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.
Writing COVID-19 Lives examines how people turned to life writing—often in fragile, makeshift forms—to make sense of the pandemic.
Introduction: Writing COVID-19 Lives [ Irene Gammel and Jason Wang] PART
I: LIFE WRITING AS PANDEMIC SELF-EXPLORATION 1: What is the Pandemic Good
For? Blurred Days and Live Memories [ Julia Watson] 2: I imagine the
circumstances of my death: Life Writing as Radical Absence in Kate Baers
COVID-19-era Poetry [ Irene Gammel and Jason Wang] 3: Aftershocks: However
did I Pass the Time? COVID-19 Autofiction as Trauma Narrative [ Marjorie
Worthington] 4: Beyond Wuhan Diary: Rethinking autobiographical norms amid
COVID-19 [ Marjorie Dryburgh] PART II: LIFE WRITING AS ARCHIVAL TESTIMONIES 5:
COVID-19 Pandemic Diaries: Tracing Conditions of Appearance and Disappearance
[ Julie Rak] 6: Crowdsourced: COVID-19, Life Writing, and Collective Memory in
Latvia [ Sanita Reinsone, Ilze aksa-Timinska, Haralds Matulis, and Elvra
varte] 7: Postcards from Lockdown: Womens Pandemic Lives [ Kristina Bhaun
and Irene Gammel] PART III: LIFE WRITING THROUGH MEDIA ECOLOGIES 8: Fragments
of Care: Hassan Akkads Refugee Testimony in a Time of Crisis [ Ana Belén
Martínez García] 9: Being the Comic Art: Loss, Creation, and Lessons Drawn
from COVID-19 [ Christopher J. Gilbert] 10: Worlding the Post-Pandemic: On
Documenting, and Enduring Lockdown [ Brent Luvaas] CODA: I Am Here, This is
Happening: Life Writing and the Pandemics Echoes [ J. Michael Ryan]
Irene Gammel, FRSC, is a professor of art, literature, and culture and the director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research explores life writing, trauma narratives, modern literature and visual culture, and the performance of self in public. She is the author and editor of 15 books, including Looking for Anne of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery and Her Timeless Heroine (2025), I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (2020), and Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (2002), and the winner of the C. P. Stacey Award. She has coedited many books including Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022). Her work investigates how individuals narrate personal and collective histories in times of crisis and cultural change.
Jason Wangs research explores how modernist and contemporary literature and media encode power, politics, and social values. His doctoral dissertation, entitled Urban Walking: Configuring the Modern City as Cultural and Spatial Practice, explored the aesthetics of spatial politics and the politics of spatial aesthetics in urban literature and culture from the early twentieth century to the postindustrial period. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022). He has contributed chapters to Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (2019) and Confluences 2: Essays on the New Canadian Literature (2017) as well as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Wang is a lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan Universitys School of Fashion.
