Leslie:
Welcome to episode 63 of Your Words Unleashed podcast! Today, I’m welcoming my friend and writing coach, Dr. Michelle Boyd. Here’s a bit about her. Michelle Boyd, PhD, is the founder and director of Inkwell Academic Writing Retreats, a transformative retreat-based training program that teaches scholars to overcome their writing fears. She’s also a self-described struggling writer whose success as an award-winning former tenured faculty member belied the challenges she faced throughout her career as an academic.
Scholars who work with Michelle call her coaching magical, but it’s not magic, it’s science. Her coaching programs are rooted in research showing that each scholar has their own natural writing process and that many of their struggles come from external barriers that prevent them from recognizing, accessing, or trusting that process when they need it. Michelle has been leading retreats since 2012 when she co-founded and coached her first retreat as a faculty member.
Her latest book, Becoming the Writer You Already Are, examines why writing is so challenging and how academics can rely on their writing process to find solutions to those challenges. Welcome, Michelle.
Michelle: Thanks so much for having me, Leslie!
Leslie: So Michelle and I know each other because we’re both writing coaches with Princeton University Press for their Supporting Diverse Authors Proposal Development Grants, which I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast. And also when I left the academy in the summer of 2022 to fully launch my coaching business, Michelle was one of the very first people I asked to meet with for advice, and she’s been so helpful to me and such a role model for women of color academic entrepreneurs. I wanted to have Michelle on, to get her best writing advice for struggling book authors, as well as to talk about the power of writing retreats, which I really don’t know a lot about.
So, Michelle, can you first tell people a bit about your background and your journey through academia?
Michelle:
Yeah. I was not someone who knew about getting a PhD or about graduate school when I was in high school and didn’t really know about that until I went to college. I went to an HBCU, a historically black college. I went to Hampton, and I had a bunch of professors who were all black men and women. They were very devoted to nurturing young undergraduates, and that’s how I first found out about grad school, did a program that was very similar to the SROP program, where I was able to do research.
When I was still an undergraduate with a professor from another university, my professors took me the national conference for black political scientists. I say all this to say I had a lot of support. I think that this is one of the things that we forget is that that is what can really make the difference in someone’s career. I had that support very early as an undergraduate. It continued when I was in grad school. I went to Northwestern and had an amazing advisor who was incredibly supportive, who still influences my thinking now, even though I’m coaching and I’m no longer a faculty member.
And, I also was really lucky to be part of a group of people of color at Northwestern who were going through grad school at the same time and really able to support one another through all of the things that are challenging when you are a person of color trying to get through grad school. So that was sort of the early part, and I feel like that’s sort of the ongoing theme. I was a professor for, I guess, 13 years, in Chicago, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I just had this amazing set of colleagues in the African American studies department where I had a 100% appointment, and they really kind of picked up where my other forms of support left off in mentoring me and nurturing me and supporting me as a junior scholar, and really made it possible for me to experience all the things I experienced when I was a faculty member.
Leslie:
Can you talk a little bit about your decision to no longer be a faculty member?
Michelle:
Oh, I can! I get this question all the time. I think the short way of thinking about it is I was burnt out by the time I got tenure. And I used that phrase at the time because it was the only phrase that I could come up with. I didn’t really understand why I had so little enthusiasm and energy for this thing that I had just spent more than a decade of my life. No, well, more than a decade, when you include graduate school and tenure of my life, trying to go after, and I was just exhausted.
And so I honestly, I applied for a job that was a non-faculty job, that was kind of a grad student support position in a university in Chicago. And I was just going to take the job because I thought, you know, if I let any of my colleagues know that I’m even thinking of this, they’re all going to think, “wow, what a loser you are. I can’t believe that you’re not fully dedicated to the discipline and to the field!” And my husband suggested to me, you know, “I think you should just talk to your chair, just tell them what’s happening.” And of course, when I did, people continued to be as supportive as they had been and really gave me opportunities to do administrative work at UIC that was in line with the research work I had been doing.
I was the associate director of programs at an institute that focused on race and public policy, which is where my research was focused. So I was in charge of programs, and there was an associate director who had another arena that they were in charge of. They were actually the person who suggested that we hold a writing retreat for the grad students in that research institute. It was not even my idea, but at the time, because I was trying to figure out, “what am I doing with my life? What is it that I’m really interested in doing?”
I was doing a lot of reading about writing process, about the craft of writing. I was remembering that I liked to write. I was doing a lot of audio production work, trying to figure out if there was a way that I could combine audio production with ethnography, which was what I was trained in. That was what my research was based on. So I was doing a lot of exploration around how do I communicate about the things that I’m interested in? How can we communicate complex scholarly ideas in a way that’s more accessible? And so thinking about the craft and the process of writing was all wrapped up in that.
And so when my colleague suggested that we have this writing retreat for grad students, she said, “I think there should be someone to coach them.” I said, “Oh, I would love to do this!” I had been in writing accountability groups for a long time. I was falling back in love with writing. And we did the first retreat. There were only ten spots, but I think it sold out in an hour. And we had them over and over again, and we had to figure out a way to have two separate groups at two different times because the alums wanted to come back, and it was just, people really wanted it, they really needed it.
And then when I would see them the next time around, they would say, “Oh, you know, that thing that we talked about that you coached me on? I’ve been doing that since the last retreat, and it’s really changed what’s happening with me in my writing.” It wasn’t that they didn’t have any struggles after that, but I realized,”Oh, wow, I thought they were just going to come get the work done and go home.” But that’s not what happened. Something else was happening that I didn’t fully understand at the time.
But that was sort of the beginning of my realizing there’s an experience that people are having that’s different from the really positive benefits of an accountability group or even an advisor or having someone read your work, all these things that we need to support us work really well. And also, there was this other magical thing that was happening that I loved, I was good at. They were thriving, and, I just kind of. I fell for it very, very hard.
Leslie:
That’s so awesome! So, tell me, what is the magic of writing retreats? Cause I never did one. Like, I never did one, and I wish I had. But what are people getting that they can’t get in other spaces with other folks?
Michelle:
Well, I think at any writing retreat, right, you’re gonna get time and space, and I think that, in and of itself is amazing. Right? It’s just enough to slow down and, think. And I think people feel a little less rushed when they are at a writing retreat. So I think regardless of what retreat you go to, you’re going to get those things. Those things, for me, when I’m leading a retreat, are actually not the most important thing. They’re like the basic. Because those things lead you to get a bunch of work done, which is great.
But what I want to have happen when someone comes to a retreat is that they really come to understand something about either their writing process or that project that they’re working on that they can then take away with them to their writing that they’re doing outside of the retreat.
So, for me, when I’m leading a retreat, part of what people are getting is one, time with other people who are mirroring back to them the same struggles that they’re experiencing. So we do a lot of work to help people feel connected to one another, to see one another’s struggle, because seeing that other people are struggling in the way that you do really can disrupt a lot of the internal narratives we have. That can be a really big source of our struggle. So just seeing other people struggle and seeing that you are not alone is huge.
And then, on top of giving people this experience of connection and accompaniment from other people, one of the other things that happens at a retreat is we teach a very concrete skill each day that helps folks who are in the retreat understand what the key challenges of a writing session are and then understand the basic principles that they can draw on to meet that challenge. So what’s the challenge, what’s the principle? And then what’s a specific tool that you then practice?
So, I’ve kind of named two things there, right? It’s both the skill that you’re learning, and it’s the opportunity to practice that skill in the group environment and then reflect on it, that leads to people having just this embodied experience of success with their writing and success. I don’t even like that word. Just that it can happen, that it doesn’t have to be a torment, that they remember what they like about it, that they remember that they have skills about it.
When people repeatedly have this embodied experience of success, that changes their narrative about themselves, and it changes whether or not they’re willing to come back and struggle with the session, because they have both the skill–I know how to do this thing–and they have that remembered experience that–yeah, I actually can do this. And so it sort of disrupts those stories that we tell ourselves.
That can really foster a strong sense of self-doubt, which is fostered strongly enough by the environment of academia. Right. When we put those two things together, it can be really difficult. So that’s the magic I was going to say quickly, Leslie, it is having that embodied experience of being able to meet and work through the challenges of your writing and the fears that come with that.
Leslie:
I love that you’re using the word embodied, too, because it is this felt experience of, we don’t have to call it success, but it could be a process of presence, of just meeting something, facing an issue that was really scary, and having people’s support as you’re doing that, which rarely ever happens for academics who tend to be so isolated.
Michelle:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, this is the thing about social writing. I think social writing can be as simple as you just are in the space with other people. But that can go a little sideways if you don’t trust those people or you don’t feel comfortable talking with them about your experience, and then you never get to see that they struggle like you. So it is sort of strange. As a political scientist, this is not my, you know, talking about embodied experience is not where I started, but that is what is happening for people.
And I think that’s why people use the word magical when they talk about the retreat, because it feels so outside of what I think we typically talk about as, scholars. But I’m still surprised how even just a five-day retreat can give people a foundation that they can jump off from in that respect.
Leslie:
Yeah. And I know you run these both online and in person, and so you found this magic to still happen in an online forum, too, I’m guessing.
Michelle:
Yes, I will say that. So we hold a half-day retreat, a three-hour retreat called the Power of Pause. We do that twice a year. We do it in spring and fall, and that I’ve been doing for a really long time, and I never had any sort of doubts about that. I could see very quickly that people were able to connect with one another. I mean, I do a lot to facilitate that. It doesn’t happen automatically, but it is possible to create that kind of meaningful connection online.
I will say that switching Compose, which is our five-and-a-half-day retreat to an online format as a result of the pandemic, was not what I was aiming to do in the least. And I was really afraid. I thought, “this is never going to work. It’s just people are going to feel isolated.” Remember when the pandemic started and everybody was saying to students, “Oh, you don’t have to turn your camera on”? I thought, “this is not going to work if all of our cameras are off.” And so even though it was against what everybody was doing, I said, “if you come to this retreat, you got to keep your camera on because that’s part of being connected, being able to see someone’s face”. So, yeah, Leslie, it translated, and I was more shocked than you imagine.
Leslie:
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So you’ve described yourself as a struggling writer, but you’ve still published a couple of books. So maybe you can just tell me what are the biggest struggles you’ve had. Maybe we can start there.
Michelle:
Yeah, well, you know, I remember the struggles around the latest book becoming more so than I remember the ones from the first book. And I will say that, first of all, that book is in a totally different genre than the ones I’d been writing in for my entire academic career. And I could not figure out the structure of that book to save my life. I didn’t understand how to organize the chapters. What was the primary question that just threw me for a loop for years?
And then another struggle. I was writing a book where I had to draw on a lot of research literatures that were not, you know, the literature. And it was particularly tricky because I wanted to know enough to be able to feel good about the statements I was making. I still have the standards for making arguments and using evidence that I had when I was a faculty member, but I hadn’t known the literatures for 10 – 15 years. And so really being willing to strike that balance between, okay, I’ve actually read enough. No, this isn’t the field that I was trained in from the time that I was. However old you are when you go to grad school 21 or 22. But I can have confidence in myself that how I’m using this work is valid. I’ve captured what’s important about it, and I can feel confident about the statements I’m making that was really, I really struggled with that a lot.
Leslie:
So what inspired you to write, Becoming the Writer You Already Are?
Michelle:
So there are two answers to that question. The first answer to that question is, what was the impetus, which is really kind of what led to it. And then the inspiration was a little bit different. So I’ll give you the inspiration, and you can tell me if you’re interested in the impetus. You know, while I was writing it, I remember I had already started Inkwell, and I led a writing workshop. It might have been at the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy Conference. I can’t remember. But all I remember was that this young black woman came up to me afterwards, and she had tears in her eyes. She could barely stop herself from crying. And she told me that she was not just the only black person in her department, but in her whole school. And that she had been on the verge of quitting.
Now I don’t even remember which workshop I gave. It was probably about writing process and how we all have our own unique writing process. And she said to me that she had realized that she was not a terrible writer, that the things that she was going through were things that everyone was going through, and had given her a kind of path to help her through her trepidation around her writing. And I thought about that young woman every time that book was not going well, you know.
She was kind of the person I had in my mind. I wouldn’t even recognize her if I saw her today, but she was sort of me like, I loved writing before I got to grad school, and then I hated it by the time I was done. And it was just because it was so hard and so mysterious. So she was my inspiration, not my impetus.
Leslie:
And what was the impetus?
Michelle:
The impetus was that when I was, I think, in my second year as a faculty member, I think around 2003 or 2004, I had a writing group. And one of the things I noticed was that I always made these estimates for when I was going to submit something, and I was always off. So my writing group gave me the assignment of, figuring out how long does it take me to write an article. And in the midst of doing that, I sort of started laying out, well, what are the stages of writing an article? Well, like, what do I do?
And as I was trying to answer that question, I started laying out the phases and realizing, “Oh, these kind of remind me of the stages of gestation and birth.” Now, mind you, haven’t had kids. Have not had kids. So did not realize that this was a common metaphor for thinking about your writing. But that’s what occurred to me. And then once I was done, what I had was this chart that laid out the phases that I was in and how they matched up to the development of a baby in utero. I was like, “wow, this is actually really helpful.”
I started off trying to understand just my phases, but I came to understand a lot more about my writing process and going back and forth between the metaphor. So I shared this with a couple of people. I found out after a few years that people were sharing it with their students and they were finding it helpful, so I decided to write an article about it. I wrote an article for a professional development journal in political science. And then an editor came to me and said, “so I read that article. It was great. Are you writing a book on this?” Which I was not doing. And I said, “yes, I am.” And so after conversations with them, it became clear that they were interested in it. Yeah. I realized there was more to say there than the little one-page chart, you know, that I had created when I first did the exercise. So that’s how it happened.
Leslie:
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s what a lot of authors don’t know sometimes is that book projects start because editors approach you.
Michelle:
Yes, yes. And I feel like the people who know that don’t say it out loud a lot. And I can say for a long time, the reason I didn’t say it out loud was because I was kind of embarrassed. I thought, “well, maybe this meant that I didn’t earn it.” Forgetting everything that I just told you about. The fact that I developed this idea, that it shaped my writing, that I wrote the article. But, yeah, it’s like, it’s part of the secret knowledge. I have a colleague at UIC used to always talk about the secret knowledge, all these things that people know that help them get where they are, that we don’t really come out and talk about. But yeah, that’s how people get their books published.
Leslie:
That’s how my second book came about. I had made a conscious decision not to write a book on the topic. And I was telling people, “I’m doing this project. It’s not going to be a book.” And then I went to a conference. An editor approached me. She was like, “I need this book.” And I was like, my first question to her was, “how short?” Because I’m like, I wasn’t planning on doing this for the next three years, but honestly, that’s how it came about. And I’m very glad I did it. It was worth it.
Michelle:
Yeah, again, it’s a part of that support that I try to always name whenever I’m talking about writing. It’s not that I didn’t work hard. It’s not that I didn’t do good work. I think both of those things are true about me. And I had the support of a writing community, of people of color, community of advisors, mentors, colleagues, and in this instance, of an editor who did their job. And I ferreted some things out, and here we were.
Leslie:
I’m glad you’ve had so much amazing support, because I know that’s not the case for maybe the majority of authors.
Michelle:
I think it might be. And it’s a very particular kind of support that I’ve had. And then I think once I figured out that I had it, then I worked on cultivating it whenever I moved to a new spot. And I think there’s lots of literature around success in academia at various levels, right, that says it’s the cohort that can really make the difference in your success. And that was very much the case for me.
Leslie:
Yeah. But just going back to your book for a second, what would you say are the main takeaway points from it?
Michelle:
One takeaway, I would say, is that writing is incredibly difficult and that it has challenges that are external to us. There are inherent challenges that just come with writing because it’s writing that we’re never going to get away from. There are institutional challenges that come from doing the kind of writing we do within an academic environment. And when I say academic, I mean within the academy as academics. And that the struggles that we face in writing really are rooted in those external challenges. I think that’s one of the main things I want people to see, is that those things are enormous challenges. There are enormous barriers, and we hold them in common. Right. So that’s one thing.
The second takeaway is in the midst of all of that, one of the things that we all have by the time we get to grad school and by the time that we’re professors is we have our own writing process. We have a way that we move from having an idea in our head and then getting to words on a page, and we all go through the same phases, but we go through those phases differently. And when we are able to pay attention to that process, when we’re able to raise our awareness of that process and then actively draw on that process to solve the challenges of writing, it goes more smoothly and it’s far more enjoyable.
What’s tricky about it is that often our writing process is a form of tacit knowledge. It’s the kind of thing we know without knowing it. And so we have to do some work often to elicit that awareness, to make it clearer to ourselves. What do I do when I first sit down and the project’s brand new? What do I do? What do I do in the moment when I’ve hit a roadblock and I can’t go any farther? These are common phases in a writing project, and we all have unique ways that we move through those and some of those things.
We actually, we know some things and we have some things that are missing, right? We maybe don’t have a really great strategy for something that we have in our back pocket. That’s fine. You can learn that. And you can experiment with the different ones that you might hear out there and really experiment with them and see which one matches my style better. Which is the one that makes most sense for me, which is the one that really captures how I think, how my thoughts develop over time. That’s your writing process.
And the more you understand it, the more it can be one of the best tools for moving past your challenges.
Leslie:
That is so interesting. And I’m wondering what advice you might have for writers. You know, a lot of the folks that I work with, they feel like they’re going into battle when they sit down to write and that they actually have to fight through many layers of these self-defeating thoughts that are sometimes operating right below the surface.
But, if they really investigate them, they’re things like, “you don’t know enough. Who are you to be saying this stuff? People are not going to think you’re intelligent enough.”
A lot of the inner critic stuff rises up and it almost paralyzes them so that they lose this sense of being able just to do the thing. It’s so common amongst the people that I work with. How do you kind of talk to people about that issue?
Michelle:
Yeah. So the thing that I say about that is, first of all, that the moment when we sit down to write is really a transition moment. And I don’t know that we always think about it explicitly like that. And whenever you have a transition, it’s tricky. We got to move from one thing to the next. And the general point that I like to make about that transition moment is we want to make it as easy as possible.
So one way to make something easy is to make it ridiculously small. I mean, this is what I refer to as “tiny bite writing.” Tiny bite writing is things like, I decide to find the latest copy of my document, and I open it up on word. And that is really all I shoot for at the beginning of the session. Tiny bite writing is “okay, I’ve got it open, and I know what the document is, and I read one page.” It’s essentially this strategy of making things so manageable that they are no longer frightening. And what happens nine times out of ten? I don’t even have to tell you this, Leslie, because I know, you know, you do that first little step and all of a sudden you’re hooked.
So that’s kind of one way of making things easy. I think my favorite way, though, of suggesting that people make things easy is that instead of going into battle, they do quite the opposite and they actually try to seduce themselves into their writing.
So what’s the thing that you just love to do? You know, you could read the archive all day long, or you just love going back and listening to the interviews that you did with someone from your field site. Or I love to read, and I never feel like I have enough time. What is it that just fills you with delight? Do that first.
Seduce yourself into the writing so it’s not so frightening. And again, same thing tends to happen. You get into it so much, you forget your fear, and then you keep on going. And you know what? Even if you didn’t, you touched your writing, which is sometimes all we’re looking for. Just touch it, and then come back and touch it the next day.
Leslie:
Yeah. I love that thought about how to make things easy, because I do think that’s actually a huge reframe for most academics.
It took me a long time to realize that I operated with this underlying belief of success only comes when things have been really hard. No, when I’ve worked really hard, it should feel really hard. And it is really hard. And so when I offer to people to consider, what’s the easiest way you could do this? That’s always the question.
What path has the most ease? And it doesn’t mean that the process itself is easy at all. Writing’s hard, but there are certain areas where maybe we are making it a little bit harder than it needs to be. So where can we find some ease? And I think that it’s such a valuable lesson, like, in life.
Michelle:
Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I don’t know if you feel this way, Leslie, but I find that the conversations that I have with people about their writing struggles and the conversations I have with myself about my writing struggles, they all lead to kind of a set of ideas and a set of approaches that aren’t just useful in writing but are useful in pretty much every arena in life.
Leslie:
Yeah. I think the point I like to really encourage people to think about is the process of it. Right. That there’s a lot of faith and trust you need to put into the process of writing something like a book, and that if you put all of your hopes and pin all of them onto that end product, you’re losing a lot of opportunities for experience and joy and that richness. Right? But that’s life, too.
Michelle:
Yeah. And it’s unlearning, something because I say these things all the time, and I have to remind myself of them all the time, you know, when it’s going really well, I don’t have to remind myself. And then I have those moments where it’s just really hard. I forget, and then. Oh, right. I come back to it. It’s just, it gets easier, but it never goes away that we have to do that work, I think.
Leslie:
Yeah. And I think it’s so valuable for people to hear you as a coach who’s written a book on writing and also written your own scholarship, talk about that so openly. So thank you for sharing.
So, I know you’re going to be running a free sort of half-day retreat pretty soon. Do you want to tell listeners about it and how they can sign up?
Michelle:
Yeah, absolutely. So the retreat is called the Power of Pause, and it really is a moment to just experiment with retreat writing to see if it works for you. I like to say that Inkwell has the most loving writing community on the planet, where together for 3 hours, I give a short coaching session at the beginning and in the middle, where I sort of talk about what is a retreat and what does it look like, and how can we best go through that writing time. And then people kind of hunker down and use the strategies that I’ve offered to practice their writing and see what the experience is like. So again, it’s the power of pause. And you can either get on the waitlist or register at, inkwellretreats.org tryaretreat.
Leslie:
Or you can just go to Inkwellretreats.org and just play around. Search around on the website and just find out more about what Michelle is doing. Thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom on this episode.
Michelle: Yeah, it’s been great to chat with you. I always enjoy chatting with you.
Leslie: No, me too. And I’m glad that this can be a public kind of chatting.
Michelle: Absolutely!
Leslie: So, listeners, I have learned so much from Michelle today. I hope you have, too. Please go ahead and sign up for her Power of Pause writing retreat, and I will link to it on the episode page. I will talk to you all again soon.
