Edited by Shane Neilson, Sarah Fraser
and Arundhati Dhara
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2023/$26.99/224 pp.
The COVID Journals seeks to capture the experiences of healthcare workers during the pandemic through narrative and poetry, art and diary entries. Its strength is in the diversity of its contributors’ approaches: from the literarily allusive “A Journal of the Plague Year 2020,” by Nick Pimlott, to the story of an elderly Gujarati woman resistant to restrictions and rules in Manisha Bharadia’s short vignette, “Endurance.” What remains prominent in this collection is that each of these writers and artists uses their art to provide a balm to the uncertainty and mayhem of life during COVID. All of the contributors appear to be attempting not only to record and represent life in the pandemic but also to make sense of it and create a form of control through narrative, art or poetry.
Jennifer Moore, for instance, playing on the title of the Claire Danes TV show, reveals in “My So-Called COVID Life” the attempt to balance both empathy and self-preservation that is a theme common to many of the contributions. She describes using technology to try to comfort the families of her patients, only to find that often FaceTime “brought no comfort, only accentuating distress.” In a moving scene, she describes how their family dog would attempt to greet her, “tail wagging and happy to see me.” But her children display a fear that is also common in many of the contributions: “My children,” Moore relates, “pull him back, terrified he will be infected.”
There are numerous such haunting lines in this collection. Kacper Niburski’s “With Beauty” describes the disinfecting and cleaning recommended at the beginning of the pandemic response. A two-clause sentence, though, perfectly captures the fear of the unknown so many of these contributors articulate: “Each person was a disease; each encounter was a deadly battle of unknowns.” Lest I leave the impression that all is fear and disease, there are moments of levity, such as Elizabeth Niedra’s poem “I Am Letting Myself Go”: “I will lead the revolution/ NO—MORE—HARD—PANTS/ No more pants of any shape”.
I do think a more definitive structure to the collection would have been helpful for the reader, or even biographical headnotes to situate each contributor geographically and professionally. The collection is aiming to capture a moment in time, not literary greatness, and some art and writing will strike readers more than others. But what the collection does convey well is the empathy and energy of our healthcare workers, who were stretched to the breaking point. Above all, readers can glean the extent to which healthcare, though a necessary job, is a calling, a vocation, and we are fortunate that healthcare workers answered that call in our time of need.
Jay Gamble teaches English at the University of Lethbridge.
_______________________________________
