time I write.” Thus, writing had become more regular, which had an effect on the beginning of writing: “The barrier to write / concentrate on my own text is lower while writing has become more regular.” Although participants reported that writing in a group was more productive than writing alone, they attempted to reproduce the same effect when writing on their own: I notice that the effect of the group on my writing pace has been enormous. Writing alone for 90 minutes has never been so efficient. Yet, after these Friday sessions, I try to encourage myself to obtain the same pace I achieve during other mornings. Thanks to the group I also noticed that the morning hours are the most efficient time for me to write and I will continue writing specifically in the mornings. When there’s an efficient start in the morning and you have made progress with your text (only/even) for 90 minutes, it has a huge positive effect on the whole day. I feel that I’ve been efficient and the day has only started. Of course, you cannot always continue writing, but the positive effect stays even if you have to move on to other work tasks.

This respondent described the positive effect of accomplishing a 90-minute writing session in the morning. Most participants reported that participating in the writing group had an impact on their identity as a

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writer, mirroring results from studies concentrating on writing retreats (e.g., Grant 2006, Murray and Newton 2009). Participants learnt to prioritize writing: “I acknowledge that writing is one of my most important jobs.” Participants also adopted a more positive attitude of themselves as writers: Writing in a group has changed my perception of myself as a writer to a more positive one. I have noticed that I can also write so that I don’t criticize myself all of the time. Shared experiences in the writing group have led me to not feel bad when writing is not always easy and recognize that it’s hard work. It’s been a relief to hear that I’m not alone with my own experiences.

The discussions in the group helped participants to realize that other writers experience similar problems. Participation in a writing group impacts not only their identity as a writer, but also their entire academic identity, a role in which writing plays a significant role: Really lovely and empowering experience. I felt I was among my peers and my academic identity became stronger. [...] I feel more clearly that I’m a “regular” academic writer when I’m able to work on a text regularly every week. Furthermore, joining the group made me better realize how important morning writing sessions are for myself and for my academic identity.

Regular writing in the writing group made the participants regular writers who found it easier to work on their text on their own. The experience strengthened their self-efficacy, that is, the beliefs individuals have regarding their ability to perform specific tasks (Bandura 1997, see also Zumbrunn 2021). Writers with a strong self-efficacy enjoy writing more, feel less writing-related anxiety, and are more strategic than writers with a weaker self-efficacy. Interestingly, self-efficacy predicts success more than the actual abilities of the individual. When we compare the feedback from the participants of the writing group to the three dimensions of social writing defined by Murray (2015), we notice that they involved the cognitive and social dimensions, whereas the physical dimension was less present in social writing groups than in structured writing retreats (cf. next section). The cognitive dimension includes the planning of writing, setting and monitoring goals, prioritizing writing, and developing self-efficacy, all of which participants of the

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writing group learnt. The social dimension, in turn, involves discussions (e.g., reflections on writing), the creation of academic networks and supporting one another. These discussions reveal that challenges are an intrinsic part of the writing process rather than something that only novice writers suffer from (cf. Murray and Newton 2009).

Facilitating Virtual and Structured Hybrid Writing Retreats Most of the research on writing retreats has focused on in-person offline retreats. Existing literature has paid scant attention to the impact of virtual writing retreats on academic faculty and postgraduate students (Koulaxi and Kong 2022: 14). However, Koulaxi and Kong (2022) described the impact of a series of virtual writing retreats for master’s students during the Covid-19 pandemic. The virtual retreats did not follow the structured writing retreat format introduced by Murray, but consisted of 45-minute sessions of writing together on Zoom, then taking a 10-minute break and repeating the process. Their results demonstrated that the virtual retreats created communities, generated support, and enhanced productivity. Similarly, Janz and Murray (2021) wrote a blog post on how virtual writing retreats benefitted the productivity and mental health of academic women during the Covid-19 pandemic. Participants noted several key benefits to their retreats, such as the mutual setting of goals, creating accountability, and sharing successes and frustrations with others, all of which relieved stress. In this section, we first describe how we organized our virtual and hybrid writing retreats, and, second, we present the learning experiences of the writing retreat participants. Organizing Virtual and Hybrid Structured Writing Retreats Thus far, we have arranged virtual, in-person, and hybrid retreats. Specifically, Johanna organized a two-day virtual retreat in June 2022, where six people participated and also responded to a feedback form. The writing sessions were preceded by goal-setting and free writing exercises and followed by discussions about their post-writing feelings. The retreat followed the structure of in-person retreats, alternating writing sessions and breaks. Being strict about breaks was of the utmost importance,

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particularly during virtual retreats, because working online is both mentally and physically burdensome. Johanna also organized relatively short days for the retreats, from 9 am to 3 pm, in order to make it possible for the retreat participants to, for instance, take care of child pickup or read their emails during their working hours. Johanna provided participants with instructions on preparing for the retreat. The instructions worked as guidelines for first-time retreat participants and as a reminder for experienced participants. Prior to the retreat, participants were asked to do preparatory work, to reflect on their writing goals, to plan a writing space as well as meals and snacks and to tell everybody that they should not be disturbed during the retreat. During Johanna’s virtual retreat, the writing was done in short 60-minute sessions. This was due to research indicating the health drawbacks of sitting uninterrupted for more than an hour, which was emphasized in Murray’s training for retreat facilitators. The participants described the session length as satisfactory, even though they noticed that not all writing sessions constituted their best writing time or soaring time (see section above on reasons for joining): I felt really efficient for the most part, although sometimes I felt that I could not get my best out of every session. The breaks and the length of the writing sessions were good. One is able to concentrate on writing for one hour, although the sessions after lunch were the stickiest.

Discussions online are more challenging than those conducted face-to-­ face, and one cannot pay attention to nonverbal actions, for instance, to see if somebody wants to take a turn. Therefore, online groups are preferably small, enabling the facilitator to take care of all participants. Johanna used the chat function on Zoom to facilitate the discussions, and the chat also worked as a warm-up for oral discussions. Camilla has facilitated two writing retreats during the pandemic. During both retreats, most of the approximately 15 participants were on-site, although a few individuals participated remotely. The first of these two retreats was arranged in December 2020, and it combined facilitated writing sessions before noon with more free and flexible sessions that were not facilitated in the afternoon. This first writing retreat was the first time Camilla facilitated structured writing sessions, which she did remotely, even though most participants were on-site. While these arrangements were less than ideal, Camilla felt that the format functioned reasonably

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well and she received fruitful feedback on the structured writing retreat format from individuals with no previous experience in structured, facilitated writing. As facilitators, we have learnt that virtual, and even hybrid retreats, can work. The advantages of virtual retreats are that they are easier and less expensive to organize, and participation is possible for those who find it difficult to participate in face-to-face retreats due to a lack of funding or care responsibilities at home. Furthermore, participation even for one day (or two half-sessions) is possible—as we all know, it is better to do some writing than no writing at all. Obviously, face-to-face retreats carry their own advantages: unlike virtual retreats, participants can disconnect from their daily environment and enjoy new experiences during breaks and in the evening, and food is typically prepared by someone else. Perhaps virtual retreats enable participation in more retreats each year, and, in our opinion, they have come to stay (cf. also Isosävi and Lindholm 2021, 2023). Learning Experiences from the Hybrid Structured Writing Retreat During Camilla’s writing retreats, participants provided both oral and written feedback on the structured writing retreat format. The last session during the retreat included a group discussion, in which retreat participants shared their experiences from the retreat, and, later, they were asked to provide more detailed written feedback in a shared document on Teams. Specifically, participants were asked what they learnt from the structured writing retreat. Many participants mentioned that they had learnt to set goals: Learning to set small, manageable goals might at first seem insufficiently ambitious, but ultimately it goes a long way in actually getting things done.

Over the course of the retreat, participants learnt to set suitable goals for the sessions as well as for the retreat as a whole. Many participants were not accustomed to setting quantitative goals, and preferred thinking about their goals in qualitative terms, focusing on the content-specific tasks they could perform during a single session. The benefit of setting quantitative goals is that it is easier to evaluate how quantitative rather than qualitative goals are fulfilled.

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In addition, the participants established routines for alternating writing sessions and breaks. In the structured writing retreat system, it is important to alternate working sessions and breaks. Yet, for many participants, following a schedule and breaking down their goals into small chunks represented a new idea to writing: I learnt that I need to change the rhythm of my work in academic writing. I now recognize the difference between laziness and a genuine need for a break.

Learning to alternate writing sessions and breaks is good for the brain and also teaches the writer to write efficiently. If the writer knows that they only have a certain chunk of time for work and then need to take a break, they feel more motivated to work efficiently. Working without a set schedule beforehand easily renders work less effective. The participants’ responses also demonstrated that they obtained new knowledge about themselves and their working strategies. They learnt how they could benefit from the support of the group when taking on difficult tasks, and what times of the day worked best for them when focusing on writing. When the writers learnt new things about themselves as writers, they gained confidence and established what to do when they got stuck in their writing. Instead of trying to push oneself, the writers learnt how to shift tasks and move from writing to planning or creating mind maps. To summarize, many writers described that they had learnt how to understand writing as a process, which includes not only writing, but also planning, reading, editing, revising, and even taking breaks: Writing is not just about writing, but the whole process that surrounds it (such as reading, editing, rewriting and even BREAKS).

This new understanding of writing taught writers a new attitude towards writing, giving themselves credit for working on texts even when they were not putting pen to paper. The feedback from the retreats focused on all three dimensions of social writing—that is, the social, cognitive, and physical dimensions—whereas in writing groups, only the first two dimensions came up. Writing during many sessions during a single day highlights the importance of the physical dimension, which should include breaks and a focus on wellbeing. Yet,

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this physical dimension of writing should not be neglected during shorter writing group sessions either.

Reflections on the Leadership of Social Writing In the literature on social writing, the term leadership is used, although Murray (2015) states that this term may not be the best because it is often connected to formal roles, whereas the term facilitator is more appropriate to informal roles. Yet, we agree with Murray (2015), who thinks that leadership is an appropriate term, because somebody has to take responsibility for the social writing group, and thus must lead. While other authors talk about facilitating writing retreats, we talk here about leading writing retreats, because this is a leadership skill and boosts leadership in academia in general. Thus, while we think that our role resembles that of a facilitator, we also think that leadership in social writing is worth emphasizing. Our aim has been to transfer the practices of social writing to our own universities and to encourage others not only to join our groups but also to start their own micro groups and begin using social writing in their own teaching. Thus, our objective has been to spread word of the benefits of social writing and to create writing communities. Murray et al. (2011) have described five roles related to leadership in a structured writing retreat, which, in our opinion, are relevant for all types of social writing. The role of the facilitator is to (1) tell participants about the structure, timetable, and practices; (2) ask participants to set goals for scheduled writing sessions; (3) ask participants to discuss their writing goals and achievements during breaks; (4) tend to the schedule for writing and discussions; and (5) show the model of the writing process to the group. Furthermore, Murray et al. (2011) have applied the theory of containment to study the role of the facilitator in containment. There are three dimensions of containment: emotional, organizational, and epistemological. Emotional containment refers to containing unmanageable feelings. Organizational containment focuses on how different practices impact the clarity of the organizational structure and leadership. Epistemological containment relates to the fora, which enable participants to gain an understanding of complex work-related issues. These three dimensions form holistic containment, and, according to the study of Murray et  al. (2011), the facilitator plays a central role in the holistic containment.

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We have both asked the participants of our writing groups for feedback on the role of the facilitator. The responses confirmed the results of Murray et al. (2011) on the vital role of the facilitator in the emotional, organizational, and epistemological containment. Specifically, the emotional containment meant creating a good atmosphere: The role of the facilitator is very important in terms of making everyone feel welcome and creating a good atmosphere. The facilitators have always been extremely supportive, kind, and welcoming! Attending the sessions is always a pleasure because you know there’ll be at least one familiar and friendly face around, which makes a big difference when you’re already stressed about your work.

Participants understood organizational containment as the facilitator taking care of the outside circumstances in order to enable successful writing: It’s very important! The instructions of the facilitator, the discussion, and taking care of the schedule bring much-needed discipline to the writing session. The facilitator has an obvious impact because she is like a mentor that gives you “permission” or the “obligation” to write and to comment about your writing.

Finally, as for epistemological containment, this involves discussions which help the participant learn more about writing and to understand the challenges of writing. It’s efficient to verbalize your goals and discuss how the writing went after the session. It puts your own problems into perspective: everybody occasionally has problems writing and all succeed sometimes :)

Although we as facilitators do not play the role of a writing coach nor serve as a supervisor of theses, we can provide comments and advice for the writing challenges that arise together with other participants. We can ask: “What do you do if you get stuck with the text?” “What if you are nervous about comments from your supervisor?” Yet, as facilitators, we do not need to know everything and be superhuman beings. We view social writing groups as democratic settings. By facilitating the social writing

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group in her department, Camilla uses her role as a facilitator to share her feelings related to writing. She feels free to share with the other group members her failures and negative thoughts as well as her feelings related to writing. Camilla’s more junior colleagues have repeatedly responded to her sharing by providing feedback on the importance and comfort in hearing that a person holding the position of professor might also experience such feelings and benefit from the support provided by others. Thus, the democratic features of writing groups can benefit both the person leading the group and other participants. We have also taken this into consideration when arranging in-person retreats. For instance, a department head participated in one of our retreats, and those in charge started the retreat by mentioning explicitly that everybody present was there in the role of a researcher and not to fulfil any administrative duties. That is, in structured writing groups and writing retreats, all of the participants have the same rights to participate as writers and researchers. Through our initiative to lead social writing in our communities, we have gained valuable support from our supervisors who are both women. We feel that organizational support is significant, since, even today, some may be opposed to social writing or not understand what it is. We were fortunate to have the support of our immediate supervisors. We asked our supervisors about their reactions and thoughts when they learnt about our initiative to organize social writing as a part of our teaching and for PhD students and members of the faculty: I was delighted. Community building across hierarchies and support for continued writing are both essentially important for us. When I heard during a department meeting that a social writing group was going to be organized, I was not surprised that our department head supported this initiative, and I was immediately interested in participating. I was a bit disappointed that more university lecturers did not participate in the writing group, because there is a lot of applicability for us, as instructors, to use social writing in our courses. The use is not only for us as researchers, but also as educators. I think that many of our students do not manage to start their writing in time, during the writing of both their bachelor’s theses and master’s theses. There would be a lot to gain for them if we instructors participated in these kinds of sessions. In order to incorporate social writing into our classes, we instructors first need to know about social writing. Before you can offer social writing to your students, you need to first participate yourself in this kind of writing group.

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In this last response, an important aspect was highlighted: when educators learn about social writing by participating themselves in a writing group, they are able to use it in their classrooms and better help their students to write. Perhaps this benefit should be emphasized when writing groups are advertised to faculty members. Furthermore, we wanted to know if our initiative to transfer the practices of social writing to our units had influenced or inspired our supervisors, and, if so, in what ways. One supervisor described what she had gained: “In very practical terms, I have participated and experienced the support myself.” Another supervisor described the benefits both for herself and for her teaching: The Pen Drivers, our writing group, has inspired me a lot every Friday morning. I have tried some writing experiences I wouldn’t have tried without this writing group. I did some free writing in order to find out if I am able to describe an atmosphere, a scene of violence, an interior, a conversation… Some of my friends are professional writers and I wanted to know how you feel when you just write and describe what is around you or what you imagine. Of course, I have also used that time to re-read articles before publication, to write an article, those normal university duties, but I wanted to dedicate another type of writing, on Friday morning, before the weekend, for those writing sessions we had. It was precious time, only for myself. This experience has inspired me a lot for future experiences with my students. I have understood that they need those social writing sessions. It will help them a lot for their bachelor’s theses and master’s theses.

Inspired by the warm-up, free writing exercises, the supervisor above described exploring fictional writing alongside academic writing during the writing group meetings. Furthermore, such exercises provided inspiration for their teaching and organizing social writing in order to help their students to write their theses. Finally, our experiences as facilitators of social writing have taught us that we also benefit from social writing, just as the participants do, when we are able to work on our own writing projects within the group. Furthermore, we feel that by facilitating social writing groups, we continually learn more about writing and its processes. Finally, we also feel relaxed to write when we are participants, not just facilitators. It is even easier to concentrate on writing when somebody else tends to the schedule and other practical considerations. Therefore, we continue to participate in structured writing retreats facilitated by others.

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Discussion Academia in the neoliberal era is characterized by fragmentation and competition, stressing individual and measurable performance by academics. Because publication records are crucial to recruitment and promotion, there is also an increased pressure to publish, causing stress and anxiety not only amongst junior scholars working on their doctoral theses, but also amongst more senior academics. Recently, social writing in the form of writing groups and retreats has been promoted as a means to both maintain publication activity and improve the wellbeing of academics. The corporate approach to university research and education has been established in the Anglophone world, and such developments continue in the Nordic countries, including in Finland. Our chapter reports on our efforts to introduce and establish the model of social writing in our communities in two Finnish universities. We have introduced the model of social writing at different levels, using it with master’s students, PhD candidates, and faculty members. Very little knowledge exists on how social writing can benefit undergraduate and postgraduate students, but our feedback indicated that learning how to set goals and enjoying the support of the group were significant benefits for students. The same benefits are described by more senior academics in their feedback on writing together in retreats and during weekly group meetings. Participants described having learnt to set goals for the sessions and to alternate intensive working sessions and breaks. Furthermore, the feedback demonstrated how participants adopted a more inclusive definition of writing, shifting from a simplistic view of writing as the process of putting words to paper to an approach involving activities such as reading, planning, and editing as sub-­ activities within the broader activity of writing. Participants also described social writing as an empowering experience, affecting both their productivity and their writer identity. As mentioned, both doctoral students and faculty have attended our social writing groups and retreats. Some participants are lecturers who hold teaching-intensive positions. By including faculty in our writing endeavours, we have enabled the social writing model to spread to the education of postgraduate students. After learning about social writing, lecturers have begun using this model in their own teaching practice. In this manner, the social writing model has been integrated into both undergraduate and postgraduate education in our Finnish universities.

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In addition, we established our social writing practice during the Covid-19 pandemic and thus gained experience in remote and hybrid retreats as well as online writing groups, which we have discussed here. While Murray’s idea of the “typing pool” was originally established for in-person retreat settings, our experience shows that the hybrid/remote format did not constitute an obstacle: arranging retreats via Zoom and encouraging participants to keep their video cameras on enabled us to establish an online typing pool, providing both support and accountability. The establishment of our social writing endeavours during the pandemic renders them particularly connected to gender issues. Research demonstrated a significant gender gap in journal submissions during the first wave of the pandemic (Squazzoni et al. 2021). Thus, the pandemic seemed to create potentially cumulative advantages for men. By arranging social writing events in which most participants were women, we created opportunities for women academics to maintain their productivity and benefit from group support. Thus, social writing serves as a tool for empowering women, a tool that can be utilized effectively even during exceptional times. We are writing the last paragraphs of this chapter in autumn 2022, when most restrictions in Finland resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic have been lifted. It is now possible to meet in person once again, and we have both attended in-person structured writing retreats following the lifting of restrictions on social gatherings. The context always shapes how we move our writing forward, and currently people seem to enjoy coming together and writing both in person and online. The future will surely demonstrate yet other ways of adapting writing to external circumstances and situations. Perhaps, given the emerging energy crisis, writers will abandon their home offices and meet with others in libraries to write in an effort to save on energy costs at home. While recent years have revealed an increasing interest in social writing in Finnish academia, much work remains to be done in both practice and research. As noted in this chapter, certain groups such as university lecturers and professors participate less frequently in social writing than PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Considering how to contend with potential resistance from groups engaging less actively in social academic writing events remains a task for the future. To do so, additional research on academic writers’ perceptions of social writing is needed. In addition, ongoing research on the metaphors for academic writing (Lindholm and Luukka, unpublished manuscript) indicates that the metaphors used to

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describe the challenges of social academic writing resist categorization, thereby indicating that the challenges experienced by academic writers remain individual. This makes it difficult to create solutions that fit all or most writers. In addition, some of the participants in this research on metaphors viewed social academic writing somewhat negatively as a test of strength or skill, possibly comparing themselves to other writers in attendance. While the scope of this qualitative study is limited, the findings suggest that more research is needed to understand how we might make social academic writing more attractive to writers of greater professional diversity.

References Bandura, Albert. 1997. Self-efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York, NY: Worth Publishers. Dwyer, Angela, Bridget Lewis, Fiona McDonald, and Marcelle Burns. 2012. It’s Always a Pleasure: Exploring Productivity and Pleasure in a Writing Group for Early Career Researchers. Studies in Continuing Education 34 (2): 129–144. Grant, Barbara M. 2006. Writing in the Company of Other Women: Exceeding the Boundaries. Studies in Higher Education 31 (4): 483–495. Isosävi, Johanna, and Camilla Lindholm. 2021. Väitöksen jälkeen: opas akateemiselle uralle [After the PhD: a Guide for the Academic Career]. Helsinki: Art House. ———. 2023. Opas yhteisölliseen kirjoittamiseen [A Guide to Social Writing]. Helsinki: Art House. Janz, Nicole, and Rowena Murray. 2021. How Virtual Writing Retreats for Academic Women Improve Productivity and Mental Health. https://www. wihe.com/article-­details/177/how-­virtual-­writing-­r etreats-­for-­academic-­ women-­improve-­productivity-­and-­mental-­health/. Accessed 17 November 2022. Jauhiainen, Arto, Annukka Jauhiainen, and Anne Laiho. 2009. The Dilemmas of the ‘Efficiency University’ Policy and the Everyday Life of University Teachers. Teaching in Higher Education 14 (4): 417–428. https://doi. org/10.1080/13562510903050186. Kornhaber, Rachel, Merylin Cross, Vasiliki Betihavas, and Heather Bridgman. 2016. The Benefits and Challenges of Academic Writing Retreats: An Integrative Review. Higher Education Research & Development 35 (6): 1210–1227. Koulaxi, Afroditi-Maria, and Jessica Kong. 2022. Re-thinking Virtual Writing Retreats in the Covid-19 Higher Education Environment. Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching 5 (1): 10.37074/jalt.2022.5.s1.2.

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Lindholm, Camilla, and Emilia Luukka. n.d. Sustainably on the Seas of Academia. Comparing Metaphors of Social and Independent Academic Writing. Unpublished Manuscript. Lund, Rebecca. 2020. The Social Organisation of Boasting in the Neoliberal University. Gender and Education 32 (4): 466–485. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09540253.2018.1482412. Mazak, Cathy. 2020. The Big Reveal: I’m Renaming “Tiger Time”. Last Modified 10 November 2020. https://www.cathymazak.com/episode54-­the-­big-­ reveal-­im-­re-­naming-­tiger-­time/ ———. 2022. Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing. New York: Morgan James Publishing. Murray, Rowena. 2015. Writing in social spaces. A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing. London: Routledge. Murray, Rowena, and Everarda Cunningham. 2011. Managing Researcher Development: ‘Drastic Transition’? Studies in Higher Education 36 (7): 841–845. Murray, Rowena, and Larissa Kempenaar. 2020. Why Do Women Attend Writing Retreats? Gender and Education 32 (8): 1001–1018. Murray, Rowena, and Mary Newton. 2009. Writing Retreat as Structured Intervention: Margin or Mainstream? Higher Education Research & Development 28 (5): 541–553. Murray, Rowena, Laura Steckley, and Ian MacLeod. 2011. Research Leadership in Writing for Publication: A Theoretical Framework. British Educational Research Journal 38 (5). https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.580049. Poutanen, Mikko. 2022. ‘I Am Done with That Now.’ Sense of Alienations in Finnish Academia. Journal of Education Policy. https://doi.org/10.108 0/02680939.2022.2067594. Richard, James E., Plimmer Geoff, Kim-Shyan Fam, and Charles Campbell. 2015. Publishing Success of Marketing Academics: Antecedents and Outcomes. European Journal of Marketing 49 (1–2): 123–145. Rowland, Stephen. 2002. Overcoming Fragmentation in Professional Life: The Challenge for Academic Development. Higher Education Quarterly 56 (1): 52–64. Saarelainen, Suvi-Maria, Hilla Inkilä, Lluis Oviedo, Frances-Vincent Anthony, Berenika Seryczynska, Piotr Roszak, and Josefa Torrabla Albaladejo. 2021. Koronapandemian vaikutukset elämän merkityksellisyyden kokemuksiin keväällä 2020. [The Impact of the Covid Pandemic on Perceptions of Meaningfulness in the Spring of 2020.] Diakonian tutkimus 2/2021. https:// doi.org/10.37448/dt.111912

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Squazzoni, Flaminio, Giangiacomo Bravo, Francisco Grimaldo, Daniel García-­ Costa, Mike Farjam, and Bahar Mehmani. 2021. Gender Gap in Journal Submissions and Peer Review During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic. A Study on 2329 Elsevier Journals. PLOS One. https://journals. plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257919. Svinhufvud, Kimmo. 2010. Gradutakuu, blog. Accessed 17 November 2022. http://gradutakuu.fi/2010/09/07/kokoonnummeko-­p uhumaan­tutkimuksesta-­vai-­tekemaan-­sita/ Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1999. The Clockwork Muse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zumbrunn, Sharon. 2021. Why Aren’t You Writing? Research, Real Talk, Strategies & Shenanigans. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

CHAPTER 11

Becoming a Facilitator: Finding My Own Delivery Style Through Opportunities and Challenges Marcella Sutcliffe

Starting from a Place to Retreat and Restore: From Pacing My Own Writing to Supporting Social Writing Most academics considering running residential structured writing retreats—whether on campus or beyond—will need to start by finding the space. In my case it was the other way round: it was the place that helped me find my new professional role, leading me to reimagine the way I contribute to academia. The place gave me the inspiration and confidence to

https://www.chapelgarth.com/contact-­us

M. Sutcliffe (*) Middlesbrough, UK Writing Retreats at Chapelgarth, North Yorkshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_11

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embark on a new career trajectory and become a writing retreat facilitator; it meant putting to one side my primary role as a researcher and a historian; it entailed going beyond my disciplinary expertise; and, crucially, it included leaving behind a self-centred approach focused on my own writing and embracing a cross-disciplinary interest in the writing of others. The place had long been the family home; always too big for our family, although not at all grand, the house had offered all of us the pleasures of a countryside existence, rolling hills surrounding the garden, an arboretum on the doorstep, an English lawn to relax on, and country lanes to jog on when feeling energetic. While writing up my history PhD thesis I had somehow taken the place for granted; I had sat in solitude at the top of the big kitchen table, typing away with the warmth of the aga on my back every morning and afternoon, until my lab’s gentle nudge reminded me to lift my eyes from the screen and take her on our regular walks round the woods and fields. It was a routine which filled the months while my research question gradually took shape and my enquiring mind sharpened its focus. If I am honest, for much of my doctoral journey I looked upon the writing time as productive time and dismissed the dog walks as a distraction, which I mildly resented as I perceived them as interrupting my flow of thought and concentration. Soon enough, however, I began noticing the value of these breaks. I started realizing that, whenever I felt like I was going round in circles, desperately trying to find the best turn of phrase to express a concept, walking—instead of being a distraction—unleashed the creative energy I needed, enabling me to see through the particular stumbling block with which I had been grappling while staring at my laptop for hours. I then started becoming aware of the fact that the interrupting breaks for dog walking, far from being an obstacle to my productivity and progression, were exactly what I needed, those times in between writing sessions, which enabled me to recharge and think differently, step back, and see the bigger picture. I could suddenly make connections between paragraphs or chapters which I had been unable to see. As it turns out, recent scientific studies support the idea that walking helps you think (Bergman et al. 2008). As I became more aware of the power of taking breaks in nature, I started exploring ways in which such practice could be widely shared amongst academics. I had heard about structured writing retreats as a way of bringing together academics to form a supportive and productive community, and I was lucky enough to first experience one such residential

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writing retreat facilitated by Rowena Murray in Scotland. I was so inspired by the model that I decided to train as a writing retreat facilitator and bring back to the North of England my own version of a rural writing retreat for academics. An exciting journey began, which connected me with writers from an array of disciplines who all shared the same challenge: to stop procrastinating and find a place where the disciplined structure of writing time and breaktime would support their productivity in a sustainable way.

Writing Retreats at Chapelgarth: The Beginnings In February 2018 I opened the doors to the first cohort of academic writing retreaters. Following a two-day training for retreat facilitators, run by Rowena Murray, I had made enough connections with other potential writing facilitators to invite them to run a structured writing retreat at our house, soon to be renamed Writing Retreats at Chapelgarth, while I acted as venue coordinator. I found collaborating with Dr Elsbeth Robson, senior lecturer at Hull University, and Dr Marisela Mendoza, senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, an invigorating and inspiring experience: starting a new venture was exciting but sometimes unnerving, and having the benefit of liaising with supportive, stimulating, and enterprising colleagues was the perfect start to my new venture. Elsbeth became a regular facilitator and attendee. The writing retreats became increasingly regular, with small groups of individual academics filling the house on a regular basis and then Doctoral Training Groups starting to book their own exclusive structured writing retreats. As the venue coordinator, I was in charge of marketing, dealing with bookings, and all administration. My role included welcoming participants, organizing transport, catering, and leisure time of participants and, last but not least, giving academics the opportunity to write in a peaceful and productive setting. I made contacts with local suppliers, from yoga teachers to vegan caterers, as my awareness of what participants might need grew, and I developed a better sense of what working in the hospitality sector for a specific group of people meant. Acquiring the particular skills which are required within the hospitality sector took time. For the first year all my energy went into building the business and identifying what might be the best writing retreat experience. What mattered most was developing my own brand and unique selling point. Retreaters gave me honest feedback that really helped.

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I became more ambitious with what I could offer—a writing retreat centre in England which would combine productivity and wellbeing for academics in a place of natural beauty. I had found a way to use this unique house and grounds as a space to support academic writers. I was able to share what had supported my own writing: the opportunities to take a break and interact with nature. While Writing Retreats at Chapelgarth were gradually getting established, increasingly attracting enquiries from university departments and groups of scholars, I also began to feel increasingly frustrated: I was looking after a growing number of academics, mostly women; I was helping them to reach their goals by providing a conducive environment for work productivity; I was creating the setting for interdisciplinary and stimulating conversation, relief from house chores, healthy chef-prepared meals, but I had no time for myself. Certainly, no time to write! While I was providing the necessary back-up for the writing retreat facilitators to work in the writing room, I was very much outside of the writing room, dealing with all the practicalities that the smooth running of the operation required … I felt that if the structured writing retreats were to carry on and grow, I needed to redress the balance: somehow, I needed to get myself back in the writing room … and this time as a facilitator, not just a writer.

Finding My Voice as a Host Who Facilitates In the summer of 2019 I took the plunge. I had decided to run a structured writing retreat over the summer holidays to sound out whether there would be enough interest for a summer retreat. None of my regular writing retreat facilitators were available due to childcare responsibilities during the school holidays, and they suspected that uptake would be low for those same reasons. I was undeterred. A small writing retreat for very few participants seemed like the perfect opportunity to advertise some dates where I could be the facilitator: to my surprise there was substantial interest. Uptake was much higher than envisaged, as PhD mums, more than others, were finding the challenge of the long school holidays a serious impediment to their work progression. They needed to get away from the kids; they needed a safe haven where they could be looked after in beautiful surroundings, relax, eat well (and not clear up!), and write. The summer writing retreat was a game changer: I moved from the role of writing retreat host to that of facilitator, writing with the other

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retreaters. At last, I was stepping back in the writing room, working on a long-­neglected journal article while facilitating fellow academics, helping them structure their day and set their goals! At breaks conversation flowed, and the evenings rolled on as everyone looked after each other. I genuinely felt elated when the writing retreat came to an end and I received positive feedback. Wearing two hats, venue coordinator and writing retreat facilitator, had its challenges, but it soon became clear that, as everything, the success of the retreat was in the preparation: the work for me started well in advance of the retreat starting date, but once I had everything in place, the operation worked smoothly. As structured writing retreats became a regular feature at Chapelgarth and I felt more and more relaxed, I started refining my own style and owning the role. The residential writing retreats became a monthly occurrence, and increasingly, I experimented by introducing new elements, such as mindfulness breaks and yoga sessions. The writing retreaters—overwhelmingly women, amongst whom many were returners—felt relaxed and happy to spend time sharing their expertise and passion for their discipline in an informal setting. Out of this positive energy sprang a new-found confidence which enabled me to start running the residential writing retreats with greater self-assurance in my delivery abilities. I knew that I could make the structured writing retreats work and felt empowered to tweak timeslots and activities with a fearlessness which I had lacked when I was merely trying to follow in other facilitators’ footsteps. It was great attending other facilitators’ retreats—each one had their own style—and it was inevitably more relaxing and productive for me when I was not leading the sessions, but I made peace with this and accepted that being a facilitator meant balancing diminished productivity with the rewards and satisfaction gained by empowering others. Moreover, the interdisciplinary element of the writing retreats, which often fed into informal conversations, was one of the most energizing and inspiring aspects of the community of writers: people often left not only feeling restored but also buzzing with new ideas, stimulated by different disciplinary perspectives.

Global Tees Talks and Public Engagement Out of my new enthusiasm for the residential writing retreats grew a new project. I loved the intimacy of the chats and the stimulating conversations which were often born out of bringing together academics of all

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disciplines, in a friendly and relaxing environment. Conversations sparked around the country kitchen table—the warm aga keeping everyone cosy— continued in the common room, fire roaring in the fireplace in the winter evenings. Being part of this community of writers was often elating and also felt like a privilege. Researchers from universities in the UK and Ireland and from different departments would come and talk about what they were passionate about and exchange views from different disciplinary perspectives, and all this around my kitchen table! I was proud of all the work these women were carrying out; I felt determined to give them every chance not only to overcome the obstacles to their writing but also to help them tell the world about how great their research often was. Slowly a new ambition took shape in my mind: to organize a local event where I could give a platform to the many talented female academics who had travelled from afar to convene in our writing room. I tentatively approached some of my returning participants to see if they would be interested in combining the structured writing retreat with an opportunity for public engagement. I realized that the offer might not suit everyone as there is always a certain level of preparation and stress which goes hand in hand with public speaking, and it might not necessarily work with the retreat model that participants had in mind. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to hear that there were a few retreaters who were up for the challenge! The model that  I had in mind were  TEDx talks, an opportunity to platform an idea and engage with the wider public within a short space of time. The interdisciplinarity of the programme, which I was able to put together for the first event, in 2019, gave me heart: I felt that the sheer array of topics which were being discussed could attract a variety of listeners drawn from our local rural community. The region in which we are set, Teesside, in the Northeast of England, between Durham and York, was an interesting catchment area. The presence of many Local History Societies suggested that there was some appetite for attending locally organized lectures, albeit consistently delivered by mature, white males, and I was determined to tap into this as a potential captive audience. I called our series of lectures GlobalTees: Short Talks, Big Topics and started putting out my feelers within the community to see if I could reach enough interested parties to make the event a success. I felt strongly about the talks as these would not only be a source of education and local community development, but they could serve as a beacon for platforming in the public space research carried out by a cohort

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of diverse, female academics. The purpose of the talks, therefore, was dual: on one side the talks would provide an inclusive opportunity for researchers to practise public engagement and impact beyond academia, widening their networks; on the other, cutting-edge research would be delivered to the local community by often ethnically diverse young women, something that was quite novel. The Northeast was then known as the region which had most emphatically voted Brexit, and it was increasingly clear that the echo chamber effect was steadfastly narrowing the horizons and perspectives of many northerners, whose intellectual curiosity was often starved due to lack of exposure to ground-breaking ideas and unconventional perspectives. The topics platformed would go beyond the local, the region, the national, and the planet—and they would be delivered by young female researchers—quite an event for our neck of the woods! We delivered two such events in the space of six months, and the audience grew as the word spread. The catchment area also widened as we welcomed a couple who had driven from County Durham to hear speak one of our brilliant astronomers who had travelled to us from University College London. Little did they know she would end up working for NASA within a few months of that talk! It was March 2020 when the last GlobalTees event took place: people squeezed through the door, but there was already a new awareness about gathering at public events. Talk of the spreading of Covid-19 within the UK was beginning to make some of us nervous, as I greeted the locals at the door, sanitizer at hand.

Lockdown and Virtual Retreats None of us saw it coming … I had many booked groups with dates confirmed in the calendar until the summer, and I was getting enquiries all the time. I had built a small community of loyal repeat retreaters and thanks to them the word had got round. Yet, with the first UK lockdown being announced, everything had to be put on hold. As we all awaited news about restrictions easing, it soon became clear that there would be no speedy way out—the writing community seemed to have dissipated. It was then that news started emerging on how badly affected by lockdown female academics were. Some had problems of isolation, but many more were feeling the burden of childcaring responsibility (including home-­ schooling) which were landing disproportionately on their plate. I felt impotent and frustrated, knowing that much of the value of my structured

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writing retreats had been in giving women that space, which would allow them to put their life on hold and do the writing. It was the dawn of the Zoom era, and I was quick to identify in the virtual writing retreat format a way forward. Inevitable technological hitches apart, I soon braved the new world of virtual writing retreats and started facilitating all-women full-day sessions as early as April. The early days of virtual writing retreats had an atmosphere of their own: during the first lockdown, which was stricter than the subsequent ones that followed, there was a genuine sense of everyone feeling disoriented. Some were cooped up in tiny rooms, unable to find in the university library the familiar collegiality of other students or colleagues; others were feeling increasingly disconnected from their work as house chores and caring responsibilities crowded in on them; others who were used to sharing a space in an internet café found that their day had lost the structure they so much needed to make progress. It was in this context that I launched my first free virtual writing retreats, which I ran weekly for the length of the first lockdown. There were many good things about these: feeling part of a supportive community at a time of shared fears, anxieties, and challenges. I commissioned a rhymation (the combination of poetry and animation) which aptly captured some of the emotions and atmosphere of those early lockdown virtual writing retreats (see Fig. 11.1), which I called

Fig. 11.1  Lockdown writers, Chapelgarth. (Illustration credit: Izzy Budd. Poem credit: Ceci Sutcliffe)

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Well Write Wednesdays. They would later be followed by similar Tune into Tuesdays sessions, which I set up when the second lockdown was announced.

Distanced On-Site Retreats As a residential writing centre, Chapelgarth experienced the intermittent challenges which hit different sectors, on one side education, on the other side, the hospitality sector. While virtual writing retreats remained a valuable method to renew and establish connections with struggling academics, those who had experienced in-person writing retreats knew that there was much we all missed. As the hospitality sector geared itself up to reopen in accordance with Covid Safe guidelines, I decided to take on the new challenge and open the doors to small numbers to ensure social distancing. As many other businesses found, the experience was exhausting. Many common rooms had to be repurposed, and individual eating stations replaced the conviviality of sharing the same space, jug of water, cafetiere, teapot, or bottle of wine. Having completed the compulsory risk assessment form—required for all businesses aiming to receive the We’re Good to Go hospitality industry standard, I found myself compiling an access protocol which in many ways dissipated the friendly environment which was so much part of our offering. As the cautious guidelines I circulated show (see the appendix), participants were even advised to take their own cushions! University departments which had encouraged staff to attend structured writing retreats took different views on the policy to adopt in view of the pandemic. Leicester University was keen to claim for the reimbursement of the fees as soon as lockdown was announced; other institutions, such as UCL, preferred to postpone indefinitely. Decisions on how to operate and run a smooth operation were taken away abruptly as new lockdowns were announced and the goalposts continuously shifted. Despite all the challenges, there was a silver lining. Having run a few socially distanced residential writing retreats and having had the pleasure of meeting new people, I was already planning new writing retreat models which might better suit different types of residential groups, such as creative writing groups. Meeting wonderful creative writers had added a new

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dimension to my world, and I could see the many possibilities that could open up, once the pandemic was truly over.

Awards for Women in a Pandemic If there is one thing that I can credit virtual writing retreats for, it is that they created a space where I could still feel connected with other women in academia, gradually becoming more aware of their growing needs and challenges. Informal chats and conversations during breaks were most valuable as they offered me an insight into the type of challenges so many stoic PhD students were enduring. Unable to access archival material due to the repositories being closed, historians were posing their research question anew; similarly, with deadlines and funding constraints, geographers were finding that they had to cancel their planned fieldwork in places which were now inaccessible. I was humbled by the show of resilience, dedication, resourcefulness, and courage that shone through in so many. I recognized that same desire of furthering knowledge, of shining a light on neglected narratives, of unearthing hidden connections, which I had witnessed in the women platforming their research during our GlobalTees Talks; yet now these women were trapped at home, unable to operate and progress with their research. Inspired by similar stories I resolved to establish a set of awards in recognition of the unprecedented challenges that the present cohort of PhD students were confronting. I advertised the awards and received more than thirty submissions within two weeks of announcing them. The prize would be a residential writing retreat for each category awardee, to be scheduled into the post-pandemic era. After painfully sifting through the many applications, and with the aid of a valuable panel of expert judges from Goldsmith College (London University), Clare Hall (Cambridge University), and Birmingham City University, I was able to produce a shortlist and eventually to announce the winners of each advertised category. I was delighted to finally pencil in these prospective retreaters into my post-pandemic calendar: in the summer of 2021, when I was able to open the doors again, meeting these three women at my structured writing retreats was an emotional encounter. However, it had been hard to turn down so many other applicants, whose struggles and challenges I had read about and empathized with. The circumstances were rendered even worse by the announcement of the third lockdown—which we would all have to endure for a further few weeks. The writing was on the wall for me: I opened up to all runners-up and nominees a series of free virtual

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writing retreats to coincide with yet another lockdown. It was a pleasure to see how many of these female academics took up the offer! This was a particularly supportive, emotional community of female PhD students: new connections were made, new writing buddies were introduced—some of whom became in-person writing partners eventually. As it transpired, the informal networking that took place within writing retreats, whether in person or online, had enormous potential which went well beyond the productivity goal.

Resuming Normality and Rebuilding Community in Person Once lockdown restrictions were lifted I decided to gradually phase out our virtual writing retreats: I could hear the echoes of Zoom fatigue, and I was excited at the thought of resuming in-person retreats. By the end of 2022, it really felt that I could pick up things where I had left them, when we had all been suddenly interrupted. I reopened the doors to our local community and thought—with some emotion—about people once again queuing up for a place at one of our events. GlobalTees, as a vision, had never really disappeared from my mind—I had hosted online EventBrite book launches, including one of the graphic novella by Kate Caruthers Thomas (Fellow at Birmingham City University, retreater and facilitator) Five Survive Lockdown. Finally, the first in-person post-lockdown GlobalTees event took place in November 2022: it had a special, sweet taste for me. On one of our November writing retreats—the month which is associated with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month), I invited author Helen Mort to present her book, A Line Above the Sky, a book about motherhood, mountaineering, and risk-­taking. Helen’s book had taken shape and had been mostly written at Chapelgarth during lockdown, on one of our socially distanced writing retreats which had been so exhausting to organize and run. Finding my name included in the acknowledgements was an additional bonus and a surprise: it certainly reaffirmed the empowering and enabling role that a writing retreat facilitator can have. And it reminded me of how rewarding this role can be.

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Appendix: Guidelines Sent 9 July 2020 Writing Retreats at Chapelgarth SUMMER 2020 I am really looking forward to welcoming you (back) at Chapelgarth this summer. It’s been a long time since we opened our Writing Room! I am writing to you to let you know about the changes that we have put in place in response to the Covid-19 crisis and the easing of lockdown. I am keenly aware that the retreat/restore aspect is a very important part of the experience of our residential writing retreats and I have therefore worked hard to ensure that everything is in place so that you feel safe and can therefore relax and focus once at Chapelgarth. Due to the unique service we offer, I have been following closely all government updates relating to both the hospitality and catering sector as well as libraries/universities measures. Returners will have to adapt to the new system, so please read this carefully as there will be quite a few changes which you will need to take on board! Before Setting Off and on Arrival –– We are asking everyone to take their temperature on the day that they are travelling to the venue. –– On arrival we may also check that you do not have a temperature. –– On arrival (4.00 pm) please park in the car park and wait in the car—ring me on (telephone number) so that I can take each of you separately through the appropriate entrance/reception where there are hand sanitizers. –– There will be hand sanitizers throughout the house.

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Blended Writing Retreat –– As a facilitator I will be doing most of the initial talking. When giving instructions I will be using a screen to communicate to all participants in different writing rooms. Social Distancing –– One-way system of staircase in place (signs will be put up as reminders). –– Each Writing Room to hold max 3 people on individual desks (2 m distance). –– Dining Room and breaks room also with individual tables (2 m distance)—weather permitting breaks will be outside or in the conservatory. Hygiene –– Bathrooms/restrooms. Each retreater should use their own bathroom/ shower room (allocated or ensuite). This will mean going upstairs during breaks and washing your hands only in your own allocated area—there will be no shared washrooms available downstairs. –– All main meals/snacks will be served at your allocated tables. When serving and clearing the dishes from your individual tables I will be wearing a mask or visor and gloves. –– All rooms will be aired to ensure ventilation, however the Writing Room should remain a Quiet Room and goal-setting and chats will take place either in the garden or in the conservatory area. Other stuff: All break activities will be outside. Please take welly boots, waterproofs (anoraks and trousers if possible as grass may be high) and own tennis racquets/balls if desired (Tennis court has just been repainted!). The wooden garden chairs are quite hard so feel free to take your own cushion!

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Reference Bergman, Marc, et al. 2008. The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature. Psychological Science 19 (12): 1207–1212. https://psych.utah.edu/_resources/ documents/psych4130/The%20Cognitive%20Benefits%20of%20 Interacting%20with%20Nature.pdf. Accessed 15 April 2023.

CHAPTER 12

Linguistic Care Work in Proximal Zones: Towards Allied Author–Editor Critical Agency Theresa Truax-Gischler

In April 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic’s first European wave, my nonspeaking daughter with a complex multiple communication disability (Wolters-Leermakers et  al. 2022), then on lockdown in her group home, and I were in a FaceTime call. We had begun these weekly one-hour videocalls only recently and out of necessity when the Netherlands went into lockdown in mid-March and she was no longer allowed to come home to us. Her caregivers at the group home set up her iPad on a special stand so she wouldn’t knock it to the floor, initiated the call with us, made sure the iPad had her more or less in view, and then left us to our own devices to converse and commune. Fatigued with the—to her inexplicable—social distancing and shelter-in-place measures, she signed “home crying” for the umpteenth time. An email notification suddenly shot into the frame with the subject heading “Editing appointment delayed.” I

T. Truax-Gischler (*) Nonesuch Editing, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_12

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swiped it away and turned back to my daughter, signing and saying alternately in Dutch and English spoken and signed languages “home crying,” telling her that we missed her too, and that Covid was indeed “really yucky.” Every so often I directed my daughter to stand in front of her iPad so I could see her signs and better understand her. Because I didn’t know a sign for “frame,” I made one up for her on the spot, using my two forefingers and thumbs in L-shapes to indicate the opposite corners of a frame. She picked it up right away and tried to move her body according to my directions. Still new to her, videocall technology had become our only mode of communication. Repair-intensive and interrupted by struggles with the framing problem, our time in the videocall was nonetheless joyous because it brought us together to open and close the endless circles of meaning that make both of us so happy to be languaging (Swain 2006) together in the same space. Little did I realize, as we did the kind of languaging that feels by now as natural to us as breathing, that we were enacting something Jon Henner and Octavian Robinson call linguistic care work: how disabled people and the communication partners with whom they are mutually entangled (Bhattacharya 2023; Padía 2023) “work together to co-construct meaning” (Henner and Robinson 2021, 6). This work is done, in Henner and Robinson’s granular conceptualization, in “crip time,” time that is used as part of the interdependent activity of languaging, and by means of “crip technoscience,” interaction via multimodal technology. Here, crip denotes a critical stance on any deficit-based ideology about language use and users that describes the ways marginalized groups use language as “broken.” In linguistic care work, crip time, crip technoscience, and interdependence are used to collaboratively make meaning and build knowledge through language. In our new third space of the FaceTime videosphere, my daughter and I had taken the time to co-construct meaning multimodally. By combining previously unrelated semiotic material, inventing missing signs on the spot, and going beyond what the communication seemed on the surface to be about to imagine what it might be about, we had supported the emergence of one another’s agency, our creative capacity for going “beyond the given meaning” to “forge something new” (Davies 2000, 67). This is what every encounter with my daughter is: an exercise in accessing her, my, our co-constructed critical linguistic agency. After an hour or so of conversation and play peppered with negotiations over her busily signing body appearing sometimes in the frame and sometimes out of it, we said our goodbyes, and I turned to the other

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linguistic care work I do for a living: authors’ editing with multilingual, multiliterate, transnational scholars working in the narrative social sciences and humanities. In this collaborative linguistic care work, meaning is co-­ constructed by the author together with an allied editor: an authors’ editor who works with the author “in their camp” on the side of their critical agency in preparation for publication submission. The author whose email had briefly intruded on my videocall was writing to tell me that due to Covid-19, they would need to submit their article much later than originally planned. I responded that a delay was fine and immediately contacted a fellow authors’ editor about setting up one of her author–editor social writing groups (see Baldwin, this volume) so that we and our authors could get writing and work done during lockdown. The coincidence of the two seemingly unrelated types of linguistic care work I engage in regularly—one as a (private) disability parent, the other as a (professional) academic authors’ editor—allows me here to reflect on the critical agency and editorial linguistic care work I believe necessary to what Luigi Russi (2022) calls the “editorial encounter.” By critical agency, I mean the capacity for creative invention against and beyond what is standardized, normed, biased, exclusionary, unequal, and unjust (Canagarajah 2002; Mercieca 2012; Molinari 2022)—beyond what is or appears to be given. By editorial linguistic care work, I mean linguistic care work grounded in reflection on our own ableist ideologies about languaging (Henner and Robinson 2021; Canagarajah 2022) and how we put them into play in the editorial encounter on the page, in person, and online. Here, I present an autoethnography of my own experience of collective linguistic care work in two “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994; Gutiérrez 2008; Garraway 2017), one private and one professional, of linguistic and editorial encounter populated by heterogenous languagers. Because they bring with them a variety of language modes, knowledges, and levels of access to power and the world, these languagers fill these spaces with possibility and dialogic intentionality in resistance to dominant modes. I draw on insights gained in daily collaborative translanguaging linguistic care work where I co-construct meaning multimodally together with my nonspeaking daughter with a complex multiple communication disability. I then bring these insights to bear on daily collaborative editorial linguistic care work where I co-construct meaning with academic authors multilingually on the page, electronically, face-to-face, and in weekly author–editor social writing groups and partnerships. One such social writing group served as a catalyst for deeper reflection on these issues—a three-month online

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microgroup made up of seven multilingual, multiliterate, early-career or casually employed scholars and two self-employed multilingual, multiliterate authors’ editors, all transnational women working and writing in Europe during the first European wave of Covid-19. I focus in particular on the affordances—the qualities of a thing that, when made available to someone who perceives and can use them, supports that person’s needs (Gibson 1982)—offered by linguistically and socially heterogenous third spaces in fostering critical agency and alliance. Can we “crip” our linguistic and editorial encounters? Can we take the time to reflect on our own ableist language ideologies and how we put them into play in those encounters? Can we change the way we care for one another linguistically; transform the time we take, the modes we use, and the ideologies we ascribe to? What spaces of encounter might be conducive to such allied critical linguistic agency?

Lockdown as an Affordance for Third-Space Creation As freelance academic authors’ editors working in a precarious gig economy, my colleague Wendy Baldwin and I are well acquainted with the ill effects of atomized work from home. For this reason, we are long-time practising members of solidarity-based social writing (Murray 2015) and editing networks housed in language professional associations and created with academic authors (see Baldwin, this volume). Already embedded in editor–editor and author–editor experiences of solidarity-based social writing and editing online when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Wendy and I experienced our clients’ delays as a call to “critical dissonance” and “affective solidarity” (Hemmings 2012), a response to others that tempers interpersonal empathy with insight into positional difference. While we were not all in the same boat, sharing one with heterogenous others for a time offered us collective access to thinking, writing, and editing agency we could not otherwise conjure alone. In a new third space of critical writing work (Gutiérrez 2008), we became affordances for one another’s critical writing agency. Covid-19 had us all—authors and editors alike—at sixes and sevens. Set adrift from our workaday institutional moorings, labouring under lockdown from home without childcare, and separated from family members, we found it difficult to get writing of any kind done. The sudden

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inaccessibility of academic and editorial community, structure, facilities, and private space and the greatly increased reproductive and emotional labour involved in navigating a pandemic lockdown made for far less uninterrupted time to think and work. Critical living, writing, and editing arrangements years in the making and painstakingly assembled at the edges of structured academic and gig economy precarity suddenly fell apart. For my family, the pandemic had become an affordance for using videocall technology to keep in touch, an innovation we kept after social distancing was no longer required. Compelled by circumstance to learn how to use FaceTime independently, without supervision or communication support from her caregivers during the call, our daughter passed through what is called a “behavioural cusp” (Rosales-Ruiz and Baer 1997)—a change in behaviour that significantly expands a person’s access to new settings, contingencies, and sources of enjoyment and affords their reuse for novel, creative purposes. Contingent on the needs-driven invention of never before accessed affordances, behavioural cusps allow people to learn, experience, and influence the world in new ways. In our case, learning how to use videocall technology allowed our daughter to help place the call, stay more often in frame so we could see her signs, and end the call independently, all for the sole purpose of coming together to co-­ create meaning in a videocall third space where the divide between group home and family home collapsed. If pandemic lockdown was an affordance for my daughter and I to build out the third space of videocalls, it was also an affordance for my editorial clients and I to build out our relationships in the third space of social writing. “Needs control the perception of affordances … and also initiate acts” (Gibson 1982, 410–11). We needed something, went looking for it, and put it to use. Facing various incommensurable perfect storms of pandemic, academic, linguistic, geographic, neoliberalized, classed, gendered, racialized, and disabled othering and precarity, our microgroup of nine women worked for three months during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in online “virtual proximity” (Coughlan 2014; Khobra and Gaur 2020; Chang and Lee 2021). The interpersonal closeness that developed between some of us simply by virtue of showing up and supporting one another’s critical writing, revising, and editing agencies offered enough differentially tuned affordance to enact for a brief time an entangled “arts of living” (Tsing et al. 2017) that reconstituted worlds (Nowviskie 2018) and lost writing space.

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Contrary to what much of the literature on academic social writing spaces presumes about the academics-only peopling of such spaces (Murray 2015; Kornhaber et al. 2016; Simmons and Singh 2019) and in sync with literature on informal (Mewburn et al. 2014), non-institutional (Hopwood and Paulson 2012; Murray 2014; Burford and Hook 2019), anti-­neoliberal (Bozalek 2017; Moriarty 2020; Hammond 2021), and caring academic writing spaces (Badenhorst et al. 2019), writing in heterogenous author– editor communities of practice situated in shared third spaces outside our respective institutional homes can afford a critical agency we might not otherwise find inside them. Possible affordances such heterogenous author–editor writing groups offer include their location in third spaces outside the neoliberal academy’s asymmetrical social relations and hierarchically “split discourses” of insiders and outsiders (Thorkelson 2016) and the affective solidarity (Hemmings 2012) generated by an attention to author–editor positional dissonance. By augmenting the capacity for creative critical linguistic agency and invention that often emerges in such proximal zones of mutual care (Rapp and Ginsburg 2011; Mercieca 2012; Dokumaci 2020; Rutherford 2020) with the critical lens of crip linguistics (Henner and Robinson 2021; Canagarajah 2022), authors and editors can go beyond the given normative meaning of a text and co-construct mutual access to something new.

Third Spaces and Social Proximity The pressures academic writers face are well documented: neoliberal regimes of academic performance measured in terms of numbers of papers published (Strathern 2000); an increasingly competitive market for a limited number of postdoctoral awards and teaching positions (Moriarty 2020); minoritization of multilingual scholars and novice writers within geopolitically weaponized hierarchies regulating which English(es) should  count (Canagarajah 2002, 2006; Cargill and Burgess 2017; Habibie and Hyland 2018; Politzer-Ahles et al. 2020; Habibie and Burgess 2021), which “language quality” norms should prevail (Hynninen and Solin 2017; Solin and Hynninen 2018; Pienimäki 2021; Hultgren and Molinari 2022), and which genres should be considered academic (Thesen and Cooper 2014; Molinari 2022). The neoliberal university has been described as a sphere where an “atmosphere of competition, judgement, fear, anxiety, and risk combine with the encouragement to boast…embolden[ing] the idea that ego and selfishness are vital career

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attitudes, resulting in an academy which is deeply and acutely unkind, unforgiving, and uncaring” (Burton 2021, 24). Everyday experiences of “exhaustion, stress, overload, insomnia, anxiety, shame, aggression, hurt, guilt and feelings of out-of-placeness, fraudulence and fear of exposure” contribute to the “hidden injuries” enacted within the academy’s regime of “secrecy and silence” (Gill 2016, 40). Proposed university remedies that emphasize individual resilience and self-care may perpetuate this state of affairs by disguising these ailments’ social, economic, and political origins as issues of individual success or failure (Gill and Donaghue 2016). In this context, structured writing retreats and microgroups can help chart a way through these perilous neoliberal waters (Bozalek 2017; Moriarty 2020; Hammond 2021), especially those that offer “third-space” social writing venues (Garraway 2017). One key affordance for critical writing that heterogenous third-space social writing groups provide is their location adjacent to academia’s particular socioeconomic asymmetries. In their ethnography of French academic protest politics, Eli Thorkelson (2016) argues that the labour relations, identities, affects, and political rallying cries that cluster around the political notion of “precarity” also act as ideologies that sort academics hierarchically into an “unmarked background” insider category of tenured professors and a “marked, scandalous” outsider category of those labouring under precarious conditions (484). This stratification crystallizes most clearly in the stigmatized label of “independent scholar” so often applied to postdocs hovering on the academy’s margins in between fellowships, research positions, and adjunct teaching gigs (Thorkelson 2019). The related rollback of editorial and peer-review mentoring and “care work” as a result of the academic publishing funding crisis in the humanities and social sciences (Besnier 2019; Sandberg 2022) means that peer reviewers and in-house editors are under pressure and without the time or funds to mentor novice writers or midwife promising texts. In such a rushed and harried context, they may uncritically reproduce this split discourse on precarity, marking those suffering from downstream invisibility (jobless researchers and multilingual transnational postdocs) as substantively lacking in language, writing, genre, stylistic, methodological, empirical, or theoretical chops (Cargill and Burgess 2017; Habibie and Hyland 2018; Habibie and Burgess 2021). The effect of this othering of precariously employed academics is often to foreclose the proximity necessary to solidarity. Thorkelson (2019) points to the gap between the idealistic sense of peer review as companionship—“peer review as a practice of intellectual

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solidarity in a precarious world”—and peer review as academic gatekeeping, a regulatory practice that invisibilizes the asymmetrical labour and academic capital relations structuring peership. Calls for more supportive modes of peer review (Bali 2015; Sandberg 2022), new modes of peer collaboration (Jackson et al. 2018; Peters et al. 2019), and resistance to research evaluation and regimes (Hultgren and Molinari 2022) look to restore, if not always the socioeconomic proximity, at least the intellectual companionship necessary to the proper functioning of academic peership. For those of us in the microgroup muddling through the socially distanced space of the pandemic, lack of proximity to academic writing and thinking others posed socioeconomic perils. As the prospect of meeting deadlines faded, and the pressures of non-performance and delay increased, authors and editors were pushed to the brink (McGaughey et al. 2021; Watermeyer et al. 2021). In the words of a client outside the microgroup, once job insecurity gets baked into neoliberal modes of academic governance and access to academia’s tenured elite class structure is restricted to only a few, any hopes for an academic future in the middle of a pandemic recede into a radical unknown. But the thing about finding yourself at the brink is that “a belief in the failure of the present” can spur the work of “planning for an alternative future” (Carpenter et al. 2014, 388). Forcing everyone to slow down, the Covid-19 crisis seemed to galvanize the growing dissatisfaction with performance indicators, ranking systems, and structural academic precarity into improvisational forms of resistance (Gildersleeve 2017). Cech and Hiltner (2022) reported that the exacerbation of employment instability by Covid-19 so unsettled many academics’ already precarious lives that “nonfinancial priorities such as meaningful work” (1) became a priority. Nørgård and Bengtsen (2021) reported instances of “(in)activism, positive ‘irresponsibility,’ and everyday muddled activism” geared towards the regaining of “an academic life worth living” (507). Like the divide-collapsing effects of my family’s videosphere, our academic publishing network of structurally marginalized women academics and editors offered a third space of writing and thinking solidarity located somewhere to the side of academia’s social divides.

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Third-Space Critical Dissonance and Affective Solidarity While the institutional spaces of university-based social writing groups do produce a discourse community-appropriate “container” for the activity of academic writing (Murray 2015), they are by no means socially unstratified. Composed of differently situated members, they reflect the field of power relations that structure the academy: gender, class, race, disability, and migration status (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2016), as well as career and tenured status, publication history, location, and social standing in institutional hierarchies (Thorkelson 2016). Embedded in these high-­stakes systems, institutional spaces for producing academic writing risk reproducing the academy’s “dark spots” where marginalized, postdoc and early-career academics may fall “off the radar” and “into a grey zone,” entering an extended “area of institutional twilight” (Bengtsen and Barnett 2017, 7).   In this context, the social writing containers that marginalized and less institutionally established authors turn to may include authors’ homes (Burford and Hook 2019), wider lives (Hopwood and Paulson 2012; Wisker et al. 2017), wider research settings (Khuder and Petrić 2020), and wider systems levels (Murray and Kempenaar 2020). As Wendy Baldwin reports (this volume), academic publishing networks in author–editor relationships (Sandberg 2022) are another productive site of social writing. Because authors’ editors are not academic “peers” and are located adjacent to but outside the academy, they serve neither as academic publishing and employment gatekeepers who can determine an aspirant’s success or failure nor as academic competitors vying for scarce resources. On the contrary, if authors’ editors can think critically about their role as linguistic regulators and gatekeepers (Solin and Hynninen 2018; Pienimäki 2021; Hultgren and Molinari 2022) these relatively lateral and collaborative professional relationships have the potential to produce deep, complex, dialogic, mutually beneficial, and solidarity-based practices of academic writing. A prime place for building out such caring relationships into collective critically reflective work is the third space of author–editor encounter. Academic authors’ editors working regularly and repeatedly with a relatively small number of multilingual scholars often get to know these scholars well (Burgess and Lillis 2013; Kerans 2013; Burrough-Boenisch 2013; Burrough-Boenisch and Matarese 2013; Matarese 2013). Working together outside publishing houses and journals, editors and authors may

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dialogue back and forth via emails about a passage or argument or meet live or online to look at a draft together. If the author aims to publish with a prestigious journal or university publisher, an editor trained in the relevant discipline and genre works with them to restructure the manuscript’s discourse to maximize the chances of acceptance (Norton 2011, 1). Authors’ editors are thus called upon to give support and encouragement through multiple revisions, resubmissions, rejections, and new submissions. Over time, they get to know the authors’ body of work, style, voice, and empirical and theoretical concerns. They follow authors in their research, writing, and career trajectories, crossing their fingers for job applications and celebrating good news about a book contract. And, because the relationship is often close, they let authors know how they’re doing. Complex, dynamic, and coloured with sympathetic attunement, these long-term academic author–editor relationships can build a core of mutual solidarity and care. When the pandemic hit, these caring author–editor relationships came to the fore. Because social distancing measures meant that most relationships had to be nurtured and maintained at a distance, face-to-face contact gave way to screen-to-screen contact, altering our perceptions of far and near, distant and proximate, public and private. With academic classes, meetings, and conferences being conducted online and television talk shows being aired from celebrities’ homes, domestic space, family life, and bodily health became hyper-visible and hyper-accessible (Kay 2020). Authors writing to schedule or delay an editing slot shared how they and their families were doing and sent me their best wishes. I reciprocated with a glimpse into my life, expressing relief at their safety and grief at their loss. Finding ourselves cast in the same collective boat of potential disease, incapacity, and death, our collective vulnerability, normally invisibilized in order to reduce the affective complexity of human frailty (Herzog 2020), became hyper-visible and hyper-accessible. The further we distanced ourselves from one another, the more we realized how relational and interdependent our lives were. Previously unseen societal maintainers and caretakers, those workers whose maintenance and repair labour sustains our human-built world, were redubbed “essential workers” and were expected to double down on their efforts during the pandemic. The rest of us shared another lot locked down at home, worrying about loved  ones, juggling the complications of increased reproductive care work, struggling to get paid work done. So when our early-career clients began delaying their editing appointments with us because of the

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shrinkage of writing time and space, Wendy and I knew and cared enough about them and their writing lives to form an author–editor social writing group. Beginning in mid-May 2020 and running for three months online through to the end of July, a microgroup of seven authors joined two authors’ editors to meet together for three hours a week in structured social writing sessions (Murray 2015). Together, from our homes around Europe (Finland, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK), we recursively set and assessed our writing goals and worked on-screen in companionable silence, with extra time scheduled for reflexive sharing of our writing process. In essence, we groped around and took what we found in the networks we were already embedded in. Improvising in Covid-19’s shrunken space for critical writing and meaning-making, we seized on “microactivist affordances” that might expand them (Dokumacı 2019). As we sat “next to” one another silently working online, those author–editor, author– author, and editor–editor relationships expanded and took on new form. After the microgroup came to an end in July 2020, the network coalesced into various social writing and editing partnerships and groups—knock-on effects of the regular contact and proximity we had experienced together. A subgroup of the microgroup continued to meet several times a week. Others created their own social writing partnerships (see Murray, this volume). Had the proximity of writing together in a non-institutional third space where we did not experience a split into unmarked “insiders” and marked “outsiders” made us into affordances for different kinds of author– editor collaborations? Originally devised as an exit from our isolation and atomization, the group became the condition of possibility for new solidarities. But if socioeconomic, academic, and linguistic insider/outsider divides were less salient in the microgroup, they still shaped our experiences of writing. As we shared our various pandemic struggles to achieve our academic publishing goals in the side chats, we became acutely aware of how much their outcomes were shaped by relative access to socioeconomic, academic, and linguistic power and privilege. Negotiating the dissonance between the group’s relative positions also had knock-on effects. For me, that meant new insight into the dissonance between the two aspirational stories I told about myself—one as a professional authors’ editor, the other as a private disability parent and ally. By attending to the dissonances between my own positionality relative to those in the group, I began to adopt a more critical stance on my editorial role as textual “mediator” of

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the author’s intentions versus textual “gatekeeper” of linguistic and genre norms. Such critical dissonance is a necessary precondition for what Clare Hemmings (2012) calls “affective solidarity,” a kind of social caring that gives rise to non-dominance. Structured affectively as a politicized empathy for one another, the solidarity I experienced together with the others was a “minority pursuit” (158) fuelled by collective attention to our relative positions of power and privilege.

Proximity to Heterological Others as an Affordance for Critical Agency It’s June 2020, the middle of our three-month microgroup and the tail end of Europe’s first Covid-19 wave. I receive good news: my daughter will be allowed to come home from her group home for the first time since the pandemic began. After three months of seclusion and separation made barely tolerable by videocall technology, physical access and proximity to one another is again possible. In the microgroup, a discussion about stalling in the writing process has just begun. I dash off a summary of Kirin Narayan’s (2012) suggestions for clarifying the relationship between the ethnographic or archival narrative (the “life in process” timeline of events) and its theoretical implications (the expository take-away). But then  I decide to add something personal: a private dispatch from the trenches of disability parenting in a pandemic, accompanied by a photo of my daughter laughing face in hands next to me on our joyful car ride home. With this dispatch from a disability family life lived in an ableist society under pandemic lockdown, I had unwittingly assembled around me a very specific intimate public, a “porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging” (Berlant 2008, viii). By employing a genre of disability parenting writing that treats the intimate and troubled relationship between disabled children, their parents, and ableist societies, I had simultaneously summoned the intimate public of strangers who dare to be publicly marked by the shared felt sense of disability parenting (Rapp and Ginsburg 2011) and invited my fellow microgroup mates to engage with it. Having injected my daughter and my relation to her into the third space of the microgroup, I didn’t know what more to do with her or myself. If an intimate public is “an achievement” (Berlant 2008, viii), if it “provides anchors for realistic, critical assessment of the way things are and provides material that foments enduring,

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resisting, overcoming, and enjoying being an x,” then what was that x for me now? How to proceed as an editor with my now outed persona (Barbour and Marshall 2012) as a disability parent? Had I outed this private persona in an effort to join the intimate public our microgroup had already assembled around parenting through the circulation of stories about academic writing in a pandemic while pregnant, nursing newborns, schooling children at home, and caring for the immune-compromised and sick? To be sure, my parenting and care-work stories and their theoretical implications were of a different piece. My dispatch’s hook, that trickiest of writerly artifices designed to render a text memorable by delivering the story’s theoretical implications in a nutshell, hinged on my daughter’s homecoming after months of exacerbated institutional seclusion and inaccessibility. Although the shared experience of social distancing gave everyone in my editorial and academic networks collective insight into what it is to be functionally isolated from others or have restricted access to education and work, for the disabled, sick, and elderly living through the pandemic in residential care facilities, these same social distancing measures only served to increase the inaccessibility of living in an already inaccessible ableist society (Goggin and Ellis 2020; Andrews et  al. 2021; Coelho de Amorim et al. 2022). Residential facilities went into total lockdown given the need to protect the medically and socially vulnerable, making for heart-breaking ethical accessibility dilemmas. What was I saying and doing with that disability dispatch, dashed off in a fit of access-­ driven elation? I understand the subtext of my dispatch on disability parenting in an ableist pandemic only now, three years later, while drafting this account. It was no accident that I chose to out my disability parenting persona in the shared third space of the microgroup. Placing the ongoing story of my own “life in process” as the neurotypical parent of a deeply neuroatypical child living in an ableist society, the specific dissonances created for our family by ableist pandemic measures, and academic writing in a microgroup together in the same space was in fact  an affordance-in-waiting. Writing now, I see what I could not fully perceive or make use of then: the pivotal role that proximity to heterogenous caring others plays in the co-­ emergence of critical agency. In our microgroup, my own creative critical agency could emerge on condition that I set my multiple lives in process— as a private disability parent/ally and a professional authors’ editor—in proximity to the lives in process of caring heterogenous others.

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Before my dispatch, our microgroup’s critical agencies have been creatively mobilized against many things: systemic academic precarity and neoliberal productivity regimes, performance indicators, and ranking systems that cast writing as a product rather than a process; the defunding of academic publishing that had moved editorial publishing jobs from salaried positions in-house to precarious and casualized work in the gig economy; the peripheralization of minority, multilingual, transnational, and novice writers. With my dispatch, I had expanded our critical agency to include mobilization against the shrunken pandemic space of disability. By identifying myself as a “disability parent/ally,” I was emphasizing the social context and construction of my daughter’s and our family’s disabilization in an ableist society. As the parent of a disabled child, I am “mutually entangled” (Bhattacharya 2023) in my daughter’s disability: ableist society differentially excludes our family as a unit. When my disabled child cannot attend school, I become the parent of a disabled child who cannot attend school. When my disabled child cannot communicate in a society that does not mainstream sign language and “augmentative alternative communication” (AAC) devices, I become the parent of a child who cannot communicate in a society that does not mainstream sign language and AAC devices. Through my daughter’s disability, I enter into the many social and positional ways of being disabled in an ableist society. This experience of disability parenting becomes a praxis that carries the constraints of an ableist society within it. The systemic social and institutional construction of disability expressed as barriers to access becomes both the context for and the content of my parenting. This was the dissonance my dispatch introduced to the group, summoning up a medium for my own critical agency, one I now had to own by coming out as an authors’ editor/disability parent ally. For the microgroup and my academic publishing networks, the medium for critical reflection was social academic writing conceived of as a field that is both structured (by normed academic writing genres, techniques, skills, languages, and publics; by social writing practices and forms) and subject to agentive transformation by critical human engagement (through reflection, questioning, debate, analysis, activism, creativity, and resistance) (Molinari 2022). As our life-worlds and futures of all shapes and on all fronts shrank in the pandemic, we engaged in “everyday improvisations and DIY inventions” (Dokumaci 2020, S100) that rendered what was otherwise foreclosed usable again. These patchwork affordances where we

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used seemingly unrelated things like private disability dispatches to conjure proximate “intimate publics” (Berlant 2008) for use with scholarly and editorial acquaintances who were more strangers than kin allowed us to see our own struggles for agency “as linked to a broader world” of others struggling alongside us (Rapp and Ginsburg 2011, 393). Less a matter of empathy than of co-witnessing one another’s struggles with critical writing and reflection, our experiments in social writing through a pandemic did not “depend on getting things right” (Rand 2021, 7): our collective side chats about goals realized and struggles overcome were also peppered with missteps, let-downs, and indirect paths. In probing why I felt the need to out myself with a disability parenting dispatch in this heterogenous third space, I keep going back to Danilyn Rutherford’s (2012) essentially ecological notion of proximity as an “embodied mode of intersubjectivity” produced by “the placement of human bodies and artifacts in space and time” leading people “to share perspectives and passions” (472). Proximity to radically different others (as occurs in parental proximity to their children’s disability) and the social visibilization of such proximity (as in my disability parenting dispatch to my social writing microgroup companions) can give rise to what Rutherford (2020) calls “alternative forms of sociality that emerge in the course of non-normative interactions” (1477). By placing my parenting relationship with my disabled daughter, the pandemic, the microgroup, my relationships with client authors and colleague editors, strategies for writing, and this reflexive autoethnography all in the same space, I invent a “zone of proximity” that allows me to “‘make sense’ of the ‘non-sense’ that I was experiencing and engaging with” (Mercieca 2012, 139). Together, these seemingly disparate activities become creative, patchwork affordances for the constitution of new meanings and worlds. By writing her and us into otherwise abled spaces, I make my daughter, our relationship, and our invisibilized life together legible. The resulting proximal zone gives me and those I live and work with access to a reflexive critical agency previously inaccessible, a way to write our tiny disability family into the frame and then build the frame out. For Arseli Dokumaci (2020), “care intimacy” occurs whenever proximal others (parents, spouses, partners, children, friends, caregivers) respond to a disabled person’s need for access to the life they want to live by multiplying the conditions of possibility for accessible living. But unlike Dokumaci’s conception, where mutual affordance goes one way towards the disabled person “in need of affordance” (S105), my experience as the

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mother of a disabled child leads me to believe that the microactivist affordances of care intimacy go in multiple directions all at once. My daughter’s three-month isolation from my husband and I during the pandemic lockdown made the life she, her father, and I wanted to live—the life we wanted for ourselves and each other—inaccessible. My daughter’s disability and the many affordances foreclosed to her in an ableist and disabilizing society are tangled up with our disablement as parents, our lack of affordance and access as a family. Just as communication breaks down between two or more people and never just in one, so does disability entail everyone in the system and never just one, differentially positioning and empowering them. In sharing the reunion photo of my daughter coming home to us after the easing of Covid-19 lockdown measures, I was pointing to the shrunken world that disability imposed not only on her, as the disabled resident of a group home, but also on us as a family and me as a mother. Her lack of access to us during lockdown was also my lack of access to her. Every barrier the environment had posed to her thriving as a person had also posed a barrier to my thriving as a parent (Rapp and Ginsburg 2011, 389), spurring decades spent reorienting my working life towards disability parenting and allyship as primary caretaker, speech pathologist, occupational and play therapist, behaviour analyst, and advocate. Yet once I turned back to editing, I invisibilized those years and our mutually entangled disability and banished it to our private domestic space. It was the critical women academics in the microgroup who gave me the courage to make it visible again. Writing about care relationships with children with severe disabilities, Duncan Mercieca (2012) notes that the idea of their agency often does not cross the minds of the adults around them. In rebuttal to this commonplace assumption, he argues that if we can come into close proximity with them and take the (crip) time to “think again” (4), a painstaking process commonly viewed through the lens of neoliberal productivity regimes and performance indicators as “wasting time,” we may be able to discern their agency. My experience with my daughter’s joyful homecoming and my otherwise inexplicable need to send a dispatch about it to the microgroup suggests that some part of my daughter’s agency was to compel me to think again, critically, deeply, humming with reflexive dissonance, shaking up the world a little and expanding its shrunkenness.

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Cripping Linguistic Care Work in the Editorial Encounter In much of academia, certainly in much of the humanities and social sciences where I, my editorial colleagues, and my academic clients work, there is still a certain amount of risk involved in visibility, particularly when it comes to joining writing retreats and social writing groups (Thesen and Cooper 2014) or acknowledging receipt of writing support. The dominant ableist and deficit-based language ideologies at play in the academy, academic publishing, and editorial culture describe nonstandard language use and writing as “broken” and in need of fixing, driving pernickety gatekeeping and language regulation (Solin and Hynninen 2018; Pienimäki 2021; Hultgren and Molinari 2022) concerning which genres, styles, syntaxes, languages, and lexicons count as capable and “fit for purpose” and which so deviate from the “norm” as to be considered inept. Indeed, many academic authors find it hard to publicly acknowledge the editors they have worked with, for fear of appearing incompetent (Paul-­Hus et al. 2017, 2020; Burrough-Boenisch 2019; Matarese and Shashok 2019, 2020). These risks are all the more potent for those with little economic or cultural capital: non-tenured, adjunct, jobless, precarious, peripheral, minoritized, multilingual, transnational, or novice academic writers. For these academic writers, risking social or collective writing practices can be less the productive promise of thinking through dilemmas in novel ways that move theory, empirics, and writing genres forward (Thesen and Cooper 2014) than a hazard that can threaten further precarity. “In the paratextual scene of acknowledgments,” writes Micciche (2017), “writing partners are on unusual display” (40). Navigating this hyper-visibility and the hyper-access others have to authors’ backstage support systems demands a certain amount of risk-taking critical agency, itself subject to material opportunities and obstacles (Molinari 2022, 155). In such a world, I wonder if we—editors and authors—are paying enough attention to the dialogic nurturing of risk-taking critical agency in the editorial encounter. Have we used all our faculties of linguistic care work (working dialogically and critically in the author–editor encounter to co-construct meaning in the text; making our positionality and stance visible to one another), crip time (devoting time to “thinking again” about how we practice together and how authors’ and editors’ positionalities are brought to bear on the writing or editing at hand), and crip technoscience (facilitating access to multiple modes of author–editor encounter so that

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we expand proximity to one another)? If, to succeed in publishing and their careers, academic authors must develop their own risk-taking, hyper-­ visible, out-in-the-world critical linguistic agency, shouldn’t we editors do the same? Often tasked with making texts “fit for purpose,” editors can uncritically act as language quality regulators and genre police, fixing meaning in normative forms and getting in the way of academia’s central task of ensuring that “the same signs” are “appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (Bhabha 1994, 55). We can even end up perpetuating the dominant ableist and deficit-based language ideologies that keep academic authors struggling at the proverbial publishing gates. What better way to be reflexive about editors’ roles in gatekeeping than to leverage and expand the author–editor relationships we are already embedded in and the affordances that exist in and around them? If an affordance must first be perceived to be used for our needs, perhaps critical agency and positional visibility can help us to “crip” the linguistic care work we do. By reflecting on my own ableist language ideologies, could I change how I put them into play in the editorial encounter on the page, in person, or online? My daughter is home, and we have her AAC iPad loaded with Proloquo2Go out, a dynamic, symbols-based communication grid that “speaks” in a child’s voice when she presses a button. We use it to augment her signs, which, because she has a hard time grading her hand and finger muscles to produce refined or fluid movements, often “rhyme,” or look the same. She is trying to tell us something multimodally and translingually, mixing several languages and language modes, the way most multilingual speakers (de Bruin et al. 2018) and AAC users do (McNamara 2018; AssistiveWare 2022). She signs our home sign for the Zijl, a river we often visit with her to watch boats, and I fill in the blanks by asking clarifying questions that will grant me access to the context of her communicative intention, mixing spoken English and Dutch and signed American and Dutch languages as I go: “Oh, you want to go to the Zijl om boten te kijken [to go boat-­ watching]?” Not quite it. Then she signs our home sign—a sign “built out of common gestures, used with family members” (Senghas et  al. 2004, 1780)—for the River Queen, a Dutch canal barge that docks at the Zijl and which often figures in our pretend play. “You want [American sign] to play [Dutch sign] going [American sign] to the Zijl [Dutch sign] on the River Queen [home sign]?” Nope.

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She goes over to her iPad and starts flipping through the Proloquo2Go folders, moving up and down the folder structure quickly whenever she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. Then she pushes the symbol for bike: “Fiets,” says the iPad in the Dutch girl’s voice, “Merel,” created “to give everyone a voice” (Acapela Group 2018). “You want to bike to the Zijl to see the River Queen?” I ask, peppering my sentence with signs. Again no. She signs the Dutch sign for friend and then the sign for bike. “Oh! You want to go riding on the duofiets [duo-bike] from Fietsmaatjes [Bike Buddies],” I say, signing the two signs for bike and friends she has just used together in what is now our new home sign for Fietsmaatjes, a Dutch volunteer organization that pairs volunteer bikers with “guests” with disabilities on three-wheel electric bikes. “Nee,” she says in Dutch without the initial “n,” signing “no” in American sign language. “Hmmm. OK. Let me think,” I say, drumming my fingers on my chin. “Are you remembering [American sign] last week [Dutch sign] when we went on the duofiets [home sign] to the Zijl [Dutch sign] and we saw the River Queen [home sign]?” That’s it! She isn’t asking for anything. She wants to chat with me about our past shared experience. I was caught in the wrong communicative function (requesting), the wrong motivation (she wants something), and the wrong tense (the past). I needed to go beyond what the communication seemed on the surface to be about (a desire to go biking) and imagine that something more complex might actually be going on (sharing memories together). “That was so much fun [American sign]. What was your favourite part [American signs]?” I ask her, continuing the conversation in her vein now, letting her lead me down a more complicated path of new meaning-making. And so, with our interdependent crip linguistic care work in hand, my daughter and I proceed to co-construct meaning, sharing our inner worlds and experiences with one another. We take our crip time to check that we have understood one another, repairing the missteps and refining the meaning that emerges from this dance of languaging. We use our crip technoscience, my daughter’s AAC device, languaging multimodally all along the way. Our mutual linguistic care work creatively mobilizes our critical agencies, leading us to blend semiotic features in our talk beyond and against the normed expectations and biased dismissals of what a person with a complex multiple communication disability is capable of. What I have learned over these years from and with my daughter is that linguistic “deficiency” never lies in one person but is always a function of the discourse community they are embedded in. Are our home signs the

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signed equivalent of Canagarajah’s (2006) codemeshing, a term he uses to describe hybrid texts that mix languages and semiotic features? Is our mix of spoken and signed languages, home signs, symbol-based AAC, and “nonstandard” morphology and syntax our way of translanguaging? We’re not interspersing disparate languages and modes; we’re using ‘one linguistic repertoire that houses all of [our] meaning-making tools’ (Padía 2023, 3). Together, we use all the linguistic, technological, and semiotic resources at our disposal to co-create meaning, becoming affordances for one another’s needs: I become an affordance for her need to communicate with me and she becomes an affordance for my need to communicate with her. We are communication partners, allies, constantly misfiring, groping, cobbling together, and repairing our messages, helping each other open and close successful circles of meaning about the world and our place in it. “Linguistic care work,” Henner and Robinson (2021, 7) write, “embraces interdependence between languagers as a practice of collective access in desire to work towards mutual understanding.” Against Rutherford’s (2020) suggestion that proximity to disability gives rise to “alternative forms of sociality that emerge in the course of non-normative interactions” (1477) and the conventional description of symbol-based languaging as “augmentative and alternative communication,” translanguaging and crip linguistics allow me to see that even these formulations are ableist because they forward alternatives  relative to an abstracted norm. There is nothing “alternative” or “non-normative” about any of it: our family’s translanguaging linguistic care work is simply our way of using our entire collaborative linguistic repertoire to fill our world with meaning.

Coda: Towards Author–Editor Alliance If what we want is to develop a critical, allied author–editor relationship— and I admit that not all academic authors and editors do—then we need to bring some of these communication partnering skills to bear in our editorial encounters and build them out into new hybrid forms of collaboration. One way to do that is through third-space author–editor social writing partnerships that centre mutual studentship in critical dissonance and affective solidarity à la Hemmings. Another way is to encourage everyone in the editorial encounter to take their crip time to “think again” reflexively about how their languages, literacies, and authorities are hierarchically positioned. I think here of native/non-native speaker divides, the

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split discourses of academic insiders and outsiders, and the primacy afforded to English in the mostly monolingual spaces of publishing. As Canagarajah (2006) points out, because the spaces where academic writing is taught and published often don’t reflect the multilingual “real world,” they effectively “disable” writers who are multilingual and multiliterate (592). Rather than approaching these multilingual realities as “language interference”—a disabling approach to editing we internalize as an impulse to “fix” what we see as an “error” while appealing to various textual and syntactic “authorities”—can I instead view them as artefacts of the author’s use of their entire  translanguaging repertoire to meaningfully negotiate language and writing culture realities and constraints? I think back on all the times when I could have asked more questions, offered more choices, allowed for more hybridity and creative solutions, let “foreignness” and “domestication” play more fruitfully. How many times, in my own precarious, gig-economy-driven haste—real-world constraints on editorial “crip time” that should neither be ignored nor downplayed—have I not reined in the impulse to “domesticate the foreign” (Venuti 1995, 305)? How many times have I offered the author a choice in the weighting of languages, syntaxes, and meanings on the page? To change my experience of textual difference as error requires rethinking how I read and evaluate difference. Borrowing from the world of AAC where we assume the communicative competence of non-speakers, a critical agency perspective would view textual difference first as the author’s creative negotiation of writing norms, and only then as a possible error. When, we must ask ourselves, is textual difference not a strategic and creative choice by the author acting in pursuit of their rhetorical objective? Bringing about such an allied author–editor relationship would also necessitate thinking critically about the tension between the author’s experience of receiving a corrective editorial “bite” (Russi 2022) and the “bite” editors receive when facing down a job that contains multiple textual differences. How can editors “bite” in a way that honours the author’s critical and creative negotiation of familiar moves, monosemic meanings, and authorized-only textual differences? Can we instead  approach the “bite” of textual difference as a “literary affordance” (Khost 2018) inviting us to home in on the relationship between what is given in the text, what the author’s possible intent may be, and what the reader might understand and take for use from it? What would “collective access” look like were we to stop thinking of editing as a practice of language

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“correcting” (Hynninen and Solin 2017) and start thinking of it as a practice of collaborative work towards “mutual understanding” (Henner and Robinson’s 2021, 7)? When I work with my daughter to access her meaning, am I policing her “correctness,” or am I co-constructing with her across thousands of strategic microactivist choices our mutual access to a world made out of words? To go beyond what is given in the text and access the possible new, authors and editors must be willing to go beyond the given institutional boxes that separate insiders and outsiders, come closer to one another, and create proximal spaces of joint practice. To close the gap between what is given in the text and what the author’s critical intent is, they will have to move from a model of momentary editorial encounter towards a model of author–editor alliance and interdependent writerly becoming. Such proximity practices might involve taking more time for face-to-face meetings where questions about big-picture intentions and aims can be posed, joint revision sessions where collaborative work on tricky passages can take place, social writing partnerships and groups where critical stances on writing and our social world can be sparked. Already networked and inspired by the growing social writing and linguistic care-work practices around them, authors and editors wishing to explore the many affordances to be found in such allied author–editor writing rooms will continue to need, find, and invent new zones of proximity useful for expanding mutual access to reflexive critical writing agency.

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CHAPTER 13

Meetings at the Textface: What Academics and Language Professionals Gain When They Team Up and Adopt a Social Writing Approach to Academic Text Production Wendy Baldwin

Imagine a scenario… You’re a mid-career academic, and you need to write so you can add more publications to your promotion packet. But with all the other professional and personal obligations you have, you have a hard time prioritizing your writing and you find it difficult to write with any real focus during those pockets of time between meetings, classes and office hours … you feel overwhelmed, anxious and maybe a little isolated and a bit like an imposter. Imagine another scenario… You’re a Spanish postdoc searching for a permanent position in Spain. To be competitive you have to write in English, your second (or third) language. In addition to the intense pressure to publish, you feel at a

W. Baldwin (*) Linguaverse, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2_13

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disadvantage because you didn’t receive as much training in academic writing in English as your peers in other countries or at other universities … you feel overwhelmed, anxious and maybe a little isolated and like an imposter. Imagine a third scenario… You’re a self-employed authors’ editor and academic translator who helps academics revise and polish their manuscripts so their odds of getting published are boosted while juggling the demands of running a business on your own. It’s been a while since you were in the academy, however, so updating your knowledge of the culture of higher education and the current practices and thinking in the discipline (s) you work in could help you better serve your clients … you feel overwhelmed, anxious and maybe a little isolated and a bit like an imposter.

Introduction Academics typically interact with language professionals (LPs), if at all, within the well-established relationship of client–service provider. This commercial overlay, however necessary, obscures and leaves untapped the potential for the parties to enter into a different type of collaboration. In this chapter I introduce a co-working model based on a social process approach to writing that allows academics and academy-adjacent LPs like myself to forge a new kind of relationship, in which the parties view each other as members of distinct communities of practice that overlap at a mutually critical endeavour—the production of fit-for-purpose academic texts—and share a goal—getting those texts to a target readership. This type of near-peer collaboration may seem counterintuitive to academics, especially those who have not worked closely with a language professional. One of my goals in this chapter is to show that bringing academics and LPs together over a sustained period of time and within a structured co-working model that places both parties on the same relational plane (i.e., interactions are collegial rather than transactional) benefits academic text production and producers alike in non-trivial ways. In teaming up and working side by side at the academic textface, academics and LPs can draw on each other’s expertise while giving and receiving support as each engages in and struggles with their own text production work, thereby enhancing outcomes, practice, self-efficacy, and overall satisfaction with text production tasks.

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I begin with the personal, recounting how the co-working model came to be and my experience working within it over a two-year period and alongside three different academic partners. (LPAC is the shorthand I’ve coined for these language professional–academic co-working partnerships.) I then take a step back and sketch out the structure, components, and benefits of the model, adding my partners’ voices to my own. After that I consider how these partnerships and the key features that distinguish the LPAC model from other social writing models can help individuals work within—and also resist—the larger economic and hegemonic forces that place pressures of varying degrees on academics and independent LPs.

Sharing a Table with Academics: A Tale of Near-Peers As an independent authors’ editor and academic translator, I work for and with academic authors to help them make their academic output—in my case, research articles—fit for publication. I’m hired directly by authors, often (or always, in the case of translation) prior to an initial submission and other times when an author has received a rejection or a revise and resubmit decision from a journal. My job covers a range of tasks, from checking for consistency and accuracy in surface-level mechanics to helping authors present information to their intended audience more effectively, and from helping authors enhance their understanding of genre and discipline conventions and linguistic expression in academic English to, in the case of translation, helping authors be aware of the places where the work in their source language might need to be adjusted to produce a text that is fit for purpose and meets the language and genre norms of the target academic community. I began co-working with academics in 2018, after training as a structured writing retreat facilitator with Rowena Murray. My initial impetus for wanting to run writing retreats was my desire to help my clients—the majority of whom have English as a second or third language—get their academic writing done, in addition to helping myself do my own writing, which I was forever pushing aside. But at the training and the 2.5-day retreat I attended beforehand, I saw that much of my own struggle to get text production work done while juggling multiple roles in my professional day-to-day were not so different from the work, struggles, and

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juggles of the academics surrounding me. It was also clear that structured writing sessions and the support of the other writers helped me make progress with my writing project as well as face and manage my doubts and anxieties as much as it helped the academics. While the details of our professional tasks and lives were different, their broad outlines were similar. From April 2018 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, I co-worked on a one-to-one basis with three different academics based in Europe. One worked near me, and so we met in person at a university library; I met with each of the others online (via Skype or Google Chat). I shared an academic discipline with two of my three academic partners. One partner was an early career researcher (ECR), while the rest of us were mid-career. All of us were multilingual, though only one of the academics plus myself were native speakers of English. All of us worked primarily on preparing research articles for publication, though one was also working on a book. Most of my work was editing texts in English, though I sometimes translated articles from Spanish into English. Only one of the academics had a permanent position at a university, but all of us wore multiple professional hats and had to continually manage the tensions between roles: the academics had to fit writing into the slivers of space between research, teaching, advising, and other service and administrative commitments; I, as a self-employed language professional, had to juggle my academic text production work with the variety of tasks involved in running a writing support business, including administration, client care, and keeping my knowledge and skills current. All of us were women, two of us had young children at home, and all of us had household care duties that affected our ability to find the time and space to focus on academic text production work. The mixture of overlap and complementarity in terms of knowledge, skill, practice, perspective, and circumstance allowed us to move, as near-­ peers, into our protected co-working space and reap the benefits that come from toiling together, holding each other accountable, celebrating wins, and commiserating over struggles. It also gave us a way to access expert knowledge and engage in incidental learning that we wouldn’t normally enjoy within our respective communities of practice.

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The LPAC Model My model for bringing academics and LPs together at the textface is an extension of the micro-group model in Murray (2015). Two text producers agree to meet regularly over some extended period of time (for example, a semester) and focus on academic text production. The model is simple in that it does not require any special training or knowledge to implement and sustain, yet it’s robust enough to accommodate any number of variations, making it a powerful but flexible container that can support a broad range of academics and LPs engaged in text production. The model reflects a social process approach to social writing (Murray 2015), where writers, or in our case, producers of academic texts, disengage from people, spaces, and behaviours that can hinder writing. Under these conditions, text producers are primed to engage more deeply with their texts, ply their craft more deliberately, and become more aware of the behaviours that help or hinder output and process. The model keeps each participant focused on the tasks of doing and managing the work of producing fit-for-purpose academic texts while simultaneously creating a space where participants can support each other and fill in gaps in knowledge or practice. Structure LPAC sessions used the same structure, though the length of time spent working in this way varied, usually as a function of my academic partner’s availability. Figure  13.1 illustrates the structure distributed over a 90-­minute block, which we found to work particularly well as a session length in terms of scheduling, getting text production work done, and enjoying immediate benefit, but partners could use a session length that better suits their time available, and they may on occasion wish to chain sessions together over a half or full day, with breaks for movement and refuelling in between. Goal-Setting: 5 Minutes We’d spend the first five minutes setting and sharing goals for the 75 minutes we’d work at our respective textfaces. When meeting in person, we did this orally, but when meeting online, writing our goals in the chat box was a good option, especially if one or another partner wasn’t in a position to speak (e.g., working from a quiet library or a noisy café, while the baby

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Fig. 13.1  Illustration of a 90-minute co-working block, typical text production tasks for the academic and the LP, and the three stages of the structured session: goal-setting, text production work, and check-in

was sleeping, etc.). Seeing these in black and white and knowing our partner would see them too helped us articulate goals that were specific and likely attainable. This bit of goal-setting not only set each of us on the right track for our own work and let us cheer each other on, but it was a good way for each of us to observe the other’s practice, skills, and expertise. Over time, the ways in which we overlapped with and complemented each other (see below) came into sharper focus.  ext Production Work: 75 Minutes T For 75 minutes, each of us (muted our mic and) turned our attention to our individual texts, working towards our stated goals. At the 75-minute mark, we moved into the check-in. As the trained structured writing retreat facilitator, I served as the time keeper and moved us from stage to stage (other LP–academic pairings can make whatever time keeping arrangements suit best). Check-in: 10 Minutes The final 10 minutes or so were for checking in. Checking in started with an assessment of how the text production work went. Were goals met? What went well and what didn’t go so well? Did any useful insights or particular challenges emerge? What issues need resolving before returning

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to the textface? Often there was time for each partner to query the other about their expertise with regard to the task/problem at hand or otherwise engage in discussion that supported the writing and the text producers. Overlap and Complementarity Academics who participate in writing support and practice partnerships (e.g., writers’ groups, shut/show up and write groups, writing meetings— see Murray, this volume) overlap with and complement each other along any number of dimensions—this mixture of shared, partially shared, and unique knowledge and experience is part of what enriches the writing space and the writing task. Similar mixtures and dimensions are in play in LPACs, though the community of practice (CoP) dimension has greater prominence here than it would with groups of academics. The CoPs of academics and academically oriented LPs intersect at the academic textface and each brings to the endeavour of academic writing and publication different sets of knowledge, practices, and perspectives. Within my academic– LP partnerships, this interplay between related but distinct CoPs provided some of the most interesting benefit, as it created a dynamic where each partner was simultaneously insider and outsider, expert and learner, yet neither was positioned relative to the other within a hierarchy. Working under these dualities, each of us had the luxury of focusing on our own skill, practice, and process while having the opportunity to observe and learn from the other, whether directly or incidentally. My partners and I had multiple points of overlap and complementarity. The five dimensions that yielded benefits for one or both LPAC partners are as follows: community of practice, academic discipline, language(s), career stage, and location. Figure 13.2 locates my academic partners (A; white circles) and myself (LP; grey circles) on the dimensions. Community of Practice This is the point of overlap and source of complementarity that undergirds the meetings at the textface: the academic working in an institution of higher education versus the language professional who works with academic texts. Each partner brings to the meetings domain-specific knowledge and a set of professional practices and perspectives. The academics brought with them not only their academic-who-writes persona but the whole of their professional life and the interactions and tensions between

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Fig. 13.2  Overlap and complementarity between my three academic partners (A; white circles) and myself (LP; grey circles), along five dimensions: community of practice, academic discipline, language (native language with the primary additional language in parentheses), career stage, and location

the various elements: research, teaching, advising, committee work, administrative work, etc. Similarly, as a self-employed language professional, I brought my editor-/translator-of-academic-texts persona, as well as the other aspects that make up my professional life, including all the tasks and obligations involved in running a business, managing clients, engaging in continuous professional development and peer training, and so on. In other words, we brought to our co-working sessions not only our expertise and experience in producing academic texts that are fit for purpose but also all the activities that support or interfere with our ability to successfully engage in our core endeavour.

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Academic Discipline This dimension can be a point of overlap or complementarity, depending on who the partners are and the degree of expertise held by each. In my case, I shared an academic discipline (linguistics) with two of my three LPAC partners. My third academic partner’s discipline was international relations. Language(s) Given the internalization of higher education and the pressure felt by academics across the globe to use English as an academic lingua franca, the language dimension is likely to be relevant to any LPAC; minimally both partners will have a vested interest in academic English, though other languages may easily come into play as a potential (re)source. Within my LPACs, I was the native English-speaking language professional who was highly proficient in academic English; I also had proficient academic Spanish as a potential (re)source. One of my academic partners was also a native speaker of English and a highly proficient writer of academic English, one was a non-native speaker of English who was an experienced and proficient writer of academic English, and one was a non-native speaker who was sufficiently proficient and still developing as a writer of academic English. The other languages my academic partners had as potential (re)sources were German, Italian, and Spanish. Career Stage The partners in an LPAC may be at similar or different career stages. In the case of my three partnerships, I was a mid-career language professional, two of the academics were similarly mid-career, and the third academic was early career. Location This dimension will be of greater or lesser importance, depending on the individuals involved and what their own needs might be. In terms of my three LPAC partnerships, we spanned three different countries: Germany, Spain, and the UK. As my partner in Spain worked near me, we were able to co-work in person; with the other two our meetings were virtual.

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Benefits of the LPAC A Shared Commitment to Space, Endeavour, and Mutual Support Just by working within an environment designed to promote focus and purposeful engagement with the task of text production, many of the benefits that emerge from the near-peer collaboration within the LPAC are the same ones that are amply documented as emerging from structured writing retreats and social writing partnerships between academics (Eardley et al. 2021; Kampenaar and Murray 2019; Kornhaber et al. 2016; Moore 2003; Murray and Newton 2009, among others). These include increased and more regular output, deliberate reflection on writing (as process/ product), development as a writer, and the cultivation of strategies for prioritizing writing and increased self-efficacy. After co-working with each of my academic partners for about a year, I asked them to answer some questions about their experience of working with me, the LP, within the structured LPAC model and the benefits they received. All three gave me their permission to include their anonymized responses here; I’ll call them Ann, Bea, and Carrie. Ann commented on the usefulness of the goal-setting and check-in components: “[Setting goals] applies gentle pressure. If I see I’m not going to meet my goals, I buckle down in a way that I wouldn’t if no one else was around. … The discussion helps me get back on track in the next [session].” Taking the time to set and share goals provided a layer of accountability that was firm but also friendly. These two components helped her set a course and correct it when she veered in a different direction. Bea reported that our co-working practice helped her get organized, in terms of working in timed sessions and figuring out priorities. Before working within the timed, structured environment of the LPAC, she felt she needed to clear her calendar to write, but now she thinks about her work in terms of “packages of time” and in terms of what’s more realistic, which helps her get started. Before we were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Carrie was working on a book project, something she was having trouble dedicating time to while she juggled a long list of professional and family obligations. She reported that our meetings and their consistent nature “visibly benefit[ted her] often side-tracked projects.”

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I similarly found my commitment to meeting each LPAC partner on a regular basis and in our shared space to be beneficial to my own text production work: setting goals, working with focus, tracking my output, and observing and sharing my process kept me moving forward, reduced distraction, and helped me meet targets and deadlines with less stress. And just like my partners, I found great satisfaction in noticing my behaviours around text production, assessing their effectiveness, and learning to celebrate the things I was doing well and tweak the things I could do better. Dimensions As Areas for Growth The above benefits are rooted in the overlap between the academic and the LP profiles and the shared endeavour of producing academic texts in a structured and protected space. But the structured and extended nature of the LPAC, where partners meet on a regular basis over time, also creates opportunity for the partners to explore and make the most of their complementarity. Community of Practice The fact that I belong to a separate but related CoP was probably the point of difference with the deepest and broadest impact for both of us. The LPAC presented my academic partners with the opportunity to step away from the day to day of teaching, advising, departmental tensions, institutional politics, and the myriad duties and pressures that are ever-­ present in higher education, and enter a writing space with someone who similarly values academic texts and understands how to produce them but has a different approach to and relationship with academic writing and writers. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be enriching. As Ann noted, “[Y]ou have a different perspective on academic writing, and that is something I can’t get from other academics.” But less expected was the discovery that sharing a text production space with a near-peer reduced the vulnerability that academics often feel about letting others witness their struggles with writing. When I asked Bea about benefits of the LPAC, she said, “[i]t helps to see the other person’s struggles. You see that other people don’t always meet their goals, that things don’t pan out, etc.” But she was quick to point out the additional layer of comfort that she got from working with me rather than her peers: “[The LPAC] gives you the space to do thinking and writing. These are processes that are hard and you don’t necessarily want to share with your closest colleagues.” Where

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structured writing retreats offer a welcome respite from surveillance by bosses and administrators, in tackling text production in a smaller space with me rather than with one or more peers or on her own, she was able to let her guard down and relax into the messiness and vulnerability inherent to the writing process. From my side of the equation, my LPAC partnerships allowed me to have regular contact with academics working in two of the higher education spaces where many of my clients are or aspire to be (Spain and the UK). Having the chance to ask about how each system worked in terms of areas such as promotion and academic rank, institutional hierarchies, and academic culture more generally gave me an updated understanding of the circumstances in which my authors were operating, making me more responsive to their needs. It also gave me some of the critical insights I needed for translating texts about education studies or in reference to higher education, where concepts and terminology frequently do not align especially well, even in a post-Bologna landscape. Simply put, partnering with someone from a different CoP that overlaps at a significant point with one’s own can inject fresh perspectives, fill in critical gaps in knowledge, and provide respite from professional stresses, tensions, and vulnerability. Both partners are in a better position to quiet the intruding voices (real and imagined) of others and their own doubts about their capabilities during the co-working session and even recalibrate those voices and doubts in a more positive, realistic way. Academic Discipline For my two partners whose discipline is linguistics, my own expertise in the field was useful. If, for example, during check-in, they needed to talk through the logic of an argument or theory or assess whether a particular method or piece of evidence was clearly explained, I was a fairly useful sounding board: I could make comments or ask questions that helped them resolve the issue at hand, or at least work things out enough that they had a good idea of how they could unravel the knot later. For my partner whose discipline is international relations, I was still useful, but at a more general level. Although we did not share detailed knowledge of literatures, theories, or methods, we shared certain traditions and ways of knowing. That, coupled with my broad experience editing and translating in the humanities and social sciences for nearly two decades, meant that I was still useful as a sounding board.

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As for the other direction, I was able to draw on my partners’ disciplinary knowledge to help me with tricky spots in the texts I was editing or translating. The linguists, for example, could help me with questions related to the language and logic of statistical analysis, and my partner in international relations could be a source for guidance on issues relating to, say, human movement. And zooming out once again to the general level of social science, any of partners had the ability to help me get a better handle on uncertain interpretations or tricky logic. Language(s) For my two partners who were not native speakers of English, my proficiency in academic writing in English was a clear benefit, particularly for the one who was a less experienced academic writer more generally (in any language). But even my native English-speaking partner would sometimes consult with me: turning ideas into words that hit the right tone, level, and style is not always easy. All writers face doubts about linguistic expression at one time or another, and my expertise in academic writing and matters of language, style, and mechanics made me a handy resource. But more than that, for the non-native speakers I was a source of reassurance and confidence. On plenty of occasions, it turned out that they already knew the answer or had a perfectly good sentence. But by being able to consult with me at a critical moment and receive confirmation of their ability to express themselves clearly and appropriately in academic English, they were able to leave the session feeling confident in their linguistic expression skills. As for me, an authors’ editor and translator who works nearly exclusively with multilanguage scholars, I too was able to draw on my partners’ linguistic expertise. In either case, I frequently bump into linguistic puzzles of one kind or another. The English text I’m editing can show traces of the author’s other language(s), and my Spanish-speaking and German-­ speaking partners could give me insight into where authors who speak those languages might be coming from. Career Stage The dimension of career stage became most salient on both sides of the LPAC where the difference was greatest, i.e., with my early career academic partner. In addition to my own experience in academia, most of my career has given me sustained connection with and observation of academic friends and clients, not to mention the research and writing on

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academia and higher education more generally. That meant that at times I could provide information, guidance, or a sounding board to help my partner work through issues related to learning the ropes of academia, promotion, relationships with supervisors, etc. As a provider of writing-­ related support, I found it very useful to be able to see at close quarters what ECRs are currently up against as they fight to gain and retain a foothold on the academic ladder. This gave me greater insight into what my younger clients might be facing, which helped me tailor my writing feedback. It’s also helpful for me to know what sorts of challenges academics at any career stage are dealing with; all of this knowledge makes me more attuned to my authors’ needs. Location In terms of making the meetings happen, location did not seem to matter: meeting online was as effective, productive, and rewarding as meeting in person, as long as each of us was in a setting where we could focus for the allotted period of time and distractions were at least predictable if not controllable. I joined my partners from my home, my office, a local library, the university campus. My partners joined me from similar spaces: their home, their office, a local café. But location did matter to me in terms of being able to draw on my partners’ knowledge of the higher education culture they were embedded in. My foundational experience in higher education took place in the US, but my clients are mostly grounded in European systems of higher education. Over the years I have learned about the higher education systems in Spain (where I live) and the UK (the English-language benchmark for Europe) through observation and reading, and it’s not uncommon for me to work on academic texts that talk about university courses; degree programmes; assessment and promotion schemes for students and faculty; the various roles available for faculty, staff, and administrators; and the hierarchies in which they are embedded. Despite the harmonization that the Bologna process has brought to universities within the European Higher Education Area, when it comes to the nitty gritty detail there is still a great deal of nonalignment of practices, norms, and regulations, all of which comes into play at the level of linguistic expression. Helping an author land on the best way to express these things in English and for an international readership can sometimes be fraught, and being able to consult my partners on specific points about their higher education system was invaluable.

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The Power of Shared Purpose and Tapping into an Adjacent Community of Practice My and my academic partners’ experience with the LPAC model suggests that when it comes to producing academic texts in a structured, socially supported, sustained, and sustainable fashion, a more appropriate basis for successful meetings at the textface might be shared purpose rather than shared profession. In considering the broader communities of practice that facilitate fit-for-purpose writing for academic publication, academics gain a larger pool of potential partners in text production. They can take advantage of overlap and complementarity, strategically fine-tuning relevant dimensions to meet their needs, and gain access to different but critically relevant bodies of knowledge, experience, and skills. For example, an ECR or PhD student might want a partner in a related CoP who is mid- to late career and has experienced or amply observed the early career stage. Such a partner may do more than lend a sympathetic ear, as they have relevant knowledge and may even be in a position to provide appropriate guidance. Or a multilingual writer who is not immersed in English-medium environments and lacks confidence about writing in English will find a linguistic ally in an English-language professional who understands the language and academic writing conventions of the academic’s discipline. Or a scholar who is branching out into a new area of expertise can seek a partner who has some specialization in that area and can serve as a sounding board or consultant. In this way, the academic’s potential for enhancing their writing and their skills in academic text production is boosted in a more tailored way, and with that comes a boost in confidence and improved self-efficacy. Finally, as I hope this section has made clear, the LP who partners with the academic also has as much to gain across the various dimensions.

Solidarity, Resilience, Resistance The LPAC model is currently far from being in widespread use, but my experience within it to date (now going on five years) has shown me that it has the potential to be a vehicle for fostering solidarity, building resilience, and spurring small (or large) acts of resistance between and within individuals and related CoPs. Academics across the globe are under pressure to publish in English, the lingua franca of research and knowledge dissemination. Their career

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progression—and for an increasing number of scholars, getting any kind of steady or permanent foothold in the academy in the first place—depends on it. Yet for many, and especially those who are marginalized or minoritized, the ability to write and publish in English is undermined by the neoliberal university and a profit-driven model of scholarly publication that relies on productivity and output metrics that capture only certain portions of what their labour involves. More demotivating still, at least in English-dominant countries like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, writing support for students and faculty has tended to fall within the purview of feminized/highly gender-skewed and therefore less prestigious spaces (Mewburn 2019; Skerratt 2019), and within spaces where support has long been operationalized as the redressing of deficiencies in language and literacy, particularly for multilingual academics (Cayley 2023). This deficiency perspective is still all too often upheld by publishing gatekeepers who accept a narrow set of Englishes as being sufficiently academic (Burgess 2014; Piller 2016). Although there is now greater awareness of the gender imbalance and marginalized nature of writing support, and increasing recognition that the linguistic deficiency view of multilingual writers is incorrect and harmful (Canagarajah 2002, 2006; Lillis and Curry 2010), women, multilingual, and other peripheral scholars still face barriers that exact a toll on their time, energy, and scholarship. Self-employed LPs like me similarly centre text production, and as Theresa Truax-Gischler (this volume) shows, authors’ editing is linguistic care work with both text and client, requiring time, attention, and emotional and intellectual engagement. But because we are running businesses and must compete in a marketplace that applies constant downward pressure on rates and the balance between paid and unpaid labour, carving out the time needed to do the text production and linguistic care work is constantly bumping up against competing tasks and anxieties. At the individual level, there isn’t a great deal that academics and LPs can do about extractive employment cultures and market forces, and dealing with anxieties and pressures about labour on one’s own hampers our ability to do our text production work. Within the LPAC, both academics and LPs can set aside professional anxiety and pressures and inhabit a safe, supportive, and self-directed space for working through them individually and collectively. Beyond boosting solidarity, resilience, and resistance in and among individuals, in bringing together professionals from adjacent CoPs on a regular basis and over the long term, the LPAC model allows

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each partner to see that the larger systemic issues that impact their labour at the academic textface are also present in other CoPs. Over time, this perspective has the potential to spur cross-CoP solidarity and influence action and/or push back within and across related CoPs.

Conclusion I came to this chapter with feelings of trepidation, worried that academics would not see the value of teaming up with language professionals like myself to co-work within a structure like the LPAC model, let alone see us as valuable partners in the arena of academic text production. I hope readers are able to see the value that the LPAC model and partnership provides, if not for themselves then at least for their colleagues and supervisees. While the landscape is fortunately starting to shift and universities are doing more to make academic writing support more widely available and mainstream (see Lindholm and Isosävi, this volume; and Damčević, this volume), not everyone has access to this kind of support and others may find it simply insufficient. Academics still need to seek out individual and informal solutions, of which the LPAC is one. As long as there are academics who do not have access to institutional support or work within a culture that has not normalized or made transparent the difficulties inherit in academic text production, reaching out to a member of a related community of practice and joining forces at the textface can make a lot of sense in conjunction with other formal and informal means of support. Moreover, since academic writing and academic text production are never static and the knowledge, methods, norms, and expectations continuously evolve, the LPAC is an additional tool for the text producer’s toolbox. Lastly, while any academic stands to gain from belonging to an LPAC, some academics may find such a partnership particularly desirable: some may need space to work through writing struggles away from peers, multilingual writers may need a boost around issues related to expressing themselves in English, or PhD students and ECRs may still need to learn the ropes of writing for publication. In fine-tuning overlap and complementarity in different ways, academics and language professionals can gain one or more needed boosts from near-peer collaboration.

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References Burgess, Sally. 2014. Centre-Periphery Relations in the Spanish Context: Temporal and Cross-Disciplinary Variation. In The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing: Discourses, Communities and Practices, ed. Karen Bennett. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137351197_6. Cayley, Rachael. 2023. Thriving as a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Habits for Effective Academic Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11664964. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2002. A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. ———. 2006. The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued. College Composition and Communication 57 (4): 586–619. Eardley, Alison F., Emma Banister, and Marie Fletcher. 2021. Can Academic Writing Retreats Function as Wellbeing Interventions? Journal of Further and Higher Education 45 (2): 183–196. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0309877X.2020.1744542. Kampenaar, Larissa, and Rowena Murray. 2019. Widening Access to Writing Support: Beliefs about the Writing Process Are Key. Journal of Further and Higher Education 43 (8): 1109–1119. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0309877X.2018.1450964. Kornhaber, Rachel, Merylin Cross, Vasiliki Betihavas, and Heather Bridgman. 2016. The Benefits and Challenges of Academic Writing Retreats: An Integrative Review. Higher Education Research and Development 35 (6): 1210–1227. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1144572. Lillis, Theresa, and Mary Jane Curry. 2010. Academic Writing in Global Context. Routledge. Mewburn, Inger. 2019. How to Fall into a Career Trap (Without Even Realising). In The Positioning and Making of Female Professors. Pushing Career Advancement Open, ed. Rowena Murray and Denise Mifsud, 217–220. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­26187-­0_11. Moore, Sarah. 2003. Writers’ Retreats for Academics; Exploring and Increasing the Motivation to Write. Journal of Further and Higher Education 27 (3): 333–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877032000098734. Murray, Rowena. 2015. Writing in Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing. London: Routledge. Murray, Rowena, and Mary Newton. 2009. Writing Retreat as Structured Intervention: Margin or Mainstream? Higher Education Research & Development 28 (5): 541–553. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360903154126.

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Piller, Ingrid. 2016. Monolingual Ways of Seeing Multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11 (1): 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/1744714 3.2015.1102921. Skerratt, Sarah. 2019. My Personal Journey on the Pathway of Resilience. In The Positioning and Making of Female Professors, Pushing Career Advancement Open, ed. Rowena Murray and Denise Mifsud, 133–153. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­26187-­0_7.

Index

0-9, AND SYMBOLS #remoteretreat, 5, 34–36 A Ableist, 175, 176, 184–186, 188–190, 192 Academic core, 9 vs. academic periphery, 9 Academic English, 205, 211, 215 Academic publishing, 10, 179–181, 183, 186, 189 Academic writing, v, vi, 4, 8, 16, 27, 35, 98, 100, 103–107, 133, 134, 136, 139, 149, 153, 155, 156, 161, 178, 180, 181, 185, 186, 193, 204, 205, 209, 213, 215, 217, 219 Accountability, 34, 35, 38, 44, 146, 155, 212 Affective labour, 2, 6 Affective solidarity, 178 Affordance, 177

literary affordance, 193 microactivist affordance, 183 Authors’ editor, 175, 176, 181–183, 185, 186, 204, 205, 215 B Barriers to writing, 17, 21, 24, 25, 28–29 C Capacity, 3, 6, 9, 18, 24, 35, 89, 90, 94, 115, 174, 175, 178 Career development, 133 Coaching exercises, 98, 107 cue cards, 99, 101–103 the ideas cycle, 99–101 supportive networks, 99, 103–107 Community of practice (CoP), 209–210, 213–214, 217–219 Confidence, 54–55, 98, 149, 159, 163, 215, 217

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Pais Zozimo et al. (eds.), Women Writing Socially in Academia, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44977-2

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INDEX

Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, 3, 8, 33, 42, 48, 118–120, 165–170, 173, 175–178, 183–185, 188 social distancing, 167, 171, 173, 177, 182, 185 Creativity, 6, 9, 15, 33, 34, 97–107, 117–119, 126, 127 Crip linguistics, 178 D Day retreats, 113, 205 Disability, 9, 173, 175, 181, 183–188, 191, 192 Disability parenting, 184–188 Disengagement, 142–144 Doctoral students, v, 3, 97, 118, 119, 122, 123, 131, 139, 154 E Early career researchers (ECR), 45, 53, 71, 109, 110, 114, 115, 141, 206 Empowerment, 2, 4 F Facilitator retreat facilitator, v, 1, 2, 7, 24, 54, 68, 89, 99, 101, 103, 107, 114, 125, 133, 138, 147, 160–163, 169, 205, 208 writing facilitator, 5, 103, 161 Fatigue, 50, 51, 112, 125, 169 Feedback, 7, 19, 44, 56, 57, 83, 84, 92, 93, 101, 110, 111, 114, 118, 123–126, 133–136, 138, 142, 144–146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 161, 163, 216 Feminism/feminist, v, vi, 3

G Gender, 2, 3, 6, 13–15, 17, 26, 27, 36, 47, 71, 111, 140, 155, 181, 218 H Hegemonic, 7–9, 205 Higher education, 2, 3, 131–133, 204, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216 Hope, 2, 8–10, 38, 41, 55, 86, 89, 98, 99, 111, 141, 142, 180, 217, 219 Hospitality, 2, 161, 167, 170 Hybrid retreats, 146, 148, 155 I Imposter, 203, 204 Intersectional, 2, 8, 36 Isolation, 2, 43, 119, 165, 183, 188 J Joy, 2, 10, 27, 36, 38, 98, 137, 140, 141 L Language professional, 8, 9, 176, 204–219 Leadership, 2, 5, 9, 13, 15, 17, 133, 150–153 Linguistic agency, 8, 174, 176, 190 Linguistic care, 8, 173–194, 218 linguistic care work, 8, 173–194, 218 M Magic formula, 87 Master’s students, 71, 97, 133–137, 146, 154 Micro group, 125, 135–137, 150 Mirrored retreat, 111–113

 INDEX 

Models LPAC model, 205, 207–212, 217–219 retreat model, 5, 34–36, 54, 134, 164, 167 Motherhood, 2, 5, 43, 169 Multilingualism, 47 multilingual academics, 218 N Near-peer, 8, 9, 205–206, 219 Negotiation, 18, 25, 55, 174, 193 Neoliberal, 9, 131, 133, 154, 178–180, 186, 188, 218 O Online writing retreats, 7, 107, 120, 125–127, 146, 166–169 P Parenting, 184–188 disability parenting, 184–188 motherhood, 2, 5, 43, 169 Peer, vi, 19–21, 24–26, 44, 53, 104, 118, 120, 123, 126, 136, 137, 141, 145, 179–181, 204, 210, 213, 214, 219 Peer review, 21, 179, 180 Practice transfer, 160 Pregnancy, 2, 5, 42 Productivity, vii, 5, 7, 8, 18, 35, 36, 38, 109–115, 140, 141, 146, 154, 155, 160–163, 169, 186, 188, 218 Promotion, 26, 140, 154, 203, 214, 216 Q Queer, 6, 9, 47, 186

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R Real writer, 68–70, 72, 74–86 Reflective writing, 72, 76, 80 Residential retreat, 110, 113 Retreat participants, 146–148 Risk-taking, 169, 189, 190 S Self-efficacy, 18, 68, 92, 93, 145, 212, 217 Sign language, 186, 191 Social media, 34, 47, 105, 122, 133 Social writing, 2–10, 46, 68, 71–72, 85–86, 94, 98, 99, 107, 119–121, 123, 131–156, 159–161, 176–179, 181, 183, 186, 187, 189, 192, 194, 204–219 Social writing partnerships, 183, 192, 194, 212 Strategies, 3, 52, 58, 110, 149, 187, 212 Structured writing retreats, vii, 1, 5, 7, 13, 15, 18, 24, 27, 41, 43, 50, 51, 53–55, 67, 71, 72, 85, 97–99, 107, 110, 118–121, 123–127, 133, 134, 138, 139, 144–150, 153, 155, 159–168, 179, 205, 208, 212, 214 Sustainability, 25–26 T Translanguaging, 47, 175, 192, 193 V Virtual writing retreats, see Online writing retreats

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W Wellbeing, 2–5, 7, 35, 112, 113, 118, 123, 125, 131, 133, 139, 149, 154, 162 Workshops, 51, 67, 71, 109, 115, 118, 123, 124, 126 Writer identity, 69–74, 154 Writer spectrum, 6, 67–94 Writing goals, 22, 24, 30, 110, 114, 115, 134, 147, 150 Writing group, 3, 27, 43, 44, 53, 99, 113, 114, 118, 120, 123, 124, 133, 134, 138–146, 149–155,

167, 175, 178, 179, 181, 183, 189 Writing meeting, 5, 8, 13, 18–20, 23–26, 57, 85, 137, 183, 209 writing meeting template, 20–22, 27 Writing sessions, 6–8, 42, 110, 112, 114, 117–127, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 144–147, 149–151, 153, 160, 183, 206 Z Zoom fatigue, 51, 112, 125, 169