Thread by @raulpacheco

My talk is in less than 20 minutes but I want to start a thread on projects like this from Dr. Yasmeen Abu-Laban, a full professor at @uabpols (University of Alberta’s Department of Political Science).

I think it’s amazing that Dr. Abu-Labán organizes these writing sprints.

I love the idea of "writing retreats" but I am very aware of the drawbacks and time/resource limitations of trying to organize or participate in a writing retreat. raulpacheco.org/2020/01/on-the…

I do love the concept of in-house writing retreats, such as #ShutUpAndWrite

HOWEVER...

MY own experience running a #ShutUpAndWrite workshop at CIDE was in the range of between very poor and ok-ish. I think doing it helped those who participated, but not all of them enjoyed or benefited from it to the same level that I wish they had. This frustrated me.

I don't teach academic writing at CIDE, though I do teach writing-intensive classes, and I do teach (paid) writing workshops at different universities and research centres. What frustrates me is that doing something like what Yasmeen is doing with her Writing with Yasmeen Mondays

... would only work if people formed a community around it. Drop-in sessions don't really do much for me. I feel like people don't build their skill set around what I am sharing, and I would enjoy doing writing drills and exercises while at the workshop. So I don't think I...

.. would want to follow Dr. Abu-Laban model. If I have people come and do writing with me, I think I would like them to follow through a specified syllabus, whether they are faculty or students or staff or research assistants, or whatever.

HOWEVER... I very strongly believe...

... that we need to create both the physical and the mental spaces to facilitate, enable and ENCOURAGE writing for faculty and for students raulpacheco.org/2019/08/we-nee…

In every single book I have read on #AcWri one of the key prescriptions is MAKE TIME AND SPACE TO WRITE. This is...

... not an exaggeration. EVERY. SINGLE. BOOK. I have ever read on writing, let alone academic writing, insists on space (and time) to write, from Zerubavel's The Clockwork Muse raulpacheco.org/2018/08/the-cl… to Stephen King raulpacheco.org/2018/05/on-wri… to Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler...

(link here for T&K's book) raulpacheco.org/2018/08/writin… to Henry Miller raulpacheco.org/2019/08/henry-… to Helen Sword raulpacheco.org/2017/08/air-li… to William Zinsser raulpacheco.org/2017/08/on-wri… to Eric Hayot raulpacheco.org/2019/09/the-el… to Christine Tulley's How Writing Faculty Write (thread forthcoming)

I already gave my three talks at @ualberta and this gave me an opportunity to reflect on my beginning of the thread of yesterday, and on @krgpryal 's prompt on writing retreats.

I think (like in everything) that we need to build a typology. There should be in-house and external

This is my first stab at categorizing writing retreats. I would assume that there are universities who provide in-house writing retreats with support provided.(*)

(*) if they don’t, they should. They can hire an external consultant to run a first workshop or train facilitators.

Updated my table as per Dr. Woulfin’s mention of UConn.

Anyway, this trip really gave me a new set of ideas on the kind of workshops I will be giving over the next few months.

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