Stitching time together with words. That’s how writing often feels for me in the thick of the teaching semester. I don’t have big enough blocks of time (or headspace) to make too much in the way of art, but I can slip in a few sentences here and there, maybe even a paragraph or two in one sitting if I am lucky.

That’s why it felt like such a gift to be on sabbatical last spring, to have time not only for making but also for writing across uninterrupted days. I met my self-imposed deadline of completing a full draft of my book, Listening as Artistic Practice: Essays and Invitations, and sent it off to my editor right before returning to teaching. (It’s now out for peer review.)

Apart from that book, much of my recent writing has been a collaborative venture, sharing words and ideas back and forth with friends and colleagues. Earlier this fall, Elena Marchevska and I presented a paper at the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) on a panel titled “Friendship as Method.” Engaging with that idea (first proposed by cultural studies scholar Lisa Tillmann), of a methodology rooted in relationship, prompted me to realize much of my career has been grounded in that very concept. Elena and I have been writing together regularly, and we’ve recently had two journal articles published. “Unraveling Knowledge Systems through Slow Practice: On the use of Deep Listening in art and education” is part of a special themed issue (edited by Agnes Bosanquet and Sean Sturm) on Slow Academia, for Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education. And then just last month we published “Thinking of You: Writing Feminist Scholarship One Letter at a Time” in the inaugural issue of a new journal, Feminist Art Practices and Research.

An ongoing collaboration with Sheryl Wilson and Christine Crouse-Dick, focused on the concept of Slow Leadership, also led to a short publication recently. Emerging from a presentation at last year’s conference of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG), we published “The Slow Leadership Framework: A Humanizing, Social Justice Approach to Leadership” in the journal Feminist Pedagogy.

My collaborative research with Sheena Wilson on Walking the Talk: Climate Moves continues to evolve. Our edited collection of essays is in the process of publication and we have a number of other writing projects going as well. In addition, we were recently contacted by Futurum Careers, a UK-based organization that works with scholars to make their research accessible to high school-aged students, with the goal of promoting careers in the humanities, arts, and sciences. It was a great experience to have our research reflected back to us, to see how someone else interprets our thinking, and to consider how young people might engage with it as well. “Walking Against Climate Change” is now included in Futurum’s series of educational resources.