I go to a writers conference every week, in Hawaii.
How do I get there? I get there by walking into my front office, putting my “Do Not Disturb” sign on my home office door handle, sitting down at my desk, and finally clicking on the 4 pm Zoom link for the weekly Kauai Writers Conference.
This one hour conference started because of Covid. The in-person Kauai conference, scheduled for November 2021 (and which I had registered for earlier in the year), was cancelled due to a Covid surge. But kudos to the conference organizers. They quickly pivoted after the cancellation, and they arranged for the conference speakers (editors, agents, authors and the like) to talk with the attendees in an interactive format, every Sunday afternoon online.
In some ways this functionally has been more valuable to me than attending the in-person conference.
First, I’m able to attend nearly every talk. Second, the talks are highly interactive, often with some great back-and-forth. Third, being at home, I have my full array of writing resources to reference real-time as needed. And fourth (and most importantly for me), the consistent and professional weekly nature of this conference acts as a reminder that writing is my profession.
So, will I be going to this year’s in person’s conference? Probably not. I have an in-person conference in San Francisco in July and a subsequent one in Seattle in September. In-person conferences can be time consuming and can also act as a distraction to my most important job—which is actually sitting down to write. And really, more than two writing conferences in a six month period is simply too much of a good thing, so at least this year, there will be no Hawaiian leis for me.
However, I will be able to continue this online Hawaiian writing conference indefinitely. These weekly online gatherings have been so successful they will continue.
Now that’s ohana.
Aloha.