From writing alongside to writing together

Writing Partnerships in Higher Education: A Guide for Academics and HE Professionals, edited by Verity Aiken and Lin Norton, is published by Routledge (2026).

Our LITE writing retreats began, as most good things do, with something modest. A one-day retreat on-campus in May and a 3-day retreat at the start of July at Weetwood Hall. We gave colleagues writing about pedagogical research and SoTL a room, a stretch of uninterrupted time, and the quiet company of others also trying to write. We called it social writing, and it was exactly that; people working alone, together.

Very quickly, at the start of the one-day retreat, something blossomed, which was mirrored and took on a greater pace at the 3-day retreat. Conversations that started as break-time chat began drifting toward the page itself — would you look at this section, I think it needs your eye — and eventually, occasionally, toward something more: two or three of us discussing the possibilities to write a paper together, properly, from the ground up. Social writing had opened a door to something else, without ever asking anyone to walk through it.

It's with that shift in mind that I picked up Writing Partnerships in Higher Education: A Guide for Academics and HE Professionals, edited by Dr Verity Aiken and the late Professor Lin Norton (Routledge, 2026). It felt, from the first pages, like a book written for exactly that threshold; the space between writing near someone and writing with them. Across 208 pages, a wide range of contributors offer their own honest, sometimes uncertain accounts of what it actually takes to co-author well: not a formula, but a set of practices, tensions, and reflections that ring true to anyone who has tried it.

Section One: Insights from Writing at the Coalface

The book opens close to the ground, with contributors describing what collaboration actually feels like from the inside, rather than how it should look from a distance. There's writing here on the emotional labour that co-authorship quietly asks of us, on the practical friction of writing across time zones and disciplines, and on the particular care needed when co-authoring with international students, who are learning not only how to write a manuscript but how to move within an unfamiliar academic culture while doing it.

What I appreciated most was the section's willingness to sit with difficulty rather than resolve it too quickly. These chapters read less like case studies and more like reflections offered honestly, complete with the disagreements, the recalibrations, and the slow realisation that a co-author may be seeing the same project quite differently than you are. Mick Healey and Ruth Healey's account, drawn from twenty-five years of international collaborative writing, carries a particular weight. Not because it resolves the difficulty, but because it has lived alongside it for so long and found it worthwhile anyway.

This first section doesn't ask readers to abandon solitary writing in favour of collaboration. It simply, gently, makes the case that writing with others is its own discipline, with its own craft to learn.

Section Two: Cultivating Writing Cultures

The lens then widens, from the individual partnership to the conditions that make partnerships possible in the first place. This is where the book moves from personal account toward something closer to a guide, in the fullest sense of that word.

Rowena Murray writes on what sustains the benefits of social writing spaces over time. Tanya Hathaway (LITE Research Team) and Namrata Rao map what initiates and, more importantly, what sustains a genuine writing ecosystem within a partnership, across geographic and institutional distance. Jessica Heuser traces how writing groups continue, quite literally, over WhatsApp. Together these chapters ask a patient, practical question: what allows collaboration to take root and outlast any one person's energy or tenure?

It is, I think, the section most useful to anyone building something like our retreats. Not because it offers a template, but because it takes seriously how fragile good collaborative cultures can be, and how much quiet tending they need. Reading it, I recognised our own early social writing days in a new light: not as a finished thing, but as the groundwork for cultures that could, in time, hold something more.

Section Three: Writing with Others in Creative and Innovative Ways

The final section opens outward again, this time toward invention. Here collaboration takes looser, more experimental forms: writing partnerships mediated by technology, conversation itself treated as a kind of co-authorship, small stories emerging in the space between spoken word and text. Ron Scapp's contribution offers a useful, critical counterweight, resisting the temptation to treat collaboration as an unqualified good in every circumstance.

There's no neat conclusion here, and I don't think the book wants one. Instead, it leaves the reader with a genuinely open question: what else might writing with others look like, once we stop assuming it has to mean two people and a shared document?

Where the Book Meets the Retreat

Reading this alongside the frameworks we use in our own retreats felt like recognition more than revelation. Writing Partnerships in Higher Education doesn't argue that collaboration is better than writing alone. It argues, more modestly and more usefully, that if you are going to write with someone, it deserves the same care and craft you'd bring to writing by yourself. Perhaps more, since there's another person's thinking, time, and reputation bound up in it too. Aiken and Norton have edited a collection that is scholarly without being distant, practical without being thin, and unusually honest about a part of academic life we don't often teach anyone how to navigate.

That, in the end, is the invitation our LITE writing retreats have slowly grown into. They will always hold space for people who simply want to write, well, in good company. But for those who find themselves ready to take the next step, from writing alongside a colleague to writing with them, this book is a thoughtful place to start, and our retreats are a welcoming place to try it.