Ridge Writing Retreats

Welcome to the Ridge

A Sea View

I wrote everything by hand first; it has to go through my body before it goes on screen. The breaks were so long, I couldn’t wait to get back to my text – but I wrote more. I told my reader I was writing something for her to read now, so I had to write.…

Fifty books, five ways of writing 

Do you do a reading challenge? This year’s Helsinki Libraries Challenge made me think again about ways to write. The photo shows what I read to fit the 50 categories this year. I began from my TBR pile, which to quote a colleague, Isabel, can be seen from space. If I’d bought or received it,…

An olive branch outside the academy walls

How do you find people to write with? How do you sustain the collaboration? And how do you breathe fresh air into established writing relationships? What do you expect a writing partner to do – work on the same text or different texts, in the same institution or outside, at the same career stage or…

Stet summer

Summer is coming in. You don’t have to sing cuckoo, but it helps. If you don’t know why you might, listen to Sumer is icumen in. The Hilliard Ensemble apparently have good Middle English pronunciation. I can’t judge, but would expect no less. The further north you live, the more extreme the relief. Last month…

A NEaT few years

I became vice chair of Nordic Editors and Translators (NEaT) in the middle of that first few weeks of lockdown. Two years later, I was elected chair, and this week, after four years in post, I handed over to our new chair.  For me, a key thing in positions of trust is making sure that…

Cover image: the ridge/harju in Jyväskylä. All photos (c) Kate Sotejeff-Wilson