Category: Creativity and Coronavirus

E. M. Wright

1,000,000. Number of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. predicted in a statistical model published March 13th that assumed no social distancing measures.

 

154. Number of minutes on March 15th that I spent reading news media on my iPhone.

 

0. Number of states with “stay at home” orders on March 16th.

 

On March 17th I woke up at 2 a.m. I checked our bank account balances and mortgage. I estimated our average monthly budget. I calculated a budget for us without my husband’s income. I calculated a budget for us without my income. I filled a notepad with numbers.

 

349,000,000,000. Number of dollars the US government allocated on March 27th to a Forgivable Loan Program for small businesses.

 

100,000. Number of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. predicted by U.S. officials on March 31st as a “best case scenario.”

 

6. Distance measured in feet to maintain between yourself and any non-household member.

 

On March 29th I woke up at 4 a.m. I read The New York Times. The Guardian. FiveThirtyEight. My local newspaper. The Washington Post. Vox.
I needed more. More facts. More graphs and charts. More ways to control the uncontrollable.

 

6,650,000. Number of Americans who filed a new claim for unemployment benefits during the fourth week of March.

 

5. Number of times I used hand sanitizer during a trip to the grocery store on April 3rd.

 

55. Number of diagnosed Covid-19 cases in my county as of April 3rd.

 

On April 4th I woke up at 2 a.m. to read the news. I read for hours. And hours.

 

6. Number of minutes within a timekeeping increment for my law firm.

 

70. Number of professional increments I need each day within a schedule that has become po-rous, overlapping math tutorials and skinned knees with PowerPoint slides and client consulta-tions.

 

13. Number of increments I spent on April 7th attending to my professional obligations.

 

17. Number of increments I spent on April 7th walking through the woods with my children.

 

During the night of April 8th I slept 9 hours and 40 minutes. I woke tired and slow. After breakfast I put the milk in the pantry instead of the fridge. I stared at my computer screen.

 

12,621. Number of deaths in the US attributed to Coronavirus as of April 8th.

 

21,919. Number of deaths in the US attributed to Coronavirus as of April 13th.

 

28,280. Number of deaths in the US attributed to Coronavirus as of April 16th.

 

I dream of a corps of poets, deployed to every news conference, stepping forward to the microphones. Come to save us from a world turned inside out. Giving us words to crawl beneath the facts. Words to hold our souls. Words to take root in the places where our stories live. Because those who habitually see the world inside out may be the only ones who can restore our equilibrium in the present moment.

Mansuda Arora

There’s a certain look people get on their faces when I answer the question of where I’m from. I go to great lengths to assure them I’m not the survivor of apocalypse they expect me to be. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more cities will start having to reckon with the torn social safety nets that failed to catch the people of Detroit.

I recently stumbled across the hashtag: #SayNiceThingsAboutDetroit. “We’re practically begging at this point,” I thought. A few years ago, the city announced they were closing seventy-two parks. The playgrounds and parks where I took my first steps are now paved over or overtaken by wild grasses. The people I loved with their beautiful copper and blue faces have since fled like refugees from their own homes. There are houses on the edge of the city that the land has reclaimed, vines and branches shattering windows, weeds, and cattails overgrowing the lawns. This is where the people who stayed began what the locals call “urban farming” when all the national grocery store chains left. This is subsistence farming. Survival farming. Only once we have our own land can we be free. The land may not be valuable, but the people of Detroit are free.

When I imagine moving back home, I’m afraid the city I knew will have been wiped away completely by the time I return. Before the pandemic, I dreamt that the house I grew up in was overtaken by vines, spilling from windows and shattering the glass. They grew, gripping the indentations between the bricks and down onto the street, filling the cracks in the sidewalks. The buildings began to topple under their weight, first crumbling, then sinking into the earth. In the back of my mind I thanked God that no one was inside, and with that thought, I looked around to find that there was nothing but silence and everyone was gone. No one skating in the park, no one buying hot dogs from the usual vendors, no one loitering on the steps of the library. Not even the police were parked in their usual spot at the intersection corner.

What happens when a city goes bankrupt? City services are cut down. Fewer trash cans, fewer cops, fewer schools and no one to put out the fires when people would rather burn down their homes and collect the insurance money than make another payment on a home that is falling apart above their heads. The government has given up on our recovery.

The Detroit of the future will be made up of the people who stuck it out, who defended their homes amid disaster. The people of Detroit are survivors of the failed experiment of the American dream, and they are the most beautiful people I have ever known. I know that someday after the world has its reckoning, I will return, and it will not be long before people have something nice to say about Detroit.

 

—April 14, 2020

Anna Kate Blair

I’ve been thinking about saltspray roses, rugged and adaptable, clinging to dunes, strengthening coastlines, hardier than their blossoms suggest. I’ve had trouble writing, lately, because I don’t want to expose myself, don’t want to publish anything that I might regret, and yet (for me) writing demands vulnerability. I turn my flaws to the light, hoping that I might be human, and so I’m always risking regret when I write. It’s impossible to stay safe. I risk it, though, because writing carries possibilities of alchemy and growth, of salted flowers in unexpected places. I see writing as an ecotone, a liminal space in which it feels possible for anything to change, all violence and fertility, elemental and charged with flux.

My favourite outcome of alchemy is intimacy. I am motivated by the conversations, the relationships, that build through writing. In isolation, though, connection is intangible, and there’s strength in staying quiet, protecting oneself. I was, when I was younger, guarded and resilient, like a sea wall, made of stone, but I’m trying, now, to be sustainable, integrated, like a saltspray rose, gathering strength through entwining roots with others, leaning into the wind. It takes work to stay tender.

I’ve found other creative activities, though, that soothe me. I’ve been learning about tarot cards, shuffling them so often that my thumb has a small blister. I sleep with a sachet of lavender, wake up clutching amethyst, and write down my dreams. I blow on the stems of my indoor plants so as to simulate the air outside, dye my hair with honey and beetroot. I’ve remembered, like many, that I’m good at cooking. These practices emphasise process and intuition, rather than a finished product, and this feels healthy.

I don’t know, when I list these things, if I’m romanticising domesticity. I am lucky to have the time and space for such activities. It feels heartless to witness personal growth against this backdrop of devastation, but it’s disingenuous, when asked about creativity, not to acknowledge it. I won’t credit it to coronavirus. I was, right before the pandemic’s scope became apparent, finally learning to accept loss and uncertain futures, changing in ways that surprised me. I can’t separate my response to this pandemic from everything that preceded it.

I’m still trying to write on the edge of my own knowledge, to stop sand from slipping into water. I don’t want to soften things with simile, with saltspray roses, and yet we need beauty, or we will. We’re at the beginning, still, and I’m expecting grief, anticipating so much loss that mourning is subsumed, death left unprocessed because it’s quotidian, everywhere, affecting everyone. I don’t feel good. I could write of how the world might change, but trying to smooth the passage into the future can destroy our capacity to cope with the present. I’m struggling to write, but that’s fine—growth is difficult, but saltspray roses manage it, in their wild ecotone, and all I need to do is stay inside.

 

—April 13, 2020

Giselle Leeb

Last night, I dreamt that a campsite I stayed at during a cycle tour was barren, as if there had been a terrible drought. I touched the wall of a house and rubble cascaded down. Then I was walking up a narrow staircase with a man who was escorting me to a job interview with his boss. The staircase wound up and up, getting tighter, until I couldn’t go any further.

A few weeks ago, saturated with anxiety, I could hardly concentrate, and repeatedly broke my rule of not looking at the Internet while writing, to obsessively read the news. After a while, I banned myself from reading news in the mornings until I’d done some writing.

At first, I did feel that writing was unimportant, in view of what’s going on. Then I thought: you were always going to die and so if writing is meaningless now, it always was. Or wasn’t.

Writing is for me a comfort and an affirmation of living, like playing sport or painting or making music, or doing just about anything you enjoy. You’ve got to love it to do it. Or, you do it because you love it. That doesn’t change.

I’ve just finished the final edits for my short story collection and I’ve written a number of stories about ecological collapse. I’m now starting work on a cli-fi novel, which inevitably involves some form of apocalypse, whether slow or sudden.

All of my recent writing has ended up being about what’s happening to us now. The only difference to my previous writing is that I now have the additional immediate perspective of how I feel—I am, like everybody, directly involved. I’ll have to wait and see if this changes how I write.

Writing and being published creates a connection, a communication, with the reader, a telling of your story and everyone’s stories. Stories are about understanding life: about suffering, struggle and new possibilities, and simply about what it’s like to be alive.

In recent weeks, my love for and anger at my fellow humans has grown. Anger as people break social-distancing rules. Rage at the government response. And love for people as I read their particular stories of suffering, or losing somebody they love, or the unfairness of unequal exposure to risk caused by economic inequality.

But also, I’ve had a new feeling that judgements won’t work. I don’t mean not holding power to account, but rather not blaming people on an individual level for not doing everything they can. Ranting at each other seems less important than trying to listen to each other and think about what really matters. It means changing our doomed consumerist cry from: I deserve it, to: what can I do to fight for everybody?

Good writing is always complicated. Already we are listening more than usual to other people’s stories. I just hope there’ll always be ways to keep writing and people who will want to keep reading.

 

—April 12, 2020

Johannes Punkt

Editor’s note: In the submission call for this series, I asked everybody to answer two questions: how has the pandemic affected your creative practice, and how will the world change?

 

The short answer, Michael, is that I will change nothing and I doubt the world will change. The slightly longer answer is that the world has always been unravelling: in our lifetimes, there have been multiple genocides and there hasn’t been a single day without apartheid or war. As I’m fond of saying, the apocalypse is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.

A predicament many writers are suddenly facing, staring into the white eye of pandemic, is this: how can we write something that feels true if what’s true keeps being beaten, burnt up, disappeared, diseased, disintegrated, dissolved, eviscerated—gutted like a fish, pulled away from under us, quarantined, quashed, revealed to have been lies and slander? How can we write something real? How can we put pen to paper to lovingly describe the deck chairs on the Titanic when the ship is sinking and they won’t keep still?

First, reader, if this is the first time you’re feeling this particular feeling of the world being sucked into the drain, vorticing your words away and mixing your metaphors with sewage water and rising bile, and I say this without meaning to be flippant or to dismiss the very real panic, congratulations. Up until now you, somehow, had comparative stability. You were, somehow, not living with the threat of climate change that keeps thrumming the threads of all our lives vibrating right next to your ear. Or a myriad of the other things that threaten to devour us. You were making sandcastles at the top of the hourglass. You may have known about the threat of literal apocalypse, but you didn’t feel it bodily. That’s good, for your life. That’s good.

At some point in the history of literature, the horizon crashed into the International Date Line and all fiction that was being written turned into speculative fiction. I don’t know exactly when that was, because the International Date Line is imaginary, but maybe it was the day after the Berlin Wall was razed. Maybe it was the day before Iceland fined and imprisoned its bankers that had caused the economy to collapse. Maybe it was yesterday, but I doubt it. More to the point, there is no longer such a thing as fiction that is not speculative. 

Normally, in the world you thought you lived in before, speculative fiction was the catch-all term for a specific market of fiction dominated by science fiction and fantasy, but where other genres such as steampunk, horror, alternate history, and the like also resided. In this definition, writing with strong similarities to speculative fiction but which comes from a tradition of more literary or mainstream elements, such as slipstream, magical realism, modern fairy tales and technothrillers, has usually not been included under the umbrella. This division is purely market-based, as all genres are. What defines speculative fiction is a point of departure from our world: a man with giant batwings under his suit, telekinesis, a portal through a mirror to another world, the continents on Earth itself being arranged differently, the year 3001, Napoleon victorious at Waterloo. The points of departure are different in nature, but they are all flipped variables. 0 to 1. In our world, the one you used to live in, the Soviet Union did not put a man on the Moon before America did. In the world you used to inhabit, freak storms did not sink all of Columbus’ fleet. In that world, Neanderthals didn’t evolve parallel to us. But what if they did? And so on. 



Some variables are more influential than others; some changes cascade other changes. What you’re experiencing is whole arrays turned into garbage code, though, and it’s natural to not be able to parse this. Some of you have felt this before, and maybe the only thing that made you able to create art again was manually going down to the fuse box of your life and flipping the variables one by one: not homeless anymore, not in love with that asshole, five thousand kilometres away from family, eleven days without skipping a meal, twelve days without skipping a meal, thirteen days without skipping a meal.

You’re not going to have that much access to that fuse box while the societal web is tearing. But the principle remains the same.

This is not a controversial statement: all fiction is based on points of departure from the world you believed yourself to be a part of, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fiction. So the thing that separated speculative fiction from the other fiction, disregarding the market argument, was the nature of the variable. The point of departure was such that the world felt like a different place, right? And now, when you think back on a working class novel from the 1980s that you’ve read, it uncannily feels like it was written in a different world. But it hasn’t changed. It is merely speculative, and you’re seeing it.

So, you don’t know which variables do what in the web you’re seeing unravelling. You’re standing in your indoor sandals in the basement, flipping light switches and trying to get the floor to stop yawning open. If you’re a speculative writer already, you might have an advantage here, because you already know how to scout for the variables. If there’s no ink when you try to type, you probably need to imagine the world you’re writing in first. You don’t have to write what you know, you can take one variable at a time. (It’s always like that in trying to make the world better than it is, which is what you should be trying to do.) Speculate. Rinse, repeat. Depart.

 

April 5, 2020

Innocent Ilo

The messages are urgent—create more art now, document your experiences in these times, don’t sweat over if what you’re creating makes sense, the world needs it, you need it. I create art, mostly short fiction, and I have to do it while battling with depression and anxiety. No, I cannot write through my depressive and anxiety episodes. I wait patiently for those rare moments of mental clarity to create art. These moments of mental clarity have become even rarer during this pandemic with my Twitter feed choked with news about yet another confirmed case of the Covid-19 virus or how testing is still inaccessible for most people or how health workers are on the frontline with limited personal protective equipments. So any attempt to write funnels into hours of staring at a blank word document until I exit the window with a What am I doing? Does the world really need this?

Away from my crushing anxiety, the world outside my window is in sharp contrast with the one inside my head. It is bubbly and almost detached from the present. This is the world I’ve grown to find solace in during these times. As part of the strategy to contain the virus, the Lagos State Government shut down schools. So, the schoolchildren in the block of apartment I live in have devised a means to keep themselves busy.  Just before noon, they gather in the quadrangle and take turns teaching themselves literature, mathematics, and science. There are breaks in between and assignments. Their laughter and arguments over who got the multiplication problem wrong wake me from my afternoon nap.  In the evenings, the once-busy street is filled with kids playing football. Neighbors who could go weeks without seeing each other because of their busy jobs sit in front of shops drinking beer and eating street food. It is an infectious atmosphere (no pun intended). There is a growing sense of community and a growing interest in other people’s well-being. This is something people normally do not have time for in this rise-hustle-and-grind city. 

Not creating fiction of my own has also given me more time to do what I love; discovering and rediscovering the beauty of other people’s works through reading. I have tripled my reading, from published works to solicited drafts from friends. There is a comfort that comes with the assurance that someone else is writing and documenting about/through this epoch when you can’t. I am also thinking about if and how this period will leave a mark on my craft? How lasting will this mark be? Will it be me doing too much? Will it be me doing too little? And when these questions begin to overwhelm me, I look at the world outside my window and find the calmness I seek. 

 

—April 5, 2020

Octavia Cade

Nearly a year and a half ago, I applied for a residency. Massey University, paired with the Square Edge Community Arts Centre, has a writer-in-residence every year. I only applied to practice applying for things. I didn’t expect to get it—and I didn’t. The 2019 residency was given to another writer . . . but would I be interested in coming in 2020? Yes, I said, I would.

This residency has never been given to a speculative writer before. I think they gave it to me because New Zealand is hosting WorldCon this year, and having a science fiction writer would be thematic.

WorldCon is a virtual convention now. Pandemic put paid to that. It has put paid to a lot of things.

I arrived less than a week before the entirety of New Zealand went into lockdown. Even then, contagion was changing the expectations of residency. My library reading got postponed. So did the workshop. Then the library closed entirely. The welcome event at the university was scaled down, and then cancelled. I have an office, apparently, in the department of English and Media Studies. Somewhere to be creative.

I’ve never seen it. The university is shut down as well.

Both Square Edge and Massey asked if I wanted to go home. They were very kind; it would be understandable. I chose not to go. I can self-isolate just as easily here as there . . . and there is something very present about a residency that is so very divorced from expectation. We are all of us, up and down the country, forced to live in the moment.

We are also, I think, forced—speculative writers particularly—to examine our expectations, and how they have turned to prejudice. Many of us have engaged with apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic writing at some point. It’s a literature of desolation, and mine has been no different. The experience of emergency, however, has shown our narrative bias in a clear light. People are being kinder, mostly. Across the country, they are putting teddies in windows so that kids, out on their lonely daily exercise, can have a bear hunt. This is not the stuff from which dystopia is made. We’re better than we think we are.

As artists, our creations should reflect that.

I’m struck, particularly, by two of my own post-apocalyptic, post-plague stories, written a couple of years apart. The first was published in Reckoning. “The Feather Wall” was about a conservationist, stuck on an off-shore island with an endangered species of bird. Alone. Unhappy. The second, which has just received a tentative acceptance from another publisher, tells of community recovery. People coming together, learning to write about—to talk about—the effects of apocalypse in diverse and inclusive ways. It is a far kinder story.

It is, perhaps, also the more realistic, because it is the kinder story.

Pandemic is a terrible thing, it’s true. But it is not the only thing, and it does not define us.

 

—April 2, 2020