Building Bridges Through Writing: A postdoc Retreat in August 2025

This reality made our recent three-day writing retreat all the more valuable, not just as an opportunity to be productive and focus on a few days of intensive writing, but as a way to build meaningful connections within our research community. 

The retreat was attended by all current postdocs affiliated with NORBARN: Hege Fimreite (HVL), Kine Melfald Tveten (HVL), Ingrid Midteide Løkken (University of Stavanger & BI Norwegian Business School), Czarecah Tuppil Oropilla (HVL), and Francesca Vaghi (HVL).

We started our stay at Solstrand with a brief discussion on ‘how we feel about writing’; the intention of this prompt was to have an open conversation with each other, exploring what we find challenging (and also rewarding!) about the writing process. We each wrote a response to this question on a piece of flipchart paper, and at the end of our stay we revisited this prompt to talk about whether our perspective had shifted during the course of the writing retreat.

We also wrote our goals for the writing retreat on a whiteboard; we tried to make these realistic aims. At the end of each day, we spoke about what we had achieved and how close we were getting to our overall stated goal – most of us managed to finish at least one of the writing projects we had planned for ourselves, a great feeling!

One of the most rewarding aspects of our retreat was the opportunity to finally meet colleagues face-to-face. While some of us had mainly collaborated virtually or just knew each other through e-mail exchanges, spending some days together in person gave us the opportunity to share our research interests, our methodological approaches, career aspirations, and the challenges we face as early-career academics. Realising the breadth of expertise within our group was a source of energy and inspiration.

But perhaps most importantly, we gave ourselves permission to play with our research processes and with our writing approaches. This experimentation included engaging with new writing techniques, like freewriting and generative writing. We also looked at two ‘tools’ that can be used when stuck on a particular writing task: Brown’s 8 Questions (1998), and “outlining.”

Our three-day writing retreat reminded us that academic work, at its best, is fundamentally collaborative. Based on our experience, we recommend that similar events maintain this balance of structured writing time and informal discussion. The combination of productivity and play proved essential; it allowed us to achieve concrete goals while building our network, inspiring us to think of what more we can do within and for the NORBARN community.

Would you like a copy of our writing schedule and materials

to organise your own academic writing retreat?

E-mail Francesca Vaghi: francesca.vaghi@hvl.no