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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2021
In March 2020, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIU) went into lockdown. With the annual Big Muddy New Play Festival about to kick off—two productions entering tech and four full-length staged readings rehearsing—SIU's M.F.A. Playwriting Program had been left in the lurch. COVID-19 and the scramble to move courses online and to graduate our M.F.A.'s canceled the entire festival. A year later, still online, the SIU M.F.A. Playwriting new play festival did not meet this same fate. Based on twelve months of experimentation, the program was able to develop a streaming festival. Our 2021 new play festival on YouTube brought together more than forty artists across eight time zones to collaborate with our five graduate student playwrights. The international ensemble, represented in an interactive map (Fig. 1), showed how open-access software and streaming platforms could help students at our rural university transcend our limited geography.
Editor's Note: In March of 2021, we issued a call for reflections on the things we have experienced, learned, and want to document and remember during more than a year of pandemic life and its attendant upheavals. As a journal primarily concerned with engaging histories, we were especially interested to know: How did people make it through community lockdowns, forced isolation, tentative reemergence with attendant social distancing, the shift to online education, the need to postpone and/or reimagine research projects, and so on? We received contributions that shared glimpses of innovative pedagogy, tests to and refashionings of community, experiences of loss and medical crisis, feelings of confusion and despair, and yearning for the opportunity to do differently and better in the future. We are thankful to the contributors here, who are helping us to document both the challenges of the present and our hopes for the future of our field.
An extended version of this reflection was published on Howlround.com on 20 May 2021.