Committee Meeting 10-Jan-2026 Events Report
Report on Events for the Committee Meeting on 10th January 2026 by Gary Carr
To date we have not had a meeting of the full subcommittee. I tried to get one before Christmas, I have been ill between Christmas and now. I hope to push ahead in January.
I have had discussions with Louise since the last committee meeting and some discussion with Chris prior to that, at the event in Lichfield.
Henry has also sent through details of Ian Pike, who I will contact in the next few days.
Summary of Discussions
Location
In discussion with both Chris and Louise the idea of a "distributed" festival, where events take place on the same day in different locations was received with enthusiasm. Done well this would combine face to face (or hybrid zoom/f2f) workshops with a short award presentation sequence. Awards to be made at the location winners are attending, linked by zoom.
There are many potential issues, here, such as finding organisers at 4-5 locations, getting awards early enough to distribute, technical considerations etc. It requires a different kind of thinking from the organisers and participating groups, less centre-led, more group participatory. The rewards might be that we start to return to "live" events, which benefit the people who can attend in ways that go far beyond workshop content. I issued an analysis of the pros and cons of different festival formats to subcommittee members in November.
Date
The current date, at the start of September, is a busy one for events and festivals. I believe that it was selected originally to make use of university accommodation downtime and to avoid the main holiday season (I could be wrong!), however most universities now handle events through conferencing facilities, most works shutdowns seem to occur from mid-July through early August, so even if we returned to a larger event the timing would need to be reviewed.
Early September is also a busy period for me personally with both family and professional commitments. If we could pull the date forward to mid-August, we might avoid both the early rush of writing/book festivals (many seem to happen from mid-July through early August) and the September/Early autumn festivals. It would clash with Edinburgh Festival, so might affect some performance-related tutors and workshops.
Themes
Louise had a thought that to bring a distributed festival together we might use an overarching theme, to be interpreted fairly loosely.
Budget
To date we have been working without a budget guideline. It is clear that NAWG cannot afford another large deficit on a festival, but equally there will need to be advance expenditure. This applies to festival and workshop bookings.
Communication / Group Co-operation
In order to have a successful festival, we need local co-operation.
Plan for January
- Pull together a phone or video meeting as soon as possible to discuss all of the above (GC).
- Create an article for the newsletter, link, and possible email to groups (GC).
- Pull together some guidelines for groups organising events (GC).
- Make financial projection. Discuss budgeting, incentives and fiscal control with treasurer (GC/Sub-com).
- Consider best publicity/advertising strategy (Sub-com).
Non-festival Events
- Contact Ian Pike. Does anyone know him? If so, I'd like an overview, what did we pay last year? (GC).
- Organise some online workshops for late Jan through to March. Do we have a budget for this? Do we need to charge to cover costs? (GC/Sub-com).
- Discuss tutors (Sub-com +).
- Discuss online content creation, group participation (Sub-com +).