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Write-A-Long Writing Retreat Programme 2024

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Write-A-Long Writing Retreat Programme 2024

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If you enjoy writing alongside other writers, and finding community, solidarity and accountability in sharing your writing goals and writing space, please join one of our virtual writing retreats.

As well as regular writing retreats hosted by colleagues from the Research Culture & Researcher Development team, the University of Glasgow is part of an inter-institutional virtual writing retreat programme with a number of Universities from across the country. Find out dates, times and hosting institutions by clicking the link above.

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Write-A-Long Writing Retreat Programme 2024

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As writers working within the academic landscape, we all know how challenging cultivating and maintaining a writing practice can be. There might be all sorts of reasons for this:

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Dr Rachel Chin – on how to receive feedback

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Dr Rachel Chin – on how to receive feedback

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In our 'From manuscript to publication' session, we heard from Dr Rachel Chin about the journey she took towards the publication of her first book, War of Words: Britain, France and Discourses of Empire during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Part of that journey involved receiving and responding appropriately to feedback, a process which can be both notoriously complex and uniquely hurtful, and yet also provides welcome challenge and an opportunity to really hone in on the best features of your writing and wider practice.

In this blogpost, Rachel reflects on the steps she's taken to make that process easier to manage emotionally, and learn how to use feedback constructively to improve her practice.

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By Dr Rachel Chin, Researcher Development Project Officer (Glasgow Talent Lab)

I don't think that I'm alone in finding the idea of feedback, whether given or received, daunting at best, terrifying at worst.

As the sole convenor of HIST4273, an Honours course on the history and legacy of the Second World War, I spent the first half of 2023 in a state of advanced worry about the prospect of receiving student feedback at the end of the term. It took me a full three weeks just to open the book reviews that I had received for my monograph, Britain, France and Discourses of Empire during the Second World War. In moments like these, I find myself thinking about how nice it would be to live in a treehouse in a secluded wood far from the thoughts and opinions of others. However, when I take the time to interrogate my experience with feedback, I have to conclude (however reluctantly) that I have benefited from it in real ways.
Learning from feedback
Receiving feedback on my research, teaching and projects has made all my work more robust. A grant application that I recently submitted went through a dozen drafts and received feedback from nearly the same number of individuals. The career development programme for research staff, which I led last year, received feedback across its lifetime, from participants, colleagues, PIs and workshop providers. The comments and suggestions that I received in both instances forced me to think through why I had made the decisions I had made. They also brought into the frame new ideas, which I hadn't always thought of. This feedback enriched my work in visible ways and demonstrated the value of feedback as a mode of collaboration and co-creation.

At the same time, not all feedback is good. Sometimes it's delivered poorly, doesn't fit with what is being asked for or is simply unhelpful. At its worst, feedback (see well-known jokes about 'reviewer two') can be personally offensive and patently rude. I'm sure that all of us have been at the receiving end of some very unhelpful feedback at one point or another. The experience can be hugely demoralising, and I don't want to downplay this. Yet here too I have seen opportunities for professional growth. In 2021 I received a peer review response to a book proposal that I had submitted that asked why my text hadn't taken the time to address a dozen different additional themes, each of which could have been, and indeed has been, an entire book on its own. This comment was unhelpful in the sense that it was not a change that I could make to the text. But it was valuable in another way. It gave me practice and confidence in defending my research decisions and the message that my book was delivering.

My experiences receiving and responding to feedback have also influenced my approach to providing feedback. Most importantly, they have made me a clearer and more empathetic communicator. I find the prospect of getting feedback on a project or a piece of work hugely stressful at times, and I therefore try to keep this in mind when I'm commenting on someone else's work, whether it's a student, a colleague or a stranger. Likewise, I find disorganised, unclear or irrelevant feedback frustrating, so I've made a point of trying to be as clear as possible in my comments, making specific and actionable suggestions rather than vague wandering propositions.
Practical approaches to feedback
In my personal and professional life, I've adopted two practical approaches to feedback. These have helped me to keep feedback in perspective and alleviate some of my trepidation around it.

First, when I read through feedback for the first time, I don't take any notes. Then I close the document and walk away for at least 24 hours. Putting space between feedback in this way gives me time to think about it from a distance and to remember that it is feedback on a piece of work, not feedback on who I am as a person. When I return to the feedback, I always find that I can view it much more objectively and better distinguish between helpful and not so helpful comments.

Second, when I'm providing feedback, I pay extra attention to my use of adjectives. If something is good, is the language I'm using portray this sufficiently, or am I downplaying its strengths for no reason? If something can be strengthened is my feedback providing a roadmap to do this, or is it only criticising?

Giving and receiving feedback isn't the straightforward process that it is sometimes made out to be. It can quickly transcend the professional space that it is meant to sit in and descend into something that feels more like a personal attack. And yet, this is why I believe that feedback, both how we respond to it and how we deliver it, can be such a valuable point of learning.

Certainly, feedback has helped to make my own work more robust and more inclusive. But it has also made me a more confident leader and presented opportunities for me to stand up for the approaches and decisions I have made. Likewise, it has made me interrogate what kind of leader I want to be - that is, an empathetic leader, whose feedback supports growth and knowledge creation, rather than reproducing my own opinions Ad Infinitum. After all, the treehouse of my dreams isn't suspended by air. It is supported by the forest beneath it. Feedback, when done right, should also provide this support and growth.

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Feedback as part of professional development

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By Dr Rachel Chin, Researcher Development Project Officer (Glasgow Talent Lab) I don't think that I'm alone in finding the idea of feedback, whether given or received, daunting at best, terrifying at worst. As the sole convenor of HIST4273, an Honours course on the history and legacy of the Second World War, I spent the...

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In our 'How I write' session, we heard from Dr Robyne Calvert in a moment of great success, as she prepared for the April 2024 launch of her first book, The Mack (Yale University Press). However, as we all know from experience, no one's path is plain sailing all the time, and in the blog attached here, Robyne reflects on failure, and how it inflects the way she thinks about herself, her career and her research and publication journey.

This is a key part of a supportive writing environment, as Robyne writes, and knowing that others fail, that even successful writers fail miserably on a daily basis, can help us find both solidarity, and a way through to the other side of a failure.

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By Dr Robyne Calvert, The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network (Scotland Hub) Project Officer

Like many mid-career researchers, I've had my share of failure. In fact, one might even suppose that I've somehow learned to cope well with failure, given I've made it to early-mid-career. But what I am coming to realise is that simply overcoming failure isn't really the aspiration. Embracing failure as an inevitable part of academic life is a much wiser, and more achievable, goal.

Recently, a few of us in the Research Services team attended a webinar organised by the UK Research Integrity Office* entitled 'Research Culture: Environments and Accountability'. All the speakers were fascinating, and the highly recommended talks can be found on the UKRIO YouTube channel.

A comment that had particular resonance for me came from Professor Maria Delgado, Vice Principal (Research and Knowledge Exchange) of The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She spoke of their successes in creating an accountable research environment, and of the importance of recognising the diversity in the UK research ecology, rather than adopting a 'one size fits all' approach. In adopting the principles of research integrity embedded in The Concordat to Support Research Integrity she observed in her presentation that research is slow, it takes time, and crucially, sometimes it fails:
I think research shouldn't be about quantity. It's important to shift the discourse to an understanding that sometimes research experiments fail. Arguments don't come together the way we may wish; we get things wrong, and we learn from this. And we share the lessons learned with others. And acknowledging those failures and dealing with those failures has to be part of a healthy research culture.
Hearing Professor Delgado speak so passionately about failure spoke to me on a deep level. In my own research career, I had the privilege and misfortune of working on one of the greatest failed projects in Glasgow's recent memory: the reconstruction of the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, following a significant fire in 2014.

My involvement was as a researcher and research developer, and I had the great joy of working alongside the design team to rebuild Charles Rennie Mackintosh's 'masterwork' - until June 2018, when a second fire destroyed the building. The project was near completion, and I was also nearing completion of a new biography of the building, to be published alongside its grand re-opening in 2019.

The disruption of my own project was nothing to the loss of the building itself, and the displacement the event caused to those who lived and worked in Garnethill. My work felt insignificant in comparison, and suddenly aimless. Thankfully, colleagues assured me that my book was now more important than ever, but completing the text seemed an unsurmountable and futile task in the aftermath. What was meant to be a celebration seemed to turn into a eulogy every time I tried to write. I set it aside to process the grief of this event.

The great failure of the Mackintosh restoration project necessitated my research to become slow. The pandemic made it even slower. Time gave me the perspective to be able to write about the failure of the project, to incorporate it as another chapter in the history of this great building. And - I hope - it has made it a better narrative, as I embraced my own failings as a biased, emotive researcher. I couldn't pretend there was distance between myself and the building; and actually, the impact that it had on its users was precisely what made it powerful - so why try to be dispassionate about it?

Failure and time enabled a whole new approach and tone to my writing - and with unflagging support from my publisher, the book will be out 2024 - 10 years on from the first fire (itself the consequence of a series of failures).

We know we can and should learn from failure. But can we embrace and accept it as part of the process? At whatever stage our career, we have experienced multiple disappointments: not getting the interview, not getting the job, not getting the grant, not getting the award, not getting the promotion, not getting the recognition... and somehow all these no's so often overshadow the yes's. How can we not let failure drag us down and burn us out?

As defined in The Researcher Development Concordat, 'Research culture encompasses the behaviours, values, expectations, incentives, attitudes and norms of a research community. It determines the way that research is conducted and communicated and can influence researchers' career paths and mental wellbeing.' Learning how to not only accept but embrace failure can surely only help both our career paths, and our mental wellbeing.

Because of my own experience with failure (and the aforementioned disaster is not nearly the only one I have been party to), I am oddly excited to see how we might find better ways to include it as part of our research culture in Scotland. I hope to develop some opportunities to think about this in my role in as The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network (Scotland Hub) Project Officer (I usually have to take a deep breath before saying that aloud - we'll use BAECRN going forward). In fact, at our network launch event last October, several attending ECRs suggested that 'learning from failure' was an area they would like to further develop.

Happily, the BAECRN Scotland has kicked off with great success: we've just awarded over £37,000 to 12 collaborative research projects in the network, representing 39 researchers across Scotland, including independent scholars. I have to say, giving away a pile of money was a delightful way to start a new job!

However, 40 applications, representing just over 100 researchers, were unsuccessful. This may feel like failure to some of them, but I hope to turn this into an opportunity to rethink this notion. We have offered an opportunity for feedback, and support where possible to seek funding through other BA schemes. I am also planning a future 'reverse engineered' workshop with the Carnegie Trust that looks at grant reviewing as a means to become a better grant writer. Because so often, it isn't the ideas that are failing, but the way they are articulated that falls short. I think we have a lot of great work we can do, drawing on the experience and fresh ideas of this group. If you are a researcher in the Arts & Humanities or Social Sciences, and are within 10 years of receiving your PhD, please do join the network and get involved.

I've noticed that every time I have written fail, or failing, or failed in this post, I cringe a little inside. Failure is negative, and we are conditioned to shy away from its use. But I want to accept - and help others accept - failure as merely another bumpy step in the road to achievement. And perhaps even a necessary and highly useful one. I've failed before; I will fail again. In the immortal words of Chumbawumba...
Nope, I can't do it. But you know what I mean.
* In case you didn't know, UKRIO regularly holds free webinars, and the past ones are also available on their YouTube channel.

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By Dr Robyne Calvert, The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network (Scotland Hub) Project Officer The Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, 26 February 2020, 13:24pm. Photo by Robyne Calvert. Like many mid-career researchers, I've had my share of failure. In fact, one might even suppose that I've somehow learned to cope well...

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In our 'Writing place, body & self' creative writing session, we explored erasure poetry with poet Pratyusha. This technique, which outside of the usual parameters of conventional academic practice, might be of value to writers seeking to find a fresh perspective on their academic practice, or who are trying to distill the essence of particular piece of text. To give it a try, and see if it shakes up your academic writing practice, isolate a piece of text in a new doc, and experiment with deleting, blacking out, and highlighting fragments of text to see what emerges.

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Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.

Erasure poetry may be used as a means of collaboration, creating a new text from an old one and thereby starting a dialogue between the two, or as a means of confrontation, a challenge to a pre-existing text.
Examples of the Erasure Form
One seminal work of erasure poetry is Ronald Johnson's Radi Os (Flood Editions, 1977), a revision of the first four books of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Other more contemporary examples of erasure include Jen Bervin's (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), which uses Shakepeare's sonnets as primary source texts; The O Mission Repo by Travis Macdonald (Fact-Simile Editions, 2008), which uses the 9/11 Commission Report as a source; The ms of my kin by Janet Holmes (Shearsman Books, 2009), which uses the poems of Emily Dickinson as a source; David Dodd Lee's Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, The Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlazeVOX, 2011); and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), which uses as its source the legal text from a case against Gregson, a company that owned the ship Zong on which 150 Africans were massacred.

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Erasure - Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an

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This text, from Cixous's Coming to Writing and Other Essays, is one I often return to when I feel unsure of myself, or if I feel like I'm becoming a bit untethered from who I am when I write.

It's a wonderful and beautiful text, and I always feel like it reconnects me with the 'why' of my writing practice. Not that my 'why' is the same as Cixous's, but because she writes so urgently, and compellingly and searchingly about the 'why' of her own writing that it prompts me on reflect on and refind mine.

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This podcast, written and presented by David Naimon for the Portland-based publisher Tin House, is a series of long-form interviews with established writers. The conversations are deep, the episodes are long, and a thought-provoking range of facets to the interviewee's work, voice and practice are discussed. The format does take a while to get used to- the introduction to each episode is quite long, the questions themselves are (sometimes frustratingly!) long, but the answers and conversation are worth persevering- I've learned to embrace the long intro as a lesson in a different kind of academic writing practice- as a sort of brief essay/opinion piece for a popular audience- and now enjoy listening to it for lessons in that medium. Favourite episodes of mine include Bhanu Kapil's, and the episode on Tone with Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar.

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Author interviews with today's best writers - established & up-and-coming - in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Hosted by David Naimon & Tin House in Portland, Oregon. --The Guardian's 10 Best Book Podcasts --Book Riot's 15 Outstanding Podcasts for Book Lovers --the most intense and awesome podcast I've ever been a part of-Gary Shteyngart

Author interviews with today's best writers - established & up-and-coming - in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Hosted by David Naimon & Tin House in Portland, Oregon. --The Guardian's 10 Best Book Podcasts --Book Riot's 15 Outstanding Podcasts for Book Lovers --the most intense and awesome podcast I've ever been a part of-Gary Shteyngart

The best lit interview podcast bar none

This show is incredible, David's insightful questions never fail to tease out extraordinary moments from impeccably chosen guests. I've listened to several more than twice. If you still need convincing look up George Saunders' video endorsement of David's skills. Then tell your friends.

Great

Along with Bookworm, this is the highest quality podcast on lit. David is incredibly good and knowledgeable. And in response to the last reviewer, he ask questions because that's his job, lol. Keep up the good work.

Excellent

I happily found this podcast by chance. The interviews are fascinating of course but the breadth of writers interviewed has been useful to widen my own reading.

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between the covers : conversations with writers in fiction

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‎Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry on Apple Podcasts

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Author interviews with today's best writers - established & up-and-coming - in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Hosted by David Naimon & Tin House in Portland, Oregon. --The Guardian's 10 Best Book Podcasts --Book Riot's 15 Outstanding Podcasts for Book Lovers --the most intense and awesome podcast I...

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This podcast, presented by the team at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, is a series of interviews with creative writers. I like it for the big writing names, the good conversations, and the varied interviewing styles of the different inteviewers, which are a great opportunity to reflect on how to ask great questions, and how to host fantastic conversations.

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Translation: Documents of Contemporary Art Series

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Translation: Documents of Contemporary Art Series

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Okay, so I know what you might be thinking: "Translation? But I work in just one language."

However, while this book is ostensibly about the art and labour of translation, there's so much in it for writers who want to think deeply about voice, and language, and meaning, and character and textual timbre. It's for writers who want to think about what it means to be a communicator, and how their voice resonates, and how that resonance carries into different contexts, and what it means not just to speak, but to be heard.

Plus, all the contributions come in bite-sized extracts, so it's a perfect place to go for a chunk of inspiration.

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Reflections on the cultural and political complexities of translation in global contemporary artistic practices.The movement of global populations, and subse...

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The UK has a really vibrant and exciting creative writing scene, and there are loads of fantastic publications that you might like to try out. Seeing how others articulate themselves in text is always really fascinating for me, and helps me reflect on who I want to be when I write, and how I want my writing to resonate with the people who will read it. Bath Magg is lovely, and I also love how it's laid out visuallly.

A highlight of Issue 12 (linked) for me was Elaine Ewart's poem 'Application for the post of Professor of Transformation'. Beautiful, thought-provoking and relevant to many of us trying to find a way to bring our own subjectivity into our academic writing practice, and working out how to navigate that complex and shifting line between who we are, and how that translates into our professional lives.

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In our 'Writing place, body & self' creative writing session, poet Pratyusha introduced us to M. NourbeSe Philip's use of erasure poetry in this text, Zong!. We thought about intentionality, about the labour of obscuring and uncovering truths in a text, and about how we communicate the core of a piece of writing.

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Zong! is NourbeSe Philip's book length poem published by Weslyan University Press, and by The Mercury Press in Canada. This extended 182 page poetry cycle is composed entirely from the words of the case report, Gregson vs. Gilbert, related to the murder of Africans on board a slave ship at the end of the eighteenth century,
A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry
The video links below show a few of the more than 60 readings/ performances of Zong! that NourbeSe has presented in nine countries. These events include eight annual durational collective readings held on the anniversary of the Zong massacre. The 2020 reading will run for 10 days beginning November 30th 2020.

The case report Gregson vs. Gilbert, recounts the massacre by drowning of some 130 enslaved Africans over the course of ten days beginning on November 29th, 1781. The captain of the eponymous slave ship, Zong, having made many navigational errors resulting in extending the length of the voyage from West Africa to Jamaica ordered the Africans be thrown overboard so as to allow the owners of the ship, the Gregsons, to claim indemnity from their insurers, the Gilberts. When the insurers refused to honour the contract of insurance, the ship's owners initiated legal action against them, which proved to be successful. Upon appeal, however, the insurers, the Gilberts were granted a new trial. The report of that hearing, Gregson vs Gilbert constitutes the only extant, public document related to the massacre. Through fugal and counterpointed strategies, Zong! explodes the coded, documented silence of the historical text to become an anti-narrative lament that tells the story of this haunting and tragic massacre: it cannot be told yet must be told; it can only be told by not telling.

Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

Zong! has also presented in three dramatic performances by theatrical directors and excerpts of Zong! have been used in six different visual arts installations by different artists in five countries.
Zong! Performances -a selection
This clip has video excerpts that include: names of Africans that are part of Zong!, projected on the night sky as it would have been over West Africa at the end of November 1781, and accompanied by whale song; the 2018 performance at the Royal Ontario Museum, held in the presence of reliquary figures and artifacts from the museum's collection; the Living Memorial for the Victims of the Zong Massacre perfumed in Miami's historic Virginia Key Beach Park in 2018; the 2015 collective durational reading, Zong! Behind Closed Doors, featuring dance by Vivene Scarlett; and the 2016 durational reading also featuring Vivene.

This clip begins with the 2015 durational reading and include excerpts from 2013 durational reading, a performance at Arika in Glasgow, Scotland, in , an improv performance and choreography inspired by Zong! by dancer Ida Mara Freire, all in 2013

Other videos are available on NourbeSe's YouTube channel

While still unpublished, an early version of one poem was published in Facture, four poems, along with an introduction, were published in Fascicle and two poems were published in boundary 2.

A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshoped and presented at Toronto Harbourfront as part of "rock.paper.sistahz" in April 2006.

This production was directed by Diane Roberts with actors Andrea Henry, Andy Marshall, Lili Francks and Xuan Fraser. Yvette Martin was the stage manager with Natalie Wood and Mark Prince as contributing artists.
Event Brochure
a

a dramatized reading

of

Zong!

by M.NourbeSe Philip
In 1781 the captain of the slave ship, Zong, murders, by drowning, one hundred and fifty Africans so as to collect insurance monies. Through fragments of voices, shreds of memory and shards of silence, Zong! unravels the story that can only be told by not telling.
workshop dir. Diane Roberts

April 13, 2006, 8pm
Harbourfront Centre Studio Theatre

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Zong! is NourbeSe Philip's book length poem published by Weslyan University Press, and by The Mercury Press in Canada. This extended 182 page poetry cycle is composed entirely from the words of the case report, Gregson vs.

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In our creative writing session, 'Writing place, body & self', poet and writer Nina Mingya Powles shared a text from Natalie Diaz's work, Postcolonial Love Poem. This video records an event held by the Woodbery Poetry Room in New York in 2020, and includes readings both from Diaz, and from the equally thoughtful and formidably talented Vietnamese-American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong.

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VOCARIUM READING SERIES: Natalie Diaz & Ocean Vuong (February 25, 2020)

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Research Culture & Researcher Development run a fantastic and deeply supportive Thesis Mentoring Programme. This pairs PGRs who are actively writing their doctoral thesis with a trained and experienced Thesis Mentor. The Programme is a wonderful opportunity to talk through the ups and downs of your writing journey with someone who understands from experience what that feels like. While applications to the Programme are currently closed, please do keep an eye out for their re-opening.

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Could Thesis Mentoring kick start your good writing habits?

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Thesis Mentoring | Final Year PGRs | Next: January - May 2024

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Welcome Living Hearts: A UofG community walking and creative writing project

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Welcome Living Hearts: A UofG community walking and creative writing project

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Welcome Living Hearts aims to support researchers from across the University to develop and articulate their relationship of belonging to the UofG community by presenting an opportunity to work together as part of a supportive group of colleagues to consider that relationship through taking a creative and thoughtful approach to walking.

The project takes the form of a monthly 1-hour creative walk on and around campus, where we walk together and respond to creative writing prompts, taking a break from our daily work, and cultivating our writing practice in a supportive group. These walks will be held on Wednesday lunchtimes, 13:00-14:00, on the first Wednesday of each month, meeting outside the Entrance to the Advanced Research Centre on the Main Campus. All are welcome!

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Sway: Create and share interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more.

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Sway is an easy-to-use digital storytelling app for creating interactive reports, presentations, personal stories and more. Its built-in design engine helps you create professional designs in minutes. With Sway, your images, text, videos, and other multimedia all flow together in a way that enhances your story. Sway makes sure your creations look great on any screen.

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Research Culture & Researcher Development host a supportive and mutually beneficial Thesis Mentoring prgrammes, which pairs PGRs who are actively writing their thesis with a trained and experienced Thesis Mentor. Mentors are post-doctoral Research Staff and Research Professionals, who have volunteered their time to support a PGR over a 16-week period. Mentors have the opportunity to gain informal supervisory experience, and to make a really valuable impact on the writing life of a PGR colleague. Applications to become a Thesis Mentor are currently closed, but please do keep an eye out for them re-opening again soon.

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Could you offer support as a Thesis Mentor?

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Thesis Mentoring | Recruiting mentors | Next: January - May 2024

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A Reading Group/Journal Club is the perfect place to enjoy being part of a writing community, while learning about writing by 'reading like a writer'. By this, I mean, reading not just for content but for voice, style, tone, textual structure, textual mechanics, and more. A Reading Group or Journal Club is also a fantastic safe space to practice using academic language, and become comfortable with the conventions of academic writing and practice. If you're not able to join one, why not get together with some friends or colleagues and start your own?

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Abstract

One way that doctoral scholars can better develop the ability to critically engage with the literature in their field is through participation in a journal club. Often informal and unofficial in nature, these can be considered 'Hidden Curriculum' within doctoral education by serving as authentic pedagogical spaces for learning. Through collectively discussing and critiquing articles, journal clubs offer an interdependent space in which scholars arguably learn together about the more implicitly hidden approaches for independent critical engagement expected of postgraduate researchers. Drawing from an autoethnographic exploration of our own participation in a journal club, this chapter describes what being part of a monthly journal club means for developing the researcher independence of a group of doctoral scholars, augmented with quotes from our reflections. We describe the multiple dimensions of learning, personal aspects of participation, and environmental aspects of our experiences that we learned through our exploration, framed through the theory of reciprocal determinism. We conclude that journal clubs can offer an authentic and safe interdependent learning space for developing researcher independence.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our family and friends who support us as we navigate through our PhD journeys and careers in academia.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Kara A. Makara, Dayana Balgabekova, Karen Gordon, Fanzhu Meng, Natthaphon Tripornchaisak, Zhihan Wu & Dely L. Elliot

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kara A. Makara .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Dely L. Elliot

2. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Søren S. E. Bengtsen

3. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Kay Guccione

Appendix: Guide Questions for the Group Discussion During the Journal Club

Appendix: Guide Questions for the Group Discussion During the Journal Club
Guide questions for group discussion:

1. 1.
What are the key terms in this article? How did the authors define them?

2. 2.
What is the purported 'gap' in the literature that this paper tried to address?

3. 3.
What theories have been considered? What is the underpinning theory used in this article?

4. 4.
Identify one or two arguments from the authors.

5. 5.
How did they collect research data? Give an example how the authors justify a methods-related decision.

6. 6.
What did they do to convince the readers of the validity/trustworthiness/credibility of their findings?

7. 7.
How do their findings offer new insight?

8. 8.
Identify a phrase that is worth citing or quoting as it may have some relevance to your research.

9. 9.
What is the contribution of this study?

10. 10.
Identify examples of study limitations.

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Makara, K.A. et al. (2023). 'It Is a Nice Way to End the Week': Journal Club as an Authentic and Safe Learning Space. In: Elliot, D.L., Bengtsen, S.S.E., Guccione, K. (eds) Developing Researcher Independence Through the Hidden Curriculum. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42875-3_6

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'It Is a Nice Way to End the Week': Journal Club as an Authentic and Safe Learning Space

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One way that doctoral scholars can better develop the ability to critically engage with the literature in their field is through participation in a journal club. Often informal and unofficial in nature, these can be considered 'Hidden Curriculum' within...

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The Conversation is an independent publication that publishes analyses of world news and current events written by academics for a popular audience. They offer self-paced training in journalistic writing which you can access at the above link.

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Short courses that cover how to pitch and write for
The Conversation and reach non-academic audiences.

The Conversation is an independent source of news analysis and expert comment written by academic experts, working with professional journalists who help share their knowledge with the world.

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The Conversation - journalistic writing courses for academics

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Writing journalism training online courses for academics researchers postdocs phd to help communicate complex subjects to general readers

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Writer Jessica J. Lee led us through a discussion of the opening paragraph of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk in our creative practice workshop 'Writing place, body & self'. We talked about listing in creative writing, and all the possibility it allows for, how to write effective descriptive prose, and how to hone in on the key details of an environment.

In the attached text, Macdonald lists 11 things she tells herself when she writes. As you read them, consider: do they translate into your writing contexts?; why/not?; how might you adapt and use these tips for your contexts, and when might they be most relevant to you?

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A not-too-serious and also quite serious list that is entirely non-prescriptive, and is absolutely not a set of instructions. Your mileage will vary wildly. There are as many ways to write about the natural world as there are kinds of beetles. But these are the things I really do tell myself when I write about nature, and today I decided I'd confess them all.
1.
Avoid the Frederick Forsyth explanatory mode.
I adore the way Forsyth breaks the narratives of his thrillers in order to dump data on the reader. Here's an example: after a character in The Dogs of War discovers platinum deposits there follows a lengthy disquisition on the international platinum market, and shortly after this, a history of catalytic converters. I'm not complaining about this mode, but in writing about nature, I try to be more like John Le Carré. You don't catch him explaining the history and workings of the British security services. He just puts two men in a club in Whitehall and you learn what you need from what they say. And what they don't say.
2.
Don't talk down to readers.
They may know as much as you do about your subject, or more. If they don't, they don't want to be told how lucky they are to have you tell them all about it. Military techno-thrillers are often packed with acronyms like SOSUS and AIM-9s and Pratt & Whitney J-57s, and even if you don't know what the hell those things are, you feel you're being talked to as an equal when you encounter them on the page (and these days, it's not difficult to look them up). Same goes for nature. And as for technology. . .
3.
Don't make the space pre-industrial.
This is such a classic genre move it's almost automatic, and it works in the same way wildlife art hardly ever shows evidence that humans have ever existed. If there are burned-out cars and shotgun-addled road signs, or a creek full of trash and a high-security perimeter fence alongside the singing nightingale, don't leave them out. That's how this world is. Honor it.
4.
Things allowed in nature writing include. . .
Jokes, sex, brand names, illness, food, insomnia, laziness, movie references, lovesickness, yeast cookery, even the history of armored vehicles, if that seems relevant-the list is pretty much endless (David Gessner's wonderful essay collection Sick of Nature is glorious on this-he complains productively of how tired and sick he is, not of nature, but the "hushed voice" and "saintliness" of a certain kind of writing about it.)

Also, the voices of other people. One of the joys of Tim Dee's recent book on gulls, , is how, between his fiercely lyrical and thoughtful observations, he lets the people he meets talk at length over the book's pages. He amplifies their voices; he lets them breathe; he never speaks for them.
5.
Be honest when you don't feel it.
Ambivalence is interesting and sometimes the natural world is boring. Sometimes you can be striding up a mountain trail, surrounded by clouds, and be thinking only of your malfunctioning washing machine. When the natural world offers only blankness, and doesn't feel writable-about, it's useful to start wondering why. Tugging on that thread can unpick a whole load of hidden assumptions about our relationship to natural environments; what we ask of them, what we want from them, and why.
6.
The Great Nature Writing Debate
I'm a contrary person, and generally respond badly to being told what I should think, or how I should feel. Some writers are magnificently polemical. I am not good at being so, although the nightmarishness of our current political and environmental situation is spurring me to try harder to do so. What I have sought to do instead is offer readers complication and wonderment, as well as vantage on the issues that burn around us.

It's important to consider how and why we value particular landscapes and creatures, and why we value some less than others. If you can instill wonderment and complication, you can forge in others attachments to the world. No one fights to save what they don't love; no one can love what they don't know. (NB: outside the remit of writing about nature: organize and make good trouble.)
7.
It's usually about you.
It's not possible to write about nature without including a lot of information about yourself. Race, gender, class, and personal history will inform what you say, even if nature is supposed to be free of such concerns-in fact, particularly because it is supposed to be free of them.

If you're sad about the disappearance of a landscape or the local extinction of a creature, think about why exactly you are mourning them. It's not going to be entirely conservation-led, nor simply a fascinating instantiation of an aspect of environmental philosophy. Do not shy away from the specificity of how you, as an individual, feel. If you mourn something, if you can communicate that loss, the reader can mourn with you.
8.
But sometimes it's not.
Sometimes it's not about you. Encountering an animal is always a strange experience; they're built of all the things you have learned about them, from books, television, magazines, conversations, images. But behind all those is a self-willed, non-human entity that exists in its own umwelten, its own life-world. Animals aren't just repositories for human meanings, even if we unthinkingly use them to reflect our own selves and concerns. They are always more, always reminders that the world does not exist for us alone. They resist us. Behind all our human clutter, they are entirely, and perfectly, themselves.
9.
Be specific.
The great English nature writer Richard Mabey has written beautifully on this. He quoted John Fowles's suggestion that the name of a creature is a "pane of dirty glass between you and it" and then took righteous and blistering exception to it. "It seems to me," he explained, "that naming a plant ... is a gesture of respect towards its individuality, its distinction from the generalized green blur."

His observation has extreme salience in terms of our understanding of biodiversity loss. As Barry Lopez wrote in his essay "The Stone Horse," you have to be able to make such distinctions "to be able to talk clearly about the world." Ryegrass monoculture and a verdant meadow are both green blurs, but one supports a complex wealth of lives and one does not. You can't comprehend what is under threat, what has already gone missing, what we should fight to restore, unless you can see those differences.
10.
But not too specific.
There's joy in knowing things, and a delight in fine taxonomic distinctions. But one can go too far along the road of specificity. I've been known to fall into the nature-writers' trap of wanting to demonstrate my expertise. I have fallen prey to the need to carefully look up the identities of various plants and insects and fungi I have seen so that I can state their names in a piece I'm writing. Then, one day, I realized that this is not honest, and neither is it generous. Say when you see something and you don't know what it is. You can find out later, and you can write about that process too.
11.
Sometimes what you think you are writing about is not what you are writing about.
I am sure this happens to everyone who's tried to write anything, and particularly writers like me, who tend not to plan pieces but work on them organically (it's inefficient, but I don't seem to be able to do it any other way). It took me a long time to understand that sometimes, when I thought I was writing about ibises, I was really writing about homesickness, or when I thought I was writing about homesickness, what I was really writing about was ibises.

Homes, not spiders; loneliness, not riparian forest. I learned to listen very carefully to what was going on between the lines, to always pay attention to what the words in front of you are really saying. It's never too late to stop and start again (unless you're on deadline).
Helen Macdonald's essay collection, Vesper Flights, is available now.

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Helen Macdonald: The Things I Tell Myself When I'm Writing About Nature

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A not-too-serious and also quite serious list that is entirely non-prescriptive, and is absolutely not a set of instructions. Your mileage will vary wildly. There are as many ways to write about th...

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If you're interested in how to write for radio and podcasting and how to translate the technicalities of your research for these media, BBC New Generation Thinkers will definitely be of interest. This yearly competition invites academics- both PGRs, and scholars in the early years of their careers- to pitch their research. Those selected come from all disciplines, and various UK institutions. The Programme linked above introduces the 2023 cohort.

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Ten early career academics will work with BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to share their ideas as part of the scheme. This episode unveils the 2023 group.

From lessons in civility learnt playing French board games to the value of babbling by babies in speech development, a history of central heating to the neglected industrial landscapes of the A13, Anti-Asian tropes in AI, Quaker needlework to Viking burial practices, 70s women's art collectives, the history of Ireland's Magdalen laundries to the first philosophy book by a woman to be published in 17th-century Germany: Chris Harding hears about the research topics of ten early career academics chosen as the 2023 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to promote academic research and turn it into radio broadcasts Incidentally you can also find on BBC Sounds the set of Essays by the 2022 New Generation Thinkers and there's a collection of other discussions and features from New Generation Thinkers across the years on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme website But in this podcast Chris Harding talks to: Dr Marianne Hem Eriksen, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester is working on a project which asks what does it mean if a human body isn't buried and the bones are broken apart and scattered? Dr Andrew Cooper, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick is researching "Germany's Mary Wollstonecraft" - Amalia Holst Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz, Loughborough University is conducting an oral history project looking at women's art collectives in 1970s-80s Britain and Ireland Dr Gemma Tidman, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary, is working on her second book, Playing on Words: A History of French Literary Play, 1635-1789 Dr Rebecca Woods, a Senior Lecturer in Language and Cognition at Newcastle University, researches how play helps language learning and the value of multilingualism. Dr Dan Taylor works at the Open University. His most recent book is Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom and he's been an adviser on a BBC-Open University co-production Union, a four-part tv series due later this year presented by David Olusoga Dr Sam Johnson-Schlee, from London South Bank University has been researching a history of gas heating and he's published a kind of domestic spaces memoir titled Living Rooms Dr Kerry McInerney, a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge co-hosts the Good Robots podcast and looks at anti-Asian racism in AI Isabella Rosner, is a PhD student at King's College London and presenter of the Sew What? podcast and her research looks at Quaker needlework Dr Louise Brangan, Chancellor's Fellow in Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow is researching the way Ireland is now coming to terms with the impact of the Magdalene Laundries and the treatment of women and babies. Producer: Ruth Watts

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BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Introducing New Generation Thinkers 2023

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Christopher Harding finds out about the research done by ten academics chosen this year.

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Pathfinder Career Narratives is an established blogpost series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates from the University of Glasgow and further afield. If you're wondering how to talk or write about who you are, what you do, and your own journey as a writer, researcher or professional, the writers of these blogposts provide such exciting and valuable blueprints for this kind of writing practice.

Plus, if you have a career you enjoy and a doctorate, you could be an example to researchers! To write for the series, email the team at researchculture@glasgow.ac.uk.

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Posts about Pathfinder Narratives written by

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In our roundtable conversation on Writing for Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement, public engagement professional and comedian Zara Gladman shared some of her top tips for academics looking to get involved in public engagement activities. Dr Gladman is the UofG lead for the nation-wide Explorathon festival where academics are invited to take parts of their research out into the community. For more information, click the link above!

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Shows, Talks, Family Activities, Comedy & Discovery

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Dr Kevin Leomo, who was a contributor to our Roundtable Conversation on Public Engagement & Knowledge Exchange co-leads on Thinking Culture, along with other colleagues from UofG's College of Arts and Humanities. Thinking Culture is a programme of events and activities which aims to enrich the cultural life of Glasgow by bringing academics, artists, and audiences into meaningful conversation through the creative arts: find out more by clicking the link above!

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Hot Animation, Film Screening Series

Andrew Stewart Cinema

Hot Animation is a month-long series of screenings that give cultural expression to heat and changing temperatures. Screening the films Rango (Verbinski, 2011), Kirikou (Ocelot, 1998), Children of the Sea [...]

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Cultural Futures in the Crisis

Civic House

Cultural Futures in the Crisis 3:30-6.30pm, 12 March 2024 Civic House, 26 Civic Street, Glasgow G4 9RH Join Justin O'Connor for a launch event for his forthcoming book 'Culture is [...]

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The Trial of William Merrilees

James Arnott Theatre

The Trial of William Merrilees is a one-night-only, unscripted, live performance. You are invited to act as jury, hear both parties of the case, ask questions of the witnesses, and decide [...]

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Thinking Culture is a programme of events and activities which aims to enrich the cultural life of Glasgow by bringing academics, artists, and audiences into meaningful conversation through the creative arts.

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This podcast, written and presented by Cathy Mazak, breaks down the overwhelming process of a writing practice into a series of c.20min podcasts on a variety of topics, including beginning to write, re-beginning your writing practice, making your writing practice a good habit you can stick to, having a productive writing practice and more. They're aren't too many ad breaks, although Mazak does quite often advertise her own paid writing programmes.

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The podcast for academic womxn who want to write and publish more while rejecting the culture of overwork in academia.

Cathy Mazak, PhD, helps you create the career (and life) you want by centering your writing. Kick guilt and overwhelm to the curb and amplify your voice to make a real impact on your field--without breaking down or burning out.

The podcast for academic womxn who want to write and publish more while rejecting the culture of overwork in academia.

Cathy Mazak, PhD, helps you create the career (and life) you want by centering your writing. Kick guilt and overwhelm to the curb and amplify your voice to make a real impact on your field--without breaking down or burning out.

Very helpful but would prefer less advertising

Though the UK academic system is different I still find this podcast very useful. The only thing I wish was that it was not used to advertise all the host's courses quite so extensively.

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‎Academic Writing Amplified on Apple Podcasts

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The podcast for academic womxn who want to write and publish more while rejecting the culture of overwork in academia. Cathy Mazak, PhD, helps you create the career (and life) you want by centering your writing. Kick guilt and overwhelm to the curb and amplify your voice to make a real impact on yo...

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This podcast, presented by Dan Simpson, gets granular about the daily routine, writing habits and practice of a wide range of authors. Most are creative writers, including novelists, screenwriters and poets, but the tips and tricks they share about what helps them write are useful to all of us I think, and certainly of interest to the nosy among us! That said, there are a couple of academic writers on too- those interested in translating their research for a popular audience might wish to begin with Shakespeare scholar Prof. Emma Smith's episode... There are quite frequent ad breaks/sponsorships.

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In every episode we look inside the daily diary of a writer, to peak at the secrets of their success. How do they plan their day and maximise their creativity, in order to plot and publish a bestseller?Some are frantic night-owls, others roll out of bed into their desks, and a few lock themselves away for days in the woods - but none have a regular 9 to 5, and we'll find out how they've managed it.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In every episode we look inside the daily diary of a writer, to peak at the secrets of their success. How do they plan their day and maximise their creativity, in order to plot and publish a bestseller?Some are frantic night-owls, others roll out of bed into their desks, and a few lock themselves away for days in the woods - but none have a regular 9 to 5, and we'll find out how they've managed it.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An excellent resource!

Just discovered this podcast and found the JD Kirk ep truly inspiring.

My favourite podcast

I've been listening to episodes of this wonderful podcast daily over the past few months.
I've often toyed with the idea of writing a novel myself but have felt out of my depth and not knowing where I would start. Don't think that a creative writing course is for me plus I'm still working and they are expensive.
This podcast has been wonderfully enlightening. It's allowed me to realise the type of writer I would naturally be to suit my own nature and the habits that I've developed during my work life.
While I'm still not sure of exactly the genre or style of what I might eventually write, I'm pretty certain that I know how I would go about writing it - plotter or pantser, word count or not, mornings or evenings etc. - plus other tidbits of advice that I've liked.
Thanks Sam - wonderful!

Want to love it but...

Interviews often just devolve into women moaning about the "struggles" of trying to balance motherhood and writing. While I understand this topic may be of interest to some, it can quite annoying to listen to over and over again. Please include more variety! It would be great to hear from people who struggle with perfectionism, anxiety, whether to continue a project or abandon it, the editing process, etc.

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In every episode we look inside the daily diary of a writer, to peak at the secrets of their success. How do they plan their day and maximise their creativity, in order to plot and publish a bestseller?Some are frantic night-owls, others roll out of bed into their desks, and a few lock themselves aw...

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Nothing ground-breaking or revolutionary here, but I aimed for 500 words a day when writing up, which was low enough (for me) to be achievable and often surpassed, but high enough to still be making progress. I combined this with pomodoro for focus. Here's a recent-ish blog post on this for anyone stuck in a rut and looking for air.(My favourite chrome extension is strict pomodoro which allows you to access internet for references but to blacklist your procrastination sites of choice).

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Back in 2013, I wrote a blog post on 500 Words a Day, Academic Writing. Noting that its not something many academics admit - but writing is hard, not for all, there are some academics who simply flow words but for many its a challenge. There is nothing worse than the blank page of a Word/LaTeX document, knowing you have 10,000 words to go and only a title or abstract in place. It also depends on your stage in an academic career. Researchers generally have more time during the day to, as the job title suggests, to research and therefore write, lecturers less time (increasingly so) and so on. That said, the ability to do anything else than write the paper/masters thesis/PhD chapter is strong, many academics are excellent in justifying just one more bit of research before they start writing.

If you go through a period of not writing, be it weeks or months, then the guilt as an academic starts to build up, we are meant to write papers as those around will often be only too keen to chip in during conversations. I see it across the board, from professors through to starting out researchers and students leaving the course essay until the last possible minute. There is a need to not only get over the fear of starting a new paper but to also form a pattern to take away the worry that can all too easily build up.

I stated that "It turns out the answer is easy, and thanks go to Sir Alan Wilson of CASA who i found sitting typing early one morning, turns out he always aims for: Write 500 words a day".

I was wrong, its not easy at all, but i found out how to solve it.

Jump forward to 2023, I am mid book writing with 23,000 words now in place over the last 8 weeks, and most suprising to me, I've enjoyed it. The dread of the blank page of A4 has gone and i think i've finally learnt how to break the fear, the writers block and not only get it done but to actually miss it if i have a day when i cant write.

There are many books out there that will, over the course of 30,000 words or so, generally tell you the same thing on how to be productive, how to write academically, how to write your first novel etc. In essense it comes down to two simple points and if you can follow these you will, within two weeks, get into a pattern which might just change the way you write and with it your output and perhaps even your path in life:

1) ) Use the Pomodoro Technique - The "Pomodoro Technique" is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The name comes from the Italian word "pomodoro" (tomato) because Cirillo used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer when he first implemented the method. The technique is designed to improve productivity and focus by breaking work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes long, separated by short breaks.

Here's how you can implement it:

Take a Short Break Relax for a 5-minute break. Stretch, walk around, or do something you enjoy for a few minutes, tbh i normally use the 5 minutes to check my open tabs in Chrome - Twitter (i cant call it 'X' yet) etc.

Repeat - the technique statrs that after four pomodoros (i.e., after completing four 25-minute work sessions and taking three 5-minute breaks) you then take a longer break, around 15-30 minutes. This longer break allows you to relax and recharge before diving into another set of pomodoros. To be honest i often do it after 3 sessions as thats the point where my brain is beginning to drift. If all has gone well however i may well be nearing the 500 words at this point, some days the 500 words are easily won, some days much less so. If its proving more challenging then i repeat the process until done.

The primary benefits of the Pomodoro Technique i have found are:

An Enhanced Focus: By dedicating short periods to a single task, it becomes easier to stay engaged and focused. Its amazing how rare a focused 25 minutes actually is without using the technique.

Regular Breaks: These prevent burnout and keep your mind fresh, they are also often enough not to allow sneaking checking of Chrome tabs.

Tracking Productivity: By counting pomodoros, you can gauge how much effort tasks require and better estimate future tasks. This also goes for word count, if you track your word count as you go, I have a running total i update each day on Slack, then it does start to take the pressure off.

You can adjust the timings to suit your needs. Some people prefer longer or shorter work intervals, but the key is to maintain a consistent pattern of focused work followed by a break.

2) Get into a Pattern - a Habit of Writing. The Pomodoro Technique will automatically do that, a habit is often portrayed as a bad thing but it can also be good and it trains your brain to be ready to write at a set time. Personally i use 9.30am to 12.30pm, so a three hour slot each day. This is a time i would often have meetings, so i have blocked out the diary going forward and have moved meetings to the afternoon. At that point my writing is done and im not distracted by an article i should be writing.

Writing 500 words a day gives you 2,500 a week - 10,000 a month which is easily a PhD chapter, two working papers, one journal paper or a 1/4 of a short novel.

It may seem obvious, but it is all too easy to complete a long day with it filled with meetings - often meetings you have put in the diary youself and ending up at the end of the day without having any words on paper.

I've been doing it for just over two months and have 22, 652 words written, if you are reading this then do try the technique and let us know in the comments how you get on.

The book? - The working title is: Cities in the Metaverse: Digital Twins, Spatial Computing, Society, Avatars and Economics on the New Frontier with Dr Valerio Signorelli,and Professor Duncan Wilson of CASA.

This blog post? - 1,991 words, or three Pomodoros....

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Writing 500 Words a Day - The Pomodoro Technique

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Back in 2013, I wrote a blog post on 500 Words a Day, Academic Writing. Noting that its not something many academics admit - but writing is hard, not for all, there are some academics who simply flow words but for many its a challenge.

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This pod explores the topic of writing and fear via an interview by Cristina Munoz with the legendary writing teacher Peter Elbow. Hear how Peter approaches the problems of the blank page and Cristina's reflection on her own developing practice as a writer.

This pod is part of a series called 'Your Brain on Writing', facilitated by Prof Inger Mewburn and Prof Paul Magee as part of the Centre for Public Awareness of Science internship program at ANU.

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This pod explores the topic of writing and fear via an interview by Cristina Munoz with the legendary writing teacher Peter Elbow. Hear how Peter approaches the problems of the blank page and Cristina's reflection on her own developing practice as a writer.

This pod is part of a series called 'Your Brain on Writing', facilitated by Prof Inger Mewburn and Prof Paul Magee as part of the Centre for Public Awareness of Science internship program at ANU.

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Your brain on writing: Fear - The Whisper Collective Podcast

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This pod explores the topic of writing and fear via an interview by Cristina Munoz with the legendary writing teacher Peter Elbow. Hear how Peter approaches the problems of the blank page and Cristina's reflection on her own developing practice as...

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Practical support to help you beat your blocks and get writing again - by Bec Evans and Chris Smith, authors of Written and coaches at The Written Academy.

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Practical support to help you beat your blocks and get writing again - by Bec Evans and Chris Smith, authors of Written and coaches at The Written Academy.

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Practical support to help you beat your blocks and get writing again - by Bec Evans and Chris Smith, authors of Written and coaches at The Written Academy. Click to read Breakthroughs & Blocks, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

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University of Glasgow: Writing Retreat with a Beat 

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University of Glasgow: Writing Retreat with a Beat 

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Do you like to listen to music while you write? Whether you do, and what you choose to write with, are such personal decisions, and all of us might prefer wildly different auditory environments to support our writing. This series of short videos presents a range of UofG academics discussing the music they write to, why they love, and how it supports their writing practice.

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If you find working alongside others to be comforting and motivating, but are unable to make one of our writing retreats, you might enjoy this lovely Write-A-Long YouTube channel from UofG research student Merve, who hosts study sessions of various lengths which she streams from campus, and which you can work alongside.

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"study with merve" "study with me" "real time study with me at the library" "study with me no break no music" "study with me rain sound" "rainy day study wit...

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A student in amazing Scotland! Data Science MSc at the University of Aberdeen. International Relations MRes student at University of Glasgow, swinging freely between Energy Security, Pipeline Politics and International Law!

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Useful tips here!

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How to improve your academic writing 📚💻// University of Glasgow Student Vlog

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AcWriVox - resources from the University of Sheffield 

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AcWriVox - resources from the University of Sheffield 

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This series, led by colleagues at the University of Sheffield, aims to make the unseen practices and processes of writing more visible and less mysterious.

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More diverse individual takes on writing are in the making, and even more are being recruited, particularly from women.

These videos were directed and filmed by the Think Ahead team and professionally edited by Robert Myles, filmmaker.

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AcWriVox is a growing playlist of videos documenting the voices of academic writers. Created for WriteFest, academic staff share their writing processes, habits and spaces with us. This series aims to make the unseen practices and processes of writing more visible and less mysterious.

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A classic resource for (especially international) students who aspire to develop their academic writing. This phrase bank is very useful for writing essays and thesis chapters, and in general, it makes writing rich and thoughtful.

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The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ). Other phrases are listed under the more general communicative functions of academic writing (see the menu on the left). The resource should be particularly useful for writers who need to report their research work. The phrases, and the headings under which they are listed, can be used simply to assist you in thinking about the content and organisation of your own writing, or the phrases can be incorporated into your writing where this is appropriate. In most cases, a certain amount of creativity and adaptation will be necessary when a phrase is used. The items in the Academic Phrasebank are mostly content neutral and generic in nature; in using them, therefore, you are not stealing other people's ideas and this does not constitute plagiarism. For some of the entries, specific content words have been included for illustrative purposes, and these should be substituted when the phrases are used. The resource was designed primarily for academic and scientific writers who are non-native speakers of English. However, native speaker writers may still find much of the material helpful. In fact, recent data suggest that the majority of users are native speakers of English. More about Academic Phrasebank.

This site was created by John Morley.

Academic Phrasebank is the Intellectual Property of the University of Manchester.

Copyright © 2023 The University of Manchester

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The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organised according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation (see the top menu ).

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The Journal of Imaginary Research, edited by UofG's Dr Kay Guccione and published yearly, publishes short works of fiction in the academic genre of the Research Abstract. The journal really interrogates the form, with thought-provoking and often hilarious results, and would be an excellent first port of call for anyone looking to improve their abstract-writing skills, or anyone hoping to publish creative work.

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The Journal of Imaginary Research is now accepting submissions of new short fictional pieces for our annual volume produced each November to celebrate Academic Writing Month. We publish imaginary research abstracts, and all our volumes are available as free downloads here.
What do we mean imaginary research abstracts?
We mean short works of fiction, that take a format that is familiar to us as researchers and academics. An abstract is the summary of an academic paper, that gives us a succinct overview of the research that has been done, and the new outcomes or ideas that the research has generated.
The 2022 theme This year our theme is 'service'. It's an old word that first related to ceremony or worship, like a church or wedding service. Servants are engaged in service, but so too are leaders. Service means giving time or performing duties for a person, idea or cause. There is sometimes a sense of loyalty, duty and length, but also the quick and easy service of consumerism, of waiting tables, selling with a smile, emotional labour. It's a word deployed by the armed forces and department stores. We can service abstract things like education or science, people, institutions, or appliances like washing machines. It is both a euphemism for sex and also the word used to describe delivering a ball over the net to start a game of tennis. We'd like you to interpret the theme in your own way so that your submission relates somehow to service. You don't need to explain this to us or within your piece; it's fine to take the theme literally and write about the provision of public transport, but it's also fine to use the theme as a mood, a way to enter your imagination. Where will your imaginary research go to? What will your imaginary research service? Or should, indeed, imaginary research service anything at all?
Keep reading to find out how to get started and how to submit your writing...

Why do we publish fictional research?
We publish imagined research abstracts as works of fiction firstly because writing for enjoyment is a good thing to encourage. We spend a lot of time trying to reduce our anxiety about writing, and so writing imaginatively is a good way to reshape our relationship with writing into something creative and enjoyable.

Secondly, writing fiction in a familiar format, helps us to reflect on how we can creatively communicate our other research projects, and how we can find the joy of creativity within the grind of productivity. Creativity is a property of all writers and the privilege of all researchers. It allows us to dream and hope.
Can I see examples?
The imaginary abstracts we have published in Volumes 1-7 and our summer 2020 Special Issue were written by real academic staff, research staff, and research students. These volumes of our Journal-zine provide plenty of examples of the different approaches and styles, some funny, some serious, all completely made up.
How to get started with your submission
How you approach your imaginary Abstract is open to you. We'd like you to use an image as writing prompt, and accompaniment to your finished piece. Start with an image; any copyright free image or photograph you choose. Use this as a prompt for your writing. Perhaps begin by noting down observable facts about the image, then add some invented facts from your imagination. Combine the observed and the imagined and think about other notions, words, and concepts you associate with your developing ideas. What imaginary research project could help you articulate, investigate, or explain what you see and what you imagine from the starting point offered to you by the image?

Consider your imagined abstract and imagined researcher biography as a piece, together. Who is the researcher who would do this work? What are they like? Where do they work? What have they achieved in their career?
To have your creative work considered for inclusion, please submit, in one MS Word file:

1. A title for your fictional study

2. A 200-word imagined (fictional) research abstract

3. A 100-word imagined (fictional) researcher biography

4. A high resolution copy of the copyright free image which accompanies your written abstract - by all means take a photo specifically for this purpose or see these resources if you don't have a stash of your own:
https://pixabay.com
https://unsplash.com
https://broadlygenderphotos.vice.com (gender inclusive photo set) https://affecttheverb.com/collection/ (disabled, Black, Indigenous people, People of Color in work and home lives)
https://obesitycanada.ca/resources/image-bank/ (positive portrayals of individuals with obesity)
https://ageingbetter.resourcespace.com/pages/home.php (positive portrayals of older people)

Submit these four things for consideration to kay.guccione@glasgow.ac.uk Editorial process by 5pm on Friday 2nd December, 2022
Remember, have a look at Volumes 1-7 and our summer 2020 Special Issue to get an idea of the sort of work we publish.

Due to the volume of submissions we are now receiving, we have a fast and simple editorial process. When we receive your submission, we will do one of the following:
Enjoy it!
(a) accept and publish your submission without edits,
(b) send your submission back to you with some suggestions on how to resubmit it for the next issue or
(c) make minor edits to your work and publish it in the current issue.

That means that your piece may be published with minor edits that you have not seen. If you would prefer that this doesn't happen, then let us know when you submit. We haven't had disappointed any writers yet, but we want you to be aware of our editorial processes so you can make an informed decision. In all cases you maintain the copyright on your submission, and no money is made by the sale of your writing.

A key aim of our journal-zine is to encourage academic colleagues to embrace writing simply for enjoyment, as an act of care, or as a reflective act. We also hope that reading and writing our imagined works, will bring an enjoyable diversion into your work lives.

Editors: Kay Guccione (@kayguccione) and Matthew Cheeseman (@eine)

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abstract works of fiction // fictional abstracts

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Society for Scholarly Publishing Early Career Development Podcast

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Society for Scholarly Publishing Early Career Development Podcast

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This Podcast, hosted by Meredith Adinolfi and Sara Grimme, is for people hoping to work in the academic publishing industry. However, there's lots about it that might be useful for people hoping to publish as well- featuring interviews with people in a wide variety of publishing careers, it breaks down the industry, and helps listeners understand exactly what- and who- is involved in taking a text from initial manuscript submission to publication, and reception by a wide reading public.

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The Society for Scholarly Publishing's (SSP's) Career Development Committee has launched a podcast series for early career publishing professionals. Co-hosted by Meredith Adinolfi (Cell Press) and Sara Grimme (Digital Science), the podcast series offers advice and discussion on how early career publishing professionals can add to their skill sets, develop networks, and take advantage of opportunities. The series presents interviews and insights from experienced professionals on how to navigate one's career in a diverse and ever-changing landscape of scholarly communications.

The Society for Scholarly Publishing's (SSP's) Career Development Committee has launched a podcast series for early career publishing professionals. Co-hosted by Meredith Adinolfi (Cell Press) and Sara Grimme (Digital Science), the podcast series offers advice and discussion on how early career publishing professionals can add to their skill sets, develop networks, and take advantage of opportunities. The series presents interviews and insights from experienced professionals on how to navigate one's career in a diverse and ever-changing landscape of scholarly communications.

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‎Early Career Development Podcast on Apple Podcasts

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The Society for Scholarly Publishing's (SSP's) Career Development Committee has launched a podcast series for early career publishing professionals. Co-hosted by Meredith Adinolfi (Cell Press) and Sara Grimme (Digital Science), the podcast series offers advice and discussion on how early career publ...

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Utilise publishers' programmes of support for authors. This is Taylor & Francis's:

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Utilise publishers' programmes of support for authors. This is Taylor & Francis's:

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From this home page, you can access a range of resources, including information, blogs, tips and tricks for new authors, and live events.

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Gain an insight into the fascinating world of research with the How Researchers Changed the World podcast. Each episode follows the story of one passionate researcher, unpacking their motivations for the subject they study, the challenges of their research, and how one particular piece of research went on to change the world we live in.

Listen to How Researchers Changed the World

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Author Services | How to publish a journal article - step by step guides

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Gain an insight into the fascinating world of research with the How Researchers Changed the World podcast. Each episode follows the story of one passionate researcher, unpacking their motivations for the subject they study, the challenges of their research, and how one particular piece of research went on to change the world we live in.

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In our 'Living and working in/through languages' session, UofG academics Dr Giovanna Fassetta and Dr Maria Grazia Imperiale introduced us to the linguistic theorist David Gramling's work, focusing on the way he conceptualises monolingualism and the invention of multilingualism. In this lecture given in 2020, Gramling thinks through the relationship between monolingualism and the justice system, interrogating the way we navigate our use of language as people and as researchers. (RL)

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Center For Multilingual and Intercultural Communication at Stony Brook

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Monolingualism, In/Justice by Dr. David Gramling

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This shared resource for students and staff was created by Dr Mona O'Brien and Dr Julia Bohlmann for PGT students and staff who support them. However, we think there's lots in this fantastic resource that's also relevant to the PGR and Research Staff contexts too, particularly around understanding the UofG writing support ecosystem. Each section of this Moodle, which anyone with a GUID can enrol in, contains a themed video of students speaking about their experiences of undertaking a postgraduate taught degree at the University of Glasgow and resources to support students and staff during that journey.

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English for study and communication 2023-24

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English for study and communication 2023-24

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This Moodle, for researchers who use English as an additional language, is created by Helen Oakes and colleagues. Through it, you can find booking for the English for Study and Communication workshops which run across the academic year, and are open to all across UofG. There are also a number of resources on the Moodle for writers new to English for Academic Purposes.

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Dr Maria Grazia Imperiale & Dr Giovanna Fassetta shared their recent project Welcoming Languages with us. The project rethought the relationship between children seeking asylum in Scotland, and the schools where they learn. Instead of teaching incoming children the dominant language, standard-version British English, Giovanna & Grazia worked with Arabic teachers in Palestine to create a Levantine-version Arabic Language Programme for teachers in Scottish primary schools, inverting the direction in which language is often taught, and building rich community links as a result.

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Welcoming Languages - Online Arabic from Palestine language course

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The Welcoming Languages project explores the inclusion of a 'refugee language' in Scottish education as a way to enact the idea of 'integration as a two-way process' that is at the heart of the "New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy" (Scottish Government, 2018).

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While not strictly about writing, or about using academic English, this podcast hosted by UofG academic Dr Sadie Ryan interrogates voice, language, and the fascinating nuances of communicating. Not all the episodes are about multilingual speakers, but this one, an interview with her mother who speaks both English and Polish, is.

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“At that point I felt like I’d made a very important contact with her on a very deep level, somehow. Because she spoke to me in Polish.” My mum, Anna, is Polish. But she’s not from Poland - she was born in Edinburgh, and has lived there for most of her life. How can someone who is completely Scotti

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Poet Anne Carson in a recent interview in The Paris Review, talking about- among other things- the craft of writing, translation as a state of mind, hesitation, negative space, Homer and Emily Dickinson.

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Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A theatrical set piece painted by Ragnar Kjartansson leaned against the wall. Out the window: the ocean and Iceland's barren expanse. "America seems so cluttered, vegetatively," Carson said. "Trees everywhere, plants all over the place, flowers. Here it's just empty. There's lava, there's the sea. There's just lines. Empty space."
Empty space is one of Carson's creative playgrounds. "Lecture on the History of Skywriting"-the centerpiece of her latest collection, Wrong Norma- is narrated by the sky, or space itself personified. Formally, where other Sappho translators have filled the gaps between the ancient poet's fragments, Carson's If Not, Winter marks the negative space with brackets, emphasizing that lines and stanzas have been lost to history. Carson has often explored absence-as-presence: Eros the Bittersweet argues that desire comes from lack, while Nox, an elegy for her late brother, Michael, mourns the final absence of someone who had long been missing from her life.

We were there to talk about Wrong Norma, Carson's first original work in seven years, which she called "a collection of disparate pieces, not a coherent thing with a throughline or themes or a way you have to read it." But images, phrases, and ideas recur: bread, blood, pebbles, a fox, lawyers, a heart of darkness, John Cage, the word wrong, and various flavors of wrongness, for example. "I don't have much to say," Carson remarked. Yet over a pair of hour-long conversations, we found plenty to talk about.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about the "wrongness" in the title of Wrong Norma.

CARSON

When people ask me, "How are Canadians different from Americans?" I say, "Canadians have one characteristic: they're polite, but wrong." All the time, polite but wrong.

"Wrong" I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing. And also, something you always feel in academic life is that you're wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being "not wrong" every time you speak. So it's kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling.

It's something Simone Weil says in an essay she has about contradiction, because people find contradiction in philosophical texts so perplexing, and she specializes in contradiction. She says it's a useful mental event, because it loosens the mind. And once you can loosen, you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It's just suddenly a different landscape. And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness allows in.

I could talk about wrongness tomorrow and say an entirely other thing. A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day.

INTERVIEWER

As I read Eros the Bittersweet, I was thinking about the adage that friends and lovers "speak the same language." I don't know if that's true-it seems more like everyone speaks their own individual language, and there's this constant act of translation happening in relationships.

CARSON

I don't think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It's more than translation, it's just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It's probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.

INTERVIEWER

That seems similar to the idea that the way that one language expresses an idea might never fully translate to another. What happens in that space you inhabit as a translator, between the original work and the translation?

CARSON

I think of it as a ditch, a ditch between two roads or countries. It's always been interesting for me, the state of mind that the translator arrives at, where they have two languages simultaneously on their brain-screen. And they're saying something not quite equivalent and they both keep on floating there. Some writers-Emily Dickinson would be the outstanding example-make use of that ditch within their own language. So she's not translating from another language. She's translating herself. She writes certain lines and words and then crosses them out and puts another word in, or writes the third word on the side, or turns the paper over and makes another version of the whole thing. And it all exists together as the poem. It's just a really weird state of mind, to have all that floating, and have it be, have it constitute the poem in its entirety-in its untidy, unresolved entirety.

In translation, this arises in a different way, because you have a text, and it has perhaps certain obvious errors in it. And then you have variant readings at the bottom of the page, which are ideas that different scholars have had over the years to make a better reading where it seems wrong. So you get, again, these possibilities floating in your mind, for the same thing, but different. And they're all kind of there together constituting the poem. I've never known what to do with that. It's a beautiful event to have the poem in Greek with various readings in English underneath it, and to have all that floating as possibilities for what the guy really said.

I can't communicate the beauty of that most of the time on a page in a book, or in something called "a translation of x." There's no format for that. You can do it sort of on a computer with links and whatnot, side text. But basically nobody wants to be bothered with reading all those links, and it doesn't feel the same. As a scholar, when you're looking at the page itself with the language and the variants, and it all floats in your mind, it's just an extraordinary experience. Incommunicable, I think, in its finer aspects.

INTERVIEWER

What about the act of creating something from scratch? Is that experience similarly spatial?

CARSON

I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it's interesting. It's more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It's just following a track.

INTERVIEWER

The fox is one of the mysteries of Wrong Norma. Did he have a fixed meaning or feeling as you wrote about him, or would it change every day?

CARSON

I don't know where that fox came from. I was writing the liner notes for the LP of Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors, and I was drawing at the same time. The fox appeared in the drawing, and he was such a great fox, I thought, "I've got to put that fox in somewhere," so I put it into the Visitors piece. It was just an accidental fox that arrived by himself and then seemed to need to be dealt with.

INTERVIEWER

How do you access your most creative headspace?

CARSON

Sometimes, what I end up writing about is just the way the light is. And there seems to be some kind of contract that's already in place between me and the light to say-in this notebook, which no one will ever read-what the light is like today, to get exactly the right words. I don't know what that contract is. But it seems to underlie all the other writing.

After the light, we could talk about my mother or what I'm having for dinner or Proust's theory of translation. But the important thing is over. The light was the important thing. It remains a mystery to me why that's the case, or where that contract came from.

INTERVIEWER

In the piece "Snow," you write about a premonition featuring the night clerk at the hotel where you stayed the week before your mother passed away. Is that something that happens to you often?

CARSON

Once it did. In Greek myth, the god Hermes is called the psychopomp, which means that when somebody is about to die, he goes to them and leads their soul to the underworld. So I kind of categorized the bellhop in the hotel as that guy. But when Currie and I were going to his father's funeral, we picked up a hitchhiker in the middle of Michigan, nowhere. God knows where he came from, because it's just empty landscape and then this guy, on the side of the road, in a really clean blue suit. He had a blue suit and a blue shirt. He was really starched-looking, and he got into the car and the car suddenly smelled like laundry, he was that clean. We tried to talk to him, and he didn't want to talk. He was going to some public library on the side of the road three towns down, but he wouldn't describe who he was. And then we let him out of the car at the library and went on our way. That guy was a psychopomp, because we didn't know Currie's dad was dead yet. Or, he wasn't dead yet. He died the same day. We figured that guy was the sign that somebody's going to the other world. So it does happen. I wouldn't say often.

INTERVIEWER

For a long time, you and Currie co-taught a class on artistic collaboration at NYU called "The Egocircus." What sorts of exercises would you do with your students?

CARSON

"Burn something, use the ash" was one of the prompts. "Improve a hotel" was another. We sometimes gave them just three words like "sailing, butter, death." And then they would make things. It wasn't that we disallowed writing entirely-they always did come up with writing-but we encouraged them to use other skills. They were always discovering things they could do that they didn't know they could do.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any non-writing skills that are part of your writing process?

CARSON

Drawing and painting. I'll put swimming in. Tidying up, I'm a good tidier.

INTERVIEWER

How does swimming figure into your writing?

CARSON

It keeps me from being morose and crabby. Sometimes I think in the pool. Usually it's a bad idea. The ideas you have in the pool are like the ideas you have in a dream, where you get this sentence that answers all questions you've ever had about reality and you get up groggily and write it down, and in the morning, it looks like "let's buy bananas" or something completely irrelevant. Plus, I like water. Some people just need to be near water.

INTERVIEWER

You and Currie are fans of John Cage, who talks about eliminating the ego from art. I'm still thinking about the John Cage epigraph that appears in your 2016 collection Float- "Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it."

CARSON

That pertains to writers because they tend to have an accumulated store of memories and choices, which they call their autobiography, and then they just recycle that endlessly as they're writing. You've just got to get out of that.

INTERVIEWER

In the writing world, particularly in and around M.F.A. programs, there's a lot of discussion around things like "character" and "perspective," the mechanics of narrative. Do you think about "craft" in these terms?

CARSON

Never. I don't think about it. I think people should just quit that stuff. Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.

INTERVIEWER

I worry that-in America at least-the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?

CARSON

That's part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it's not no thought because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you're not arrived yet at the thought. It's a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It's very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.

Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don't know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don't even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.

That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you're not quite thinking yet. It's an absent presence in a way, but it's not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It's not that-it's on the way to knowing, so it's suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that our experience of time has something to do with the way that we pay attention? Do you think that someone who reads a lot would experience time differently from someone looking at screens all day?

CARSON

That seems to imply judgment. I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that we seek out ways to make time stop. That only happens in moments of total attention, which is why we pursue them. I suppose that can happen when you watch a movie on Netflix. Or when you're deep in the midst of composing your best poem. Either of them can provide a focus of attention that you can enter, disappear into. My only interest in dealing with time is to find ways to make it stop. Because when it doesn't stop, you're in boredom.

You're watching it go by, and there's nothing happening in it enough to fill it. Enough to take you away from misery. I don't find much of a middle ground between boredom and whatever the other thing is ... immortality, I guess. Forgetting time.

To be out of time, to be in that other state, is completely fun. So fun that you forget worrying about time.

INTERVIEWER

Do you spend hours at a time in that state?

CARSON

Minutes maybe, if I'm lucky.

Kate Dwyer is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and many other outlets.

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"Throwing Yourself Into the Dark": A Conversation with Anne Carson - The Paris Review

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"Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true."

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Author Sheila Heti discusses the formal experimentation she uses in Alphabetical Diaries, involving re-ordering and cutting out previously written text to build new narratives. The episode, hosted by Chris Power also includes contributions from academic and writer Holly Pester, and writer Kieran Goddard.

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Sheila Heti on her new experimental book, Alphabetical Diaries - made up of sentences taken from 10 years of journals, re-ordered from A to Z. Plus Holly Pester and Keiran Goddard.

Sheila Heti on her new experimental book, Alphabetical Diaries - made up of sentences taken from 10 years of her journals, re-ordered from A to Z.

Plus new literature reflecting the negative impact of the housing crisis and the built environment in which we live. Chris talks to Holly Pester about her book, Lodgers, and to Keiran Goddard about his new work, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.

Presenter: Chris Power
Producer: Emma Wallace

Book List - Sunday 18 February and Thursday 22 February

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
The Lodgers by Holly Pester
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning by Keiran Goddard

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Sheila Heti on her new experimental book, Alphabetical Diaries.

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Ekphrasis: descriptive writing with artworks.

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Ekphrasis: descriptive writing with artworks.

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In our session 'Developing your research narrative', we worked with ekphrastic writing techniques, challenging ourselves to flex new writing muscles, and critically evaluating how we might bring these tools into our academic work. If you'd like to read some more ekphrastic poems, click the link above.

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In our session 'Where to publish?' with Dr Paul Cannon, we were introduced to bibliometrics. Paul talked us through how to use this data to understand a publication's reach and impact, and how to make decisions on where to publish a piece of writing that reflect how we want the text to resonate within the publishing landscape.

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University of Glasgow - MyGlasgow - MyGlasgow Research - Managing Your Publications - Publications and Research Reputation - Indicators - Bibliometrics

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Bibliometrics are a traditional set of indicators which use citations in academic journals as an indication of the scholarly engagement and impact of research papers. A number of bibliometric tools are available which track citation data including SciVal, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.

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The Open Research team at the University of Glasgow, led by Valerie McCutcheon, who we heard from in our Library Skills and Services Roundtable, run training events across the year which you can access here.

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Research Data Management and Open Access Training

We offer an introductory training course in best practice in research data management and in data management planning for staff and for postgraduate researchers (PGRs). This training is delivered through Moodle and Zoom. Information on how to join can be found below.

Postgraduate aught students (PGTs) or undergraduates who are interested in learning more about data management are welcome to complete RSDC 6037, Introduction to Research Data Management (PGR), but should first read our advice on data management for PGTs and undergraduate students.

Our course materials are available for re-use. Offline versions of our course materials are available through EdShare, and are licenced with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

In addition to the training outlined below, we also offer bespoke training for any staff or student group on request.

Bespoke Training

To arrange an open access training session, please email research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk.

For a research data management training session, please email research-datamanagement@glasgow.ac.uk.

For a training session for staff on using Enlighten, please email research-enlighten@glasgow.ac.uk.

Courses for PGRs

Introduction to Research Data Management (PGR)

Through this online course students will learn about data management in an accessible way that they can apply to their own work. Topics include compliance with the University's and funders' policies; managing and storing data safely; and what should happen to your data when you graduate.

The session will be illustrated with real-life examples of good research data practices.  This course will also help researchers to prepare their data management plans, which are now a mandatory component of the first Annual Progress Review.

This course is research students who are collecting data or gathering findings, regardless of their subject area or approach.

Once students have the online   they will be invited to join a follow-up webinar where they can discuss issues in research data management with the Research Information Management team

You can enrol on the course in Moodle.

The University and most funding bodies now require researchers who collect data of some sort as part of their work to write a Data Management Plan (DMP). Plans typically state what data will be created and how, and outline the plans for sharing and preservation, noting what is appropriate given the nature of the data and any restrictions that may need to be applied. We recommend that researchers use DMPonline, a flexible web-based tool, to create DMPs. The course will provide guidance on using DMPonline and an introduction to data management planning.

You can book a place on this course through MyCampus.

When data are created as part of academic research, they should be carefully stored, managed and, wherever possible, shared.

this online course will learn about data management in an accessible way that they can apply to their own work. Topics include compliance with the University's and funders' policies; managing and storing data safely; and depositing data in appropriate repositories

This course is suitable for research who are collecting data or gathering findings, regardless of their subject area or approach , and for administrators supporting research projects

have completed the online   they will be invited to join a follow-up webinar where they can discuss issues in research data management with the Research Information Management team.
You can enrol on the course in Moodle.
ARUDMP

This course is intended for researchers who are at a stage of their projects where they are ready to produce a Data Management Plan. It is recommended that researchers first complete the online Introduction to Research Data Management course (

You can book a place through the HR Self Service Portal (Find the course in the Learning and Development tab by searching for "DMP").

Other data management training at Glasgow

For staff

A number of courses are provided through on areas relevant to data management, such as managing research data, publishing in refereed journals and writing impact statements for grant proposals.

A number of IT training courses are available on using software such as Excel, Access, NVivo and Endnote.

Research & Innovation Services host a number of training courses and annual conferences to support researcher development.

For PGRs

Postgraduate research students should consult their Graduate School training handbooks, brochures and webpages to see the tailored support that is available to them in this area.

Research & Innovation Services also offers a number of training courses, some mandatory and some optional, for PGRs, some of which address research data management.

External Data Management Training

MANTRA is an excellent free, online non-assessed course with guidelines to help you understand and reflect on how to manage the digital data you collect throughout your research. It has been crafted for the use of post-graduate students, early career researchers, and information professionals. It is freely available on the web for anyone to explore on their own. MANTRA is maintained by Data Library staff in Information Services, University of Edinburgh.

The White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities has a one-day course on Research Data Management in Arts & Humanities with free access to the training slides and summaries.

The UK Data Archive offer training for social science researchers and has produced an excellent introductory guide to managing and sharing data for all researchers.

The National Centre for Research Methods was set up by ESRC to increase quality in social science research. You can search their database of courses and events, e.g. for courses on qualitative interview research.

Data Management Case Studies

The Research Data Management service collects examples of open research practice at the University of Glasgow. Below you can read case studies of the examples we have gathered so far.

If you are engaged in research and creating or working with open data and would be interested in contributing to a case study, please get in touch at research-datamanagement@glasgow.ac.uk.
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We offer an introductory training course in best practice in research data management and in data management planning for staff and for postgraduate researchers (PGRs). This training is delivered through Moodle and Zoom. Information on how to join can be found below.

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Additionally, if you're interested in further resources related to Open Research, which is a complicated and multi-faceted field, you can find those here.

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Open Research Resources

Our Open Research pages offer:

There is an Open Research channel in the Research Culture Commons team where events are advertised and topics can be discussed.

There is an informal open research working group at the University and we are planning to roll out some wider open research 'champion' type groups.

There are also a wide range of other resources relating to open research; these are listed below. If you're looking for support in a particular area, and you can't find it here, please get in touch with us.

Our standard introductory training courses cover best practice in research data management, data management planning, and open access for publications. This training is delivered through Moodle and Zoom and can be delivered in person on request. See our Training page for more information.

The University of Glasgow is participating in the UK Reproducibility Network Open Research Programme. A Team from the University will coordinate the train the trainer programme and assess open research training tools and resources. More details will be shared as activity gets underway.

Open Research Events

Protocols.io training webinars

Protocols.io are running three free training webinars over the next few month on different aspects of their service.

All research staff and students at University of Glasgow have free access to the premium protocols.io service.

Research papers and protocol organization in labs often lack detailed instructions for repeating experiments. is an open-access platform for researchers to collaboratively create step-by-step, interactive and dynamic protocols that can be run on mobile or web. Researchers can share protocols with colleagues, collaborators, the scientific community or make them public, with ease and efficiency. Real-time communication and interaction keep protocols up to date with versioning, forking/copying, Q&A, and troubleshooting. Public protocols receive a DOI and allow open communication with authors and researchers to encourage efficient experimentation and reproducibility.

You can sign up to these webinars at the links below.
Introduction to protocols.io protocols.io Tips and Tricks protocols.io - Getting Credit
National Centre for Research Methods

Data Management Case Studies

The Research Data Management service collects examples of open research practice at the University of Glasgow. Below you can read case studies of the examples we have gathered so far.

If you are engaged in research and creating or working with open data and would be interested in contributing to a case study, please get in touch at research-datamanagement@glasgow.ac.uk.

CREATe Copyright and Licensing guides

The CREATe UK Copyright & Creative Economy Centre has produced a series of guides on licensing research data: https://datasetlicencing.wordpress.com/outputs/ as well as many other resources relating to copyright: https://www.create.ac.uk/resources/.

General copyright advice can be found here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/help/copyright/guidance/

We also recommend https://www.copyrightuser.org/.

For information on the University of Glasgow Research Publications and Copyright Policy, please see our Open Access process.

Data Availability Statements

All publications and theses should include a data accessibility/availability statement which explains where the data which support the publication can be found. Data accessibility statements should include a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which directs readers to a record for the dataset in a repository. This way, a dataset can be cited correctly even if the data themselves are not suitable for sharing. If no data is available, a data accessibility statement should indicate this. A good data statement should also include the terms on which the data are made available.

Please note that an instruction to contact the author directly would not be considered acceptable by most research funders - authors should create a record for a dataset in an appropriate repository and direct readers there.

Your journal's or publisher's guidance for authors should indicate the format and placement of a data access statement. If no 'Data access' or 'Data availability' section is specified, we suggest placing your statement in the 'Acknowledgements' section.

For examples of data statements, please see our guide to identifiers and citation: https://edshare.gla.ac.uk/1419/

Support for Research Integrity

The University offers extensive support for activity that improves the integrity of research, including training and guidance: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/ris/researchpolicies/researchintegrity/.

Support for Data Protection and Freedom of Information

The DP/FOI Office can offer support for researchers collecting or processing personal data: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/dpfoioffice/. For advice on where to start with Data Protection paperwork relating to a research project, see our Project Initiation Workflow for Projects Involving Personal Data.

Support for Ethics

Information about the University's Ethics Committees can be found here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/strategy/ourpolicies/ethics/.

Glasgow Open Journals

Glasgow Open Journals is a service provided by the University of Glasgow Library that supports the publication of academic and student-led open access journals.

Glasgow Open Journals is based on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. This service is provided free of charge to University of Glasgow staff and students.

Protocols.io

The University of Glasgow provides Protocols.io premium accounts for all students and staff.

Protocols.io is an online platform for the creation, management, and sharing of research protocols or methods. Users can create new protocols within the system or upload existing methods and digitise them. Those with access to a protocol can then update, annotate, or fork it so that it can be continually improved and developed.

Users can publish their protocols making them freely available for others to use and cite or, with the enterprise version, keep them private. The tool supports the Open Science / Open Research agenda by helping to ensure that methods used to produce data and publications are made available, assisting with reproducibility.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/it/softwareandonlinetools/protocols-io
You can view a recording of an introductory webinar on Protocols.io at the University of Glasgow.

Open Research Coordination Group

There is an open research coordination group. This group is working to set up a network of open research champions and discussion channels. More information will be posted here soon.

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you have a question in the meantime.

UKRN Open Research Programme

The University of Glasgow is a partner in the UKReproducibility Network (UKRN) Open Research Programme.

The programme aims to facilitate training in Open Research. Shared training sessions are being defined and there will be a Train-The-Trainer programme. We will also be contributing to and reviewing resources.

There is 25-minute overview of the project here https://arma.ac.uk/recording-introduction-to-uk-reproducibility-network/

Contact research-openaccess@glasgow.ac.uk if you have any questions regarding this programme.

External resources

Below are a selection of resources managed by external organisations which you may find useful in thinking about open research.

UKRN Open Research Programme

The UK Reproducibility Network has collected, for each discipline, a list of open research case studies, examples of open research practices, and links to resources to support open research (open methods, data, outputs, etc):
https://www.ukrn.org/disciplines/

UK Reproducibility Network Primers

The UKRN primers introduce different aspects of open research, intended for a broad audience.

The Turing Way

The Turing Way is a handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. It is structured as a series of guides, each containing chapters which cover best practices, guidance and recommendations.

The Turing Way is not meant to be read from start to finish. Start with a concept, tool or method that you need now, in your current work. Browse the different guides that make up the book, or use the search box to search for whatever you would like to learn about first.

Open Science: A practical guide for PhD students

A UCL-produced UK guide to Open Science for PhD students, based on the original French version produced by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

This guide is designed to accompany you through your research, from developing your academic approach to the dissemination of your results. It provides a set of tools and best practices that can be directly implemented and is aimed at researchers from all disciplines.
Open Science: a practical guide for PhD Students

Open Science Framework (OSF) Guides

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a platform that supports open and reproducible research in a number of ways.

There are a number of guides available which you may find useful:
Create a data management plan
A data management plan helps ensure that your data remains usable to both you, your collaborators, and other researchers beyond the end of your project. Here is how you start.
How to make a data dictionary
A data dictionary is critical to making your research more reproducible because it allows others to understand your data. The purpose of a data dictionary is to explain what all the variable names and values in your spreadsheet or dataset really mean.
Sharing research outputs
OSF encourage sharing of all data, materials, and software code whenever possible. The likelihood that sharing any particular research output will contribute to the benefit of a field depends on many factors including how complete it is, how completely it is documented, where it is stored, and how it is shared.
Sharing data
The OSF is streamlined to facilitate data sharing. This guide explains the process from a new user perspective, assuming minimal experience with the OSF.

UK Research Integrity Office Open Research resources

The UK Research Integrity Office has a large number of resources relating to Open Research and related questions regarding research integrity: https://ukrio.org/ukrio-resources/open-research/

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Our Open Research pages offer: There is an Open Research channel in the Research Culture Commons team where events are advertised and topics can be discussed. There is an informal open research working group at the University and we are planning to roll out some wider open research 'champion' type groups.

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What kind of writing environment do you need to be able to write at your best?

What works for each of us as writers is different, and finding out what works best for you may involve a bit of trial and error.

Amelia Tait's article, written for Penguin Books, takes a tongue-in-cheek look at how trying out the writing environment of famous authors affects her writing productivity.

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The best places to write your novel according to authors: tried and tested

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Sheds, hotel rooms and residential libraries: we wrote a novel in the places where famous authors did to find out which was best.

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Information literacy skills: using databases 

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Information literacy skills: using databases 

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Being taught by my College Librarian as I arrived into my PhD how to use a database quite literally changed my research and writing life.

Librarians shared tips and tricks on how to improve your information literacy skills through properly using databases during our Roundtable conversation. If you'd like to hear more, click the link above.

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Necessary cookies enable core functionality. The website cannot function properly without these cookies, and can only be disabled by changing your browser preferences. Analytical cookies help us improve our website. We use Google Analytics. All data is anonymised. Hotjar helps us to understand and improve our users' behaviour by visually representing their clicks, taps and scrolling.

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How does the way your body feels affect how you write?

Are you more or less productive when you're cold? Or warm? How does the position of your body when you're writing affect how the work 'flows'?

During our three-part launch event for Walking, we hosted a Writing in movement workshop led by artist Camilla Nelson, where we thought into the connection between our bodies and our writing. We practiced using the various facets of our vision, and wrote from each place to see how this affected our work. In the performance linked above, Camilla engages with some of these same concerns.

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"Fantastic!" - Philip Meersman, Director of Brussels Poetry Festival

"a beautiful chaos" - Scott Thurston, Reader in English & Creative Writing (Salford University)

Photographs by Lieven Detemmerman

Reading Movement is an extended solo treatment of John Hall's "Reading (il)legible Pages" ("On the Page", Performance Research: Vol. 9; No.2, June 2004) by Camilla Nelson. This 25 minute performance physically and sonically disrupts, extends and transforms the act of reading. The reading body is so often stilled and silenced. This work offers the body a chance to move, to be seen and heard, to be liberated from the social restriction of normalised reading behaviours. This solo has grown out of an intense period of collaboration with the Palestinian dancer, Khaled Barghouthi (2015-2016), mentoring from Maja Jantar, Katrina Brown & Suzanne Scott (2016-2017) and a series of specialist sound & movement language workshops (The World is Sound, 15 days exploring voice in relation to movement, March 2017; a 6 day workshop with physical theatre group OBRA & poet Lucy Burnett, June 2018). The draft script of "Reading Movement" was long-listed for The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers in 2016. Following a residency at Op-Weule in Belgium, organised by the ever generous Philip Meersman, Reading Movement had its first airing as a solo work-in-progress at the Bath Fringe Festival before the final piece premiered at Brussels International Poetry Festival to enthusiastic acclaim.

A Review of Reading Movement: A Work-in-Progress by Camilla Nelson for the Embodied Cartographies exhibition, curated by Fay Stevens for Bath Festival Fringe, 5 June 2017.

"The programme was a folded blank sheet with only a title, typed in capitals and pasted on the front. We were to read into this what we wanted. At times, I wanted to read the book the performer, Camilla, held: the thin bound book from which she drew a slowly escalating scattering of sounds. They were sounds that began as rasped breath, a kind of death rattle; then became a retching effort that wracked her black-and-white skirted body.

But first she lay huddled over its secrets under a square-snow fall of torn pages dropped from a wide-brimmed hat. She rolled up and over, restlessly reading along the way, as you might if studying something with the potential to overwhelm you. Something that resisted you. The sounds - not so much primal as unschooled - began to reverberate in my solar plexus with the unsettlement of sickness. Some elicited in me the nervous humour that madness might.

Her dulled eyes went from the page to some far-sighted invisible screen that may have been blank. We sat circled in a small, white-washed chapel with a scuffed old oak floor. Outside, wind-blown June rains soaked bushes and darkened the grave stones. When she came to standing, her body waved as if caught by the wind. Into the mutter of sounds fell a few recognizable words resolving her anguish. Maybe the audience, like me, were relieved.

Afterwards, I did not ask to see the book. I was moved and needed to move. On wet Walcot Street under buffeted umbrellas my companion and I spoke only briefly but felt those hard-won words in our bodies. My friend considered how words are captured like wool on barbed wire fences. I thought of the grey maps on the chapel walls with countour lines thickened and blurred into lost human forms. Walking for words, reading words, reading movement."

Reviewed by Sara Firman (poet & artist)

This work grew out of a 5 minute improvisation with Palestinian dancer, Khaled Barghouthi, produced as part of the Secret Hotel Landscape Dialogues Summer Lab in Mols Bjerge (Denmark, 2015). The texts used in the initial performance (see video above right) were 'Body, Space Image' eds. Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay, 'Invisible Things' by David Harradineand Synne Behrndt and 'At the Intersection Between Art and Research' eds. Carsten Friberg & Rose Parekh-Gaihede, with Bruce Barton, pp. 80-83 (this is the text that is being read aloud, the other two are being used as elbow supports). The film was made by Sohar Villegas. In 2015 we received a grant from the Artists' International Development Fund to develop the work in England (March 2016) & Belgium (Oct 2016) and in 2016 the European Cultural Foundation awarded Reading Movement a STEP Beyond grant to fund Camilla's travel to Palestine. This allowed Khaled & Camilla to perform a collaborative work-in-progress at Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival on 17th April 2016. Since then the work has evolved into a solo performance supported by a residency at Op-Weule (Brussels, Belgium), kindly organised by Philip Meersman (where the top left video was filmed) and again as a work-in-progress at Fringe Arts Bath (2017) by invitation of Fay Stevens. Reading Movement premiered at the Palais Royale for Brussels Poetry Festival (2017). The UK premiere was hosted by S.T.R.E.A.M (A Series of Transdisciplinary Rituals and Experiments in Art and Music, 7-9th Sep, 2018) and a further performance was commissioned for VITAL SIGNS (Salford University, 28-30th Oct, 2018) with accompanying workshops.

Camilla Nelson: British Language Artist

Home of Singing Apple Press.

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Photographs by Lieven Detemmerman Reading Movement is an extended solo treatment of John Hall's "Reading (il)legible Pages" ("On the Page", Performance Research: Vol. 9; No.2, June 2004) by Camilla Nelson. This 25 minute performance physically and sonically disrupts, extends and transforms the act of reading. The reading body is so often stilled and silenced.

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Speaking a 'tiny language' in a monolingual global environment

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Speaking a 'tiny language' in a monolingual global environment

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Engaging with the discourse that Giovanna and Grazia introduced to us in their languages session, this recent article written by Ana Schnabl and published in The Guardian, describes Schnabl's experience as a Slovene speaker in a literary culture that prioritises 'standard versions' of German and English.

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Do you speak a ‘big’ global language? Here’s what my tiny language can teach you | Ana Schnabl

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I’m one of the 2.5 million users of Slovene – and English and German speakers would do well to be curious about us, says Slovenian novelist Ana Schnabl

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In their information, and their practical writing sessions, Dr Rachel Herries and Dr Rhoda Stefanatos introduced us to narrative CVs as a new writing format. If you'd like to access more on these, click the link above to be taken to a collection of UofG-based resources on narrative CVs.

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University of Glasgow - MyGlasgow - Research and Innovation Services - Strategic Research Initiatives - Resources - Narrative CVs

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Narrative CVs are now being asked for as part of funding proposals. This is a relatively new element for funding proposals and we are still learning, but below are the resources we are aware of. The Strategic Research Initiatives Team has particular expertise in team narrative CVs, so please contact us with any questions.