Authors Speak: Drawing as a Sacred Activity

The speaker used a PowerPoint presentation to discuss her background and give examples of different drawing techniques.  She also incorporated music for the time attendees spent drawing. After the drawing section of the event, she asked everyone to hold their drawings up to their cameras. The in-person attendees at the Goodman Community Center took turns holding their drawings up to a webcam as well. Virtual attendees were able to compliment and applaud in-person attendees, and vice versa.

As for library staff in attendance, there was always one person who was the designated moderator, plus one or two other staff members who would stay for the whole session, or part of a session, depending on their schedule. In addition to library staff, the coordinators from GCC and Newbridge also stayed on each call to help in-person and virtual participants with technical difficulties or sharing their work. To ensure that everyone could share out at the end of the session, we called on each participant and asked if they would like to share, rather than relying solely on the hand-raise function or people calling out spontaneously. This seemed to work well.

The program was well attended, especially for the first four sessions (including the initial book talk). A little over 30 people, including library staff, attended the first two sessions, and the numbers fluctuated for the remaining sessions. Nineteen people attended the final session. In the future, we would reduce it to five weeks total.