Introduction

The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations. 

The New England region is peppered with small country towns separated by extensive areas of agriculture land—which makes up 80% of the region—and diverse natural ecosystems preserved in National Parks, which make up 15% of the region. It is home to approximately 186,200 people and spans around 79,400 square kilometers, 49, 336 square miles (Australian Government, 2021). The Anaiwan, Kamilaroi, Gumbayniggirr, and Dhungutti people identify as the traditional owners of the land. The region has a fraught history of colonisation (Clayton-Dixon, 2020). Agriculture, forestry, and fishing are the region’s largest industries, representing 16% of the region’s workforce (Australian Government, 2021). The healthcare and social assistance industry is also a prominent employer, with many nursing homes and hospitals (Australian Government, 2020). The university town of Armidale, at the region’s centre, is diverse with many international communities including, since 2018, a sizable Ezidi community, relocated there as part of the Australian government’s refugee policy. The region’s landscape and history has proven fertile sources of regional creative practices. This region was locked down with the rest of Australia from March to May 2020, the period that this paper discusses. 

The New England Writers’ Centre: Adjusting to the new normal

Sophie Masson

In this context, the New England Writers’ Centre has been operating for over 20 years. In that time, it has acquired a high reputation as one of our region’s key arts organisations, running many literary-craft-based workshops and events; offering professional development opportunities to aspiring local writers and illustrators; and showcasing local professional authors and illustrators, highlighting the literary excellence of the region. Over the more than 20 years that the organisation has been operating, it has also run hundreds of workshops and other literary events such as readings and author talks, which have been attended by thousands of people overall. Participants and audiences range widely in age, from school children to senior citizens, and across cultural backgrounds. In the older age groups (post-adolescence), women tend to form a larger part of audiences and participants than men. Individual workshops usually attract between 5 and 20 participants. 

Strongly committed to our community, the writers’ centre has always been a nimble organisation, having had to weather many challenges over the two decades of our existence, from dips and cuts in funding to finding creative and innovative solutions around regional issues of distance, affordability and accessibility, as well as other issues such as drought and fire. We’ve pioneered a range of measures in the past to help overcome the tyranny of distance in our vast region, for instance with our LiveLink workshops in collaboration with the Department of Education, beamed out to remote and rural schools and Skype workshops for adults: these occurring as long as ten to twelve years ago.

But the pandemic and its accompanying restrictions presented another big challenge: the centre had made good use of technology over the years to supplement our program and our offerings, but the majority of our workshops and events have, until now, been held in person, face-to-face, with most workshops held over one day or half a day, occasionally in half-day sessions over several weeks (the latter only with local presenters). But by early February 2020, even before restrictions started in March, it became quite clear to us that this format might not be possible quite soon, that visiting presenters coming from outside our region might be reluctant to come, and that local participants might not be keen, either. So, we decided immediately to pivot our program, which was to start in March, to an online format. The first of these, The Grammar Toolkit, a course held over three two-hour sessions over three consecutive weeks, was quickly reformatted by its presenters, Dr. Linda Nix and Dr. Hilary Cadman, to suit a Zoom presentation. Feedback was good though a few issues were observed, mainly to do with participant skill and confidence about handling the Zoom platform. 

Because of the success of this initial presentation and its appeal both beyond and within our region, our Program Manager at the time, Beattie Alvarez, came up with the idea of initiating two brand-new workshops centred around our very popular Thunderbolt Prize crime writing awards. The Thunderbolt Prize is an award for crime writing that capitalises on the infamous historic figure of a “bushranger,” an escaped prisoner who hid in the New England region and committed robberies from around 1863 to 1870; he operated under the pseudonym “Captain Thunderbolt.” These Quick Crime workshops, one in fiction featuring well-known crime novelist Sulari Gentill and one in poetry featuring award-winning poet Jenny Blackford, were a big success and attracted strong participation from a clearly engaged group of crime writing fans from well beyond our region. It became clear to us at this time that aspiring writers were keen to take part in online workshops which could give them some of the sense of the engagement and connection with peers that they missed—and this was key to the success of the next big workshop on creating historical novels. Looking to the rest of the year and next year, we envisage many of our workshops and events will be held online. But as restrictions have eased, we’ve also been able to reschedule events which had had to be postponed back in May: school visits both in the Armidale region and further afield by visiting and local authors, and a combined art/words workshop featuring visiting author Ursula Dubosarsky, who came here in person, and guest publisher Margrete Lamond, who  presented and participated remotely from her home in Orange: the first such “hybrid workshop” we’ve ever held, and a brand new challenge in itself!

So what have we as an organisation learned from our rapid pivot?

• Our workshops and events have appeal well beyond our region.
• The lower cost to us of online workshops—presenters paid the same fee, but no travel costs—also means we can offer the workshops at a lower price, thus increasing accessibility and equity for participants. This might encourage the region’s communities who would not normally be able to afford the workshops to participate. 
• We knew that technological skills might vary considerably between participants, which proved to be the case, but we also learned that some presenters feel challenged by it. One workshop we’d hoped to transition online, for instance, couldn’t go ahead because the presenter didn’t feel confident about handling the format and also didn’t like the “feel” of it. As the workshops often include presenters and participants from a variety of generations and skill sets, digital literacy plays a major role in the effective delivery of learning experiences.  
• More opportunities open to us to attract a large range of visiting presenters: our proposed 2021 program even includes some international ones.
• Adults generally respond well to online presentations, but it’s much harder with younger audiences: schools report “screen fatigue,” though some are happy to accommodate Zoom and other online presentations.
• We have always had a national presence through our national awards, the New England Thunderbolt Prize and the New England Illustration Prize, and our association with the Historical Novel Prize, but these new online offerings have increased that. We are now in a position where quite a large chunk of participants in our workshops are from outside the region. In this way, the workshops offer opportunities for interconnectedness across regions.

These initial discoveries lead us to need to think carefully about our place as a regional organisation within our local community: we want to continue attracting our members and local audiences to attend our events, but we also want to keep building on the idea of regional literary excellence beaming out nationally—an innovative regional literary organisation helping to nurture the confidence and careers of aspiring writers and illustrators across Australia. And that is something for our community to celebrate!

Promoting digital literacy and community connectedness through a historical fiction workshop

Ariella Van Luyn

I was initially approached by the New England Writers’ Centre to run a whole day face-to-face historical fiction workshop because of my background as a historical fiction writer and position as lecturer at the university in the region. I had been on NEWC’s board and had come to understand the role the Centre played in the region described above. When asked to re-design the workshop for online participants in response to COVID, I realized the course I had initially planned would need to alter significantly to foster not only writing but also digital literacies. In addition, while some of the online learning design principles I had collaborated with colleagues to develop and trial in an online editing skills class (Wise, Van Luyn & Cantrell 2020) might apply, it was unlikely that community participants would have the same goals. Indeed, previous research into the role of regional writers’ centres has documented that local writers are likely to be motivated by goals of sharing local knowledge and place stories (Reddy 2019) and create textual communities (Fuller 2004). 

As a result, I felt that promoting story sharing and facilitating connections between writers even more isolated during COVID was a priority for the course. I established the learning objectives for students so they could:

• Share local and historical narratives with an awareness of audience engagement,
• Identify and apply techniques of craft to the development of their own project, and
• Develop skills in written and verbal communication to provide feedback on the development of creative work.

In Foundational Practices for Online Writing Instruction, Beth Hewitt & Kevin DePew (2015, 51) suggest that “an online writing course should focus on writing and not on technology orientation or teaching students how to use learning and other technologies.” I kept this in mind in the design of the course, wanting to reduce the amount of cognitive load given to figuring our new skills.

As a result of these outcomes and considerations, I choose to run the workshops as three two-hour sessions over six weeks. The sessions were offered on a Saturday morning via Zoom; this time slot seemed to suit about 80% of participants with around 20% having to leave for caring duties. I recorded the session to allow participants to re-watch the workshops at a later time. While asynchronous workshops, where participants work through learning material at their own pace, have been effectively delivered by Australian writing organisations such as Kill Your Darlings based in the state of South Australia, this mode would not have encouraged participant interaction so essential to the value of regional writing organisations. Indeed, in the New England region, the writing centre plays an active role in promoting the writing practices of many of its members.

Further, moving the workshop from a 6-hour whole day session—traditional in regional face-to-face workshops where many participants travel some distance to attend—to shorter expanded meetings enabled writers to both draft scenes and narrative outlines of their specific writing project between sessions and to dedicate time in the Zoom session to talking to each other about their writing projects. To facilitate this, I used the Zoom break-out room function as well as a prepared scaffold for peer feedback, which I created and prepared for participants via Google Docs. 

The technical and conceptual leap to Google Docs, required because I had created an online booklet of activities for all participants in lieu of the learning management system I was used to teaching at a university, proved to be an obstacle for some participants. I observed that some participants did not find typing into Google docs intuitive, and preferred verbal communication and e-mail over this technology. Further consideration is needed to understand how best to create online learning resources that allow participants to collaborate via writing online. Lyn’s experiences with online writing workshops below emphasises the role of the writers’ centre in creating connections and experiences in online contexts. 

Reflections on the new learning environment

Lynette Aspey

When I first arrived in Armidale in 2013, one of the very first things I did was hunt around for a local writers group. I wanted to make friends and to share my love of literature. Those early connections were made in cafés around dining tables–in shared, often crowded, spaces. Soon after, I joined the New England Writers’ Centre and started to attend their workshops. These workshops brought authors, illustrators, editors, agents, and publishers to our rural community and became calendar highlights that I planned for and anticipated many weeks, and sometimes months, ahead.

And then, COVID.

As quickly as that, isolation forced work and searching for work, attending meetings, socialising and learning to go online. Workshops that had previously required presenters to be contracted six or even twelve months ahead in order to facilitate travel and accommodation were suddenly stripped of all these time, cost, and geographical limitations.

The online learning environment exploded with choice–opportunities flooded my social media and email inbox. I suddenly found myself subscribing to multiple learning platforms. My wish-list of topics to learn becomes steadily longer. Starting and stopping online lessons became my preferred form of procrastination.

Which may be why I believe that the workshop format still delivers the most effective learning experience–despite the fact that we’re communicating digitally in a well-run workshop, there is still that opportunity for direct human connection.

As a workshop participant, I’ve observed a marked shift in how comfortable people are becoming with technology. Friends and family who, prior to March 2020, had been innocent of online meeting platforms suddenly began using “Zoom” as a verb and upgrading equipment to improve their online experience (not to mention re-arranging their rooms and tidying up the view behind them).

In the early days of lockdown, around March and April 2020, a good ten or more minutes were often used up at the beginning of the workshop while folks tried to sign in, or figured out how to make themselves heard, or to see the presenter on their screen. By May, this delay had virtually disappeared.

In addition, the manner in which online presentations were delivered quickly gained in sophistication. Early in the transition to online-only workshops, many presenters simply shared their screens, delivering the same prepared PowerPoint presentations that they would have used for in-person meetings. Inevitably, the feedback was poor–often because the quality of the slides revealed a lack of skill for delivering information visually but mostly because the delivery was static, and we were already tired of reading from our screens.

The presenters with the most successful workshops were comfortable delivering information in a personable professional way to what must appear as a “Brady-Bunch” collage of faces and avatars. Successful workshop hosts learned to utilise the technical tools available, while keeping a balanced mix of personal presentation and shared screen, all the while fairly curating their audience participation.

So, what have we gained and lost in this landmark shift to learning in isolation? Personally, I miss the energy of a room full of people being inspired. I miss the sense of commitment that is inherent in accepting an invitation to attend a learning opportunity with like-minded people. While many workshops utilise “break out” rooms, these online conversations lack spontaneity and depth.

On the other hand, I value the array of learning that has become so easily accessible–there is so much to learn, and I am able to pick and choose not only my topics but the time in which I will utilise that learning.

We must all adapt. Demand for cutting edge communications will push the development and delivery of new and better technologies. It’s naive to expect any return to a pre-COVID normality. Those workshops-of-old, where we cosily shared space and finger food are now an unacceptable public health risk. Virtual reality is here and will only improve–there’s every chance that those shared spaces and time with other people that I miss will evolve with the technology and take on an entirely new dimension.

Conclusion

This profile, collaboratively written from three different perspectives of those involved in a regional writing organisation, demonstrates that community writing groups play a significant role in promoting community literacies, sharing local stories and knowledge, and facilitating nurturing connections. The NEWC was able to draw on its history of online course offerings, which reflected the need to cater for those who could not travel to the rural location, to resiliently pivot to online formats as a result of COVID. At the time of writing, the organisation has found both opportunities to connect to other Australian communities and potential threats to the organisation’s distinct local brand. In light of this, designing online writing workshops for such community organisations should continue to facilitate the sharing of local and place stories, and connections between participants. This has been achieved to some extent via scaffolded peer feedback in Zoom break out groups, but further iterations of such work require more careful use of online writing tools. From a participant’s point of view, online presents an almost overwhelming range of learning possibilities. Further, facilitators that use a mixture of shared screen and conversation are effective. These initial experiences speak to the potential for online community writing instruction as COVID restrictions evolve. 

References

Australian Government. 2021. “About my region—New England and North West New South Wales.” https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/aboutmyregion/nsw-new-england. 

Australian Government.2020. “Local Jobs Plan: New England and North West New South Wales. 

Clayton-Dixon, Callum. 2020. Surviving New England: A History of Aboriginal Resistance and Resilience Through the First Forty Years of Colonial Apocalypse. Australia: Newara Aboriginal Corporation. 

Fuller, Danielle. 2004. Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada. Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press. 

Hewett, Beth L. and Kevin Eric DePew. 2015. Foundational Principles for Online Writing Instruction. USA: Parlour Press. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/owi/foundations.pdf 

Reddy, Nancy. 2019. “‘The Spirit of Our Rural Countryside’: Towards an extracurricular Pedagogy of Place.” Community Literacy Journal, 13 (2). 10.1353/clj.2019.0012

Wise, Beck, Ariella Van Luyn, and Kate Cantrell. 2020. “Not-So-Invisible-Mending: Teaching and Learning Professional Editing Skills in a Large Online Class at a Regional Australian University.” Journal of Online Writing Instruction. http://www.roleolor.org/ldquonot-so-invisible-mendingrdquo-developing-editing-skills-in-large-online-classes-through-visible-labour.html