Speakers
Session 4 – breakout seminars (running concurrently)
This session is for academic, non-fiction and fiction editors who want to work more closely with authors at earlier stages. It is for you if you’ve ever thought “I wish I could’ve seen that text earlier!”
What if you could write alongside your authors while they were still shaping their text? Try this one-hour taster session in structured social writing to see if it could work for you. After a brief introduction to the method, we will do some structured social writing, and then explore how we could use it.
In structured social writing, writers work on their own projects and learn from each other in a creative, productive community. It is not a workshop or class: you discuss the process, but not the content. The scale of the group session is up to you, from an hour online to days on an in-person retreat, weekly or once a year. Rowena Murray developed the method to help academics write for publication, but it works for all kinds of authors. The model carves out regular time, space and community to write.
Editors can facilitate social writing to support authors at the earliest stages of their process. You can integrate this with your other services, from book coaching through to proofreading. In an age of AI, automated and dehumanised text processes, social writing centres on humans. Editors can use the model to add value, to build community with authors and, as we work with others' words, to carve out time and space for writing of our own.
Dr Kate Sotejeff-Wilson midwifes texts for academics and the arts. She translates into and edits in English at KSW Translations, runs Ridge Writing Retreats, and chairs Nordic Editors and Translators. Her recent translations include Esa Kirkkopelto’s Logomimesis (Routledge 2024) and Regina Töpfer’s Negotiating Childlessness in the Middle Ages (Arc Humanities Press 2025). With Wendy Baldwin and Joana Zozimo, she co-edited Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms (Palgrave 2024). Kate is happiest in the space between languages and is a woman of many book clubs (shall we start one for the CIEP?).