Creativity and Covid
Creativity and Covid
When the first fifteen cases of Covid-19 had just started to metatastize into the first wave of a plague, I was on the bus on the phone with my best friend. She was asking me when I was going to start writing poetry again.
Having written and failed to publish an autobiographical novel about a decade before, I had written one poem in the interim, which had gotten a decent response at an open mic, but one which I didn’t think was actually very good.
My post-adolescent poetry sometimes had a rhythm to it, but it felt like a portal had silently closed on my creativity in general. Besides that poem, all I wrote in that decade were press releases and social media posts as a restaurant General Manager, and if there was ever a way to practice writing turgid prose, that was it.
I had friends who had published novels, or gone to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and even a friend frequently published in The New Yorker, but at forty-three, creative expression felt like something anchored to the past, like riding my bike thirty miles on the Chicago bike trail or fitting into skinny jeans; good experiences, but distant ones.
When the City of Chicago suddenly closed all the bars and restaurants on a Sunday, mid-shift, all I found myself all at once unemployed, fearful and quarantined at home in a small one bedroom with my partner of eleven years.
Like Jennifer Aniston herself, I began our confinement by organizing our closet and drawers, but I felt like the moment we were in demanded a more radical set of practices than organizing the junk drawers and trying to fill time with meaningless distractions.
I had played with the idea of starting a Facebook group which would virtually mimic the space that Boccaccio’s characters in the Decameron had created for themselves in seclusion away from Florence during an earlier plague, and to my own surprise, I actually went ahead and did it, partially inspired by Boccaccio, and partly inspired by these words written by Toni Morrison, who wrote “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
The group vibe started with friends sharing music they had written, and favorite works of art, but I soon found myself sharing videos of me reading poetry almost nightly: favorite pieces by Chen-Chen, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limon, David Ferry and many, many others, including my Dad, and various other family members, my niece, my grandmother.
Inadvertently, I was speaking my own self-taught master class in poetry into existence, with the result that I finally started writing my first poem of many years after consuming an edible and watching SNL, which started with this first line
“That this is something with which
the air can be invisibility pregnant
and no one knows its actual half-life
in any particular location.”
Some seven months later, a very talented writer friend would hear me read this line and refer to it as “sick,” to my great delight.
Around this time, I wrote in a notebook, “Do Lear over Zoom.” There’d been a lot of ink spilled about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during yet another plague, and given the intimate proximity of death, especially at that point, I just felt like “fuck it” when it came to writer’s block or self-criticism of my free-range poetic style. We could both get sick and die at any time, so whatever place in the canon my work might land, at least I was producing some kind of testament to whatever latent artistry I still had, and could translate into work.
I put out feelers to friends, and a dear friend of many years pledged to join me in making an online reading of King Lear a reality. She brought on board some very talented actual *real* actors from Philadelphia and I reached out to friends from previous restaurant jobs, College and even my sixteen year-old cousin who excels at Community Theater in the Boston Area.
As soon as we were fully cast, people began dropping out, and for legitimate reasons. We were still, after all, in the midst of a pandemic.
We lost two Kents in a row, and then the third one didn’t show up for broadcast day. Another player dropped out that day too, but Cornwall picked up Kent, and I picked up a large number of small parts last minute, and once we got my octogenarian Father to turn off the Zoom screen on one of his two iPads, which was causing reverb, we proceeded to record a three and a half hour production of King Lear over Zoom.
It was not perfect, but it existed in the world, and in spite of the tech issues, real work was happening in that space, with some incredible moments. My sixteen year old cousin was brilliant. My friend and until very recently at that point, work colleague, was dazzling as Cordelia/The Fool. And the Philly contingent, all professionals, were amazing too.
Having taken that plunge, I would go on to write ten more poems, start an Etsy store selling photographic notecards with my Aunt, start recording a weekly cooking show with my Father on YouTube and also begin to teach a beginners wine class on Instagram and Facebook, and sure, most of that content was being produced for a small circle of family and friends, but on the other hand, it existed in the world, as did we still for the time being at that point.
I wrote on the front of a notebook about six months after Lear, “Produce so much work that you don’t really care about anything’s individual reception.”
To get lost in artistic process was perhaps the only good thing that came out of that terrible period. Tomorrow was in particular not promised, so if I liked where any individual creative project was going, posterity felt very much like it might be the judge, so again, the work mattered, but it was also a form of whistling in the dark, and felt less burdened by ego and the East Coast private school ethos I grew up among. The work wasn’t going to be in Aperture or The New Yorker, but the work was the work.
And the work reminded me that a creatively productive *I*still existed in this world. I wasn’t just a person who had endured a string of career setbacks, who had lived paycheck to paycheck for a solid seventeen years.
I was also a person with expertise and experience, and given the tenuous nature of things, I was finally ready make art, “do language,” and to live up to the bold pronouncement of my only tattoo, which spans my chest, and simply reads “fearless.”