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”

……………

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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Writing with Pleasure was published by Princeton University Press exactly one year ago. If you missed my virtual book launch on Valentine’s Day 2023, featuring ebullient poet-illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh and legendary PUP editor Peter Dougherty, you can watch the video replay here.

It took me six years to bring this buoyant book into the world — and yes, I experienced plenty of stumbles and grumbles along the way. But pleasure, I’ve learned, is an emotion contoured by shadows as well as light. No mud, no lotus.

Some days, I’ll confess, all I could see was the mud. My data set included 590 handwritten narratives of pleasure gathered from academic writers around the world; thousands of individual notes and quotes; millions of combinatory possibilities. So much information, so many swirling ideas! How could I make sense of them all for myself, let alone for my readers?

Fortunately, my research on productivity and pleasure equipped me with many creative strategies for bringing curiousity, playfulness, and joy to my writing. One that I turned to again and again was a technique I call “Containers for Chaos”: an iterative process of meaning-making that shifts back and forth between conceptual and material modes. It’s an intensively intellectual activity informed by physical acts of seeing, making, and doing.

Here are three Containers for Chaos that helped me find the shape of my book and the flow of my writing.

Enjoy!

Scrivening

Picture a long wooden table cluttered with piles of pdf printouts, handwritten notes, interview transcripts, rough drafts, notecards, post-it notes, photos, DVDs, ideas scribbled on cafe receipts — you get the idea. Next, imagine a row of colorful milk crates beside the table, each labelled with a potential chapter topic or title. As you sift through the items on the table, you toss each one into the box where you think it belongs, gradually accumulating all the materials you’ll need to support your arguments for each section of your writing project.

That’s how I used Scrivener, a proprietary software program beloved by many academic writers despite its steep learning curve. This screenshot of my Scrivener console comes from the video replay of The Secrets of Structure, a live Zoom conversation that I held with developmental editor and ScholarShape founder Margy Thomas in September 2020, when Writing with Pleasure was still very much a work in progress.

Yes, I would have preferred the chunky materiality of a real wooden table, a real set of milk crates, real piles of real documents with crinkled edges and smudged ink. But the multimodal affordances of Scrivener — the color-coded labels, the scanned handwritten texts, the virtual index cards — helped me contain the chaos of my complex materials in a satisfyingly creative, visceral, non-linear way, with all the added benefits of digitized searching, effortless cutting-and-pasting, and efficient storage.

Fractals

Much though I enjoyed working with Scrivener, I still needed an occasional break from keyboard and screen, a return to the material pleasures of paper, pen, and glue.

One day, following an intriguing conversation with Margy about her Story-Argument model — which offers a way of conceptualizing a scholarly project based on macro, meso, and micro levels of meaning — I decided to map out the story-argument of my book, chapter by chapter and section by section. In joyful anticipation of the task, I gathered some colorful materials that I already had to hand and laid them out on my carpet: a book of Indonesian wrapping paper designs; a stack of post-it notes; a fountain pen filled with turquoise ink.

The image above captures my mapping of the first two chapters: Chapter 1 “Society and Solitude” and Chapter 2 “Body Basics.” On each of the two facing pages, I’ve stuck nine square post-it notes that record the following information:

• The One Essential Idea (OEI) of the chapter.

• The Hook that will draw my readers in and the Revelation that will inspire them.

• The Hook and Revelation for each of the chapter’s three sections.

• Three key Units of Meaning (UoM) for each section:

  • The Claim that will make my reader think, “Oh, really? Prove it!”

  • The Evidence that will persuade them.

  • My Interpretation and Analysis of that evidence.

• The Complications and Caveats that I need to keep in mind.

Smaller post-it notes suggest possible topics for the three illustrated panels in each chapter (“The Pleasures of . . .”) as well as further areas for research.

The visual, tactile process of assembling this Container for Chaos proved intensely pleasurable for me, both intellectually and creatively. The entire project took me no more than a few hours. And by the time I had finished, I understood with a new intimacy and clarity the fractal nature of my book, which started from One Essential Idea — “Academic writers can and should write with pleasure!” — that radiated out into every chapter, every section, and every illustration.

Mosaics

Another Container for Chaos was the mosaic mirror on the wall of my study, which became a sort of talisman for me, a visual representation of the aesthetically beautiful, intellectually complex work that I wanted my book to be. In my Preface, “The Mosaic Mirror,” I recalled how I created the mirror from a curated collection of fragments:

I remember the first time I crafted a mosaic mirror, the one that now hangs in my study. I had already spent a long time assembling its constituent pieces and sorting them into containers: shards of stained glass in rich blues, purples, and greens; sea glass worn smooth and opaque by the waves; seashells and broken pieces of mirror; colorful glass nuggets with flat bottoms and domed tops. I laid out all my materials on my dining room table and began positioning them on a large piece of particleboard around a smaller square mirror at the center: fragments of glass and shell arranged randomly but not capriciously in flowing drifts of light, each set off by the color, shape, and texture of the others.

Describing the structural design of the book, I reflected on the anxieties I felt about publishing such an unconventional piece of scholarship:

The treasures I have laid out here are at least as precious and varied as those bits of stained glass, mirror, and shell, but much more hard-won: first-person narratives of pleasure contributed by hundreds of writers from many different countries; books and articles from a wide range of research disciplines; excerpts from my own poetry and experimental prose; original artwork by my friend and colleague Selina Tusitala Marsh—all broken up into colorful fragments that I arranged with a similar sense of self-confidence mingled with dread. Have I got the balance right? Do I dare to glue them down? Is the grout between them bland enough to set off each independent element yet also strong enough to anchor them in place?

Selina’s artwork beautifully captured the playful mosaic-like energy of the book, reminding us that the pleasures of both writing and reading extend far beyond the march of black letters across a stark field of white:

If you are the kind of reader who likes to start by reading the preface of a book and working your way straight through to the afterword, feel free to set my mosaic metaphor aside and progress along the linear path laid out in the table of contents, which will offer you safe passage. But if you would like to try out a more creative, intuitive, nonlinear style of reading, I invite you to approach this book as you would a mosaic mirror on a gallery wall, first stepping back to take in the whole composition, then moving in close to absorb its colors and touch its textures in whatever order you please.

Each of these Containers for Chaos — my Scrivener project file, my book of fractal logic, my mosaic mirror — helped me find my way to the final structure and shape of Writing with Pleasure. At the same time, each container held its own little universe of colorful chaos: capacious enough to absorb new ideas, flexible enough to allow for experimentation and play.

Perhaps life itself is a Container for Chaos?

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 January 25, I invited members of my WriteSPACE community to join me for a special event, the launch of my new diagnostic survey: The Journey Planner.  

In the first hour of this exclusive WriteSPACE Special Event, I encouraged the writers to answer a series of reflective writing questions and to take two of my diagnostic tools. In the second hour, we discussed their individual goals for establishing healthy and happy writing habits.

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

……………

This Special Event featuring Helen’s new Journey Planner test offered a chance to reflect on our writing goals for the year.

Helen’s new survey is a great way to identify your writing roadblocks, fill up on your personal rocket fuel (e.g. your strengths and passions as a writer), and chart an ambitious but achievable path to better writing this year. In small groups, Helen was able to offer individual feedback and coaching to help each of us refine our itineraries.

It’s not too late to take the survey, you too can take steps towards designing a plan of action for your writing this year.

Go to the Maproom page in your account. Under the intro paragraph, you will find a link to ‘Try our Journey Planner!’

Complete and submit the Journey Planner Survey, including your results for The Writing BASE and The Roadblock Quiz. Helen will read your answers and will offer personalised advice for you to hone and achieve your goals through a video. I will also be able to send you some resources and a PDF with some writing prompts to explore your plan abstractly and/or creatively.

In fact, why not try the same exercise that Helen coached us through during this Special Event? Grab yourself a notebook and a pen, and find a comfy spot. Take 10 minutes to draw or mind-map your writing goals for each of the following areas:

• Style

• Creativity

• Community

• Productivity

• Pleasure and play

How important are each of these aspects in your yearly plan for your writing? Think about their relative size, texture, shape, colour, and symbolism. See what unfolds on the page…

My personal goals for the year involve unblocking my creative writing and nourishing the vitality of my everyday writing practice. It struck me during this exercise that, much like a healthy diet involves different food groups, a healthy writing practice should also be rich in diverse nutrients. Each of the 5 aspects listed above became a fruit on my plate. Style became a huge grapefruit, not only enormously important to me but sharp and unique in its flavour. Creativity became a wonky pear to represent creative innovation in my work. Community became an apple already partly munched (with thanks to the WriteSPACE community). Productivity was a long banana that stretched into longer and longer stints of daily writing. And pleasure became a strawberry, the smallest of all the fruits on the plate, but potentially the juiciest. I’m reminded of a great interview conducted by celebrity chef Paul Hollywood of the world’s most delicious and expensive strawberries, sold by a humble farmer in Japan. With the right sunlight, warmth and care, those Japanese strawberries could grow to enormous sizes. Similarly, with the right SPACE, my writing practice can become as delicious and richly textured as a fruit salad this year.

If you would like to share your Journey planner sketch/ mind map with us, feel free to submit it via the SPACE Gallery page.

Thank you to Helen for guiding us through this new tool, and thank you to all the writeSPACE members who attended. I look forward to seeing some of you again at the Open Beach House Special Event.

See you again soon!

This Special Event was exclusive to WriteSPACE and WS Studio members.

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

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Many years ago, I took part in a cross-disciplinary collaboration called Metonymy, billed by its organizers as an exercise in artistic blind dating:

Each artist will be paired with a poet or writer, and over a period of one month you will work together to create a collaborative multi-disciplinary work.

My “date” was Anne-Sophie Adelys, a visual artist I had never met. Because we lived at opposite ends of our sprawling city and both had hectic work schedules, we decided to collaborate without meeting. Instead, we agreed on a shared theme — “memory / childhood / paths not taken” — and then mailed two notebooks back and forth once a week for four weeks. (That was back in the days before Zoom, and when the mail service still worked).

Below I’ve traced a few of the thematic and imagistic connections that I remember making as the notebooks travelled between us. But time, like memory, creates its own kind of distance — and some of the most resonant meanings may be those that emerge from the blank spaces in between.

Enjoy!

The containers

To kick off the project, Anne-Sophie and I each selected a blank notebook and mailed it to the other person. Mine was a pretty little pocket-sized blank book with flowers on the cover, a recent birthday gift. Here’s how it looks today, filled with the bulky treasures later added by Anne-Sophie:

Her notebook, by contrast, was a plain black Moleskine:

We both had fun decorating the padded envelopes that we sent back and forth. Here’s one from me to Anne-Sophie:

And one from Anne-Sophie to me:

At the end of the experiment, Anne-Sophie kept her original notebook, and I kept mine — so my only record of hers is the digital exhibit that I created way back in 2010 for my poetry website, The Stoneflower Path. Flipping through my little flowered notebook in preparation for writing this post, I discovered several poems and drawings that didn’t make it into our digital exhibit. What forgotten secrets lurk in Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I wonder now?

Flowers

When I opened “my” notebook on its first journey home from Anne-Sophie’s studio, a cardboard flower popped up:

Inspired by Anne-Sophie’s three-dimensional imagination, I wrote a poem called “My Grandmother’s Garden” and let it ramble through the notebook line by line, page by page, leaf by leaf. Then, having already filled 20 pages of the notebook with lines of hand-written text and tiny cut-out leaves, I copied the whole poem out again on a scroll of tissue paper that unfurled from the book when it was opened:

My Grandmother’s Garden

in that garden with walls
like a chocolate box
or a casket of dreams
I clambered to the top
of the old apple tree
and feathered my nest with
lace scraps from the attic
paper from the bookshelves
darkness from the cellar
until my wings outstretched
my perch and spiralled me
up to gawk from the sun:
at it all: my mansion of
memory no wider
than a widow’s cottage,
the rolling lawn a doll’s
handkerchief, the secret
garden a tangle of
weeds behind the toolshed.

Birds

At the front of Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I had pasted a manila label hand-lettered with the phrase “a box of birds.” (Or maybe Anne-Sophie glued the label into the book, and I wrote the words on it? I honestly don’t remember!) It’s a New Zealand colloquialism, meaning chirpy or in good spirits, as in “That little girl is a box of birds!”

The following week, in my flowered notebook, I wove the same words into a poem that conflates fuchsias, birds, and little girls in a ballet class:

Fuchsias

four girls in the back
of Mrs. Fleetwood’s station wagon

a box of birds
a basket of flowers

carpooling to Miss Irene’s
Russian ballet school

Ginna, Kimberly,
Helen, Yvonne

an hour in the suburbs
a room with a barre

birds at the window
fuchsias on the lawn

Should I have been surprised when my notebook returned to me two weeks later with a beautiful bird inside, unfurling its gorgeous wings as the book popped open?

Books

I mailed my notebook back to Anne-Sophie with a new poem inside:

The Books

walking home from Pilates I recall
their perfect posture, the graceful way they slid
from their slipcovers like dancers from the barre
at Miss Irene’s, each bending at my will
as my own obstinate body would not,
its pages arcing over my palm:

a balancing act
an opening door
a floating bird

People

Meanwhile, amongst all the birds, books, and flowers travelling back and forth between us, a familial theme was emerging. People I didn’t know, along with other enigmatic hints of family life — a pair of shoes pinned to a clothesline, an old camera with a neck strap — started appearing in Sophie’s notebooks:

It may have been this drawing of two women strolling side by side that inspired me to write about the sister I never had:

Family Tree

in my dream of a sister
our mother sweeps her hair
into a golden whalespout

our father wraps damp sheets
around her burning body
and rocks her fever away

a jolly jolly sixpence
rolls from his pocket
by the light of a jealous moon

and in our separate gardens
the dark birds assemble
on a wire drawn taut between us

Yes, those dark birds from Anne-Sophie’s envelope found their way into the final sequence of my poem — just as my dream of a sister found its way into a sequence of rose-adorned letters that Anne-Sophie drew towards the back of my flowered notebook, spelling out the word S-I-S-T-E-R:

And then there were the brothers: the real ones who once tied their two-year-old sister (me!) to a clothesline and who later threatened to blow her up with a bottle of fake nitroglycerin. But that’s a story for another day! In the meantime, here’s the photo of my two-year-old self, my hair in a golden whalespout, that I glued into Anne-Sophie’s black notebook:

Looking back all these years later at our creative experiment, I can still vividly remember the anticipation that I felt each week as I opened the mailbox to find Anne-Sophie’s latest envelope/artwork inside. I would tear the package open and flip through the notebook to find how she had responded to my latest entry: subtly, obliquely, never in an obvious or literal way. I did my best to respond in kind, not just with poems but also with glued-in photos and cards and scraps of paper, items inspired rather than directly informed by Sophie’s enigmatic line drawings.

And now I’m thinking: What might such an experiment look like if conducted not between a visual artist and a poet but between, say, a creative writer and an academic, or a scientist and a literary scholar, or any two curious human beings who love notebooks, miss the materiality of snail mail, and would love to find out what creative serendipities might be sparked by such an exchange?

If you decide to try it out, I’d love to hear about it!

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.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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If you subscribed to #AcWriMoments — the 30-day series of daily writing prompts that I co-curated last month with Margy Thomas— you may recognize this image, which I’ve based on the gorgeous photograph of a yellow weaverbird building its nest provided by Steven Pinker as part of his Day 15 prompt, “Linger over good writing.”

Lingering over good writing (and encouraging other writers to do the same) is pretty much what I do for a living — so what better way to illustrate the technique than by lingering over Steve’s own #AcWriMoments contribution?

Taking a page from my own Day 26 prompt, “Write in color,” I’ve used colored pencils to spotlight some of the stylistic features in Steve’s work that I find worth savoring.

Enjoy!

The first paragraph

The starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

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Steve’s opening paragraph (like the sentence I am writing right now) makes two potentially risky grammatical moves: the first sentence contains the bland be-verb phrase “is to be” (highlighted yellow), and we find multiple -ing words (highlighted blue) across the two sentences. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with either choice. However, as a general rule, be-verbs lack the kinetic energy of more active, vivid verbs, while the suffix -ing can signal the presence of either a verb, noun, or adjective, depending on context; so unless you’re in full control of your syntax, a surfeit of -ings can end up messing with your reader’s brain!

Needless to say, Steven Pinker is in full control of his syntax and style. The is to be phrase in the first sentence functions as a kind of syntactical fulcrum, balancing the phrases a good writer and a good reader (highlighted in pink), while the second sentence uses the repeated -ings to good effect and leaves us in no doubt of Steve’s facility with active verbs (highlighted in orange): acquire, spot, savor, reverse-engineer.

Take a moment, too, to spot and savor the poetry in this passage: the alliteration of spotting and savoring; the assonance and consonance of reverse-engineering examples.

The second paragraph

Much advice on style is stern and censorious. A recent bestseller advocated “zero tolerance” for errors and brandished the words horror, satanic, ghastly, and plummeting standards on its first page. The classic style manuals, written by starchy Englishmen and rock-ribbed Yankees, try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticidal:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

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Moving a bit more quickly now, let’s ride the wave of these four splendid sentences, which roll us inexorably toward that famous “murder your darlings” quote by Arthur Quiller-Couch, a starchy Englishman if ever there was one. To fully appreciate their tidal flow — surging from 8 words to 22 and then 34 before ebbing back to 17 — I recommend that you read the whole paragraph out loud.

Here I’ve highlighted the verbs in orange, the adjectives and adverbs in yellow, the nouns in turquoise, and the colorful quotations from Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) and Quiller-Couch (On Style, 1914) in purple.

You can see at a glance how carefully Steve has chosen and balanced every word and phrase — even (or especially?) the ones borrowed from other writers as negative examples.

The third paragraph

An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of writing as a form of pleasurable mastery instead, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game.

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Now the floodgates have opened, and the metaphors (highlighted in turquoise) come pouring in thick and fast. We’re carried through the bleak dystopian world of the first sentence, where learning to write resembles a particularly nasty kind of boot camp, to the utopian promise of the second, which offers us a vision of writing as “a form of pleasurable mastery instead, like cooking or photography.” By the final sentence, the word writing has disappeared, transmuted into a craft, a calling, and a game. (The maroon highlighting tracks the journey of writing from learning to doing to perfecting; the orange highlighting illuminates the key phrase at the heart of the paragraph).

Note the quickening rhythm as we’re drawn through the interminable obstacle course of the first sentence (30 words) and the questioning possibilities of the second (16 words) to the punchy promise of the third (15 words). A parallel shift in tone — from negative to hopeful to positive — can be tracked through the transition from third person (“an aspiring writer”) to second person (“barking at you”). By the time we reach the end of the passage, we know that the author isn’t just talking about writing; he’s talking to us.

The list

Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence. Reverse-engineering good prose is the key to developing a writerly ear. Stylish writers, you’ll find, typically share a number of practices, including:

• an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary;

• an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze;

• the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs;

• the use of parallel syntax;

• the occasional planned surprise;

• the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement;

• the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

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Good writing, Steve suggests here, is “kindled by delight.” In that spirit, I couldn’t resist using a rainbow of colors to highlight all the items on his list of stylish practices, as his own writing exemplifies every single one of them.

Thank you, Steve, for the examples and inspiration!

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend that you to read Steven Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, from which his #AcWriMoments prompt was adapted.

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.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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On November 15, I invited Jillian Hess for a lively conversation on "Writers and Their Notebooks".  Jillian is a professor of English at the City University of New York and author of How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information (Oxford University Press, 2022), and she publishes the fabulous twice-weekly Substack newsletter Noted, which has been named as a Substack Featured Publication for two years running (2022 and 2023).

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Jillian and I discussed some favorite exemplars of creative note-taking and what we can learn from them. In the second hour, we led a hands-on discussion and workshop for WriteSPACE members, guiding participants through some playful note-taking experiments of their own.

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

……………

This Special Event featuring Helen Sword and Jillian Hess offered a deep dive into the note-taking practices of some famous figures, including Julia Child, Carl Jung, John Milton, George Eliot, Toni Morrison, and Sylvia Plath, among others. Not only that, we also heard about the personal note-taking of both Helen and Jillian! It was so interesting to be exposed to new forms of writing and to contemplate how we can draw inspiration from other writers’ practices.

But what do we actually mean by notebooks? Jillian’s Substack newsletter, Noted, traverses the breadth and scope of this complex genre: drafts, annotated bibliographies, process writing, commonplace books, diaries . . . . Exploring these forms can offer us a teleological reading of the writing process: that is, because we already know what a famous author’s finished work looks like, we can gain insight into how they got there.

Jillian described beginning her own notetaking practice of collecting quotes that inspired or moved her. Much later, while researching in various special archives collections for her PhD, she stumbled upon notebooks much like her own, filled with quotes and sayings. The only difference was that these notebooks were hundreds of years old. She had discovered a very established and theorised tradition called the “commonplace book” tradition. This research would not only become the basis of her recent book about commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums of the Victorian period, but would also launch her amazing Substack newsletter Noted. No longer a purely academic project, she has broadened her previous focus on romantic and Victorian literature to include figures like artists, musicians, scientists, and chefs.

Jillian also spoke about the bounds of access: While she recognizes that digital access is democratizing this information, she noted that only a small percentage of the material is digitized. For example, to read the papers of writers like Audre Lorde or Gloria Anzaldúa, you have to wade into the archives for a fuller picture.

Here are some memorable quotes from Jillian and Helen’s conversation in the first hour:

• “The commonplace book (or any notebook) can become the nesting place for incubating ideas.” (Jillian)

• “Research on student note-taking shows you remember more when you write by hand because you have to synthesise the ideas as you’re writing. So, notetaking as a practice actually has a pedagogical power.” (Helen)

• “It really depends on what you need as a writer. I think we all need different things from our notebooks.” (Jillian)

• “For me, it’s the glide of the fountain pen on the paper. I have not yet found anything that can replicate that. The material pleasure of writing connects me to being human in various ways.” (Helen)

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In the second hour, Helen and Jillian co-hosted a dynamic workshop that encouraged us all to fill our notebook pages with creative flow. What I personally found fascinating was the discussion that emerged, born from a tricky question: Why are we taught that clean and tidy handwriting in notebooks is better than messiness? And how can we overcome this assumption? By learning to love and accept our messy notebooks, can we also learn to love and accept the messiness of our early book and article drafts?

Jillian assures us that there is creativity in the messiness. But she too has been caught thinking that a tidy notebook equals a tidy mind. If you have felt neatness envy, it might be time let go of that guilt. The truth is that a lot of really great writing happens in the messiness. Your own “waste notebook” may liberate you to scribble, scrawl, and jot freely, and you can extract and re-write any juicy ideas later on.

To replicate the workshop, you may want to try out one of the following exercises while embracing any messiness that may wiggle its way onto the page:

1. Spend 5 minutes filling a page of your notebook by writing about any topic that springs to mind. You may wish to incorporate color, drawings, creative arrangements, words and imagery, or quotes. Call it a brainstorm, a creative explosion, idea generation, whatever you like. But don’t overthink the process and let yourself be surprised by what flows.

2. Be inspired by Carl Jung’s daily mandalas and create your own. This could become a morning ritual, like the “morning pages” that Julia Cameron advocates every writer should try. Embrace it as a quiet and reflective moment to warm up your writing day. See several of the creations from Jung’s Red Book below.

Thank you to Jillian and Helen for an inspiring romp through the world of notebooks and notetaking, 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 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.

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On February 14th, 2022, to celebrate the first anniversary of the WriteSPACE, I offered a free Zoom workshop called “Writing and Paper Collage.” Participants from around the world gleefully showed off the piles of materials that they had gathered for the event and piled next to their computers: scrap paper, wrapping paper, wallpaper, post-it notes, bus tickets, book jackets, stickers, doilies, old copies of the London Review of Books . . . .

And then there was Hussain, who logged in from a refugee detention centre in Indonesia. He brought along the few items he’d managed to forage: a sheet of white cardstock from the back of an old workbook; a red felt marker; a small piece of plastic-coated wire. While the other participants created gorgeous, complex collages from their assembled materials — you can see some examples here and here — Hussain drew a heart with the red marker, then pushed the wire through holes in the cardstock to create a woven outline.

“The wire has an interesting story,” he later told me:

Last year in March I got Covid then I was quarantined here. Because the room was hot, the accommodation management brought a new fan and the wire was wrapped around its cable. As boring as it is being locked inside a room, I took the wire and initially made a ring for myself. On the day of the Valentine workshop, the idea of a heart came to my mind.

Hussain had first contacted me out of the blue in April 2021, shortly after I launched the WriteSPACE. In imperfect but eloquent English — acquired mainly, I later learned, from free instructional videos on YouTube — he introduced himself and politely asked for help:

I'm Hussain Shah Rezaie from Afghanistan but currently living as a refugee temporary (for seven years) in Indonesia. 

Writing has worked yet as a rescuer to the daunting difficulty of my life as a refugee. One of the thing that stand on my way to write is getting access to some high quality writing material, as well as, making connection with experienced and renowned writers for constructive feedback. . . . Internet is the only place I sneak around to have some sort of connection. I know that the mere practice of writing is being done solitary in the corner of empty space, but becoming better writer to some extent depend on connection with like minded people. . . . I would really appreciate if I get a chance to attend to your future writing program.

Intrigued, I organized a WriteSPACE scholarship (underwritten by a generous professor in Texas) and invited Hussain to start attending my weekly Live Writing Studio. From time to time I checked in with him to ask after his family, especially after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021. But not until February 2022, a few days after he showed me his wire-woven heart at the collage workshop, did I finally ask him to meet with me one-on-one and tell me his life story.

I was born in 1998 in a gash of green between arid sharp mountains in Haidar, Jaghori. If you look through a satellite image, it all looks like deserted altitudes. Even for a wild reptile this region would be a rigorous place to live. But it’s home to uncounted numbers of Hazara. Our ancestors were pushed into the mountains as far as the elderly recall from their elderly. Since then, the mountains have protected us . . . . (From Walk with Me: A Refugee’s Journey to Freedom)

The eldest of three children, Hussain dropped out of school at age 14 to support his mother and younger siblings following the tragic disappearance of his father. At 16, he was captured and beaten by the Taliban and accused of a crime he did not commit. After making a harrowing escape, he was people-smuggled by his terrified family to Indonesia, where he spent the next nine and a half years in a series of refugee detention facilities, forbidden to access formal education or to seek paid employment.

Faced with crushing boredom and an uncertain future, Hussain refused to give in to despair. Instead, he embarked on an ambitious program of self-education, learning English and studying subjects such as psychology and creative writing via free videos, courses, and ebooks that he accessed via wifi on an old cellphone. As his writing became more fluent and assured, he found the words to describe the emotional impact of his situation:

My act of controlling the psychological gear of my distress has been a mere coping mechanism to the underlying issues that have been out of my control. It has been like walking in a lightless night toward a never coming dawn. Nine years and three months have passed since I began my life as a refugee in Indonesia. My helplessness toward the deteriorating situation of my family often darkened my walk. The basic rights I have been denied, the years of incarceration inside prison walls, have been the wild beasts in the walk. During my time in Indonesia, these beasts have claimed the lives of around 60 other refugees. (From Walk with Me: A Refugee’s Journey to Freedom)

A young man in limbo. A heart behind wire.

Around the time of our conversation in February 2022, I had developed an interest in Tarot cards — not for their divinatory power (which I don’t believe in) but for their richly poetic and symbolic qualities. That week I’d drawn the Three of Swords, depicted in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck as a heart pierced with wounds so ancient that they no longer bleed.

In Tarot, the suit of Swords — associated with the element of Air — signifies not physical violence so much as the power of language and thought to harm or to heal. After logging off from my call with Hussain, I stared at those two blood-red images: Hussain’s cardboard heart laced with wire; the Tarot heart pierced by Swords.

Then I walked into the kitchen and said to my husband, “We’ve got to get him out of there.”

Some 21 months later, on October 4, 2023, Hussain was granted permanent residency in Aotearoa New Zealand under a pilot Community Organization Refugee Sponsorship scheme.

He will arrive next month in Auckland — one of the most expensive cities in the world — with no money, no formal educational qualifications, and virtually no possessions, aside from the donated laptop on which he has composed an ever-growing collection of short stories, personal essays, and poems.

Some of these beautiful pieces have already been published in international journals such as the Cincinnati Review and the archipelago. Others will appear Hussain’s newly launched Substack newsletter, Walk With Me:

Through poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, I tell my story. My story of escaping war in Afghanistan and living nearly a decade long in limbo as a refugee in Indonesia.

The journey is sad as it sounds and difficult as it seems. Yet, through this journey I found myself. I have found hope when it was taken from me. I have found beauty when everything seemed ugly. I have found truth amidst lies. I have found psychological and spiritual freedom when I had my physical freedom hidden behind barbed wire. All through a pen and paper or the small screen of my cellphone.

Hussain could not have made it this far without the generous contributions of time and energy from a small but devoted group of WriteSPACE members and other mentors around the world — Anita, David, James, Janet, Joanna, Karim, Lynne, Nikie, Nina, Pat, Sophie, Vicky — with special thanks to my husband Richard for his unflagging support and to our business manager Victoria for her fierce commitment to human rights and her many hours of volunteer labor on Hussain’s behalf.

Now you, too, can become part of Hussain’s story.

By subscribing to Walk With Me — currently free — you can follow his extraordinary journey as it unfolds. Eventually, as soon as has opened his own bank account in New Zealand and can start accepting paid subscriptions, Hussain hopes to be able to earn enough from his newsletter to spend a day or two each week writing.

In the meantime, if you’re inspired by Hussain’s story and want to help, you can make a direct donation to a scholarship fund set up by his sponsoring organisation, WriteSpace Ltd. His long-term plan is to attend university and study psychology so he can help other refugees survive and thrive. Please be assured that every cent you contribute (minus bank and credit card fees) will go directly towards Hussain’s living costs and future educational expenses.

Thank you for travelling this path. Thank you for walking with Hussain.

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.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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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?

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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.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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