Following out The Hundreds...where has it taken us (2020)

I feel like I am developing my language. Content and form, content and form. A relationship I can now approach differently, sharpening my creative tools to both aligning and supporting each other. I am developing a reference frame for my way of working and writing, my way of living and writing my work, working and living my writing, writing my working and living. (Julia)

The group started out by helping me think in different ways, but there was one monumental shift for me. 3 minutes of constant, almost unthinking writing nearly always clears any clogged writing waste I am up against. It clears out my writing pipes and helps me to rethink. I wrote the first 500 words of my thesis on my phone in notes walking home from a Hundreds meeting - feeling totally inspired to write in a register I just couldn’t comprehend doing before. (Arran)

I’ve sometimes felt like I’m in group therapy (in a good way!), where I’m slowly starting to learn from others as well as reflect on the ways in which I can unpick the taught structures, styles and voice that have characterised not just my writing but my ways of thinking to date. (Seb)

I learnt that to read a sentence and to write one can be as life giving as a deep breathe in and a full breath out. That 3 mins is enough space for an idea to catch light and to burn brightly, if sometimes only briefly. That a risk shared is not halved but through the sharing we might come to know a little better what we do. (Helen)

The Hundreds is something that gives me the validation of my chosen methodology (autoethnography) in my research writing because I have been caught up in the process of how to make it work. No one has ever felt safe when talking about themselves in academic writing. But through working on the texts in The Hundreds, opportunities are opened up. Or they were always there, but no one was there for them yet. (Bing)

The Hundreds has provided a platform for me to offer work in the form of writing for critical feedback where perhaps it would have remained unread. It has also enabled the opportunity to offer my thoughts on my colleagues’ research in a productive and supportive space. (Benjamin)

The Hundreds is helping me to be more comfortable to share things in process, that need not be neat, rehearsed, finalized (just yet!). [Laura]

Hundreds have challenged the way I thought my writing, brought density and poetry together, strengthen voices and shaking the letters, challenging the academic writing and giving a susto to academic reader and supervisors (no a los míos ). (Victoria)

The Hundreds gave me the confidence to recognise that writing about my creative practice was a form of ‘doing’ my creative practice, it helped reconcile the fissure that had emerged between the “creative I’ and the ‘researcher I’, and I felt safer to articulate this in my chosen thesis ‘crystaline’ form. (Anna)