Full Description
Writing COVID-19 Lives examines how people turned to life writing—often in fragile, makeshift forms—to make sense of the pandemic. Across poetry, memoir, autofiction, photography, sketchbooks, diaries, postcards, and digital storytelling, the collection traces a pandemic aesthetic marked by brevity, fracture, and pause: an autobiographical "I" that is unsettled, doubled, or dispersed. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief, "you learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language." That grasping—the search for a voice that could still speak—threads through these essays.
Spanning case studies from Canada, the United States, China, Latvia, Peru, the United Kingdom, and Spain, the volume situates these works amid uneven conditions of care, precarity, surveillance, and loss. We encounter poetry written into silence; memoirs shaped by Zoom-mediated mourning; autofiction working through trauma; and photographic diaries—such as Marvin Heiferman's Photographic Shiva—that turn domestic objects into charged residues of grief.
Rather than offering a single story of "the pandemic," the volume assembles a textured archive of how lives were written—tenderly, urgently, and sometimes beautifully—under unprecedented constraint.
Contents
Introduction: Writing COVID-19 Lives [Irene Gammel and Jason Wang] PART I: LIFE WRITING AS PANDEMIC SELF-EXPLORATION 1: "What is the Pandemic Good For?" Blurred Days and Live Memories [Julia Watson] 2: "I imagine the circumstances of my death": Life Writing as Radical Absence in Kate Baer's COVID-19-era Poetry [Irene Gammel and Jason Wang] 3: "Aftershocks: "However did I Pass the Time?" COVID-19 Autofiction as Trauma Narrative [Marjorie Worthington] 4: Beyond Wuhan Diary: Rethinking autobiographical norms amid COVID-19 [Marjorie Dryburgh] PART II: LIFE WRITING AS ARCHIVAL TESTIMONIES 5: COVID-19 Pandemic Diaries: Tracing Conditions of Appearance and Disappearance [Julie Rak] 6: Crowdsourced: COVID-19, Life Writing, and Collective Memory in Latvia [Sanita Reinsone, Ilze Ļaksa-Timinska, Haralds Matulis, and Elvīra Žvarte] 7: Postcards from Lockdown: Women's Pandemic Lives [Kristina Bhaun and Irene Gammel] PART III: LIFE WRITING THROUGH MEDIA ECOLOGIES 8: Fragments of Care: Hassan Akkad's Refugee Testimony in a Time of Crisis [Ana Belén Martínez García] 9: Being the Comic Art: Loss, Creation, and Lessons Drawn from COVID-19 [Christopher J. Gilbert] 10: Worlding the Post-Pandemic: On Documenting, and Enduring Lockdown [Brent Luvaas] CODA: I Am Here, This is Happening: Life Writing and the Pandemic's Echoes [J. Michael Ryan]
