If you’re familiar with #AcWriMoments — the Substack newsletter that I’ve co-published since 2023 with my brilliant collaborator Margy Thomas— you may recognize this fiery pen-wand-branch as the title image for our November 2024 post, CONJURE.

First conceived as an antidote to productivity-pushing writing challenges such as #AcWriMo, our original “30 Days of #AcWriMoments” challenge consisted of 30 beautiful posts contributed by writing scholars, coaches, consultants, and editors from around the world. Each day throughout the month of November 2023, we sent out a fresh prompt inviting writers into “a sacred moment of communion with yourself and your scholarly work.”

After the November challenge ended, Margy and I missed those daily prompts; and so we returned to our readers in late December 2023 with a fresh twist on the concept:

On the first day of each month throughout 2024, we’ll offer you a unique theme to focus on in your cultivation of #AcWriMoments, along with simple prompts for integrating that theme into your daily life and work. You can return to this Monthly Guidepost again and again, experimenting with different suggestions and practices as you pursue whatever goals and visions you have for yourself that month.

Starting with WELCOME in January, we published guideposts structured around 12 resonant themes, each phrased as a verb: DEDICATE (February), RISK (March), LISTEN (April), GROW (May), CENTER (June), DREAM (July), CLARIFY (August), REFLECT (September), HARVEST (October), CONJURE (November), and ENVISION (December).

Here’s the scholarly secret that we didn’t reveal at the time: each of those themes emerged from a tarot card! In late 2023, Margy drew 12 cards (from a traditional tarot pack of 78) to offer her personal and professional guidance for her year ahead — and those cards, in turn, inspired our monthly themes.

Margy’s notes for November 2024 provide some insight into our process:

November - SHINE, GLOW, CONJURE

Emit a bright light; attract attention; radiate energy, especially positive

“November” comes from “nine,” a number of abundance

Scorpio season

Ace of Wands

In the classic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the Ace of Wands appears as a blossoming branch proffered by a giant hand emerging from a cloud.

Drawing on the card’s imagery and associations — creativity, fire, rebirth — we discussed various options for representing the theme of CONJURE. Then, letting my hands lead the way, I fashioned the paper collage that you see at the top of this post: a fountain pen that is also a blossoming branch and a magic wand, wreathed not in clouds but in fire.

Margy, meanwhile, drafted the text for our November 2024 post:

With a flash of your magic wand — aka, your pen or pencil — a word appears on the page. Then a whole sentence, a paragraph, a book! Words work magic by making the invisible manifest, materializing unseen ideas. Through words, you can remake your world: if not always your outer environment, then surely the unmapped lands within.

Words can CONJURE a feeling, an image, a memory. A concept, a narrative, a description of reality. A novel framework. An explanation. Words can sketch a tiny fragment or construct an entire parallel (or possible) universe.

Did I show Margy my collage image before she wrote her opening sentence, with its evocative flash of fire? Or did her words influence my depiction of unseen connections materialized through the magic of metaphor? To be honest, I can’t remember. Our collaborative process felt at once intensely intellectual and deeply intuitive — the best kind of scholarly alchemy.

If you’d like to learn more about how the ancient wisdom of tarot can help you unlock the unique creative power of your own scholarship, I hope you’ll sign up for our brand new Substack newsletter, Tarot for Scholars, which launched on January 1, 2025 with a “31 Days of Tarot” challenge. We will introduce one randomly drawn card each day in January (starting, not so randomly, with the Fool) before relaxing our pace to a card a week for the remainder of the year. Every post is free to all subscribers — but there’s an option to contribute to our “Helen and Margy IRL Fund” so that the two of us, who live on opposite sides of the globe, can meet up In Real Life one day. ✈️

Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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The Fool. The Hermit. The Queen of Swords. How can the richly resonant cards of the classic tarot deck help you unlock the unique creative power of your scholarship?

On December 16, I invited Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape, to join me for a conversation and workshop on "Tarot for Scholars." This two-hour Special Event was based on our shared fascination with the ancient wisdom and modern metaphorics of the tarot, which has led us to launch a new Substack newsletter, also called Tarot for Scholars.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

……………

What happens when scholarship meets intuition? At this WriteSPACE Special Event, Helen and Margy delved into a rich exploration of how tools like tarot cards can help scholars navigate both intellectual and personal challenges.

Their conversation underscored a powerful truth: academia doesn’t have to be rigidly analytical. Tools such as tarot and oracle decks, lunar writing guides, and creative prompts can offer scholars new ways to engage with their work and themselves, encouraging a balance of structure and spontaneity, discipline and intuition — a balance that in turn can lead to more authentic and impactful scholarship.

One aspect that stood out for me during the discussion was the contrast between Helen and Margy’s perspectives on tarot. Helen expressed a touch of scepticism, viewing tarot cards as thought-provoking intellectual tools rather than as divinely guided. Margy, by contrast, shared her profound belief in the mysterious universal forces at work in her life. This interplay between their views enriched the conversation, demonstrating that you don’t need to take a firm stance — whether as a mystic or a sceptic — to benefit from the wisdom of tarot.

So, whether you’re curious about integrating these tools or you already use them in your academic life, here’s an open invitation! I encourage you all to check out these three great resources:

1) Watch A Scholar’s View of Tarot. This 35-minute video offers an overview of tarot, providing a foundation and context for the 78 single-card videos that Margy and Helen will publish for their 2025 Tarot for Scholars Project.

2) In the second hour, Margy led us through a hands-on workshop with freewriting prompts about specific tarot cards and our writing. To try her prompts for yourself, you can watch the workshop video in the WriteSPACE membership area.

3) For those completely new to tarot, Margy recommends Susannah Conway’s courses, including:

• ‘Daily Guidance’: A shorter introduction to tarot and oracle cards, ideal for beginners.

• ‘78 Mirrors’: A comprehensive six-week course designed to foster a deep connection with the tarot.

• ‘Tarot for Your Inner Child’: A course that explores creativity and healing.

An enormous thanks to Helen for hosting this fascinating special event and to Margy for introducing us to the exciting world of tarot. I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet! Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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How can you translate your research IDEALS into a potent publication strategy? 

On November 19, I invited John Dumay to join me for a lively conversation and workshop on "IDEALS for Research Writing." John is Professor of Accounting and Finance at Macquarie University and the author of Academic Research, Publishing and Writing, published by Emerald Press in 2024.

In the first hour of this two-hour event, I asked John about his own research journey and prolific publication strategy, which has led to an impact ranking that places him (according to Elsevier and Stanford University) amongst the top 2% of scientists worldwide. In the second hour, John led a hands-on workshop introducing his IDEALS framework, which prompts researchers in any field to:

• Identify the problem;

• Define the context;

• Enumerate the options;

• Analyze from a critical perspective;

• List reasons explicitly; and

• Self-reflect.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

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John Dumay describes himself as an "accidental accountant"—a witty nod to his unconventional path—but he’s also a prolific, stylish, and craft-focused writer. John approaches writing methodically, breaking down elements to understand how they function before reassembling them into something exceptional. He’s a champion of lean, clear prose and has no patience for zombie nouns. As he puts it, “When you read something, you need to visualize it. Can you actually see what you’re writing? If not, there’s nothing for your brain to latch onto, and comprehension goes out the window.” To enhance clarity and engagement, he recommends using metaphors and analogies to anchor abstract ideas in concrete imagery.

One particularly fascinating insight John shared was about the art of constructing a paragraph. A paragraph, he explained, should present an argument supported by evidence—like telling a well-structured story. He used the analogy of a fairytale to highlight a common pitfall in academic writing: inconsistency.

Imagine a story where a princess is trapped in a castle guarded by a dragon. The king offers his kingdom to any hero in exchange for her rescue. A prince agrees to save her but, tired from his travels, he decides to visit a tavern first. He can’t sleep due to noise from a nearby castle, and ends up falling for a girl with glass slippers at a ball. The original princess and dragon are forgotten, leaving readers scratching their heads. John’s lesson? Don’t lead your readers on wild goose chases—stay consistent and ensure the end of your story ties back to the beginning.

John also encouraged us to innovate and break the unwritten “rules” of academic writing. He advocates for techniques such as using the first person, incorporating visual imagery, crafting engaging hooks, following the Writer’s Diet principles for clear writing, and layering arguments deliberately like a lasagna (rather than chaotically like spaghetti).

In the second hour, John introduced his IDEALS framework, an acronym outlined in his book Academic Research, Publishing and Writing (a great book for researchers in the social sciences and beyond). To try his IDEALS framework for yourself, you can watch the full two-hour video, IDEALS for Research Writing, available in the WriteSPACE membership area.

A heartfelt thanks to Helen for hosting this inspiring session and to John for generously sharing his expertise. I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet! Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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We live with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. Sometimes all we want is to feel the comforting weight of gravity pulling us down to earth. Other times we long to fly.

In my book Writing with Pleasure, I coined the moniker “flying unicorn” to describe hybrid writing tools (e.g. digital notebooks, pen-like styluses, voice-activated software) that play to our modern desire to bridge the material and digital realms. Illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh used the Procreate app on her iPad — a flying unicorn in its own right! — to draw herself gleefully riding astride that fanciful beast:

Illustration by Selina Tusitala Marsh for Writing with Pleasure

These days, I find myself scanning the skies for a different kind of flying unicorn: a fantasy creature that can bring the healing warmth of social contact to the heady magic of global digital outreach.

Indeed, I’m drafting this post while literally “in the sky,” winging my way home from a 5-week international trip that took me to on-the-ground meetings and workshops in California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Germany, and the U.K.

What a delight it was to drink coffee on Balboa Island with WriteSPACE member Karen; to celebrate a successful day of workshops in Fort Collins with Kristina, Kimi, and their colleagues in the CSU Writes program at Colorado State University; to tour San Antonio with Ebony and Molly from the The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching at Trinity University; to meet with Daniel from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and with Christelle from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in historic Heidelberg (where I also got to spend a whole week cuddling my new grandson Enrico 🥰); and to catch up with Amy, my wonderful WriteSPACE Events Manager, for a delicious Ottolenghi lunch in London.

But we don’t have to travel across the world to breathe the healing oxygen of human fellowship. As writers, we can celebrate both our roots and our wings: our beautiful handmade notebooks and our whizzy digital gadgets; our local friendships and our online communities.

Those flying unicorns are already dancing and wheeling all around us, if only we know where to find them.

For example, you could lift the ground up towards the sky by inviting a colleague to join you in person for a virtual workshop (perhaps our next WriteSPACE Special Event?)

Or you could anchor the sky to the ground by organizing a conference panel with fellow writers you’ve met online.

Or you could apply for a WriteSPACE Travel Grant designed to help you bring cloud-based resources to local colleagues and to send your earthbound writing partnerships soaring.

Ground or sky? Why not choose both?

I’d love to see you there — and in all the spaces in between!

Write with delight! For exclusive access to live workshops, craft-focused coaching, and premium writing and editing tools, join me and fellow writers from 30+ countries in the WriteSPACE, a vibrant international writing community and resource library. To try free for 30 days, click below and enter the discount code WSTRIAL-BP at checkout.

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What can academic and professional writers learn from the stunning sentences of the best creative writers?

On October 21, I invited Nina Schuyler to join me for a lively conversation and workshop on "Stunning Sentences." Nina is the author of the aptly named book How to Write Stunning Sentences and the popular Substack newsletter Stunning Sentences. She is unrivalled at unravelling complex sentences to show us how they work — and how we can make our own stunning sentences work for us and our readers.

In the first hour of this live two-hour event, I asked Nina what makes for a stunning sentence and why it’s worth paying close attention to intricacies of syntax, structure, and style. In the second hour, Nina offered a hands-on sentencing workshop for paid subscribers to our respective newsletters. To borrow Nina’s own words, we spent time “admiring, mooning over, loving, and learning to write stunning sentences.”

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

……………

Nina Schuyler is a master at deconstructing sentences with precision, helping us understand the intricate workings of grammar and syntax. She shared how her passion for perfectly crafted sentences began in childhood. As a young girl, she kept a notebook filled with sentences that moved her — phrases that struck her with awe and sounded like music to her ears. She would record these lines carefully, driven by a yearning to write with the same beauty and skill. Her journey into the world of stunning sentences has been fueled by voracious reading and a deep love of language, eventually leading her to teach style-focused workshops in an MFA creative writing program. Now, after 17 years of teaching, she’s exceptionally skilled at breaking down what makes a sentence memorable and impactful.

In a world where many academic writers suffer from “grammarphobia” (often due to limited formal training), it’s easy to think, Why focus on grammar in my writing when methodology and content seem enough? Does grammar really matter? Nina assures us that it does. Take the principle of repetition, for example. When used with intention, repeated words and phrases can add emphasis, rhythm, and depth to writing, enhancing emotion and making sentences more enjoyable to read.

Nina asks, ‘Why shouldn’t a sentence be anything but pleasurable?’ Grammatical techniques matter because they’re tools for connecting our writing to our reader’s body and senses. Writing with musicality invites readers to feel the rhythm, making each sentence a source of joy. One fascinating tip that Nina shared was about writing in sync with natural breath patterns. The human breath, in English, can hold around ten syllables before needing a pause. By keeping this rhythm in mind, writers can create a harmonious, easy flow. On the other hand, for moments of intense tension or conflict, shortening sentences to fewer than ten syllables can evoke a feeling of breathlessness, mirroring shallow breaths.

You can watch the full two-hour video of Stunning Sentences in the WriteSPACE membership area. Don’t miss the recording of the second hour, in which Nina guides you through exercises for crafting stunning sentences of your own.

A huge thank you to Helen for hosting this wonderful session and to Nina for sharing her knowledge so generously. I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet! Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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What does social balance in writing look like and feel like to you? Between the allure of solitary writing, the intimacy of a writing partnership, and the comfort of writing in community, where’s your own personal sweet spot?

To explore these questions and others like them, I invited writers to join me in September 2024 for a free WriteSPACE Special Event on Writing Together and Alone. I guided participants through a sequence of reflective exercises to help them find their own ideal balance between solitary writing and social support, and to discover some research-based strategies for establishing an ideal writing partnership, group, or community. I also offered a sneak peek at my new WriteSPACE Travel Grants, which I’m offering to members of my WriteSPACE community who don’t want to travel this challenging road on their own.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

……………

I think most of us can relate to a time in our writing lives when we felt socially unbalanced—the lone wolf, tucked away in isolation, writing a dissertation and hardly leaving the cave… the circus performer parent, juggling responsibilities with no time to write alone… or the social butterfly, flitting between too many commitments, struggling to maintain focus.

The challenge is to find a social balance for your writing—a harmony between the solitude that strengthens focus and the social encounters that ignite new ideas. Your unique context plays a role in this balance too. Helen pointed out that writers in the humanities often work in isolation, in contrast to the more collaborative research environment enjoyed by scientific teams.

So how do you know what works best for you? And how can you create a sense of group motivation, camaraderie, and peer support for your writing? These are the questions Helen’s wonderful workshop helped us explore.

We began by reflecting on the concepts of extroversion and introversion. You may be familiar with Christine Miserandino’s ‘spoon theory’. A similar metaphor can help you identify whether you're an introvert, omnivert who is introvert-leaning or extrovert-leaning, or extrovert. The "coin metaphor" illustrates this: an introvert starts the day with ten coins and spends one on every social interaction, while an extrovert starts with none and gains a coin after each interaction.

Achieving social balance in writing means recognizing where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum—this is your strength—and then complementing that strength by embracing the opposite. For example, if you’re an introvert, how are you incorporating social interactions to support your writing? If you’re an extrovert, how are you carving out space for solitary reflection on your work?

Helen then guided us through an exercise that asked us to reflect on three forms of pleasurable writing: solitary writing, writing with a friend, and writing in community. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his famous book Walden: "I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society." There’s a common misconception that Thoreau was a hermit, indifferent to others, but in fact, he hosted gatherings and was actively engaged with his neighbours and community—he, too, sought social balance.

After this reflective writing, we discussed how to design the ideal writing group tailored to your own ‘Writing BASE’, which addresses the behavioural, artisanal, social, and emotional dimensions of writing. Striking the right balance between solitude and social interaction is essential to a fulfilling writing practice. And your balance will look different from any other writer’s.

I encourage you to watch the full video to engage with Helen’s reflective writing prompts and take the BASE quiz, which can help you identify your strengths in writing practice.

A big thank you to Helen for designing such an insightful workshop. I look forward to seeing you all at the next Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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Writing is a fundamentally social act. We write to connect with other people, to persuade and delight them, and to understand our relationships with them.

Paradoxically, however, writing is also a fundamentally solitary act. Even for authors who research and publish collaboratively, most writing starts out as words scrawled, tapped, or typed by one person’s fingers or articulated by one person’s voice in response to signals emanating from that one person’s singular brain.

So where does pleasure sit within this social-to-solitary human spectrum? Everywhere! While researching my 2023 book Writing with Pleasure, I asked nearly 500 academic writers from around the world to recall a time in their life when writing gave them pleasure. The writers in my study described joyful experiences of writing with others and writing solo; of writing among others and writing alone; of writing for others and writing just for themselves.

And then there were all the pleasurable places and practices in between. The crowded café where a lone writer sits scribbling at a corner table, drinking “deep, rich, bitter” coffee and patting the occasional passing dog. The dining room of an old farmhouse where three sisters work silently on their homework, eating steamed damsoms as the trams rattle past. The rented beachhouse where four colleagues gather to bash out a book manuscript, alternating between solo writing sprints and intense group discussion. (“We had ourselves, our computers, our editor, and a lot of gummy bears.”)

I also noted an intriguing variation on the social-yet-solitary theme — scenes of writing infused with a shared intimacy that might best be described as plaisir à deux:

Writing at Harry’s writing desk. Light comes in through the windows, the curtains glow red with the setting sun. Harry helps me edit and reshape my work. I know what I am doing and enjoy the collaborative act of seeing the work take shape. I have been researching this article for 6 months and am excited by the ideas I have. I am sitting on a soft antique chair with the man I love. Aesthetically I like looking at Harry, at the books which line the shelves and at the two computer screens so that we can research and write at the same time. I feel comfortable and excited about the work we are producing. New ideas keep emerging. (Jennifer, lecturer in dance, United Kingdom)

In one memorable narrative, writing alone together takes on the flavor of a secret love affair:

I remember writing and getting drunk. Drunk on alcohol, but also inebriated with life and being together with another writer. This was illicit. We met at the head office where we both worked. He was taking stolen time away from his wife and their infant son. I was in a relationship with a man who had moved back to Germany, leaving me alone in Brussels at the office where I had a rather manual job to fulfil. The writing took place in our separate offices. There was no one else around. Just him two offices further up the corridor and me in my shared office. We were both secretly working on novels. He and I never had an amorous relationship, and yet were conjoined during those stolen hours. (Sofia, associate professor of literature, Sweden)

In another, plaisir à deux swells into plaisir à quatre:

It was fifty years ago—almost exactly. I was an exchange student, writing with a cousin of my host family. Jens—the cousin—and I wrote a letter together, addressed to the host family’s daughter—the cousin’s cousin—and her best friend. Boy and boy writing to girl and girl. We laughed. We (almost) cried. Together we decided that, since his cousin was family, the part of this letter—and it was sort of a collective love letter—that he wrote had to be directed to the friend. But actually he liked the actual cousin more, while I had a crush on the cousin’s friend. The hour or so we spent doing this was among the happiest I can recall. Looking back, I am struck by how unmixed and unhesitant and uncomplicated the pleasure of writing was. (David, professor of German, Vermont, USA)

I love how each of these stories reveals multiple layers of intimacy in and around a scene of writing: between lover and lover, colleague and colleague, boy and boy, boy(s) and girl(s), cousin and cousin, writer and writer.

Psychologist Danielle Knafo observes that words like solitude, relationship, intimacy, and connectedness are fluid, dynamic, and contestable: “We connect, disconnect, leave, come back, move in, move out; boundaries are drawn and erased as a relationship expresses the flux of its function and meaning.” (Knafo, Dancing with the Unconscious, 94). Somewhere in that flux, each of us may be fortunate enough to achieve our own state of pleasurable social balance from time to time: between networking and focus, between conversation and introspection, between expansiveness and intimacy, and between the comforts of human contact and the exhilaration of solitude.

[Adapted from Chapter One of Writing with Pleasure, “Society and Solitude”]

……………

So, what does social balance in writing look like and feel like to you? For more thoughts on the lure of the crowd, the call of the hermit's cave, and the deep pleasures of intimacy, watch the recording of my live Special Event ‘Writing Together and Alone’ (WriteSPACE members can find the recording on their Videos page) or read the summary blog post for some hand-picked insights.

Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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During August 2024, I invited writers from all over the world to join me for a productive, nurturing 5-day writing retreat at home with twice-daily inspiration and a supportive community of other writers.

This 5-day self-paced writing retreat was designed for any kind of writer, including those who aspire to carve out just an hour or two of daily writing time and those who are looking for a full-on immersive experience.

If you missed this event, you may wish to read some of the excellent tips and tricks shared by writers below. And if you’re keen to try it for yourself, you can conduct your own solo writing retreat for free, any time by registering below.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the retreat:

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Motivated by the uplifting support of fellow writers, this stay-at-home retreat provided the ideal opportunity to focus on those long-neglected writing goals. Helen’s videos each day posed challenges and taught us frameworks for productivity, such as SAFE goals (Simple, Attainable, Forgiving, and Easy!) and the SPACE rubric for pleasurable writing (Socially balanced, Physically engaging, Aesthetically nourishing, Creatively challenging, Emotionally uplifting). Helen encouraged us to set a new SAFE goal each morning and enhance one part of our writing SPACE before reflecting at the end of the day. These frameworks help us to be present in our mind and body when we sit down to write.

I was grateful to read everyone’s reflections, many of which were filled with useful tips and resources. I’ve compiled a selection of lively links for you to browse through below:

Shake it out during a writing break!

• Try the joy workout! https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/well/move/joy-workout-exercises-happiness.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EU4.gsVe.3AVsEYSiBARP&smid=em-share

• A great morning stretch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6kADa5Gtzw

• Jessica Smith’s workout videos on youtube (for every level and time frame!) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7wvgp4HUBe5TD10jIgxDg and Chris Dorner's step aerobics videos (wonderfully motivational) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzrxJR7KMKY

• If you fancy a yoga stretch, Boho Beautiful (filmed on beaches and mountaintops) and Yoga with Adrianne (for all levels) are great. DailyOm is a great holistic wellness resource with everything from chair workouts to meditation.

• If you’re not yet convinced that exercise is a must for your writing, watch this podcast about the positive effects of exercise on the brain (specifically the pre-frontal cortex for focus and the hippocampus for memory). I thoroughly recommend it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o-tRub-0pQ

Be carried away by the music!

• Hans Zimmer's ‘Green Card’ movie soundtrack (not too distracting and keeps a good tempo) and the Bridgerton soundtrack (upbeat and motivating) are two good options.

• For classical music, consider Cosi fan tutte or the Magic Flute (classics!) or Jordi Savall’s baroque chorale music (nice morning music). If you like sound of the mandolin in the afternoon,  try Chris Thile’s acoustic songs.

• Helen recommends bringing nature into your writing space by listening to birdsong recordings. Here is a beautiful recording featuring New Zealand native birds (At the beginning you can hear the voice of the Tui bird - my personal favourite - which mimics other birdsong, creating a surprisingly melodic cacophony of caws, trills, guttural splutters)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvCsYFZ0vQ

  A key takeaway for me was the idea that a chapter or writing breakthrough could be associated with a piece of music. When you hear it again, you can remember that powerful writing moment!

Time your writing sessions!

• Many of the writers found Pomodoro timers to be an excellent resource—Helen has funky timers in the WriteSPACE and on her YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmDOJEzeDAQ&list=PLco278p-n5o-E4HpODgdyXmWbDYQZbkpH

• An app you you may like to try is the Bear Focus Timer https://www.bearfocustimer.com/  (cute illustrations and good if you enjoy white noise while working).

I’ll end this quick summary with one writer’s reflection about beautiful writing:

My aim has always been to craft a beautiful thesis - in fact, when my supervisors asked for a plan it was in bullet point format and started with 'write 100, 000 beautiful words', then 'obsess over commas (a little too much)' - I said I wanted it to be a page-turner, a good read, but they said that can wait until the thesis is turned into a book. My argument is: why wait? Why forego the pleasure of crafting words that are, as Helen describes, 'aesthetically nourishing' to both me and my readers? I’m so glad I signed up for this week!

I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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What is that jewel-eyed bird saying to the glowing glass heart in the sky?

The answer lies inside your notebook. Unlock your own truth by picking up your favorite pen, setting a timer for ten minutes, and writing whatever words flow through your heart and hand onto the page.  

          Your title: "What the Bird Said"
          Your topic: Your writing

I tested out this prompt on the participants in two recent Virtual Writing Studio sessions. Their responses were lyrical, honest, and wise:

• The bird said: I perch in awe of the perfect writing – the heart – that stands out in the grey background, ready to take flight towards it. I prime my wings and aim toward clear, concrete, concise, and colourful writing. (Vicky, UK)
  

• I overheard the bird talking not long after I presented a conference paper titled "What can positive psychology offer to maths teaching and learning?" The bird said: "So now we are expected to be psychologists as well as maths lecturers? That bird is crazy! If I try to advise students on things beyond maths, why should they believe me?" (Anita, South Africa)
  

• I wrote about a rejection letter that I received last week. When I criticized my writing and myself, the bird reminded me that I should be more compassionate and supportive of myself. (Angelica, Texas, USA)
  

• The bird said: Perhaps try writing less and listening more. Research is a crafting art. Listen for the story in the sunrise, in the river running, in the teeth of old auntie casuarina. You worry too much about writing. Words are helpful, but they are not enough to fully express a life well-lived, or the ancient wisdom of Indigenous Songlines, or the importance of earthworm encounters. Sit with me awhile and we will listen together. (Nina, Australia)
  

• The bird said: Let your writing move like me through the blue sky … let it go anywhere; it can soar to great heights and it can swoop close to the ground. When you need to, you can take a rest on high branches; at other times, you can write with others – a murmuration of writespacers. You fly to make meaning, to come to know but most importantly, to connect your lines of flight with others. (James, UK)
  

• “Take heart,” the bird said. “As the sun burns, so does the ever-present inspiration for your writing”. How did it know that I was in the process of floundering, lost in a sea of data, demands, and deadlines? I sat back and contemplated its words, feeling for the first time in a while a sense of calm as I turned back to the screen. The words on the page suddenly seemed clearer, less imposing. The sun was in the sky, it was heart-shaped, and birds talked. Things weren’t so bad after all, and neither was my writing. (Victoria, Australia)

Creative writing prompts like this one can help you discover things about yourself that you didn't know you know. They fire our imagination and light up our words.

What are you waiting for? It’s time to open your notebook, fill your pen, and find out what that mysterious bird is telling you.

For more writing prompts like this one, check out the "Writing Warmups" playlist on my Helen's Word YouTube channel or visit my Live Writing Studio, where I'll invite you to get your creative juices flowing with some playful, permissive freewriting before we turn to more "serious" writing tasks. If you're not already a WriteSPACE member, you can use the discount code SNEAKPEEK for a sneaky month of free membership.

I'd love to see you there!

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Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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I clipped the maps, buildings, and grids in this colorful paper collage from a community theatre prospectus that I picked up in Lucerne, Switzerland on the way to my annual Mountain Rise writing retreat. (What an amazing week that was!) The two appliquéd birds graced a postcard that I purchased in early June at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and I cut out the two Swiss chalets from a tourist brochure advertising tours of a chocolate factory.

Together, these images represent many different kinds of structure: textual, textural, architectural. And what better way to invoke the varied structures of scholarly writing — and to launch my new 6-week focus on Structure — than with a riotous array of straight lines and curved lines, buildings and birds, maps and metaphors?

In early July 2024, in addition to launching ‘Structural Metaphors’ (a 6-week Swordcraft series exploring metaphors for structuring six key aspects of your scholarly writing) and the Structure Sequence of the Live Writing Studio, I also hosted a free 2-hour Special Event all about structure! There I took attendees through a series of strategies for finding the best structure for a current book, thesis, article, chapter, or any other writing project they wanted to focus on. The aim was to create a new structural design by the end of the session. 

If you missed this live Special Event, you can register below for the free recording of the live session, or read the highlights below. Enjoy!

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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This session was such a treat! Helen coached the attending writers through an interactive structure exercise, with just 30 scraps of paper and 30 minutes. If you’re working on a book or a thesis with many different facets or chapters, this workshop is for you! (Click the green button above to receive the video link). This workshop was great for experimenting with new arrangements, hierarchies, and ways of thinking. Helen also asked us to consider metaphors to invoke new sets of ideas: What would happen if I think about my book or article as a tree? or a city? or a map?

There are, of course, several fantastic tools for a more linear structural organisation (if that floats your boat) — for example, Helen mentioned how to ‘outline’ your structure, revealed tricks for using Scrivener, and recommended Margy Thomas’s ‘fractal structure’, which helps keep sections consistent in length and depth. But it’s worthwhile exploring non-linear tools, too, such as radial mind-mapping using color, metaphor, and sketches. Helen encouraged us to consider how we might approach a linear artefact such as a book using a non-linear structure to give the reader multidimensional ways to read it. (Challenging, but not impossible!) For a great example, take Helen’s book Writing with Pleasure, which was structured like a mosaic mirror—you really don’t need to read this book in a set order. Or Douglas Hofstadter’s book: Gödel, Escher, Bach, which subdivides chapters in a playful way.

It was wonderful to hear the comments from each of the attendees at the live workshop and their takeaways. Helen mentioned that it’s useful to understand the differences between stages of structuring your writing. Ideation (the inception of an idea, the spark that ignites the creative flow), leads to conceptualization (which refines the raw idea into an overall plan), and builds an architecture of ideas (which organises the information). Workshops like this one walk you through these stages, and then you can use metaphor and linear tools to solidify the direction of your project. Interestingly, the more seemingly unstructured or non-linear the topic, the more it lends itself to really strong structural thinking!

A big thank you to Helen for this very helpful Special Event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again at the next Live Writing Studio.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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In the heart of the beautiful summertime Swiss Alps, Helen hosted her annual virtual retreat sessions from Chalet Alpenheim in Wengen. Each session offered a tour of the retreat venue, followed by some reflective writing designed to shift writers into the relaxed-but-energized creative mindset of "retreat mode."

If you missed this event, you can register below for the video recording of the live session, or read Amy’s personal account and follow the exercise prompts below.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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Wengen is not only an ideal place to hike and admire nature, it is a fabulous place to write. Maybe it’s something in the air that sweeps in through the beautiful valley. Perhaps it’s simply the exceptional company of like-minded writers. Whatever it is, inspiration flows freely there!

This year, Helen took her Open Chalet visitors on a simulated retreat, journeying up and back down the mountain with multiple writing prompts. It’s definitely a good idea to dedicate half an hour to follow along with the live video (click the green button above), or you can sample the first few reflective prompts below:

• Where are you starting from on your journey today? For example, ‘I am starting from a place of anxiety’ or ‘I am starting a new project that is exciting but needs quite a lot of mental heavy lifting.’ How far have you travelled to get here? (2 minutes)

• Where do you want your next writing journey to take you? Interpret this question however you want! It could be your very next chapter or your next 6 months of writing… (2 minutes)

• In Wengen, you can take the cable car up the mountain and walk up to the viewing platform shaped like a crown. What are some of the values and interests that have brought you to this place? (2 minutes to brainstorm)

• Of all the interests and values that you’ve identified, what are some of the brightest jewels in your crown?

For the full series of prompts, register for the video above—it’s well worth it!

I want to say a warm thank you to this year’s retreaters (it is you who make Mountain Rise so special), to all the writers who came along to the Open Chalet this year and simulated their own retreats, and to Helen for guiding us through these fun and insightful writing prompts. After seeing the drawing of my dissertation structure, I hope you might be inspired to create your own structural map of your project or a reflective map of your professional writing journey. And if you would like to share it with us, you can send it via this link! I would really love to see it.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the Open Chalet at Mountain Rise 2024 video in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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It’s my birthday today, so I’ve baked a cake!

Okay, so it’s a virtual cake, not a real one. But it still looks pretty delicious, doesn’t it? I started with a dark chocolate base spread with white icing, then added a pile of gleaming red cherries, a wreath of blue macarons, and a golden rose in the center.

Birthday Cake is the latest video in my new Sharing Plates collection, a series of on-demand writing studio sessions that I’ve created exclusively for my WriteSPACE membership community — but because it’s my birthday, I’m sharing this Sharing Plate with the world.

The full 65-minute video includes:

• a playful, generative writing warmup (“Silk Scarf”);

• three short writing sprints (aka pomodori) timed with a strawberry, a blue macaron, and a champagne bucket, respectively; and

• a wordcraft workout on the theme of mixed metaphors (“Mixed Drinks”).

To get the most from this sweet treat, I recommend that you set aside enough time to make your way through the full 65-minute sequence in a single sitting. Afterwards, if I’ve got the recipe right, you’ll feel nourished, inspired, and eager for more.

You can savor this Sharing Plate on your own or in the company of other writers. Either way, I hope that your writing session will feel like a piece of cake!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find this video and other Sharing Plates in their Video library.  

Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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I’m irrationally excited to announce a new set of resources that I’ll be adding to my WriteSPACE membership area over the next few months: Sharing Plates. The first video in the series, Caprese Salad, is now available in the WriteSPACE Library, and in celebration of its launch I’m posting a free version here. Enjoy!

So what’s a Sharing Plate? Well, you’re probably already familiar with the “Pomodoro Technique,” a time management method that originated in the late 1980s. Writer Francesco Cirillo used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (“pomodoro” in Italian) to set short writing sprints for the members of his writing group, who would write together in silence for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute stretching break, and then repeat the process a few more times.

Cirillo’s simple “shut up and write” method (or, as I prefer to call it, “show up and write”) proved useful for many writers, so the technique spread far and wide, along with its unusual name. I like the method so much that I’ve stocked the WriteSPACE Library with no fewer than 37 different pomodoro timer videos, ranging from 5 to 40 minutes long. Each one offers a different timer (not just tomatoes!) that you can use to time your own writing sprints: a purple penguin, a blue macaron, a silver champagne bucket, and many more. These playful pomodori won’t magically transform you into a more stylish or productive writer, but at least they can help bring some pleasure to your writing process.

For years, WriteSPACE members have been asking me to make some longer timer videos — and now, at last, I’ve done it! Weaving together existing videos from my YouTube channel with newly-filmed material, I’ve created a series of self-contained, on-demand writing studio sessions.

Each themed 1- to 2-hour Sharing Plate video consists of a brief introduction, a creative or reflective writing warm-up, a sequence of timed writing sprints with short stretching breaks in between, and a Wordcraft Workout — that is, a writing or editing exercise designed to develop your craft as a writer.

Ideally, I hope that you’ll consume these Sharing Plates in the company of other writers, either virtually or “in real life” — but of course you’re also welcome to savor them on your own. Just set aside an hour or two of focused writing time, choose a Sharing Plate from the WriteSPACE Library (more are coming soon!) and start writing.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find this video and other Sharing Plates in their Video library.  

Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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During the first week of May, I invited writers to join me for two free online Writer’s Diet Clinics, in which we discussed how to cook up delicious, nourishing prose for your readers to savor!

If you missed this event, you can register below for the free 25-minute Writer’s Diet Tutorial video, recorded during the live clinic on May 8. In the tutorial, you will learn about the online Writer’s Diet Test and my premium Writer’s Diet PLUS tool for WriteSPACE members.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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In the first hour of each session, Helen guided participants through a brief Writer’s Diet tutorial to introduce her free online Writer's Diet diagnostic tool and its younger, more sophisticated sibling, the Writer’s Diet app for MS Word. (Some seasoned WD users could opt to spend that time doing a 25-minute pomodoro instead). In the second hour, Helen ran a live writing clinic to help the writers make sense of their Writer’s Diet test results.

The Writer’s Diet is an excellent diagnostic tool; I use it regularly for my own writing. You can paste in a text sample of anywhere from 100 to 1000 words to get a diagnosis, which is split into different categories. If you get a diagnosis of ‘Heart Attack’ or similar, the results will light up with rainbow colours, indicating you have many editing options available. In the case of this tool, the more colour you see, the more your verbal arteries are being clogged (metaphorically speaking, of course).

I love that you can filter by specific categories with the test. You click on each box, and it will give you the diagnosis just for that category. Helen offered some golden advice for this test: Take it with a little pinch of salt. Remember that it’s an algorithm, and you are the style expert of your own work. It’s easy to assume that you must eliminate all of those coloured problem words—which would be difficult and unnecessary. You don’t have to remove them all, but it does teach you about your default word selection. I tend to towards ‘misty’ with be-words, something that I always check for! Using a lot of be-words can mean too many passive verb constructions. So when I revise, I remove ‘is’ and introduce active and robust verbs to drive my writing forward.

If you have yet to take the test, I hope you’ll enjoy exploring its many insights. And don’t forget to watch Helen’s tutorial via the green link above. A big thanks to Helen for hosting these two wonderful sessions. I look forward to seeing you all at the next WriteSPACE special event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Writer’s Diet Tutorial in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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What do neurodiverse/neurodivergent writers need in order to flourish? As teachers, colleagues, and mentors, how can we best support them? And if you identify as neurodiverse/neurodivergent yourself, what strategies can help you cope with the demands of mainstream academic writing?

On April 18, I invited Eirini Tzouma for a lively conversation on "Supporting Neurodiverse Writers".  Eirini Tzouma is an Academic Development Advisor at the University of Durham and the author of a recent guest post in the Thesis Whisperer blog about the many challenges faced by neurodiverse writers in academe. As Eirini reminds us, "Neurodiversity/divergence isn't a problem to be fixed; it's a vital part of the mosaic of who we are."

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Eirini and I discussed neurodiversity and neurodivergence in scholarly writing. In the second hour, we led a hands-on workshop for paid subscribers in which we responded to questions from participants and led a brief writing experiment.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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We all think, learn, and process and perceive information differently from person to person, so neurodiversity is a matter that concerns us all. Traditional approaches to education have not always recognised that diversity; but, thankfully, the tides are beginning to turn with conversations like this one between Helen and Eirini.

Some memorable quotes from this WriteSPACE Special Event:

• “Curiosity and learning are always the best starting place.”

• On terminology: “Neurodiversity can describe the diversity that exists in a room full of people that are ‘neurotypical’ (if such a thing exists) and ‘neurodivergent’… Some people, because they find that this is hard language and can be stigmatizing, prefer the term neurodiverse. Others want to claim it and say ‘Indeed there are neurotypical assumptions, and that’s why we need systematic change’ — these people often prefer the term neurodivergence.”

• “Most senior academics don’t realise that what works for them won’t work for everyone… In fact, life’s a bit like that! Nothing new is going to work for everyone.”

As a teacher, Eirini advocates for encouraging dialogue about neurodiversity/neurodivergence in the classroom or workplace and inviting people to express any specific needs. As students become more articulate about expressing their needs, a teacher may begin to worry that their workload will be weighed down by requests. However, Eirini counters this concern with the Theory of Universal Design, which focuses on improving accessibility for everyone. Overall, it is far more helpful to have students express their concerns directly to you than to fill in the gaps with assumptions and judgments.

Many of the 40 participants at the live event had a direct connection to the topic of writing with neurodiversity and wanted to share their stories. What struck me profoundly was the overwhelming similarity of their experiences. The story often begins with feeling misunderstood or being told you are doing things wrong in your early years. Then you embark on a journey of higher education and stumble across a diagnosis of dyslexia/ADHD/autism/or another form of neurodiversity in your late twenties or even early thirties. You may have been told that ‘you’re just not cut out for academe’, your supervisor may not be equipped with resources to help you, and you find yourself elbows deep in it all. Versions of this experience were repeated many times in our Special Event chat.

This is also the story of my brother, who was diagnosed with ADHD just last year at 26 years old, during the third year of his PhD. My brother struggled with writing in school but now consistently receives grades of A+. I’m always impressed by him — he really has the traits of a successful PhD student: amazing attention to detail, unwavering commitment and passion (aka a kind of beautiful nerdiness for a really niche area), out-of-the-box thinking, and deep creativity.

While there are many positive aspects to neurodivergence, some participants at the Special Event were wary of calling it “a superpower,” a term that can sound dismissive of the very real challenges faced by neurodiverse/neurodivergent writers in mainstream academic environments: skill regression, burnout, juggling many things at once, cycles of re-learning and re-adjusting, and avoiding tangential rabbit warrens in your research, among other things. From the discussion, I concluded that it’s useful to frame neurodiversity, especially ADHD, as neither a gift nor a disability, but rather a condition that requires management in non-stimulating (or specific) contexts. When you’re interested in a task, the ADHD brain will be highly motivated and may hyperfixate, which can keep you writing for hours on end. But if you find the task non-stimulating, your focus withers, writing flow dies up, and procrastination creeps in. By the same token, hyperfixation for long periods can often be overwhelming. Overall, checking in regularly with yourself and your motivation for the topic is key.

Eirini explained that, as yet, relatively few research-based articles have been published about the challenges of helping teachers, colleagues, and mentors support neurodiverse students, and fewer still offer strategies for coping with the demands of mainstream academic writing if you identify as neurodiverse/neurodivergent yourself. But don’t despair! I collected a few gems of wisdom from the Special Event participants, which I added to Eirini’s own reference list to create a Writing with Neurodiversity Toolkit.

Teachers and students alike can benefit from Erini’s strategy “Starting on the Right Foot,” which she developed to help those with neurodiversity/neurodivergence engage in professional writing or working relationships. The strategy involves reflecting on your responsibilities, working style, and expectations, and it encourages you to communicate these openly with your working partner during what Eirini calls the “contractual stage.” Her resource is generously provided below so that you, too, can start on the right foot in conversations about writing with your students or colleagues.

A big thanks to Helen and Eirini for sharing their time, expertise and ideas so generously. If you did not attend or have not yet watched the recording, I hope you’ll make a cup of tea, get comfortable, and enjoy this wonderful discussion.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can watch the recording of the full two-hour event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them [. . .]
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

When we stand outside and look up at the stars, we cannot help feeling that we are a part of something much greater than ourselves, a mysterious cosmic dance that cannot be fully captured in human language or explained by the charts of the learned astronomer. At the same time, that “mystical moist night-air” touches our minds and bodies with a kind of astral intimacy, conveying messages that seem intended just for us.

The writing process can feel like that too sometimes: intimate, overwhelming, and altogether too vast and complex to comprehend. Whether we face that process on our own or in the company of others, we are all adventurers making our way in the dark.

Tupaia, the Tahitian celestial navigator who sailed with Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Pacific, did not find his way by starlight alone; he also knew how to read the swell of the ocean currents, the drift of the wind, the cries of the seabirds wheeling overhead, the types of fish that the sailors landed in their nets, and the texture of the seaweed that trailed from their bow. Tupaia’s extraordinary knowledge of the locations of surrounding islands—many of them hundreds of miles away—was recorded on a map that subsequent commentators labeled “primitive” because the relational network it conveyed did not employ European conventions of plotting directionality from north to south.

Tupaia’s map of the South Pacific, drawn by Captain Cook and others on board the Endeavor, makes perfect sense if you read it based on a Polynesian worldview .

Similarly, it took European sailors more than two centuries to realize that the intricate rebbelib (stick charts) used by Marshall Islanders as navigational aids are designed to map the intensity of the ocean swells between neighboring islands, not their relative distance or location.

A rebbelib housed at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (Credit: Cullen328)

Such stories of colonial myopia offer powerful lessons for writers from any culture. To a stranger, our own personal rebbelib might look like a chaotic jumble of sticks and shells. For us, it shows the way home.

Rebbelib drawing by Selina Tusitala Marsh for Writing with Pleasure

Take another look at the collage at the top of this post. What do you see there: a sun, a star, a compass? What other shapes and patterns do you notice when you allow your eyes to soften and linger? Amongst all the straight lines and curved lines, the sunbursts and spirals, what pathways can you trace — real, imagined, or desired?

In nearly two decades of writing about writing, I’ve learned the folly of pointing any writer down a single unidirectional pathway towards meaningful writing: for example, towards productivity or style or community or pleasure. The compass rose of writing offers us not a set of stark choices — north or south or east or west — but a starburst of possibilities, a dynamic creative field.

If you’re an academic or professional writer still trying to find your way, check out my new WriteSPACE Journey Planner. I’ll help you chart a route and itinerary tailored just for you.

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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On March 20, I invited Dr. Sarah Fay for a lively conversation on "Scholarly Writers on Substack".  Sarah Fay, author of the popular Substack Writers @ Work newsletter, is an expert consultant who helps writers flourish on this powerful (but sometimes rather confusing and complicated!) publishing platform.

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Sarah and I discussed why scholarly writers might choose to publish on Substack and how they can thrive there. In the second hour, we led a hands-on workshop for paid subscribers of our respective membership communities (my WriteSPACE and Sarah’s Substack Writers @ Work) in which we responded to questions about how to get started on Substack and enhance your writing aspirations and goals.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

Some memorable quotes from Sarah and Helen’s conversation:

• “Substack may be the university of the future”

• “If you’re passionate about academia but struggle to churn out words in a publish-or-perish kind of way, then Substack can alleviate some of this stress.”

• “Substack can let the fatigued academic write in a different voice”

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In the first hour, Sarah revealed the fascinating evolution of her career as a Substack whisperer, coaching countless writers on how to make their newsletters thrive on the platform. Sarah and Helen then explored all of the fabulous and uplifting reasons why any academic could and should start a Substack newsletter. If you’re an academic, chances are you’re passionate about the niche you write in, and sharing your writing publicly with others isn’t unfamiliar. You’re also no stranger to hard work and can probably squeeze in a once-per-week, or even once-per-month, publishing schedule.
If this sounds like you, Substack may just be the ticket! The thing is, as an expert writer in your field, no one else can do what you do. And your writing probably solves a problem that some people are willing to pay to solve. While Substack can be a great form of additional income, both Sarah and Helen advocate it as a great tool for academics specifically. It can:

1. Amplify your academic work by reaching new and interdisciplinary audiences

2. Supplement your academic writing and your writing skills—you could write about your academic work in a different voice or for a different readership, transforming your research into long-form journalism or creative writing

3. Allow you to take a break from your academic writing life entirely and focus on exploratory, creative, playful writing

In the second hour of this Special Event, Sarah and Helen answered participants’ questions and offered tips and tricks for successful newsletters, including these gems:

• Opt for fewer words and more engaging multimedia content (that said, there are readers who love really long rambling posts on Substack. If this is you, try to target your audience. An unfiltered mode of writing can be a great hook for readers).

• Re-stacking inspiring posts with a note is a great way to get noticed and join the community. People will likely re-stack your posts in response!

• Start from an exploratory place, it’s fine to make changes to your title or subject as you go along.

If you have or are considering your own Substack, do tune into the recording of the live event available in the WriteSPACE under ‘Videos’. At the end of the video, you’ll find Sarah’s writing prompts for analysing your current substack and/or exploring new possibilities.

Thank you to Sarah and Helen for an inspiring and informative exploration of Substack for academic writing, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your comments and engaging questions.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can now watch the recording of the full two-hour event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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Over the years, I’ve written a lot about writing and risktaking: for example here and here and here. All writing is risky, after all — and as a scholar, mentor, and tireless advocate of stylish academic writing, I see it as my mission to empower writers to face those risks with courage, resilience, and even joy.

Rēinga is a hypermedia poem about creative risktaking that enacts and embodies creative risktaking. Cape Rēinga is the place in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand where, according to Māori legend, the souls of the dead leap down the roots of an old pōhutukawa tree and start their journey to their ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki. Rēinga variously signifies “the place of leaping,” “the departing place of spirits,” or “the netherworld,” the place where the spirits go.

First published in March 2009 in ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, Rēinga exists in three different versions in my online poetry collection The Stoneflower Path (2007-2009): as a hypermedia digital poem; as a plain text linear poem; and as an audio recording.

The poem at the top of this post, recorded in March 2024, is clearly different from the one that I recorded back in 2009, not only in terms of my reading pace (slower) and the timbre of my voice (older), but because the words are different. That’s because neither of these recordings fully captures the complexity of the “real” hypermedia poem, which exists in potentially millions of versions.

Do you find the prospect of leaping into a bottomless poem discomforting? Exhausting? Exhilarating? I suspect that your answer to that question will tell you something about your own propensity to take creative risks — or not. Either way, I hope that my guided tour into and through the labyrinthine roots of Rēinga will inspire you to try something new, maybe even something risky, in your own writing.

Enjoy!

The Stoneflower Path

Fifteen years after I first planted The Stoneflower Path in cyberspace, the whizzy website of which I was once so proud now looks as clunky and dated as Bill Clinton’s Blackberry. That’s the risk, I guess, of creating at the cutting edge (or, in my case, at the colorful edge) of technology: everything ages so quickly. An even greater risk, I secretly suspected at the time, was irrelevance. I put in many hours creating those two dozen digital poems using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Audacity, and Flash; but was anyone ever going to read them, engage with them, remember then? Much as I feared, my self-published collection attracted little critical attention and slowly faded into obsolescence. (Only recently has the tide turned; a few months ago I learned that The Stoneflower Path is now considered a digital literary landmark!)

My hypermedia collection deliberately spotlights the risks and rewards of hypertext, the literary genre that The Stoneflower Path at once embodies, critiques, and celebrates. A hypertext is any text that contains hyperlinks: that is, digital links to words, images, or other media in or beyond the text.1 Hyperlinks offer readers a convenient way of accessing information related to what they’re reading, which is why they’ve become such a familiar presence in virtually every text designed to be read online (including this one). But those temptingly highlighted links risk disrupting the linear flow of our reading and directing our attention elsewhere, much as a footnote drags our eyes to the bottom of the printed page.

When planted deliberately to confuse or misdirect, hyperlinks can lead us off the beaten track completely, sending us spinning into a textual maze with no clearly marked exit. That’s how Rēinga works — and that’s why reading the full hypermedia version of the poem requires a willingness to leap into the dark.

At the place of leaping

First conceived of and published before smartphones and touchscreens became ubiquitous, Rēinga is best experienced on your desktop computer or laptop using a mouse or trackpad.

When you enter the poem by clicking on the title, you’ll always be directed to the same static image — a stained glass mosaic depicting a pōhutukawa tree, two sailboats, and a full moon — and the same opening line:

At the place of leaping

From there, however, the poem bifurcates. As you move your mouse around over the tree, the land, the sea, and the sky, you’ll discover two live hyperlinks. This is your first moment of uncertainty, your first leap into the unknown. A click on the lower sailboat takes you to a glowing purple-and-orange image with the line, This is how I want to live:

A click on the upper sailboat takes you to a grayscale image with the line, This is how I want to die:

From there, it’s no longer a matter of leaping off the cliff into life or death so much as swimming in a roiling sea of possibilities. With 20 live hyperlinks per screen (18 pōhutukawa blossoms + 2 sailboats + 1 moon, minus the current link) leading to more than 50 possible image-plus-line combinations (I used every single Photoshop filter!), you can often create a poem of 20 lines, 30 lines, or more without encountering a single repeated line.

The moon delivers only moon-related phrases, and the sailboats always bring you back to the same two choices — this is how I want to live, this is how I want to die — so you can use those three objects to create some structure for your wanderings. For example, to generate a 16-line poem with a similar cadence to my two voice recordings, try the following sequence of clicks:

at the place of leaping
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]

[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[blossom]
[blossom]
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:

Then return to the place of leaping (either by using your back button or by closing your browser window) and repeat the sequence without making any effort to follow exactly the same path. You’ll end up with a new poem that sounds and feels similar to the first, yet hauntingly different.

The hypertext of life

Life is a hypertext, full of risky leaps into the unknown. So is writing. So is art — or, for that matter, any form of creative practice.

In a post titled RISK, our #AcWriMoments prompt for the month of March 2024, Margy Thomas and I each recalled a risk that we’ve taken in our own professional lives. I reflected on how, back in 2001, my husband and I decided to move from our comfortable home in the Midwestern United States to a small island nation in the South Pacific with our three kids, all our earthly possessions, and no jobs or likely job prospects in the academic fields we had left behind:

Those first few years were tough, as we struggled to find our feet personally and professionally. But eventually we both reinvented ourselves in new careers that suited us even better than the ones we’d left behind, and our children got to grow up amongst friends and family in one of the most beautiful countries on earth, a place with strong social and community values that we cherish. Not long after we moved here, I experienced an unexpected creative flowering as a poet and artist, like a rose bush blooming more abundantly than ever after a hard pruning, and I shifted from writing about modernist poetry to writing about scholarly writing.

If, back in 2001, I had clicked on the hyperlink that said Stay rather than the one that said Leap, would I be writing this post today? I doubt it. The poems of The Stoneflower Path were among the many products of the creative flowering that I experienced within my first few years in Aotearoa New Zealand — and Rēinga remains one of my favorite blossoms in the bouquet. I still get a thrill from generating a new poem every time I click beyond the opening image, a photo of the stained glass pōhutukawa mosaic that I crafted “in real life” for my mother’s 80th birthday back in 2005. (It now resides on my brother’s mantelpiece in California). And I still love leaping into the unknown to find out what I’ll learn there.

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