“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyway.” – Glennon Doyle Melton
And we’re off! The Fall 2022 semester is officially in session. Campus is buzzing with excitement and our calendars are rapidly filling with classes, meetings, and other engagements. We’ll get to our writing projects at some point, right?show up & write. is a drop-in writing initiative that helps researchers and graduate students to prioritize writing in their schedules and build momentum on projects over a semester. Each session lasts for 2 hours and are scheduled from 8-10, 10-12, 12-2, and 2-4 Monday through Friday. The sessions are proctored by a CSU faculty member, postdoc, or graduate student volunteer who has committed to proctor and write during that time so that they, too, can make steady progress on their projects. If you are interested in the additional accountability that proctoring a session offers, let us know by completing the form at the bottom of our webpage HERE.
Writing—regardless of discipline, writer’s skill level, or genre complexities—can be challenging. For individual researchers and academics who juggle many professional duties, the challenges of creating the time and space to write can be equally great, if not greater, than the very task of writing itself. Education scholar and research dean, Rowena Murray (2015) points out that writing can feel solitary but that it is mostly relational. “Social writing” or write-together sessions, according to Murray, can be instrumental for “changing writing behaviours” positively and for facilitating a complex “management of competing tasks” (p. 134).
You can expect each session to begin with a few minutes to get settled and set goals for the session. Then writers… well … write. All at CSU are welcome to show up & write. This is an inclusive campus space where we come together to support each other as writers. You can be a chemist working on a grant proposal, a graduate student working on a thesis, or a staff member working on a novel — all are welcome!
Please visit the show up & write. page on the CSU Writes website for more detailed information.