What is a writers’ cricle?

Welcome to the third year of Epilogue Editing’s Writers’ Circles. These small groups offer accountability, productivity, and support to help you navigate academia and get your work into the world. Are you worried about balancing research productivity, teaching, and service once the semester starts up? Do you have a project that you want to complete by the end of the year, or do you want to get yourself set up for success to write a big grant proposal this year? Are you stressed about navigating the tenure process or job market?

Our summer intensive will run for four weeks at the beginning of the summer. We’ll focus on the strategies you need to jumpstart or revise a project.

By popular demand, each session will contain 3 components: a topic of the week related to writing, a chance to workshop your writing, and then a dedicated writing tome together.

Does this sound like the kind of structure and community that you need?

Come write with us.

When will the workshops take place?

These will take place the weeks of May 12, May 19, pause for US Memorial Day, June 2, June 9, and June 16. We’ll choose a date and time based on the schedules of participants. Each weekly session will run for 2 hours.

Who is the instructor?

Me—Kelly Clancy, PhD. I am an editor, consultant, the author of two books, and I’ve edited and consulted on hundreds of books, grants, articles, and job documents including ones published with and under review by publishers like Oxford University Press, University of Chicago Press, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Elements, UNC Press, Jossey-Bass, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan.

I know that writing is particularly challenging when you’re negotiating the stresses of the tenure track, managing writing with family obligations, and/or writing with an intensive teaching load. Because I’ve written, and helped people write, through all of these circumstances, I know what it takes to get things done.

Who is this workshop designed for?

Anyone who needs support to write through the pressure of the semester. Previous participants have applied for jobs, gotten tenure, been promoted to full professor, won prestigious grants, had books accepted at exciting places, and gotten papers accepted. If this triggered imposter syndrome, don’t let it! Everyone who identifies as an academic is welcome to join and belongs in the group. Most commonly, participants are post-docs or beyond in their careers.

What do we do in the writers’ circles?

Small groups of no more than 8, including a group for mid-career faculty and a group for early-career scholars;

We'll meet once a week for 6 weeks, each session lasting 2 hours.

Each week we'll set goals, create accountability for each other, discuss writing secrets, and generally be awesome;

You’ll have the opportunity to seek feedback and insights from the group on writing challenges;

We’ll write together for one hour each week inside the session;

We’ll be in a private Slack accountability group;

You can add coaching and editing support as well.

What are topics might we discuss?

• How to balance all of the shit

• Long-term goals, productivity, accountability after tenure, and all the systems that (could) work

• Thinking about service: Administration, Mentoring, Saying no

• Creating space for the work that matters

• Goals, productivity, accountability, and all the systems that (could) work

• Saying no (or not now)

• Working toward tenure and other goals

• New preps and committees and still writing

• Marathon, sprint, or something else? Finding your writing cadence

• Hell can be other people: Coauthors, reviewers, well-meaning colleagues

• Making it all stick – sustainability, goal setting beyond the session, taking transitions seriously

Why not coaching/editing or a just a writing group?

Good question! For some folks, one-on-one coaching and perhaps asynchronous editing is a great model for achieving goals.

I decided to create these groups, though, because I noticed across my coaching sessions that a lot of people struggle to answer the same kinds of questions about their careers, their writing, and their research, but also feel alone with those questions.

I wanted to create a unicorn—a community where people didn’t just complain but got real work done, but where there was no competition, gaslighting, or toxic positivity: just a sense that we’re all in this together, and everyone wins when smart, cool, interesting people succeed.

For people who have demanding schedules that make doing research difficult, the groups can also serve as a tether, keeping you connected to your scholarly identity and your work.

What will we do?

Goal set: Everyone in the group will have a goal for the semester, and then set weekly goals to help them get there.

In the Slack group we'll talk about our daily and weekly goals, and report back on our progress.

Weekly meetings: Each week, we'll spend time talking about how to overcome research and writing challenges. These are designed to be seminar-style and address the problems that academics commonly face, while providing tools and strategies for becoming a more balanced, efficient, productive scholar.

Co-writing sessions: There will be weekly co-writing sessions on Zoom--we're not just talking about writing, we're getting things done.

Registration options

**The day and time for the workshop will be determined based on the schedule of participants. You can register here.

Tier One: $750 ($550 if you register by April 1).

• Weekly 2-hour Zoom meetings

• Weekly additional co-writing session

• Slack accountability group

• Monthly feedback from other smart people on what you’re writing

• The opportunity to see what other people are working on and give feedback

Tier Two: $1000 ($750 if you register by April 1)

• Weekly 2-hour Zoom meetings

• Weekly additional co-writing session

• Slack accountability group

• Monthly feedback from other smart people on what you’re writing

• The opportunity to see what other people are working on and give feedback

• 120 minutes of one-on-one coaching to schedule throughout the semester

Participants can also add editing on to this package at a discount - please talk to me for details.

Register here! No payment is due at registration—we’ll follow up once days and times are confirmed.

I want these sessions to feel accessible for everyone, so if you’re a scholar without university funding, please contact me and we can work out a payment arrangement.