Evergreen #AcWriMoments
Plus, a delicious new resource is heading your way!
Do I really have what it takes to do scholarly work? What’s even the point of trying to create scholarship in this messed-up world? What difference could my work possibly make for me or the people I care about?
These are questions that many of us worry about as we work to create and share knowledge in a world that often feels hostile to it. Articulating these hard questions from inside our own scholarly lives is how we (Helen and Margy) first invited you to subscribe to this newsletter back in our introductory post, “All About #AcWriMoments.”
What is an AcWriMoment exactly? Here’s how we defined them in our first prompt:
Lofty definition: “Precious stretches of uncounted minutes when we sink into a sense of cohesion, even sublimity, and find pieces of encouragement or insight that enable us to return to the workaday world with the courage to carry on.”
Practical definition: “Any moment where you cultivate connection with your academic writing—whether an individual project, your larger body of work, or the person that you are as a thinker and writer—[by paying] attention, not only to the task in front of you, but also to its potential for larger meaning.”
AcWriMoments serve a practical purpose in our scholarship by helping us make progress on intangible “metrics” such as clarity of purpose and connection with our readers — not to mention that they tap into the intrinsic motivation we so dearly need in order to see this process through!
We’ve shared a lot of prompts with you since launching #AcWriMoments back in late 2023. Forty-two to be exact! The first 30 prompts were bite-sized ones that could be thoroughly explored in a single writing session or contemplated over time. After that, we shifted to offering monthly prompts designed to structure an entire month. Throughout this ambitious project, our goal has been to help you cultivate AcWriMoments large and small in your life so that you can do the work that matters to you most.
Here we are approaching 2025, and with this phase of #AcWriMoments drawing to a close, our goal feels more pressing than ever. So we now bring you two ways to continue — or start! — taking beautiful care of your Self in the coming year by cultivating AcWriMoments.
1. Revisit #AcWriMoments any time
We’ve turned the #AcWriMoments prompt collections from 2023-24 into two evergreen resources that you can access any day, hour, or moment. Bookmark these pages! Share them with your friends! Send them to your writing group so you can all try them together!
30 Days of #AcWriMoments: Daily prompts for finding courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work, contributed by writing scholars, coaches, consultants, and editors from around the world.
A Year of #AcWriMoments: Monthly prompts that suggest a unique theme for each month of the year and encourage you to integrate that theme into your daily life and work.
We may announce future iterations of #AcWriMoments at some point, so please stay subscribed!
2. Check out our next project … drumroll please … Tarot for Scholars!
On January 1, 2025, we’re thrilled to be launching a new public resource to help scholars integrate the deep wisdom of tarot into their daily life and work. In our free Substack newsletter, Tarot for Scholars, we’ll offer reflections and prompts to help you use tarot to explore your own inner world and unlock the unique creative power of your scholarship (or whatever kind of writing and thinking you do).
This labor of love has been years in the making. Margy first introduced Helen to tarot in 2020, and since then we’ve both increasingly come to believe in its power as a tool for illuminating and energizing many different facets of intellectual and creative work. Whether you’re on the rationalist end of the spectrum, like Helen, or the more mystical end, like Margy, we hope you’ll join us for this new adventure.
Here’s how Tarot for Scholars will work:
Every day in January, we’ll email you a concise (10-15 minute) video introducing you to a randomly drawn tarot card, interpreted through a scholarly lens. Each post also includes a textual summary and some journal prompts for reflection.
Then, through the remainder of 2025, we’ll share a new tarot card post each week. By the end of the year, we will (hopefully!) have covered all 78 cards in the deck.
To kick things off, we’ve created a juicy video called “A Scholar’s View of Tarot,” which provides an overview of the whole deck as well as ideas for how and why you might integrate this magical tool into your scholarship.
Fittingly enough, it was our collaborate work on #AcWriMoments that laid the foundation for Tarot for Scholars. Isn’t that how these things so very often go in scholarly life! Check out Helen’s recent essay, “Magic Wands for Writing,” for the secret tarot-laden backstory behind #AcWriMoments.
Thanks for being here. We look forward to keeping up with you over at Tarot for Scholars in 2025!
Yours in scholarship,
and