Ground and Sky
In search of flying unicorns
Dear fellow writer,
We live with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. Sometimes all we want is to feel the comforting weight of gravity pulling us down to earth. Other times we long to fly.
In my book Writing with Pleasure, I coined the moniker “flying unicorn” to describe hybrid writing tools (e.g. digital notebooks, pen-like styluses, voice-activated software) that play to our modern desire to bridge the material and digital realms. Illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh used the Procreate app on her iPad — a flying unicorn in its own right! — to draw herself gleefully riding astride that fanciful beast:
These days, I find myself scanning the skies for a different kind of flying unicorn: a fantasy creature that can bring the healing warmth of social contact to the heady magic of global digital outreach.
Indeed, I’m drafting this post while literally “in the sky,” winging my way home from a 5-week international trip that took me to on-the-ground meetings and workshops in California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Germany, and the U.K.
What a delight it was to drink coffee on Balboa Island with WriteSPACE member Karen; to celebrate a successful day of workshops in Fort Collins with Kristina, Kimi, and their colleagues in the CSU Writes program at Colorado State University; to tour San Antonio with Ebony and Molly from the The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching at Trinity University; to meet with Daniel from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and with Christelle from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in historic Heidelberg (where I also got to spend a whole week cuddling my new grandson Enrico 🥰); and to catch up with Amy, my wonderful WriteSPACE Events Manager, for a delicious Ottolenghi lunch in London.
But we don’t have to travel across the world to breathe the healing oxygen of human fellowship. As writers, we can celebrate both our roots and our wings: our beautiful handmade notebooks and our whizzy digital gadgets; our local friendships and our online communities.
Those flying unicorns are already dancing and wheeling all around us, if only we know where to find them.
For example, you could lift the ground up towards the sky by inviting a colleague to join you in person for a virtual workshop (perhaps next week’s WriteSPACE Special Event on “IDEALS for Research Writing” with Dr. John Dumay?)
Or you could anchor the sky to the ground by organizing a conference panel with fellow writers you’ve met online.
Or you could apply for a WriteSPACE Travel Grant designed to help you bring cloud-based resources to local colleagues and to send your earthbound writing partnerships soaring.
Ground or sky? Why not choose both?
I’d love to see you there — and in all the spaces in between!
If you appreciate posts like these — or just want to make my day — please take a moment to drop me a heart, leave a comment, and/or click Restack at the bottom of this message. Your enthusiasm and support mean so much to me.
Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!
Helen
Write more, right now! Join me and fellow writers from 30+ countries in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.
Books on writing by Helen Sword
Spread the joy! Share Helen’s Word with a writer in your life.
