We have had many queries recently about when we are going to return to face-to-face teaching, and we are sitting with this thought and seeing how we can launch back into what only two years ago was the status quo. We are not dragging our heels, but the pandemic has caused such a seismic shift in all our lives.
Part of this process is to pin down what we love about in-person teaching, and we thought we would jot down a few of the things we love about it, and then open it up to you, our friends and customers, to ask what you miss and what you want to regain from the learning experience.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020 London Lit Lab had a handful of in-person courses planned, and at the time our preferred venue was Birkbeck University in the centre of London. We had sold out on these courses as we watched the spread of fear gripping hearts and minds and we very quickly realised we had to act fast to put them online. We worked really hard to come up with a system of online teaching, building courses that brought participants together into small communities and allowed them to read, write and discuss in their own time. This format enabled us to teach longer courses, spread over six to eight weeks, and the emphasis was on peer-to-peer feedback, much like a workshop room, where participants could produce work and feel that they had good readers, too. It also enabled us to fit the courses around the demands of our everyday challenges, home-schooling children, our own burgeoning projects. As we got more used to using Zoom in our everyday lives, these courses also morphed into more face-to-face sessions, online, so we could see each other (and wave) but stay in the safety of our front rooms. Although we missed the contact we had teaching in the flesh, and the wonderful sense of community established over an intensive all-day masterclass, we were building a new kind of community, opening out to people from all over the country, or even internationally, including those who were not able to attend courses in person for other reasons. We discovered there are a lot of good things about teaching online.
But we are now sort of emerging out of the pandemic – how many times have we said that? – this time more thoroughly perhaps because the restrictions are now being lifted. There might follow more confidence to travel again, to sit with strangers in a room, and we know that a lot of you have online or Zoom fatigue. We do too. We also miss the personal quality of the face-to-face format. London Lit Lab were good at finding beautiful venues, like Clapton Laundry in Hackney, a renovated laundry with its original industrial quirkiness. Ashlyn and Matthew would make us all lunch: soup and home-made bread to break up the intense writing time. We’d lounge with our writing pads, stretched across sofas with the resident cat, the sun shining through skylights. Or the Keynes Library at Birkbeck, the childhood home of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in the heart of Fitzrovia, with Bloomsbury paintings on the walls.
We know that a room full of writers can feel electrifying, that in person the emphasis mostly is on discussion, on the energy infusing and growing between the voices and ideas bouncing around the room. We know there is nothing like the relief when you close a door on family obligations, laundry, washing up, even if it means travelling to London, in order to give yourself the treat of ME time, of writing time with a bunch of fellow creatives. We know this is the optimum environment in which to teach.
But we also know that the online format works well for lots of people and that what we offer is unique in itself. It would not be possible to replicate our online courses face to face. So, we would like to continue those courses, but offer a smattering of face-to-face courses alongside them. Some of the ideas we are considering are, a day’s workshop that focuses on writing and workshopping; Zoe and Lily teaching their individual specialisms, Zoe the fantastical and folklore in fiction, and Lily memoir and life writing, an intensive introduction. And we are considering Lily and Zoe pairing up and designing a new course on the use of the imagination in writing, adding speculative elements to memoir, for instance, or identifying the more personal narrative in our fantastical fiction. We are also considering offering residential courses, a few days retreat in either Folkestone or Bristol.
We would like to hear from you about what you miss about face-to-face teaching and what you would travel for. How you would like to see your creative writing courses develop moving ahead. You can email us info@londonlitlab.co.uk or send us a Tweet – @londonlitlab.