by Isabel Beeman, MCWC 2020 Conference Assistant
MCWC is arriving at a milestone in its history as a writers’ conference: for the first time ever, the 2020 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference will be held entirely online. Although many of us will miss the breathtaking scenery of the Mendocino Coast, the virtual nature of this year’s conference has already had a positive impact on our community.
The pivot to online opened the door for better inclusion and accessibility within MCWC. Thanks to the generosity of our donors, our 2020 conference will be host to more scholarship recipients than ever before. This tremendous support combined with the online programming has significantly shifted the demographics of the conference.
In comparison to MCWC 2019, the number of participants aged 14-34 has more than doubled this year. There has also been a significant shift in the racial identifications of conference participants. BIPOC (black, Indigenous, and people of color) writers account for nearly 40% of 2020 participants. The MCWC board has gone to great lengths to create a conference experience that will be welcoming, enjoyable, and safe for all participants, with a new Code of Conduct in place that highlights MCWC’s commitment to social justice. We are particularly grateful to our 2019 faculty, especially Myriam Gurba, for their insights and reflection on the MCWC experience, which led to the creation of our Code of Conduct.
This month, I spoke to Executive Director Lisa Locascio to get a better idea of what made these big changes possible, and to hear what she’s most excited about at this year’s extraordinary conference.
MCWC Executive Director welcoming participants to MCWC 2019
What do you believe made the amount of diversity at this year’s conference possible?
Since joining MCWC as as Executive Director in 2018, my priority has been to make the conference more diverse, prestigious, and accessible. We saw some of the fruits of that strategy with our 2019 conference, which brought many new writers into our community. In 2020, we had a number of intersecting circumstances that coalesced to make the conference more diverse than ever before.
First, I’d like to qualify what I mean by diverse, which is a group of people (faculty and participants alike) that not only reflects the diversity of our nation and world but which specifically holds space for people whom structural inequality and oppression have conspired to bar from literary spaces. My goal has been to specifically recruit and serve BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers. We have historically been pretty successful at creating a welcoming place for writers over 65 years old, which is a strength we want to maintain and build on.
So, what prevents BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers from attending literary conferences? Money. The aforementioned group of people are far more likely to have been subject to centuries of purposeful exclusion, and worse, designed to uphold white supremacy in our society. Whether they are offered through MFA programs, literary organizations like MCWC, or other institutions, workshops and seminars cost money. Of course I’d love it if MCWC had some deep-pocketed patron that enabled us to make our offerings free to all. But one of the great things about MCWC is that we are small and nimble, which allows us to be flexible and adaptable in the face of challenges.
We had the goal of serving more BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers. Then we were lucky to have two unusually generous scholarship funds established in late 2019 and early 2020. One of these funds is the Anne G. Locascio Memorial Scholarship, which was created in honor of my mother’s memory after she passed away in early February. The other, which we are formally announcing here for the first time, is the Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship Fund, which was created by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. The Tholakele Dube Fund is named in honor of a young South African nurse and funds conference tuition for writers under 30 years old.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. So now we had our intersecting circumstances: our desire to bring more BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers to MCWC, the wonderful generosity of donors who contributed to the Locascio and Tholakele Dube funds, and a once-in-a-lifetime worldwide event remaking society in real time. Our enrollment pretty much screeched to a halt in early March. We worked to pivot MCWC 2020 to online, but we didn’t see another registration until mid-May. So I was looking at our scholarship funds,and thinking about all of the great writers who might want to attend a literary conference, but due to the pandemic and its economic impacts, would find registration that much more inaccessible. I decided to target and recruit the kinds of writers I had been wanting to bring to MCWC.
We announced two scholarships for Black writers and received so many amazing applications that we ended up inviting five Black writers to join us as scholarship recipients. I also went back through our scholarship applications and extended offers to several writers whom we had not originally been able to fund. Ultimately, we ended up with many more BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers than we would have had otherwise. I am very grateful to them for joining our community, and we have been working hard to make sure they have the best possible MCWC experience.
What do you see as some potential benefits of a virtual conference? What are you most excited about?
Coming to Mendocino for MCWC is a special joy. I think that in addition to the events of the conference itself, everyone looks forward to taking the winding drive up the coast, staying by the sea, walking on the headlands, and visiting the beautiful towns of Mendocino and Fort Bragg. Due to the pandemic, however, we all need to stay safe at home, especially because infrastructure in remote areas like the Mendocino Coast are extremely vulnerable to potential outbreaks.
Although we have designed our online schedule to offer some opportunities for socializing, MCWC 2020 is more of a working conference than a social conference. Because of this change, I think MCWC 2020 participants are joining us this year first and foremost because they want to work with our incredible faculty. We are honored to be able to provide a space for creativity, meaningful critique, and artistic exchange.
The online format enables us to record our afternoon seminars. These recordings will be available online for two weeks following the conference, so for the first time ever a participant so inclined could in fact attend every single seminar. There’s a term from sales, a “bluebird,” which means an unexpected positive consequence, and the way that Zoom allows us to record and save these seminars is definitely a bluebird, as is the fact that our public faculty readings will now be open to everyone all around the world. Anyone can click on the link to one of these readings and tune in.
Join us on Thursday, July 30, at 5:30 PM PST for reading by MCWC faculty
My dream has always been to bring the world to Mendocino, but the reality is that travel to Mendocino County is a significant expense for almost everyone. But this year, the cost of that travel is not required to participate in MCWC. That might be the biggest bluebird of all.
We are also learning from this first online experience, which is more accessible for some but not all. Internet access infrastructure is not equally distributed across the country, and particularly not within Mendocino County itself. It shouldn’t be this way, but unfortunately someone without a stable internet connection cannot attend MCWC online. And we are learning and thinking about ways we can make our next conference, whether online or in person, more accessible to disabled writers. People with hearing loss, particularly, struggle with Zoom, and unfortunately the cost of closed captioning the conference is not currently within our reach. So that’s another way we’re thinking about accessibility, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to continue trying to make the best conference for everyone.
What kind of lasting impact do you anticipate MCWC 2020 will have on the conference in years to come? Do you plan on continuing to incorporate virtual engagement, even in a post-Covid world? What does that look like to you?
Obviously we all hope to reconvene in the beautiful environment of the Mendocino Coast for MCWC 2021, but the reality is that it is unclear when it will be safe for a large group of people to come together indoors again. In the recent Mendocino Virtual Town Hall on COVID19 Response and Recovery, State Senator Mike McGuire shared that he is telling people to prepare for another twelve months of pandemic conditions. So we’re very glad to have the opportunity to go online and learn about the needs and contours of an online conference this year in case we need to remain online next year, or pivot back online at some point in the future.
We’re also always hoping to learn from our participants what changes and offerings they want to see in the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. For example, for several years, the Board has discussed the possibility of launching a winter conference, but in order for us to launch an undertaking of that scale, we’d need to know that there was significant interest in such an event. Feedback is everything to us. We’re here to serve! My goal is to keep creating new, inventive, and meaningful ways for the MCWC name to bring high-quality literary education to writers from all walks of life. The Conference has changed my life more than once, always for the better. I hope for it to have an equally profound and meaningful impact on all of its participants.
Join us on Friday, July 31, at 5:30 PM PST for reading by MCWC faculty
With that, we would like to leave our 2020 participants with some tips on how to make your virtual experience as fulfilling and exciting as possible:
Show some personality or create beautiful scenery with a virtual background. This feature can be easily found under preferences on the zoom application (shown in the screenshot below). Just use the + icon to upload an image of your choice. Maybe you write historical fiction, and want to discuss your work with the backdrop of 1920s Russia. Or perhaps you want to get in the spirit of a remote writer’s retreat and use a photo of the Mendocino coast. The possibilities are endless! (We recommend experimenting with this function on zoom before the conference, as it can work differently on individual computers).
Take some time to thoughtfully design and curate the space you’ll physically be in during the conference. It might be tempting to simply roll out of bed and into your desk chair, but the impact of getting creative with your space can go a long way. Instead of participating in the conference from your room as is, think about how you can maximize your comfort and happiness. This could mean lots of things: cleaning the day before, setting up easy snacks for yourself, lighting some candles…what do you wear to get inspired and start writing? Where do you like to be? Support your energy levels and creativity in any way that feels right to you!
If you plan to submit to our Blind Critique or Open Mic sessions, please keep in mind that writers will be chosen at random, and that not everyone can be chosen for reasons of time limitation. For Blind Critique, please prepare the first 200 words of the piece on which you’d like to receive feedback. For Open Mic, you will have two minutes to read from your work. Sign-up forms for both events will be sent out in advance of the conference, so watch your inbox!
Have fun shopping our virtual bookstore to support our beloved Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino. You can also pick up some MCWC swag through our store on Bonfire, featuring artwork by Mendocino local Deth P. Sun.
We are excited to take this huge step forward and we appreciate all of you for supporting us through this time of change and growth. There is much to learn from this year’s unique event, and hopefully it will have a lasting impact on how we think about what it means to be a community of writers in the years to come.