Binks Hub Writing Retreat

The Binks Hub Writing Retreat is at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on Wednesday 21 October, starting from 09:15. It's a day for writers to get some proper work done, and it's free to attend.

Charlie Ellis, an Edinburgh-based researcher, writer and EFL teacher, frames the retreat as a space that brings together two things that usually pull in opposite directions: the chance for deep work and the possibility of what the historian Theodore Zeldin called 'procreative conversation'. He contrasts it with the romantic image of the isolated retreat — like George Orwell's Barnhill on Jura, where he wrote the final drafts of Nineteen Eighty-Four — and instead builds the day around two specific ideas. One is Cal Newport's 'deep work' from his 2016 book, which he describes as a mode of focused, uninterrupted concentration. The other is Zeldin's notion that genuine encounters across difference can transform the minds that meet.

Ellis has attended the sessions himself and says the breaks, when writers from different disciplines cross paths, are the most generative moments of the day. That's the trade-off on offer: long stretches of quiet concentration broken up by the kind of conversation that happens when you're sitting next to people working on completely different things.

It's a free session, so you can turn up and get stuck in. It runs from 09:15 at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh.