Welcome to the Binghamton Summer Faculty Writing Retreat.

Over the course of four days, you can choose among a program of guided writing workshops, write on site sessions, and accountability groups scheduled. Use the week to orient yourself for your summer’s work, to set your intentions, and find a community of supportive colleagues. We will update the schedule as we approach the start of the retreat.

We’ve organized the four day retreat (Tuesday, June 1 through Friday, June 4) around two hour morning and afternoon sessions with multiple opportunities to work and write with your colleagues.

The week is bracketed by two guided workshops, Finding a High Place, Enhancing the View and Staying Found. The opening guided workshop is intended to help you review the current state of your project, clarify your goals and help you make the most of the week. During our closing workshop, Staying Found, we’ll look at your time and tasks, map goals to time, and a sketch out a plan for the summer. The guided workshops will be recorded for you to watch when the time suits you.

Each day, you’ll find ninety minute write on site sessions — a kind of online cafe with a group of people logging on to Zoom to work quietly in the company of others. Join us when you can! Stay as long as you like.

Accountability groups will be offered twice a day, as well– morning and afternoon. Hosted by Robert Danberg, they all will run on the same model. Come to the meeting that suits you.

We know you may not be able to join us every day. Perhaps you may only join us once or twice during the week. We hope we’ve created a chance for you to connect with your work, to learn approaches to writing that can help you maintain your motivation for the summer and perhaps more importantly to connect with others.

If you have any questions about the week and how you might get the most out of it, please contact me.

Be well,

Robert Danberg

rdanberg@binghamton.edu

Often, people look for writing-productivity strategies with the idea that those strategies will somehow solve the “problem of productivity”. But the approach of the Summer Online Faculty Workshops is not to introduce you to a single, “one size fits all” strategy, but to offer a set of strategies, principles and tools that can form the basis of your own approach to the work you must do as you navigate what life throws at you.

We have three goals. We want to introduce you to a community of writers that may support your work. We want to introduce you to some approaches and techniques for writing, reflection, and goal setting that can help you accomplish your goals this summer. And we want to give you a week to set your goals and plot your course for the summer.

You may have a specific project you feel you can make headway on or get started during the four days of the workshop. But many participants combine writing and research with reviewing material, reflecting on what needs to be done and has been done, and making a plan for a project period (in our case, the summer).

Finding a High Place, Enhancing the View

The week begins with a guided workshop, Finding a High Place, Enhancing the View. The workshop, like the others, will be recorded and made available on the day it’s held. As you review your goals for the week, we’ll introduce you to strategies for goal setting, mapping goals to time, monitoring your work, and planning productive work sessions. At the end of the end of the workshop, you’ll attend you first Accountability Group meeting.

Staying Found

The week closes with a guided workshop, Staying Found. Our hope is that the Workshop Week will give you some information about how you work and what will support your writing practice. Staying Found takes the tools we explored in Finding a High Place and turns them towards our primary task: setting your summer goals and making a plan to meet them. You’ll review your summer calendar, the daily demands on your time, and your project goals. You’ll identify two or three priorities and start the work of planning how to make your available time work for you.

Both sessions are led by Robert Danberg (Senior Instructor, Coordinator of Campus-Wide Writing Support, Binghamton University Writing Initiative).

“Write on Site” sessions are very much like a virtual cafe. Participants log in via Zoom and work in the presence of others, as they might in a cafe or in the library. Those who arrive first say “Hello” but typically, work begins right away. Latecomers simply log in and begin.

Our “Write on Site” sessions are scheduled for ninety minute sessions, twice per day. We’ll poll the group about evening sessions.

You can log into any session on any day. Sessions will be hosted by Robert Danberg or Madeline Gottlieb, Campus-Wide Writing Support Graduate Assistant.

Workshop Materials and Recordings

As previously mentioned, each day’s Workshop will be recorded and made available that day. If you cannot attend that day’s Workshop live, therefore, you will still be able to watch and review it at your convenience.

You will be able to access the Workshop recording, as well as any necessary materials for that day, in the Google Shared Drive. This Shared Drive, titled “Online Faculty Writing Workshop” will be made available to each participant, upon your RSVP to the program. Look out for an email, inviting you to the Shared Drive, the week before the program begins.

On the Shared Drive, you will find the Weekly Schedule, as well as a folder for each day (which will contain all materials and Workshop recordings).

Accountability groups can help you prioritize tasks, set intentions and maintain motivation.

These groups are an important part of a typical face to face retreat. They are small groups that frame each day and anchor the community. Often, participants continue to meet in some form when the retreat is done.

You may be wondering how they will work when you are at home, in the midst of your daily life, and may not be working with same consistency or focus:

We will hold group meetings twice a day. (We will also be polling participants about an additional evening meeting.)

All meetings are based on the same model. Rather than breaking up into small groups, each meeting will be open to all participants and will be hosted and facilitated by Robert Danberg.

The meetings will all use the model Paul Silvia describes in his book How To Write A Lot. Each member of the group takes a few moments to relate their goals, review the previous day and discuss a plan for the day or days ahead.

Our thought is this.

You may be in a position to set aside writing time each day and attend a morning and evening. You may attend each morning to discuss the day ahead and review the previous day.

Or you may have been unable to get anything done on Tuesday (or knew in advance that you wouldn’t) but are able to attend a group on Tuesday afternoon to talk about your Wednesday goals, then return again on Thursday morning.

We hope you can see these meetings in the context of what you might want to accomplish by the end of the week, and as a place where you can begin to make connections. To an extent, the volume of what you accomplish may not be the measure of the Accountability Groups’ impact on your work during the summer ahead. The process of routine reflection and the connections you may may be what you take with you.

For a more detailed description, please see Accountability Group Format.

The accountability group structure is adapted from Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot. During the retreat week, you’ll start and end each day with a group meeting.

At the end of the first morning’s workshop, we’ll discus how a group of this kind differs from writing groups that focus on reading pages or problem solving. You’ll be assigned a group. We’ll discuss ground rules for effective meetings.

Your group meetings will not be long. Fifteen to twenty minutes is generally enough, although the first meeting may take longer. You may decide to take more time (a half hour) for the meeting you hold at the end of a day.

Group meetings begin with each member describing their goals for the day, whether they met them, what might have gotten in the way, what worked, and plans for today or tomorrow.

Typically, the format for each speaker is:

What did I get done?What helped me get work done?What work do I want to accomplish by the next time we meet?

While problem solving is not the focus of a group meeting, group members often connect during the retreat day and after to share solutions and resources.

Below you’ll find a list of books and resources that inform the Summer Faculty Writing Retreat and come recommended by writers.

Academic Writers and Writing Productivity

Professors as Writers — Robert Boice

How to Write a Lot — Paul Silvia

Air and Light and Time and Space: How Successful Academics Write — Helen Sword

Getting Things Done — David Allen

The Clockwork Muse — Eviatar Zerubavel

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks — Wendy Lauren Belcher

Finishing School — Cary Tennis

Style/The Writer’s Art and Craft

Stylish Academic Writing — Helen Sword

The Writer’s Diet — Helen Sword

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace — Joseph Williams

Several Short Sentences About Writing — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Economical Writing — Deirdre McCloskey

On Writing Well — William Zinnser

So, You Want to Write — Dorothea Brande

The Art of Memoir — Mary Kerr

Free Writing, Creativity, and the Writer’s Life

Writing Without Teachers — Peter Elbow

Writing With Power — Peter Elbow

Writing Down the Bones — Natalie Goldberg

The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron

Art and Fear — David Bayles and Ted Orland

Fearless Creating: A Step-by-Step Guide To Starting and Completing Your Work of Art — Eric Maisel

Writer’s Memoir

Bird by Bird — Annie Lamott

On Writing — Stephen King

Draft No. 4 — John McPhee

Resource Site

The Writing Initiative maintains a site, Resources for Writers, where you’ll find articles, suggestions for practice, and links to other resources.

Throughout the week, Robert Danberg will be available for half hour meetings with retreat participants. You can use these meetings to set goals, talk through your project plan, or discuss writing strategies and resources. Please contact him at rdanberg@binghamton.edu to arrange a meeting.

Please confirm your participation by Thursday, April 15th by completing the Registration Form.

Questions? Contact Robert Danberg at rdanberg@binghamton.edu