Writing COVID-19 Lives

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.