ABSTRACT
Academic women have disproportionately higher teaching, service, mentor and caring loads inside academia that limit time for academic writing. These heavier loads inside academia intersect with often disproportionate household and caring responsibilities outside academia. In this chapter, we discuss a writing retreat we ran for academics with caring responsibilities. The retreat provided space for rest and rejuvenation as well as the opportunity to build connections and community. We found that giving participants space for deep thinking and sustained writing meant that they made significant progress on their research in the three and a half days of the retreats; they also reported increased well-being and a sense of feeling ‘cared for’ by their workplace. Although writing retreats don’t address the pervasive structural inequalities that structure the academy, they interrupt the exhausting scripts of everyday life with the gift of time in the context of care and connection.
