Academics tend to write alone. Even when we are contributing to an edited volume, we rarely gather to write in the same place and at the same time. Which is what made our writing experiment so unusual.
This month the MIT Press published the product of that effort: Acquired Tastes: Stories About the Origins of Modern Food. The book’s roots trace to 2018, when its three editors (Anna along with Benjamin R. Cohen and Michael S. Kideckel) brought in a writing coach (Helen) and 11 other scholars for an intensive weekend of drafting and revising together in a big rented house in a small Pennsylvania town. The goal: to create an essay collection — rooted in history and creative nonfiction — that would tell stories about how modern food came to be.
Even with so many contributors, the collection’s editors aspired to develop narrative coherence and a cohesive voice. Traveling from all over North America, we gathered in Bethlehem, Pa., in an Airbnb called the Christmas City Mansion. It featured 10 bedrooms, 7.5 baths, a big wraparound porch, and a central historic-district location. The editors figured out where everyone would sleep, and ensured enough food for shared meals.
Most of us were strangers to one another, or professional acquaintances. Yet that weekend, we huddled over one another’s drafts, scribbled longhand in notebooks, told stories about food, and stayed up late talking and playing cards. Helen’s insights, as a creative writer and longtime writing instructor, encouraged the contributors to think of ourselves not just as researchers but as writers. The community-building aspects of the weekend — dinners together, late-night hangouts, small-group conversations in the nooks around the house — profoundly affected us, too. By the time we were hugging goodbye on Sunday, the shared sentiment was powerful: All of us wished we could do it again.
Could this kind of intimate, generative gathering — collective in spirit, intellectually and creatively fulfilling — become an alternative or a supplement to the standard academic conference? How would scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences change if we wrote and revised more often in a group, instead of going it alone?
Here are some of our takeaways — about writing and about the possibilities of scholarly fellowship — in hopes that others might take inspiration from what we did and learned.
All writing is creative.
Helen: We know that, and yet it’s a convention of scholarly work to hide the fact of its creation. Scholars are taught to omit the “I,” scrub away signs of emotionality, and hide their own uncertainties: to absent themselves, in other words, as though an essay or article could materialize from research alone. Those practices — all of which signal “objectivity” — are part of how academic culture reproduces itself. The omission of “I” (and its attendant subjectivity) has served to inscribe as “objective” the perspectives of those largely white, straight men who have historically held power inside and outside of academe.
Anna: We found that few of the scholars among us thought of ourselves as writers, even though so much of our time is spent writing. Before the weekend, Helen sent us freewriting prompts — inviting us to imagine our way into our characters, articulate our ideas in “tender” letters to beloved people in our lives, and use writing to think through ideas without concern for audience or style — that turned out to be productive in ways we didn’t expect. Reorienting ourselves as creative writers — whose considered choices on the page influence the way our ideas are communicated and received — reconnected us to the motives behind our research and to the broader value of our work.
The writing process matters — and deserves more attention.
Helen: Academics have been schooled in the conventions of scholarly production: We learn how to cite sources, how to structure articles and book chapters, and how to use language to convey respectability to a traditionally minded reader. Instruction in the writing process, by contrast, is far less common, less visible, and less overtly “curricular.” It’s as though the transformation from pile of research to draft to published work is either too mystical or too obvious to bear attention.
Anna: Talking about and practicing the writing process during our weekend together, though — beginning with freewriting, and continuing with consideration of structure, meaning, scene, and style — offered us a chance to share strategies, give and receive support, and bounce ideas off one another while they were at their freshest. It was useful in obvious, community-oriented, mutually supportive, and warm-feeling ways.
Helen: Teaching scholarly convention is meant to level the playing field, though of course it also perpetuates a system by which what are commonly called “skills” (but are, in fact, mores of a culture) must be “mastered” for respect and inclusion. Even more insidiously, making a black box of the writing process communicates to scholars and potential scholars that anybody should be able to turn research into an article, and ends up benefiting those scholars and potential scholars who have access — through family, friends, community, or class — to people whose writing processes they can observe and emulate. It extends existing inequality, in other words, and prevents us from sharing strategies and the fellowship of a shared cause.
Scholars are storytellers, too.
Helen: Our weekend together opened with a provocation. What if we began from the premise that history is not a tellable story — that the historian’s responsibility to uncover the past is in conflict with the responsibility to represent the past in a comprehensible fashion? That research and reporting are at odds? And what if we allowed ourselves to think of scholarship — including and especially the articles and book chapters we don’t necessarily think of as “narrative” — as a kind of story? An “idea story,” as I call it, is the story of how a question develops into an idea that itself develops into a meaningful argument.
On our first evening together, we held a public storytelling event, in which the writers were given seven minutes each to present a version of the work they would be contributing to the book. I probably don’t need to tell you that this proved challenging, or that the exercise of distilling one’s work into a pithy, punchy presentation was hugely valuable to those writers still finding their story’s essential point — which, I’ve found in my work as a coach and writer, is almost everyone who is still tinkering with a draft. Translating ideas for different audiences, in different forms, can be tremendously useful, helping us see our work more clearly and feel less attached to what’s already on the page.
Academics rarely get opportunities like that, in part because scholarly values — like comprehensiveness and objectivity — are so often at odds with our storytelling impulses. Setting aside those values and conventions can sometimes be useful, especially during the drafting process. Here are some of the suggestions I passed on to the writers:
- It’s possible to use your imagination to bring life to your work, without losing credibility. Frame imaginative details with words like “maybe” or “might have.” Paint a variety of possibilities (“Maybe she has a well-thumbed copy of Harland’s cookbook, or maybe she can’t afford a cookbook, and goes to her friend’s house to get recipes …”). Be clear that you are grounding your speculation in research (“Like many laborers of the 19th century, he might have …”).
- It’s not only OK to be transparent about the fact there are things you don’t know, it’s compelling. It builds your ethos as a narrator and gives the reader a position to identify with.
- Including more of yourself in your scholarly writing doesn’t have to mean describing yourself in an archive or using the first person. It could just mean including more of your own thought process — from that first earnest, searching question to an eventual hypothesis or claim.
- You don’t have to shy away from evaluative claims: Readers are drawn to moral judgment.
- It’s almost always worthwhile to follow the part of the story and the mode of engagement (reflection, argument, narrative) that is most genuinely interesting to you. It will lead to a richer, more lively final text, and a more positive writing experience.
- Especially during the drafting process, try not to fixate on “showing your work” — that is, getting caught up in the citations and evidence that substantiate your argument. Sacrificing comprehensiveness (at least in the early stages of writing) can help you clarify the trajectory of your thinking. You can add evidence later, when your sense of which details are necessary to include is clearer.
- Sometimes when we think of “narrative” or “public facing” scholarship, we feel obligated to turn toward individuals, especially larger-than-life historical figures. But it’s not necessary to lean on individuals to illuminate a larger story. Instead, try focusing your work around the members of a community, or on a question with clear public relevance.
- Consider how an essay (or article, or chapter) takes its readers on a journey. How can you invite the reader into your thought process from the very beginning? How can you give readers an entry point, and then hold their hand as you proceed?
Accessible academic writing is a way of making our scholarship “usable.”
Anna: In our conversations that weekend, there was sometimes a perceived tension between a desire to write for a broad audience and a desire to maintain scholarly standards. But as we learned, writing accessibly does not limit the strength of our scholarship. Rather, it challenges us to be more precise with our intentions, to let our central ideas emerge more gracefully, and to make space for the primary takeaway rather than getting bogged down by details.
Even more important, combining an attention to writing with a commitment to rigorous scholarly method allows our research to reach beyond our disciplines, with the potential of informing decision-making on critical issues. To have this reach, we must learn to be not only scholars, but writers. And writing with a sense of impact and audience can help reconnect us with the joyous parts of the scholarly process.
One-on-one attention can be profound.
Anna: During the weekend workshop, we organized our time in a variety of ways to give participants the space to work independently, get small-group feedback, think through ideas in a large group, and to get one-on-one time with Helen. As each group had time to freewrite at different points in the day, Helen would pull individuals out for conversation. Some people used this time to drill down into strategies for writing opening hooks or articulating central ideas. Others benefited from processing their experiences more holistically, almost like a writing-therapy session.
But nearly across the board, our participants reported a desire for more of this — more direct attention from an engaged, invested listener and interlocutor. Although Helen’s experience was really valuable, this approach could also work with good listeners who aren’t writing coaches.
Simply having a space where your ideas and writing struggles can feel attended to and honored by someone you have come to trust can be revelatory. So often, our ideas come out so much more fluidly when we are articulating them out loud to someone who cares than when we try to write them down for an imagined audience. It is so helpful to have someone serve as that kind of sounding board and reflect back to us what they think we are trying to say, where the spark is, and where any confusions lie.
A retreat can be more affordable than a conference.
Anna: We are sensitive to the costs associated with an event like this, especially in these tough financial times for higher education, but many of its elements could be recreated on a local level at little-to-no cost — especially if the contributors to a project live in the same region and if you make use of digital platforms and local expertise at campus writing and teaching centers. Even at the scale we are describing here, our costs were much less than those of the average conference attendee (who pays meeting fees as well as hotel, meal, and travel expenses).
The total cost of our event was under $8,000, but ultimately, no one paid any out-of-pocket expenses. The shared house was far more affordable than a typical hotel (around $1,600 to house 15 people for two nights), and the house kitchen helped keep food costs low. We kept the combined transportation costs around $3,500. We were lucky to be able to cover everyone’s expenses and Helen’s writing-coach fee using grant money from one of the editors’ institutions (Lafayette College).
A final joint message.
Perhaps the key takeaway of all of this is that community matters. The points above — on creativity, process, storytelling, accessibility, and attention — all ultimately come to life when we work with others. The solitary nature of writing makes the experience not only lonely, but also often less effective.
We rarely write only for ourselves — even when it feels like we are, we’re often holding an audience of some kind in mind. Why, then, wait until review or publication to engage with those audiences or with other writers?
It’s true that traditional academic conferences can be spaces for that kind of togetherness. But for too many people, they can feel stodgy, artificial, and exclusive. What if we reimagined more conferences to be smaller, more dispersed, and more intimate? What if we made space for all who are present to be invited into the dialogue, to share in the writing process and the experiences of that fertile and frustrating time? What if we recognized the value of writing expertise and connecting with those in other fields for outside guidance, along with training our own students to focus more on the often-unspoken aspects of the writing and research process?
We believe that these directions could transform academic work, producing not only stronger, more influential scholarship, but also happier, more engaged scholars — which is to say, humans.
