Writing About the Pandemic

Have you felt drawn, over the past eighteen months, to read about plague and pestilence?  Albert Camus’s La Peste, for instance?  Or Man of Glass (Instant Apostle, 2020) by ACW member, Andrea Sarginson, set in Yorkshire during the Black Death?  (I have reviewed Man of Glass on my blog, Dear Reader – a corking book, in my opinion.)  Or have you read The Village or Wind of Change (Books to Treasure, 2015) by another ACW member, Eleanor Watkins, also about the Black Death?  All these books are available through the ACW website bookshop (.  (Not La Peste.  Albert Camus wasn’t an ACW member.)

Many of you supported me by completing a survey as part of my research for my article in the March edition of Together, about reading during lockdown – thank you again, if you were one of them.  Most survey respondents asserted – very emphatically – that they didn’t want to read about plague and pestilence, but that was last autumn and this is now.

Would you, sitting reading this at the end of May in 2021, write about the pandemic, in fiction or fact?  Apart from the Together article, I have had published an article about why we should not wear disposable masks, and I have on my computer a fictional piece set mostly during these unusual times.  I have noticed that Covid stories are starting to hit the short story and flash sites online, but my guess is that most of them are yet to come and still formulating in the minds of their authors.  We write, in part, to make sense of the world around us.  As the immediate danger diminishes throughout the world, writers will gather their ideas and their characters and place them in a Covid setting, thereby distilling their own experiences and drawing a line under them. 

But we are not there yet.  We are all conscious of the Coronavirus world developing around us and firing off in unexpected ways.  What I might have written in March 2020, when it was all new and strange and we were taking our ‘one form of exercise’ in an unexpectantly warm and sunny spring, would not be what I would write now.  Perspectives change.  If I were writing my mask article now, my angle would have been slightly different.  Writers will wait and inwardly digest before putting pen to paper.

The pandemic is part of our lives now, an experience being lived by everyone in this world.  We have been knocked out of our smug existence.  Contemporary fiction (not historical or period fiction obviously, or works written some time ago) with a non-Covid setting seems hollow.  We must write about it.  We will write about the Pandemic.

Rosemary Johnson has had many short stories published, in print and online, amongst other places, Cafe Lit, Scribble, The Copperfield Review, Fiction on the Web and 101 Words.  She has also contributed to Together magazine and Christian Writer.  She has also written a historical novel, set in the Solidarity years in Poland.  In real life, she is a retired IT lecturer, living in Suffolk with her husband and cat.