The Effect of a Pandemic upon My Writing

When my daughter was in college and would call home with a crisis—and believe me they were, not to belittle them—I’d say this isn’t the end of the world. That is going to look a lot different.

It was my attempt to interject some perspective.

Now that I’m in a crisis of, well, too much to list at the moment, I feel I need some perspective. Except it is the end of the world.

Who could have imagined a worldwide pandemic and the United States falling behind, losing status? Its people tearing each other apart.

I mean I did imagine it. Ages ago, in 2011, I wrote a flash called “Before the World Changed” that has been reprinted and anthologized since then. In this piece I lyrically laid out the incremental steps that take over a middleclass couple. How they shifted and adjusted their lifestyle either because of environmental pressures or even an ecological outlook and events rapidly took over and directly began to impact their life and economy.

See story here:

But, now that the world has changed and we are staring into the hollow eyes of a pandemic that has altered every part of our lives and psyche, I find it hard to write.

It is more of an existential crisis, I mean you are reading this. I am referring here to fiction. As much as I enjoy reading fiction (I think since quarantine and my long-distance cycle trip, I’ve read nearly 30 books), it is a creative process that seems beyond me right now. A zone or space out of reach. I start and then freeze: Why bother?

Part of this has to do with the publishing world. I know books are getting agented and sold—just not mine. It is that quarantine feeling of isolation—no response. Or I go through the forms, the QueryTrackker, the rigmarole of reading an agent’s website and email them only to get a digitally-generated response that they are closed.

Of course, I have published and been represented, but today feels different, as if time or circumstances have passed me by.

Journals are resuming again and there is a plethora of contests one can enter, I’m just wondering if I should continue to go down that road. In my long list of acceptances and publishing creds I’ve probably over the past 10 years only been reimbursed $25 total for my efforts.

Again, I mostly write for myself, to work out something. But, going back to the first part of this essay, I’m finding it hard to write. Even words these days don’t seem to help untangle the morass I’m feeling, the complicated intertwining of grief and gaslighting. Quarantine only seems to reinforce the feeling of invisibility, that my words do not matter.

This week I’ve moved back into my office after rectifying some connectivity and computer issues, so here’s hoping I can also resolve this impasse and get writing.

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