What We Found in Writing
Authors on creativity in quarantine.
by peter heller, ada limón, adam haslett, victoria chang, emily raboteau, alyssa knickerbocker, nicole sealey, andrea lawlor, alexandra kleeman, joshua mohr, lillian li, gabrielle calvocoressi, and janine joseph
ON THE evening Denver went into lockdown, I was fishing. The South Platte runs right through the city, and if you’re into urban fly-fishing, you can cast for huge carp among the wrecked grocery carts and old tires. But just twenty miles upstream, where the river emerges from a cleft in the foothills, the water runs through wild, old cottonwoods and pushes gravel bars into the bends, and there are beaver dams and circling raptors and mergansers and other ducks drifting in the pools. It was late March. Remnants of the last snow melted in patches along the river trail, the trees were leafless, but the afternoon had been warm, and the sun descended out of a band of clouds and balanced on the ridge of the divide. I parked my truck and biked up the river with a rod and pack, and when I was well past the last of just a few fishermen, I stashed the bike in the trees and waded into the current and began to cast. I felt, strangely, like I was wading into my first novel, The Dog Stars, about a man from Denver who has survived a flu pandemic that has killed almost everyone. His wife, his friends, his unborn child. He has his old dog, Jasper, and a love of fishing, but the warming that has killed so much of the forest has also killed his beloved trout, so when he fly-fishes for suckers and carp, he pretends. He wades and casts and imagines he is in his old life. He appreciates the light on the water, the colors of the stones, the big carp that make a meal for the two of them.
I felt like that now. I focused on what was in front of me. I waded and fished. I saw a beaver swim out from the willows and add a stick to its dam. And the mayflies called blue-winged olives drifted off an eddy and sparkled in sunlight. And I smelled the thawing earth and cold stones and saw the raindrop ring of a trout feeding in still water. I thought, “Each according to her nature.” But despite the peace of the evening, my heart was breaking. For those who were sick and scared and those who had already died. For the ones who were working furiously in hospitals and the ones who took terrible risks to support us all because they needed the work. People everywhere were unsure of what to do or how they were going to live, and the fear in all of it was palpable in the nearly empty streets, the unmanned ranger booth, the half waves of the few people in the park.
PETER HELLER
ADA LIMÓN
ADAM HASLETT
VICTORIA CHANG
EMILY RABOTEAU
ALYSSA KNICKERBOCKER NICOLE SEALEY
ANDREA LAWLOR ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN JOSHUA MOHR
LILLIAN LI
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI JANINE JOSEPH
But I fished, just as my protagonist Hig had done. And I prayed for all of us that this would bring out the best in us, that our own true nature was courage and kindness.
It is strange when life mimics art. Or when the darkest fears manifest. And you have to challenge yourself to stay open and connected to the things you love, the people and the work. I am writing every day now as the lockdown continues. I have no idea if people in the near future will have the wherewithal to buy books, or the energy to read them. But I write and do not feel like I’m playing the violin on a ruptured Titanic. How I love to be transported when I work, and when I write I am simply going toward love. It’s all I know how to do. And put one foot in front of the other and cast into the current beneath an overhanging willow and thrill to the sudden tug and quiver that I know is a trout. And feel the tremor of joy and love that I know no virus, no fear, can survive.
—Peter Heller, author of the novel The River (Knopf, 2019), in Denver, Colorado
When the pandemic began, like many I found myself careening from deep despair to terrifying fear. And, as it turns out, neither fear nor despair allows me to write or create in a meaningful way. Still, I think creating during these unfathomable times is both impossible and necessary for me. After a month of reading and crying and intense self-isolation and some illness, I was finally able to return to the page. What struck me, almost immediately, is that fear was more incapacitating than despair. I could surrender to a hopelessness and still make something. Even if it felt like a last gasp of my own humanity or love or tenderness, I could still write it. However, if I focused on fear, I was always silenced. Perhaps it’s because fear is imagining a present and future that is worse and keeps getting worse. It’s imagining myself or loved ones ill. It’s chaos and panic. It’s an emergency. It’s without breath. I cannot write during an emergency. Where is the breath in an emergency? Whereas despair almost has a sense of surrender to it. While it can still be awful and tragic, it acknowledges the present in a way that’s almost a release. Life is awful, and here is my awful poem. There’s abandon in that. There is some breath, some distance, maybe there is even a sense of possibility in despair. It does not require action; it requires reflection and attention and a diving in deeper. Of course, I’d rather write toward hope or toward joy or grace or anything that keeps me out of the well of sorrow. But maybe hope is next. Maybe there’s an order. As Robert Hass says, “First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.”
—Ada Limón, author of the poetry collection The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), in Lexington, Kentucky
It was on a Thursday that things in New York began to deteriorate by the hour. Because memory is grief’s first victim, even now, six weeks later, as I write this, I don’t remember which measures were taken that day: the state of emergency, offices sending everyone home, hospitals canceling surgeries, only that this was the day I understood everything would change. The next morning I went into my office, closed the door, and wrote for longer than I had in months. I knew disaster was gathering. That I needed to buy food and ready myself either to remain in my apartment for weeks or get out. But before I could accept any of that, some part of me insisted I ignore it all and work. Writing is a form of dissociation. In the hours of real absorption, you leave behind your room, your body, even the mind you imagine as your own. I needed badly to experience that freedom precisely because I sensed how long it might be before I would have it again. As it happened, I was beginning a scene set in New York not long after 9/11. A character in a city in the wake of siege. Now, on the days I am still able to write, I carry the brokenheartedness for what is happening to this city of ours with me into the past, trying as writers do to assimilate the inassimilable. To create meaning in the face of death. This was the task before. It’s gotten harder. But it’s still the task.
—Adam Haslett, author of the novel Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, 2016), in Brooklyn, New York
The pandemic has changed everything in my life. I spend a lot of my weekdays helping our students at Antioch University and trying to figure out how to support them emotionally, financially, and academically. This might not seem connected to my writing, but it makes me realize how different writers are even though we often clump ourselves together. Some people seem to be able to write a lot right now. Others not at all. And all of it is okay.
The state of the world and the virus has been a kind of invisible stitching throughout the poems I’ve been writing in the same way that it’s always around, but sometimes it’s not. I’ve also been reading a lot of older poems by W. S. Merwin, Jack Gilbert, Czesław Miłosz, Louise Glück, Li-Young Lee, and Robert Kelly, and find those poets to be so wise. I find writing poems at this time to be a great form of distraction from all the worry and stress. The focus that it takes to work on a poem is immense. I don’t knit, but I imagine that’s what knitting is like.
I think writing is a form of protest. I’ve always thought it to be. As an Asian American poet writing over the past two decades, there have been many times when I was pretty sure no one would ever read my work. I wrote more and worked harder as a form of protest. Oddly, today I feel similarly. I write now to tell off the pandemic, in a way. To prove that writing as an act can and will endure. It might not “save” us, but I do know it will always be here for us. —Victoria Chang, author of the poetry collection Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), in Los Angeles, California
As soon as the public schools closed in New York City, which happened before we were ordered to shelter in
place, I abandoned any idea of writing anything other than a pandemic testimony at any time other than after my two young children were asleep. Just as the governor put us on pause, I paused work on my novel and several essays in progress, none of which seemed possible or pressing to accomplish under the circumstances. Instead of starting a diary, I reached out to my doppelgänger, Ay¸segül Savas¸, a writer in Paris whom I’d befriended at a conference back in January, a lifetime ago. When we met we’d discussed the possibility of co-writing something about sharing the same face. The global pandemic presented an epistolary structure and an opportunity to mirror for each other how the virus is playing out in two different cities, in nations with very different social safety nets. She agreed to be my pen pal. So, this is the gig. At night, to the sound of ambulances, I write to Ays¸egül. Then, blessedly, Ays¸ egül writes me back. Compare/contrast. We tell each other about our days. Our neighbors. Our families. Our restrictions. Our symptoms. Our governments. Our dinner plans. Our nightmares. That’s all. Two women bearing witness to our respective quarantines. That’s really all I’m writing for now. This correspondence gives shape to my days. I don’t know what will come of it. It’s not a project for my career, but for my sanity. For now, writing letters to Ays¸egül is enough.
—Emily Raboteau, author of the memoir Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013), in the Bronx, New York
The last thing I want to do is write fiction. It all feels like fiction already: people at the grocery stores in masks, blue tape every six feet in the checkout line. The coffee shop boarded up. The billboards that used to announce ferry sailings now blinking STAY HOME. The news is straight dystopia. Six new symptoms. Reinfections in China. The president telling us to inject ourselves with sunshine, inject ourselves with bleach. You could make this stuff up, but right now, why? We are inundated with it. Instead I’ve gone back to the most basic, the least artistic form: a journal. I stopped journaling when I had kids. You’d think it’d be the opposite, that the urge to record daily life would spike with babies. Okay, it did, but if I had a scrap of time, I needed it for paying work, or laundry, or my own projects. I haven’t written in a journal since 2015, and even then, the last entry was a grocery list. But that’s what I want right now: grocery lists. Minutiae. The meals we ate. That the cherry tree dropped all her petals at once, that I let another load of laundry mildew in the washer, that I pulled my shirt open to nurse the baby and squirted her in the face, and we all laughed. That my son screamed, “I LOVE YOU!” to the neighbor boy across the street. The goddamn weather. Because later, this will all be run through the machine that makes life into history; it will be compressed and smoothed out; the headlines will suck up the mundane. So I have concerned myself with recording the mundane. Because when I do return to fiction, that’s what I’ll need—not that they extended the stay-at-home order on this day, or discovered the blood-clotting disorder on that day—I’ll need the people at home, half panicked and half happy, doing the ordinary things: washing the dishes, putting their kids to bed. — Alyssa Knickerbocker, author of the novella Your Rightful Home (Nouvella Books, 2010), in Suquamish, Washington
Before returning home to Brooklyn in March, I’d been living in Italy for some months. If I’m being honest, given how precarious and unprepared the United States looked from afar, I felt much safer in Roma. This morning a friend told me that I have “the unique experience of [going through] COVID in two epicenters.” While this is true, writing during this time has been difficult because the novelty of the present requires, it seems, a new language. These days distractions drive my drafts. I’m easily distracted on the page and off—too close to the moment, too anxious about it, to write with any real intention. Maybe this lack of intention is the language, at least for me. April felt like one long day and each day an hour therein. Yesterday I sat down to write an e-mail; instead I started drafting a poem about my father or the tall man I saw briefly through my window or the sirens singing down my street. Neither the e-mail nor the draft is finished. —Nicole Sealey, author of the poetry collection Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), in Brooklyn, New York
I am a procrastinating writer an unnecessary writer an undisciplined writer a blocked writer a distractible writer a perfectionist writer a very slow writer a writer who spends most of their time teaching and parenting and washing groceries a writer who writes under the conditions of late Western capitalism, now in new global pandemic form. I took about fifteen years to write my first novel, and toward the end of that time, I returned to poetry (that high school sweetheart) and rediscovered the pleasures of finishing. I began a series of prose poems, which perhaps unsurprisingly felt like a fictional world. The poems have no characters or plot but speculate on daily life in a seceded near-future anarchist queer utopian western Massachusetts. I’ve now been working on these poems in spurts for years. Earlier this year, with a primed pump but no time, I vowed to dig back at a later date. I marked a certain week in July on my calendar and felt a small anxious anticipation I named “motivation.” Now in my daily life I am concerned with teaching my college classes online and homeschooling my six-year-old with my partner, who is also teaching her college classes online. For the first time in decades, despite writing nothing at all, I’m not worried. We’re living in the beginning of something new, and that’s going to change what writing means and does. I’m taking notes. Well, mentally.
—Andrea Lawlor, author of the novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017), in Northampton, Massachusetts
One of the most disorienting things about writing during a pandemic has been the way the new rules and new restrictions cut through cultivated routines. Like a riding lawnmower driven through a waist-high meadow, it cleaves the thickness of habit—and leaves something flat and prickly in its wake. I used to use a walk around the block or a small daily errand as a way to step away from a project, talk to another human being, and reward the restless animal inside me that I had forced to “sit, stay” for hours in a row. What’s the equivalent of a walk around the block when stuck inside your own overfamiliar apartment? For me one answer was finding a way to wander in my reading: I amble through textbooks on plastic surgery, in-depth accounts of wildlife trafficking and the death of Captain Cook, appreciating the ways in which these accounts fail to intersect with my novel-in-progress, giving myself twenty minutes, or one chapter, of this other world as a break from writing. A fun game to play with myself, in this new moment, is to ask “what topic is furthest from the one I’m supposed to be attending to?” and order the best, most far-flung answer I can think of from my favorite independent bookstore. Sometimes the sense of leaving a familiar space can remind you of why you made your home there in the first place—and it turns out this feeling is achievable without going anywhere at all. —Alexandra Kleeman, author
of the novel Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth Press, 2021), in Staten Island, New York
The Revolution Will Not Be Quarantined. It’s taped up on my bathroom mirror. A note: for me, by me. I see it before my espresso, before my morning workout. I see it before kissing my wife and daughter. The Revolution Will Not Be Quarantined. It can’t be, because we can’t be—not really. A shelter-in-place order has agency over our bodies, but it’s not incarcerating our imaginations, our work ethics. In our imaginations, we are free to go anywhere we want. Yes, these are unprecedented, extraordinary times. Yes, they’re fucking scary. But that’s exactly why we should be writing every day. Artists have written through world wars and famine, genocides and natural disasters, through dictators, through drought. We write not to find clarity, but to become comfortable in our confusions. Comfortable with the fact there are no easy answers coming. Writers write into the moral mud, into the visceral bemusement of the flailing world around us. We do so because it’s an act of revolution: saying to the virus—we’ve used writing since scribbles on cave walls, and we won’t let you stop us! Every syllable you get out is an act of revolution. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every poem, every chapter—these are your revolutions. We get so little time here, so let’s be audacious and dumb and spectacular. Let’s use our work to communicate across states and countries and continents and hearts. I’ll show you my revolution, if you show me yours.
—Joshua Mohr, author of the memoir Sirens (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), in Seattle, Washington
After a disaster—an earthquake in Los Angeles, a shooting in Pittsburgh— we are often compelled to reach out to friends and even acquaintances who may have been affected. But when a disaster is at the global scale that the COVID-19 pandemic has grown, when everyone you know has definitely been affected in small and large ways, you reach out to your entire phone book. Or at least I did, and because so many of the people I know are also writers, the inevitable question of care was not simply, “How are you doing?” but also, “How is your writing going?” For the first time in recent memory, the answers to this question are absent of the angst, the embarrassment, the little tail of shame that trails a writer who has not written. I can only speak for myself when I say that my answers have not changed, but my attitude has. If I write at all—multiple pages or two sentences—I am grateful. If I cannot write, I understand why not. This change is not because the mission of writing has paled against the mission of surviving. I know for myself that the two things are intertwined. Instead it’s what has not changed. Writing remains just as and no more difficult than it always has. On bad days I do not lose myself in my writing. On good days, that doesn’t happen either. Every sentence is a boulder pushed up a hill that does not change in steepness or height. Some days I have the strength to push; some days I have the strength to lie down and take a nap; never do I know what kind of day it will be.
As a bookseller, my perspective on the work of writing during a pandemic is influenced by the adaptations my bookstore, Literati, has had to take. In one week we turned our store into a warehouse, we set up an events calendar of online readings, we created a blog, we retrained our staff. The next week everything changed again. But seven weeks in, we are still standing, we are still employed, and we are still delivering books to our customers. We are uncertain of what the future holds, but the alternative is so much deadlier. A pandemic, for the luckiest of us, gets to remain a monthslong training in uncertainty. It is this training that has opened my eyes to all the small ways I’ve let uncertainty, and my discomfort with it, guide how I experience my own life. Every day now, I wake up not knowing if the boulder will be light, heavy, or stuck to the ground. How lucky I am to be so uncertain.
—Lillian Li, author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant (Henry Holt, 2018), in Ann Arbor, Michigan
As I write this the rain has just stopped. My neighbor, Ms. Edna’s granddaughter, is playing outside while Mike, Edna’s son, comes and goes on his red moped. The bike courier from Durham Courier just delivered a whole bunch of tea from Jeddah’s. He came by earlier with a bag of flour and bagels and other staples from East Durham Bake Shop. It feels like a gift and also so sad, this friendly man with a mask driving up to the house and waving as I watch him drop stuff off at a distance. Today I put on my mask and walked outside to thank him as he walked away. He turned around and also stepped back. Friendly and also scared for a moment. We live in a town full of small businesses and bounded by wonderful farms. Like most places, keeping these folks afloat is essential to the continued health of our community. And since all of the businesses and farms we support are deeply involved in social justice work, it helps the continued fight against the inequities so prevalent in the South and in this country—inequities, of course, that are all the more apparent with this virus showing us who gets to have care and who doesn’t. Who gets to work from home and wait for a delivery from the Bake Shop and who doesn’t.
I’d love to say I’ve been writing new poems and working on the ghostly novel I’ve been playing with for a couple of years. And, it is true, I’ve been taking notes and thinking and hoping summer break will give me time to write. But like so many people, my classes have been moved to Zoom, and that has been surprisingly fun and also brutal on the eyes. And it turns out there’s even more administrative work during a pandemic. The five-day workweek seems to mean nothing to Zoom. In this way, this also brings me face-to-face with the reality
of folks who work seven days a week just to get by. I think a lot of folks are dealing with their anxiety by keeping very busy, which often means keeping other people really busy. I keep wishing they’d just eat lots of carbs like I’ve been doing but that’s not seemingly the method of choice.
So I’m not writing a lot creatively right now. I am having wonderful exchanges with my students. And I have been reading a ton. Hilary Mantel is great for any season, but gosh, is she great in a pandemic. And I’ve been writing a bit about losing Eavan Boland, who was a great mentor of mine and probably would have told me I should be making more time to write poems.
Oh, the ice cream truck just went by! Someone just almost ran the stoplight, and I can hear my neighbors hollering. So I’m going to go out and look and probably also talk about the gunshots we heard last night around ten. I guess maybe this will all end up in a poem sometime. But also maybe not. I feel lucky I think of poems as things that sometimes live on the page and sometimes just happen around me and never find the page. I guess that’s something that’s keeping me alive. That and strawberry Danish and the cabbages starting to grow outside. And my neighbors. Who never talk about poems with me. And that’s just fine.
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of the poetry collection Rocket Fantastic (Persea, 2017), in Durham, North Carolina
Within four miles of where I live in Stillwater, there is a paved road that fractures into a path of rocks and red dirt that I never thought I could or might ever travel. A few months ago, however, I was welcomed into a robust community of gravel cyclists (“gravel grinders”) who showed me how these hilly paths, when journeyed by gravel bike, give access to endless miles of lush Oklahoma landscape. Since the city’s shelter-in-place order, and since my work’s move online, my mornings, afternoons, and late evenings are spent postured at the computer; but my late afternoons and early evenings are often carved for the miles away in the company of hawks and ever-curious cows. Sometimes the only evidence of other people is a lone, groaning oil derrick. When I drift to sleep at night, I sometimes still hear the gravel’s churn under my tires and am reminded of what it felt like to dream of the ocean’s waves after a long day in the water.
The expanse tethers me to perspective. Not a day goes by that I don’t remember what it was like to grow up undocumented in this country; that former position continues to inform how I operate in this citizen-world that is still new to me. When I ride into those country roads, for example, I carry with me my ID and insurance card and am stupefied still by the privilege of having both on me in the event of an emergency. Those fifteen years of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; of enduring restrictions on my movement; and of wondering if a chance encounter with a stranger might cost me my life have also informed my time during this pandemic. I’ve slipped into these months as if into an old, familiar, and well-conditioned glove—one, I remind myself, that I can take off in due time. When these days pass I know not everyone will be able to resume unrestricted lives.
For this reason my writing life does not feel like it has suffered a rupture; after all, I wrote Driving Without a License under similar pressures. If, when I return exhausted from a ride, I momentarily forget that I can weather through this, too, I remind myself of the words of one of my teachers, the late poet Philip Levine—an early mentor in my first few months as a permanent resident in the country I had considered home for far longer: “The process of writing poetry depends on being alone in a room, and being comfortable being alone for long periods of time—almost reveling in solitude and slow time.”
—Janine Joseph, author of the poetry collection Driving Without a License (Alice James Books, 2016), in Stillwater, Oklahoma