Aims
To provide dedicated writing time and develop productive writing practices and discussions around writing-in-progress.

Audience
PhD students and active researchers.

Format
This structured retreat uses the ‘typing pool’ model. Writers are all in the same room, writing in scheduled time slots, using goal-setting, peer monitoring and warm up activities to progress writing projects. Because everyone is writing in the same room, there can be brief discussions at the start and end of the day (of 10 or 15 minutes), to set goals and take stock, but almost all of this retreat time will be writing time.

Preparing for retreat
Choose a writing project to work on – e.g. journal article, thesis chapter or grant proposal. Do the necessary reading and research on journal/publisher/funder and on the topic before the retreat and arrive ready to write. The Writing for Publication workshop on the day before this retreat will introduce strategies that will help participants make best use of this retreat, but it is not a pre-requisite 

The Facilitator

Dr Marcella Sutcliffe is a Fellow at the Royal Historical Society and a Life Member at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Having worked as supervisor within the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, she subsequently trained as Academic Writing Retreat Facilitator, largely adopting Rowena Murray’s writing retreat model. Since 2017 she has been organising and facilitating residential writing retreats, delivered to academics and postgraduate students from a number of UK HE institutions, mostly based in the North of England and Ireland. Trained as a cultural historian, she has published a monograph (Royal Historical Society), has written numerous journal articles and book chapters on the history of education, and has been guest editor of the History of Education journal. Marcella has been running regular Virtual Writing Retreats since April 2020, delivering them weekly to Doctoral Training Partnerships and is currently co-editing a book on the benefits of writing retreats on wellbeing.