1. Writing alone? Not furlong!
Heather Johnson, Research and Education Librarian, Biomedical Libraries
Katie Harding, Physical Sciences Librarian, Kresge Physical Sciences Library
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
We’re here today to get you excited about writer’s retreats.

2. Learning Outcomes By the end of the session, you will be able to
Communicate the value of a writer’s retreat to campus partners and prospective participants
Apply a framework to design a writer’s retreat that meets the needs of a defined user group

3. Session Agenda Background Information Description of our retreats
Interactive case studies
Next steps
Now that you have the learning objectives, let’s talk about what we’re going to do in this session to help you achieve them. First we’ll give you background information on what a retreat is and why libraries are well suited to offer them. We’ll then describe the retreats that we’ve offered in our libraries before moving in to the case studies we’ve prepared. Each group will work on a case study to develop a schedule for a writer’s retreat based on your case study. And finally, we’ll talk about the next steps you’ll need to take in order to implement your own retreat.

4. Background

5. What is a Writer’s Retreat?
For undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and clinicians
For writers of manuscripts, theses, grants, senior projects
Help participants develop and reflect on their writing skills
Include free writing time and structured programming
Include programming led by librarians, collaborators, and participants
A writer’s retreat provides a dedicated time and space for individuals to focus on their writing, share their work, and provide feedback to their peers. You can offer a retreat to students, postdocs, faculty, and non-faculty researchers such as residents, fellows, and nurses. They can …

6. Why Host a Writer’s Retreat?
Libraries are well suited to offer writer’s retreats because they can leverage existing relationships with other departments to offer multifaceted support
Support researchers across the research lifecycle
There is little writing support available for faculty to develop their writing skills
Grant and manuscript writing requires very specific skills that may go beyond what student writing centers can offer
Faculty may not be comfortable receiving support from students at writing centers.
And as far as students writing manuscripts and helping to prepare grants, they require skills that are not taught in the classroom or in writing centers, and so, we offer them at our retreats.

7. Our retreats
Now I’m going to talk a bit about what we’ve done with our retreats so that you can get a better idea of what a retreat might look like and how we’ve planned ours.

8. Logistics and Considerations
Two consecutive days
Held in the libraries
Limited enrollment
Individual consultations
Community building
Budgetary restrictions
Space limitations
Personalized schedules
We have offered multiple two-day writer’s retreats in our biomedical library and our physical science library. When people hear the word “retreat”, they often imagine an exotic location like a cabin in the woods, and some schools offer those, but our retreats have been held in our libraries.
One of the issues we have encountered in planning our retreats is deciding how many participants to accept. We of course would love to accept everyone who wants to attend, but we are limited by a number of constraints like the ability of our writing consultants to meet individually with each participant, budget limitations, space limitations and the size of our meeting spaces, and the desire to keep retreats small enough that our participants can all interact and get to know one another. As a result, we tend to limit our retreats to participants.
We have created personalized schedules for each of our participants which is worth noting because it takes a lot more time than you might think!

9. Planning
Define Audience
Identify Partners
Plan Activities
Develop Budget
These are some of the things that we think about when we plan our retreats. First, it’s important to figure out who your audience is. You’ll want to think about what activities will be helpful for your audience and who you can partner with to offer these activities. And of course, you’ll want to create a budget that takes into account how much your retreat will cost and where that money will come from.
We’ll look at each of these elements separately.

10. Projects
Grants
Manuscripts
Theses
Dissertations
Audiences
Faculty
Non-faculty researchers
Graduate students
Undergraduate students
Postdocs
Heather and I have offered retreats to a variety of audiences, that include faculty, graduate students, undergrads, postdocs, and other researchers.
In addition to knowing who will be attending your retreat, you’ll also want to consider what kind of writing project they are working on. You can provide a retreat for a project like a thesis or manuscript, or for something like grant writing.
Some of our retreats have focused on just one of these groups, like a retreat for undergrads working on a senior thesis, but other retreats can include participants from several different groups, like retreats with a focus on manuscript writing which can be helpful for many different students and researchers. Obviously it is useful to focus on participants who are at a similar place in their writing and have similar needs, but combining participants at different stages in their careers in one retreat can set the stage for participants to learn from each other.

11. Partners Funding Faculty Data Management Writing Consultant
Internal
Writing Center
External
Other Librarians
Funding
Faculty
Data Management
Writing Consultant
Scholarly Comm
Data Visualization
One of the great thing about organizing a retreat as a librarian is how many relationships we have and how many people who know a lot about something we can contact for help.
At our writer’s retreats, we are not the writing experts. We partner with writing consultants, either on campus (e.g. someone from writing center or a writing prof) or someone from off-campus, especially for manuscript writing or retreats for faculty.
We also bring in different specialists within our library to help – people with expertise in scholarly communication, publishing, and data visualization can all contribute.
There may be opportunities to bring in interested faculty, as experts in writing and publishing within a discipline.
And lastly, there may be external partners who share some of your goals and may be able to provide you with funding for your retreat (on-campus research centers, grant-giving foundations).
Funding

12. Our retreat schedules include a few different type of sessions.
Didactic Sessions
How to begin the writing process
Retaining authorship rights
NIH Public Access Policy
Scientific storytelling
Finding grant opportunities
Our retreat schedules include a few different type of sessions.
These are examples of some of the didactic sessions we’ve offered. How to begin writing, scientific storytelling, retaining your rights as an author, public access policies, and finding grant opportunities. A really engaging presentation by your writing expert at the start of the retreat can be a great way to build momentum and to help your participants develop some shared knowledge. The scientific storytelling session offered to our graduate students and postdocs got them all thinking about how to better use narrative to talk about their research and they learned some strategies and language that helped them to do that together. So, for example, our writing specialist talked about the ABT framework for telling a story, which stands for AND, BUT, THEREFORE, and provides you with a few words that can set you up to tell a good story. So: We were in our hotel room last night AND we were craving something sweet BUT we were too lazy to leave the hotel THEREFORE we placed an order for cookie delivery. This is one of the techniques that they all learned together and could to talk about their writing projects for the rest of the retreat.

13. Interactive Sessions
Peer Review
Honing your message
Panel Discussion
Individual Meetings
Writing Specialist
Librarians
Of course, we want to encourage active learning and engagement with our participants, so we include interactive elements. Peer review sessions are often very helpful both for having people who don’t know your research critique it, and for developing the skills to review someone else’s work. Some groups may need more directions than others, and you may want to have facilitators present to help with these sessions. Heather has offered sessions on honing your message, or developing a really strong elevator pitch. We’ve also experimented with inviting journal editors who are faculty on our campus to act as a panel and talk to our participants about their experiences with publishing from the other side of the process, and to answer questions related to peer review and working with your editor.
We always offer individual consultations with a writing specialist. These are incredibly valuable to our participants, who learn a lot about their writing and what they can do to improve. Participants tend to prefer to meet with a writing specialist early in the retreat, because the feedback they get will often change how they approach their work quite dramatically.
We as librarians can of course offer consultations as well. I’m sure you can imagine lots of things that you might talk about with a researcher during their writing project, but some common areas of interest are lit searching, citation management, and how to choose a journal to submit a manuscript to.

14. Community Building Activities
Kickoff
Breakfast
Lunch
Wrap Up
Independent Activities
Writing
Goal setting
Reflection
Community building activities are a crucial part of any retreat, as they provide opportunities for participants to share their experiences and learn from one another. This can be done through scheduling activities that include group discussion and through time for participants to chat over meals and breaks.
We like to make sure that there is a significant amount of writing time built into our retreat schedule so that participants have lots of time to work independently on their writing projects. Some of the other activities that they may engage in on their own (or on their own and then with the larger group) are goal setting and reflecting on the progress that they are making towards their goals.

15. Sample Master Schedule
Day 1: 8:00 AM- 5:15 PM
Time
Activity
8:00- 8:15
Check In and Breakfast
8:15- 8:30
Welcome and Retreat Logistics/Information/Details
8:30- 9:30
Didactic Session with Writing Specialist
9:35- 10:40
Peer Revision of Specific Aims Facilitated by Writing Specialist
Independent Writing
10:45- 12:25
Individual Consultations with Writing Specialist
Individual Meetings with Librarians
12:30- 12:55
Lunch
1:00- 5:00
5:05- 5:15
Wrap Up
Day Ends
Day 2: 9:00 AM- 5:00 PM
Time
Activity
9:00- 9:15
Check In and Breakfast
9:20- 10:20
Didactic Session with Writing Specialist
10:25- 11:55
Independent Writing
Peer Feedback
Check in with Writing Specialist
12:05- 12:35
Lunch
12: 40- 1:35
NIH Public Access Compliance Seminar
1:40- 4:45
4:45- 5:00
Wrap Up
Day Ends
This is a master schedule from a biomedical retreat that Heather organized. There is a mix of didactic sessions, individual consultations, and free writing time. Some of the time segments include multiple activities, because different participants will be doing different things at the same time. So, for example, from 10:45-12:25, some participants will have writing time, while others will be meeting with a writing specialist or with a librarian.

16. Strategies for Writing
8:00
8:15
8:30
9:35
10:10
10:45
11:20
11:55
12:30
1:00
1:35
2:10
2:45
3:20
3:55
4:30
5:05
Day 1
Check In
Kickoff
Strategies for Writing
G1 Peer Revision
G2 Peer Revision
Santos
Colla
Penna
Lunch
Murphy
Soneji
Lyons
Lucas
Stefanuto
Adachi
Thompson
Wrap Up
Porter
Blunt
Duguay
Johnson
Peer Feedback
Group-Led
9:00
9:20
10:25
11:05
11:25
11:45
12:05
12:40
1:40
2:00
2:20
2:40
3:00
3:40
4:45
Day 2
Didactic Session
Seminar
With people in different places, it’s important to stay organized! This is a chart that Heather used to keep track of what all the different facilitators would be doing at a retreat.
Each row= different facilitator or librarian
Each column= time block
Your system will look different, but if you have students and facilitators in different places, a spreadsheet can be really important.

17. Consultants and Honoraria
Budget
Meals and snacks
Consultants and Honoraria
Supplies
The two major costs are food and any costs associated with hiring external consultants.
Food is important! Offering meals means that people can stay in the library and focused on the retreat throughout the day. It also offers the opportunity for participants and facilitators to get to know one another over food and snacks.
Consultants can be expensive, once you take into account any fees, travel, accommodations, and meals. if your budget is limited, look for on-campus partners who could fill this role.

18. Evaluating Success Informal feedback at wrap-up sessions Surveys
Development of writing groups
We’ve had several strategies for evaluating our retreats.
At the end of our schedule, we hold a wrap-up session and ask participants to reflect on their experiences and share their thoughts with the group. At this point they are generally feeling like they know each other pretty well, so they are happy to share their thoughts on what was most helpful and how the retreat has helped them progress.
We also ask participants to complete a survey where they tell us what was really useful in the retreat, or what they might change. This has been helpful for identifying sessions that we think are important, but maybe don’t feel that way to our participants.
This feedback helps us to better understand the needs of our participants and to figure out how we can improve our retreats next time around.
One other thing we’ve taken note of is the formation of writing groups. Our participants often express how much they appreciate the support that they receive from peers at a retreat, so we have suggested to them that they form a group that they can develop to suit their needs. We help out with the logistics of setting up a first meeting, but we leave the leadership of the group to the participants so that they can create the group that is best for them. We’ve seen these writing groups form and continue to meet regularly long after our retreats are over, and this is a really important outcome to be aware of.

19. Case study

20. Planning Your Retreat Consider the goals of your retreat.
Develop a schedule
Create a preliminary budget
Independent
Writing
Reflection
Group
Didactic Sessions
Peer Feedback
Community Building
15 minutes

21. Next steps
So now that you’ve worked with your group to create a schedule for a hypothetical retreat, you’re excited to go back to your institution and develop your own retreat.

22. Begin Planning Process
3 Months
Identify collaborators and funding sources
Select a space (meeting rooms, writing space, etc)
Create master agenda to be used for advertising
Advertise and open application/registration
6 Weeks
Select and notify participants if selected from applicant pool
Identify vendors and place catering orders
Assign prep work for participants if relevant to retreat
1-2 Weeks
Create participant agendas
Print participant packets
Shop for food
Send reminders and logistical information
Application vs registration
And if all goes as planned and you don’t have a snow storm the day of your retreat, you’ll be set up for success!

23. Questions?