Creating community: the San Francisco writers conference - a grounded-theory study

The San Francisco Writers Conference is situated in the second-largest publishing center in the United States and each year attracts more than 300 attendees. The five-day event’s tagline is: A Celebration of Craft, Commerce, & Community. This full-service conference has a budget in excess $300,000 and offers an opportunity for studying best practices in event management of a creative-writing conference. This grounded-theory study began by posing the question: What features of the SFWC are the most important to its participants? Initial data capture was done on-line with a five-question, anonymous survey. Forty-six responses were recorded over a six-month period. Responses included organizers/leaders of the SFWC, presenters, paid attendees, exhibitors, and volunteers. After a process of constant comparative analysis, the key category that emerged in the survey was “community.” Forty out of forty-six, or 87%, of participants’ responses were coded into the category of “community” when they were asked to identify the most important feature of the conference. Additional data were captured by accessing public statements made by the current SFWC board, public records pertaining to their non-profit status, and by conducting a face-to-face interview with a previous SFWC director/co-founder, Michael Larsen. A final round of data-gathering was make done by downloading publicly accessible documents and newsletters found on the SFWC website. All this material was organized, coded, and analyzed within NVivo 12 Plus. The initial processing was via word frequency. Coding was iterative, as additional data became available. As secondary and axillary coding reached saturation, again, the key theme emerged: the centrality of “community.” These findings were explored using Michael Storper’s concept of cultural economics. Using this framework, the SFWC’s methods of community-building were parsed to find features that can be replicated by other creative writing conferences. Recommendations were offered specifically for each of the five classes of participants.