Former IASH Environmental Humanities Fellow Dr Anna Pilz reflects on writing retreats and how they can be really powerful for breaking a writing block for the IAD4Researchers blog:
I first experienced the benefits of writing groups during a short-term research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. At the time, I was months past a deadline for a commissioned chapter and with the weight of guilt around my neck.
It’s not like I wasn’t able to write at all. In fact, all my words had been flowing into out-going fellowship, grant, and job applications that I couldn’t produce fast enough to mitigate the in-coming rejections. I had become well attuned to the format of boxes and the targeted language of ‘grant speak’ or departmental research strategies, but my real writing projects stalled. Somehow, my usual appetite for diving into the analysis of my archival finds was muted and my curiosity for finding the right structure for a chapter seemed to have gone extinct. I didn’t even want to open the document. (The draft file was strategically placed in the blind spot of my desktop, in the lower left-hand corner next to the tedious ‘Life Admin’ folder’.)
When you’re on a fellowship, it’s inevitable that your peers and colleagues ask you at regular intervals how your work is coming along. During one of these conversations with my fellow Fellow, Rachel Delman, I owed up to the fact that the work wasn’t coming along at all and that I was afraid of even opening my inbox because of the dreaded arrival of an email from the editor. Rachel suggested to try joining a writing group, and she swiftly set one up. All Fellows were invited to join her for a morning’s writing session. I put it in my calendar. I never attended a writing group before, and I was suspicious whether this would solve my writer’s block. But I had nothing to lose.
We were a small gathering in a spacious room; there was tea and biscuits. Alongside three or four others, I picked my writing seat around a big oval table. After a quick round of introductions, Rachel asked for our writing goal for the session. Opening the messy file was my starting point, along with some words (or even sentences) about my crucial archival find. An attempt, in other words, to reconnect with the excitement for this particular writing project. As I listened to the other’s writing goals, my initial suspicion quickly turned into inspiration and admiration. There were some sharp goals in the room, and I loved listening to what people were working on and what writing challenges they faced. And then the magic happened – I just wrote! ...
You can read the whole blog at https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/iad4researchers/2022/11/29/overcoming-writers-blo....
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