Welcome to the Ridge
Your application, your human reader
Recently I learned that a university had proposed using an AI chatbot to write research funding applications. The writers would have to check whether the bot had hallucinated the guidelines. This led to flurry on social media. Some scholars saw it as a cynical cost-cutting, productivity-boosting exercise. What I don’t know is whether the bots…
When and where do you write best?
I’m choosing dates for my retreats in 2026. This will be the seventh year for Ridge Writing Retreats! So far, I’ve facilitated about 70 retreat days online and in person in Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Tampere and Säynätsalo, and a few hundred hours of Write on Wednesdays. I write well at all our venues, and that is…
From Dissertation to Book
When I finally got my PhD, I thought I could relax and rest on my laurels for a moment. My grandfather thought otherwise. The first thing he said after congratulating me was: when are you going to publish the book? Sad to say, twenty years later, I never quite got round to turning that monograph…
Reading to challenge your writing
This summer holiday, I finished the Helsinki libraries reading challenge for 2025 (Helmet means “Helsinki metropolitan area” by the way, not a biker’s or knight’s headgear). At new year, I had decided to face my chronic TBR problem and stop buying new books until I had read some I already have. So I pulled them…
Women writing about walking
Not that particular woman writing about walking who has been in the news recently. (I haven’t read that book, and now I don’t feel like it, though I enjoyed her two pages in this one.) Women have been writing about walking for hundreds of years. Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking brings…
Cover image: the ridge/harju in Jyväskylä. All photos (c) Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
Ridge Writing Retreats 