Flourish: A Free Electronic Newsletter for Scholarly Writers

Flourish is a free, monthly, electronic micronewsletter to encourage and connect graduate student, faculty, and independent scholarly writers. I published it for five years (2005-2011). In it, I told the stories of those who were surviving and even thriving as writers in academia. Some of the topics addressed were developing good writing habits, sending essays to journals for submission, organizing research material, working with editors and advisors, persevering on books or dissertations, and using citation and presentation software. It had around 3,000 subscribers.

My intention in creating Flourish was to inspire scholars to write more and to write better. Once a month, when they saw the micro-newsletter in their inbox, I hoped they would use it as an opportunity to do a gentle internal check: “Have I been writing? Have I been thinking about publication?” I recommended that, whenever they got the newsletter, they write an email to themselves about where they were in terms of writing and what they wanted to do over the next month. This way, they could use the newsletter to keep their scholarly writing on the front burner instead of in the deep freeze.

All the issues are posted below, because they all still provide a lot of good information and stories. Some of the highlights were Liz filing her dissertation (about how a graduate student strategized and wrote her whole dissertation in one year) and Tim filing his dissertation (about how a graduate student suffered a horrifying and life-threatening trauma and survived to complete his dissertation).