Moments of Sacred Space
On Day 2 of #AcWriMoments, my co-curator Margy Thomas invited our readers to reflect on the public or private names that guide their writing process:
Turn your attention to a name you’ve chosen for your body of work or a piece of it. In your journal, in your imagination, or in conversation with a friend, reflect on these questions:
What meanings does the name hold for you? How has the name guided your writing process, or how could it guide your process? Might another name be waiting to be chosen by you? Guided by a name you have chosen, what is one small step you can take in your work today?
Margy’s prompt led me to consider the various acts of naming that have inspired my title for today’s post, Moments of Sacred Space:
Moments refers, of course, to #AcWriMoments itself. Our intentionally cheeky hashtagged title transforms Academic Writing Month, aka #AcWriMo — a 30-day period traditionally associated with ticking timers, mounting word counts, and other quantitative performance metrics — into a series of reflective Academic Writing Moments instead.
SACRED is the acronym that Margy and I used in our Day 1 post to categorize the six different kinds of writing prompts drafted by our fabulous contributors.
SPACE is my shorthand for the five elements of pleasurable writing around which I have built my virtual writing community, the WriteSPACE.
Here’s a brief tour of this SACRED SPACE.
Enjoy!
Sacred
“Which kind of #AcWriMoment are you most looking forward to cultivating this November?” Margy and I asked our 1.46K subscribers (so far!) on Day 1.
How better to articulate the possibilities offered by each of those six SACRED moments — Strategic, Artisanal, Creative, Reflective, Embodied, Delicious — than by drawing on the rich, thoughtful responses of our readers?
Strategic moments yield insights about what idea you’re really trying to convey and how best to convey it.
Rebecca wrote:
Strategic moments really resonated with me. I have a lot of "writing" strategies but what is the strategy for conveying my meaning and purpose? I'm going to move that question to my morning pages to ponder a bit longer.
Artisanal or crafty moments immerse you in the process of creating work that is not just true and useful, but also beautiful.
Pam wrote:
The artisanal moment sounds just right for where I am in my writing. I’m a knitter; I find joy in learning techniques from others, gathering ideas and materials, and then shaping these into something that is both beautiful and functional. Well, that’s my hope, anyway. This month I want to do something along the same lines with my writing.
Creative or experimental moments open you up to insights you never could have planned.
Wai Ling wrote:
I am looking forward for Creative (experimental) moments to remind me that writing a dissertation is a creative process where I can insert my authentic self into it without getting lost in the rigors of a research.
Reflective moments bring insights about who you are and how you express your unique self through your work.
Hava wrote:
I’m looking most forward to Reflective moments. I’ve been on a year-long process of slowing my pace, after a few years of working at a highly reactive pandemic pace. That left me super other-focused, meeting the needs of my students, colleagues, & institution as they arose. I’m working on discerning what I want to think about, what I want to work on, separate from the sort of emergency crouch I had fallen back into during super active COVID. I hope I can use these #AcWriMoments to help me focus in even more on my own curiosity & goals.
Embodied moments invite you to physically enact the ideas you’re trying to express, thereby deepening your understanding of those ideas.
Sophie wrote:
Having spent eight immobile weeks with a broken ankle, I'm most looking forward to Embodied moments, where I can move, stretch and bring my whole body to my writing again.
Delicious moments are, well, just that — moments to be rolled around on your tongue and savored.
Aditi wrote:
I'm looking forward to delicious moments the most. I'm getting prepared to present a big piece of work and have it be publicly acknowledged.
As for me, I’m looking forward to them all!
SPACE
While researching my recent book Writing with Pleasure (Princeton 2023), I collected “SPACE maps” from hundreds of academic writers, whom I invited to draw a SPACE of pleasurable writing that is:
Socially balanced
Physically engaging
Aesthetically nourishing
Creatively challenging
Emotionally uplifting
Their colorful responses take us to outer space and back down to earth, relive childlike joy in the playground of writing, and celebrate the bodies we write with and the places where we write.
You can find a collection of these SPACE drawings in the SPACE Gallery on my website — or, better yet, join my wonderful WriteSPACE community to experience the five principles in action.
Acronyms are powerful! When we transform the SCARED PACES of our frantic lives into a SACRED SPACE for writing, we learn to stop running after all the wrong things and to settle into a quieter, more nourishing relationship with our words and our work.
Here are three online resources dedicated to helping you build your own sacred space of writing:
#AcWriMoments: 30 days of daily prompts for finding courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work throughout the month of November.
WriteSPACE: An online writing community devoted to nurturing the social, physical, aesthetic, creative, and emotional dimensions of your writing practice.
The Productivity Catalyst: A 6-week course that teaches you how to integrate six core elements of productive writing — time, space, flow, craft, community, and joy — into your everyday writing life in a gentle, forgiving way. The Productivity Catalyst starts tomorrow, but there’s still time to join us!
This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.
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