The Nuts and Bolts of Running a Writing Camp

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Planning a week-long writing camp, writing together

By Mary Jane Curry and Jayne C. Lammers (Warner Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester, US)

This, our last post on large group writing events, comes from associate professors Mary Jane Curry (Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Jayne C. Lammers (Ph.D. from Arizona State University), at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development. Mary Jane is director of Warner’s Writing Support Services and her research focuses on academic writing and publishing by multilingual scholars and graduate students. Jayne is director of Secondary English teacher preparation and she researches adolescents’ writing, particularly that which is shared in online communities.

Many of the recent posts on social writing events have highlighted the benefits of writing together—not necessarily collaboratively—but usually in the same time and space. We share this view, and here we discuss the evolution and management of the week-long writing camps we offer for faculty colleagues and doctoral students in our graduate school of education. For the past few years, these camps have taken place in January before spring term and in June to set a strong course for summer writing. We call them ‘writing camps’ rather than ‘boot camps’, not only to avoid a military metaphor, but also to evoke the idea of a structured but pleasurable social experience of doing academic writing.

Photo by Laura Brophy

These camps began in 2011 with a two-day writing retreat offered to faculty members and advanced graduate students designed along the lines of Rowena Murray’s (2015) social writing events. For the first few, shorter retreats, we used a structure in which up to 20 participants alternated individual writing time with discussing writing with a partner and with taking breaks.

Shut up and Write! Weekly writing with coffee and colleagues

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"Shut up and Write", cafe meet ups, Writing groups, writing together

Welcome to our series on writing events. This initiative followed a call for contributions from readers on their practices and experiences as facilitators and participants in writing groups. The result is a fabulous series of posts starting from today. Over coming weeks we feature guest posts from many people and places covering all manner of social writing events including virtual and physical get-togethers, boot camps, writing retreats, writing groups, and café events.

We hope you enjoy the stories we’ve collected so that the love of writing in the company of others will continue to be enriched. For the yet-to-be-converted, maybe you will be inspired to try some of the approaches, tips and suggestions? We begin with a delightful exchange about a cafe writing group from Pam Mort.

Pam has worked in the Learning Centre at UNSW (the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) for over 20 years.  She works in collaboration with academic staff to develop students’ academic literacy and communication skills, develops independent learning resources in the disciplines of engineering and science and co-facilitates a variety of doctoral writing events. Here she describes their café writing event ‘Shut up and Write’.

‘Shut up and Write’ has been running for over two years. The weekly one-hour meeting is advertised in The Learning Centre’s website, on a café noticeboard and during on-campus workshops on thesis writing. I regularly attend and run the meeting, collect contact details of new writers, and maintain an email list for sharing links to resources and upcoming events related to thesis writing.