Digital together: Creative writing, collaborative residencies and cultural exchange in a COVID-constrained world

Since 2014, the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program has sought to invite genuine trans-cultural encounters and dialogue among peer creative writers from different nations, cultural backgrounds, interests and life experiences across Asia and Australia. These have been enacted through in-person collaborative residencies, designed and staged based on a set of five compositional principles. In 2020, these principles were challenged, tested and elaborated in new ways through a new WrICE residency conducted entirely online: a move made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic and its conditions of physical separation. Our findings from this digital residency experience offer insights into future directions for approaching transnational collaboration and dialogue among writers, artists, scholars, activists and others in a more constrained world, during and after the pandemic. Biographical note: Sreedhevi Iyer is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University. She is the author of two books, Jungle Without Water (2017) and The Tiniest House of Time (2020). Her forthcoming monograph focuses on how authors perform authenticity across multiple communicative contexts. Her creative works have been published in several countries. Alvin Pang is Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. A poet, writer, editor, scholar and translator, his creative practice spans over two decades of literary activity in Singapore and elsewhere. With his writing translated into more than twenty languages worldwide, his latest titles include What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 (Math Paper Press, 2017) and Uninterrupted Time (Recent Work Press, 2019). David Carlin is Professor of Creative Writing and co-founder of both WrICE and the non/fictionLab at RMIT University. His work includes four books of essayist nonfiction, including The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019, with Nicole Walker), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019, with MECO Network), and three co-edited anthologies. David is Co-President of NonfictioNOW.