What are you writing right now? Do you even have time to write? Or do you suddenly find yourself spending your time scrambling to get unemployment benefits, food, safe housing, a new job or new gigs? Are you muddling through a switch to teaching on-line? Striving to connect with others? Are you the sort of writer who has to write, no matter what?
Here’s the reason I ask. Regardless of what you think of the “coronavirus-is-a-dress-rehearsal-for-climate-collapse” theory, there’s no denying that an emergency puts more on your plate (or takes actual food off of it, as the case may be). That’s true whether it’s a pandemic, a famine, or a cyclone. The whole thing is damned disruptive and time-consuming — esp. for the have-nots — of whom there will be more and more, as the climate crisis deepens. Nonetheless, many people have written on the run, or from the battlefield, or from hiding. They’ve managed to produce poems on toilet paper, using — well, whatever was available by way of an ink. They’ve hand-copied or typed and re-typed samizdat, hour after carpal-tunnel-inducing hour. I have to think an experience like that would reduce one to writing only the most essential words. It also, I think, would make one’s writing feel more like communication, if you’re having to smuggle it to the outside world or preserve it in a bagfull of belongings in a displaced-persons camp. The notion of art-for-art’s-sake might have to be revised. At the same time, writing-for-the-sake-of-writing could be the only thing tethering one to any kind of regularity or stability (there’s no baseball, after all). In any case, it would profit us to be aware of what we do and think during this coronacrisis, for future reference. Are you writing about the same stuff? In the same way? Or do you detect a shift or shifts taking place, however subtle? The shifts and alterations we make today may serve us in good stead, should we encounter future emergencies that are even more disruptive and disorienting.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |