Recently, it became clear that the most popular aspect of this annual festival was the workshops for writers, essentially constituting a free writers conference, led by successful and accessible authors from our community. We did not want to cancel the festival due to the pandemic, but we had to figure out how to host it virtually, without much experience. However, as our service area covers over 4200 square miles, we knew that we had an opportunity to reach much more of our community through a virtual festival.

With only a few months of experience hosting one-time virtual programs, the Words & Pictures team figured out how to host a whole day of programs in 2020, and in 2021 expanded to a two-day festival. Rather than invest in a paid platform, we worked with the tools that we had. Our communications team created a fantastic website and we used our existing program calendar for registrations. We used Zoom, a platform that our patrons were already familiar with, to ensure that it was as accessible as possible.

Local authors who reside in the more far-flung reaches of our service area were able to participate from home, as were aspiring writers in our community who otherwise would not have been able to attend the program in-person. We also expanded our offerings to include four workshops specifically for teen authors, in conjunction with Imagined Ink, our annual teen writing contest. Finally, we were able to record all of the programs and post them, making them even more accessible to our community.