Description
Book SynopsisWriting COVID-19 Lives examines how people turned to life writingâoften in fragile, makeshift formsâto 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 âœIâ that is unsettled, doubled, or dispersed. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief, âœyou learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.â That graspingâthe search for a voice that could still speakâthreads 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 diariesâsuch as Marvin Heifermanâs Photographic Shivaâthat turn domestic objects into charged residues of grief.
Rather than offering a single story of âœthe pandemic,â the volume assembles a textured archive of how lives were writtenâtenderly, urgently, and sometimes beautifullyâunder unprecedented constraint.
