I attended a Shut Up and Write conference

I recently road-tripped to Melbourne for the Shut Up and Write (SUAW) Conference 2025, which surprised me. Anyone that knows me knows I am not a fan of travel, crowds, or the sensory overload of conferences. But I got a personal invite to attend (I think because I’ve experimented with SUAW before) and being honest with myself, I knew I needed to invest in both my writing and my social life. So, I got off my arse and went. I do really enjoy long-distance driving, just in case you were wondering if I liked anything.

The conference was held at Deakin’s Melbourne Downtown Corporate Centre. A really nice spot in a labyrinthian building containing many better dressed people than me (admittedly that isn’t hard to be better dressed than me). Two days of talks, panels, book launches, networking, compact foods and the use of the word ‘neoliberal’. Pleasingly, the room we were in was undecided on the temperature it wished to be. This assured me that it isn’t just the buildings at my university that have this quirk.

The conference opened with a keynote from Professor Pat Thomson, who talked pedagogy, a word I frequently encounter (I do work in higher education after all) but which I probably couldn’t define well. Well Pat fixed that. I now think of it as ‘how you organise things for people who are coming to learn’. She talked about signature pedagogies, how things are organised for different topics/ disciplines/ professions. She described SUAW as a signature pedagogy. It has a surface structure (e.g. people gathering to write in designated time blocks), a deeper structure (e.g. building habits and identity as a writer), and an implicit structure (e.g. normalising struggle). I’m mindful that what I took from her talk might not be exactly what she intended, but this 3 layer definition landed deeply for me.

I don’t teach core curriculum topics at university. I teach ‘wellbeing’ or more specifically ‘mental health’ (I tend to find myself using the word wellbeing more because mental health still has some baggage). Part of the hidden curriculum, I guess. So I thought I’d have a crack at viewing what I teach through the 3 layer definition.

Surface structure – visible elements of how wellbeing is taught

• Learning specific wellbeing strategies, practices and activities (e.g. mindfulness, gratitude, physical activity, social connection)
• Linking these techniques to the psychological theories and research that support them
• Using typical learning formats – lectures, workshops, discussions, reflections, skills training – to present the material
• Sending participants away to select and try some techniques in their own life

Deep structure – the logic of how people learn wellbeing

• Wellbeing isn’t learned by information sharing alone. It is learned through practice, reflection, feedback, iteration, & experimentation
• You have to get people trying these techniques for themselves and noting what happens to them so they can iterate and adjust over time to their unique needs
• Over time, they build personalised psychological literacy – the capacity to understand and influence their own psychology

Implicit structure – underlying values and worldviews that wellbeing education is built on

• That individuals have agency and responsibility in their own wellbeing
• That shifting wellbeing is complex and contextual, so individuals need to experiment to find what works for them
• When we care for ourselves, we are in a better position and more likely to care for others

Ok. That was quite useful. Seeing wellbeing through those layers helped clarify not just what I teach, but how people actually learn it — by doing, reflecting, and taking ownership of their wellbeing journeys. Reflecting on my typical presentation, I’d say that I could benefit from more clearly naming the implicit aspects of wellbeing education (e.g. agency and responsibility). I think I could also benefit from providing students with more in-session opportunities to practice techniques in a guided or scaffolded way. I often send students off to try these things, knowing full well that most won’t. I should get them doing this stuff in session. A topic for another day perhaps.

Getting back to the SUAW conference. Pat’s presentation was, embarrassingly for me, one of the first actual discussions of pedagogy I’ve sat through. For the past few years, I have been so laser focused on trying to build a robust understanding of how people build and maintain mental wellbeing, that learning design has been more of a side interest. But this talk reminded me that no matter how much knowledge I might have in my own head on the topic, if I don’t set up effective learning experiences for people attending my workshops and seminars, most of it will get lost in translation. Thankfully, Flinders has launched quite a few internal initiatives recently designed to increase the average employee’s learning literacy and learning design knowledge. I also subscribed to Pat’s blog. I sense that a theme of my learning over the next couple of years will be less about the content and more about the design of the work I do.

One of my biggest takeaways was that communities don’t form because you design them perfectly from the top down. You can’t blueprint belonging. You can only show up with some key principles, good intentions, and a willingness to learn. If something takes root, nurture it. If not, adjust. I probably should have known this already. I’ve co-managed a mental health professionals’ forum for almost twenty years, and that experience keeps teaching me that complex systems don’t respond well to top-down design. Big, planned changes sometimes fall flat; small, organic ones take off. This conference was a reminder to stop over-engineering community and instead stay alert to opportunities — create a few gentle conditions and see what grows.

AI inevitably came up, though not in the way I expected. Rather than existential angst about machines replacing writers, most conversations were about partnership: using AI to support our writing goals. I was happy about this because, to date, AI has helped me write, rather than replaced my writing. There are dangers though. I had a particularly good chat with a kind man named Jason about locally run AI models. Advantages of locally run models are much smaller environmental footprint, more privacy, more personalisation and democratisation. The trade-off, of course, is that we can’t yet run models powerful enough for all the things we’d want to do. Still, it left me seriously thinking about building a computer capable of hosting my own local writing partner. Interestingly, this conversation intersected with another about whether it was possible for an individual to have a ‘Shut Up And Write’ by themselves. We agreed that, with the right tools (including AI), solitude doesn’t have to mean isolation.

When I ran SUAW sessions back during COVID at Flinders, my thinking about them was uncomplicated (get our shit done, but also get some human connection which is lacking). But the conference showed me that there’s a real tension when it comes to SUAW and the university system. Universities are metric-driven ecosystems, and anything that improves productivity risks being co-opted into the battle for metrics. The gentle, grassroots essence of community writing (the group that meets weekly at a café to write for the joy of it) can get swallowed by institutional goals. It becomes less about creating community and more about turning it into a writing factory – producing grants and papers. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The average academic does want to produce papers – that is how they tell the story of their work. And they need to write grants, because that is how they get paid to continue to work. And PhD students are clearly benefitting from these community writing initiatives, which help them get over the last writing hump. But the question constantly arose as to whether universities and their culture are appropriate homes for SUAW. There was this implicit danger, that if a writing community wasn’t meeting those productivity metrics, then it would be shuttered, even if it was producing community.

Cue Jeanette Fyffe (probably my favourite panellist) who offered a counter-narrative to the fear of institutional hijacking of the SUAW process. She spoke about universities as possibility spaces. I’ve used similar language in the past when defending the good aspects of universities, from their disappointing ones. Jeanette argued that whilst universities are complex, they are still the right places to nurture these communities, if you push in the right direction and stay aligned with scholarly values. I think in this context she meant scholarly values not as in metrics of productivity, but places of learning, investigation, experimentation, exploration. Connect with those values appropriately and community (and productivity) will emerge.

Jeanette also spoke to how to counter institutional resistance to the communities. She (and her fellow pannelists) emphasised communication and persistence: make what you’re doing visible, document it, write guides, repeat the message, embed it in strategies. Instead of waiting for one’s community building activities to be appropriately recognised and supported, she advocated a very proactive stance. It was much less “protect SUAW from the university,” more “grow SUAW within the university”. This resonated with me as I have slowly shifted in my role from a stance of seeking acceptance (‘hey what do you think of this project?’) to actively promoting (‘hey, this project is awesome, help me with it’). And her comments sparked another realisation for me: when you build a community, in such a proactive way, members of that community inherit that proactivity and then become a potential starting node for another one. So these things can grow like networks, imbued with the confidence and conviction of their original creators.

I left the conference with a page of ideas and a slightly buzzing brain. A few experiments I’m considering:

• I want to try more small writing and working experiments without waiting for the perfect setup. For example, I host a number of students to develop content for our student wellbeing site BetterU. I’d like to run group writing sessions for them and see what happens.
• I’d like to develop and share more resources to help others host SUAW sessions, a process I have started previously.
• I have carved out a few dedicated writing times each week in my own diary and plan to communicate those to the broader community to see if anyone would like to join me (probably online) for dedicated deep work sessions.
• I want to revisit the Hivemind tool as a digital companion for collective focus. This is a concept designed by students as part of a mental health project that I run. I thought they elegantly described a system that balanced productivity and social connection.
• I’m going to collect the full Wellbeing and Self-care in Higher Education series as research for my Flourishing Universities chapter. I’ll write separately about this as it was a theme from the conference that fits better with my wellbeing work.
• And I’d like to lean back into blogging, not just wellbeing strategy content, but reflections on university life itself. This post is the first step, clunky as it may be.

I don’t know how many of these I will action, but the conference definitely left a mark. In the couple of weeks since, I have referred regularly, in communication with others, to community building as a core part of making good projects move foward.

So, am I sold on conferences now?

Even with all that inspiration, I still find conferences overwhelming and this was a small one. I walked at lunch, decompressed, hovered at the edges of conversations. But unlike other conferences in the past, this one felt a bit different in that I walked away feeling a bit changed as a person, rather than simply having some extra knowledge.

For example, a strong theme of the conference was writing as an act of care, for ourselves, for others, for ideas. If I’m honest, I don’t call myself a writer. I never have. Writing, for me, is how I organise ideas and get them out into the world. It is neither a good or bad thing, its just part of the toolkit I use. To see writing as self-care, would be like a carpenter seeing a hammer as self-expression. But I think that shifted a bit. Here was a room full of people passionate about writing and community and alert to the fact that those things are intimately linked. So I now find myself tinkering at the edges of how I think about writing in my own life and the place of writing in my sense of identity.

And then, there’s community. I knew, going into this conference, that building my social and professional networks is necessary work for me. I’m commonly anti-social (not in the criminal sense) but it has limited value as a life philosophy. But stepping into writing communities. That I can do. Both as a quiet engine of progress, but also a chance to meet like-minded people. And so, the flavour of connection, on offering at the conference and in writing communities more generally, is appealing to me.

So yeah, those are some thoughts coming out of the SUAW conference. A big thanks to everyone involved in its genesis and organisation. You created something powerful and I really appreciate it. I came home with more than just notes; I came home with new questions about writing, learning, and the kinds of communities worth showing up for.