A Meeting With Your Writing: How it works
A Meeting With Your Writing is a guided co-writing practice, and a container to do your own writing. During the academic year, the Meeting helps you protect time for writing in the face of multiple demands. During the long summer break or your sabbatical, it adds just enough structure to your week.
It doesn’t matter what language you write in. It doesn’t matter what you are writing about. It doesn’t matter what career stage you are or what kind of position you have or what kind of institution you work at.
You join a Zoom meeting. There is a short opening exercise. You hang up and write for a full 90 minutes. You call back in and we finish with a short closing exercise and share some small victories as a community.
When do we meet?
A Meeting With Your Writing is held 4 times a week to give you options:
Mondays
- 10 a.m. UK (11 a.m. CET; 6 a.m. Atlantic, 6:30 a.m. NL, 5 a.m. Eastern) (evening in Australia)
- 10 a.m. Eastern (7 a.m. Pacific, 11 a.m. Atlantic, 3 p.m. UK, 4 p.m. CET)
- 3 p.m. Eastern (noon Pacific, 4 p.m. Atlantic, 8 p.m. UK, 9 p.m. CET)
Thursdays
- 10 a.m. Eastern (7 a.m. Pacific, 11 a.m. Atlantic, 3 p.m. UK, 4 p.m. Europe)
TimeandDate.com has a useful time zone conversion tool available here for wherever you are.
Most people can only fit one meeting a week into their busy schedule but that one meeting makes a huge difference (especially if it’s on Monday). You are welcome to come more frequently if the times work for you.
In March and October, the time may shift for a week or so due to the shift between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time (aka Summer Time) which happens on a different date in North America and Europe. If you are in Australia, this is further muddled up by your own change in the other direction. The first time listed above is the time of record.
What kinds of opening and closing questions?
The opening and closing questions are intended to help create the mental container for writing. They remind you how competent you are, help you select a project and task to work on, and prompt you to think about the various things that might affect your focus today so you can identify strategies to optimise your focus. When you return after writing for 90 minutes, the questions help you acknowledge how your project moved forward and notice how your focus was.
Recordings of these opening and closing segments are also available on the members website to use for your other writing sessions. There are also timed recordings for shorter sessions to complement your longer sessions.