Connections

your Friday writing prompt

I attended a lovely writing class with Alice Vincent this week through the Arvon writing house. They do excellent online workshops with a genuinely interesting range of writers that are always very inspiring. In this week’s class Vincent was breaking down her method for connecting the personal to her research. Her first book (which I have now ordered, watch this space) is a memoir structured around a calendar year, taking seasonal prompts from the garden to move her toward explorations of more profound personal subjects. In her second, a collection of oral history interviews with women who garden in all sorts of places and conditions, she works from the stories her subjects told her, but allows essayistic personal reflections to emerge. I found her approach very reassuring given the directions in which this Substack is progressing; but it also made me pause and reflect on how we are taught to think and write as academics.

Compared to Vincent’s approach, academia remains (not always but too often) a place in which our wide-ranging interests and inspired asides are forced to narrow down and nestle into a safe little box. It can make us tunnel visioned - more so because those who seem to be most successful in the sector are often the ones with the narrowest frame of research, a tightly honed almost obsessive focus on one tiny area that they have mined and made into a helpful platform. Most people (most women?) I know in academia do not think like that or work like that. I wonder what it would take for us to also leave behind writing like that?

With due respect to the pressures of academic writing, this week’s prompt is inspired by Vincent’s workshop and invites you to make a connection with work that is not directly related to your own. Perhaps pick one of my posts from this Substack. What was something I wrote that resonated with you? Perhaps it is a word or phrase you felt called to. Perhaps a feeling one of the posts gave you. Or you might like to try out something stylistic that you enjoyed but haven’t explored yourself. Pick a post, set a timer for 10 minutes, and write a response. See where the connections can take you. Perhaps you circle back around to your own research and current ideas. Or maybe it takes you somewhere entirely new. If you feel up to it I would love to hear how it goes in the comments section below.