Given the complicated culture of writing conferences, we want to be clear: this is a community that takes its commitment to inclusion seriously. To writers who have not always seen themselves reflected, we offer a space that has been shaped with them in mind.
It has always been our goal to create, out of our summer meetings, a community that nourishes and supports a diversity of writers of poetry and prose at all stages of their development. We are a seasonal gathering, each member belonging to other home communities, aligned with other institutions. There, many of us are deeply engaged in the classrooms, streets, community centers, the halls of government, and, of course, as we are writers, on the page.
Part of our mission has been to erase obstacles for emerging writers of color to attend a workshop such as ours. We are proud of the wide range of voices and stories that populate our alumni pages.
We have always felt that what we were doing addressed the complexity of this country in deep ways and we have reason to be proud of the stories, poems, essays, and films that have been produced over fifty years by the staff and participants in this community, including work by some of our most gifted writers from communities whose stories have too often gone untold.
Our Board of Directors and leadership have been taking a deep look at our policies and practices, formal and informal, in order to strengthen these efforts. This process has been humbling and enlightening, and it has revealed that we still have a way to go. We have examined how our Community’s culture has allowed some participants to experience exclusion, disrespect, and microaggressions during the workshops.
We want to give you an update on our goals, to tell you what we have accomplished, and what we continue to work on.
- Our Board of Directors is committed to building a governing body that reflects a wide range of identities, perspectives, and lived experiences, and to ensuring meaningful leadership roles for those historically excluded from decision-making. Our literary committee continues to identify and seek to hire staff writers, agents, and editors whose backgrounds and work represent the myriad voices of our literary landscape, and to increase our outreach and scholarships to attract more writers from historically marginalized communities.
- We changed the name of our workshop by dropping the long-used common place name. We recognize this name has been a painful and derogatory legacy, which has been disrespectful to the Native American community and goes against everything we stand for. We will now be known as the Community of Writers. We are pleased to report that the resort where we have our workshops has changed its name to Palisades Tahoe. For now, we will call the place Olympic Valley or just the Valley.
- Through consultations with the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California Historic Preservation Office and Cultural Resources Office, we have developed a Native American Land-Use Statement. In addition, we are writing a brief History of the Valley to educate our visitors about the indigenous Americans who lived and found a living here in the Valley.
- We are deeply committed to building new, and sustaining current, essential partnerships that will help us reach deeper into historically marginalized communities to find poets and writers whose voices broaden and transform the country’s literary narrative. We continue to establish and nourish a wide range of scholarships.
- We continue to develop materials for participants, as well as train staff on sensitivity, inclusion, and other issues, including best practices for workshop leaders.
- We have policies in place to assist participants at the workshop to report negative experiences in real-time. Participants are encouraged to use several available ways to give us feedback. We also have policies in place for dealing with those issues as they arise. We want to listen, in order to make our workshops fruitful, enjoyable, and safe for all our participants. We know these mechanisms can’t solve every issue that arises, but they will help us learn how to make these issues less likely.
We will continue to do what has worked: raising funds to reduce financial barriers for writers who need support, and expanding access for writers of color and writers from other underrepresented communities, while deepening our efforts to diversify our board and staff. We will continue to listen, and to keep learning and adapting, so that the workshop experience is positive, fruitful, and genuinely inclusive for all participants.
—The Community of Writers