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 not? Clarifying roles, power, and responsibilities is key to writing partnerships that work.

Verity Aitken and Lin Norton’s Writing Partnerships in Higher Education is about all this and more. In the section on cultivating writing cultures, I have a chapter on growing community outside the academy walls.

As I say there, writing cultures are often negative. Academics face pressure to publish despite structural inequalities, including gender, sexuality, and language. Yet positive writing cultures are possible, even in academia. To grow a community, writers need time and space, together. We need to water earth dried up with targets, weed inequalities, and fertilize rare seedlings. Cultivating a writing community, like a garden, requires regular practice. And adapting to inclement weather. This is easier outside the walls of institutions, but can bring winds of change into them.

Over the last seven years, I’ve been growing a community of writers. I started small with a one-off event in a cafe that used to be a library. We’ve grown to writing an hour together every week and on average for a whole day a month. In the ether and in person, more than 250 of us have gathered for more than 100 writing retreat days since 2019. Some of my fellow authors of Writing Partnerships share a similar approach to social writing. Others I’ve got to know online in the writing process, or met only in reading their text. Now I can try their ways of writing together that I’d not considered before. As Aitken and Norton say in their epilogue, can we reach out of our ivory towers to offer each other olive branches? If you can feel the floodwaters rising and wonder if it’s time to build an ark, that olive branch might not be a bad way to start growing a writing community.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit