Coronavirus Journal ... for the Brevity Nonfiction Blog

I've asked my students at Wesleyan to keep a coronavirus journal -- a diary of their days as they navigate what are truly unprecedented times. (I asked the "student" in the photo here, too, but so far, no go).

I see it as a tiny, silver lining to the crisis and the quarantine because while it will be a new assignment, it's likely to be one that taps into writing (or at least thinking) they are already doing. I say "tiny" because I hesitate to wax poetic about the "good" that will come out of the pandemic since it almost seems anathema, but there's no question these extraordinary times will inspire us to do things we normally don't do.

Indeed, at the start of the term, I asked them to keep journals but had the sense few were writing in them outside of class (it's a course on memoir). Now I suspect they are galvanized. This hot-house atmosphere of illness and fear has them living in new ways, with inspiration a-plenty, and a desperate need to vent their frustrations somewhere. And their entries are LONG!

I was so inspired by their writing that I pitched a column to the Brevity Nonfiction Blog about it and the editors, I'm thrilled to say, decided to run it. You can read it here:

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/my-students-are-finally-keeping-a-journal/

As I say in the piece for Brevity, "An unusual moment in our world has created an opening for me as a teacher to reinforce the very principles I've been trying to convey (write whenever you can, track details, take your mental temperature). But ... how to replicate next time?"

In any event, my students so far are capturing exactly what I imagined, as I mentioned in my piece for Brevity; "the small changes, the absence of one activity or obligation creating space for something else, the repercussions of our new routines (one student fears the increased screen time from working virtually is interfering with her sleep and I would agree!)."

I don't plan on sharing their entries but here are two of mine:

*March 26, 2020*

File under, Thank God/silver lining/finally: I am in love with James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.”

In an introduction to the older edition I am reading, borrowed from Olin, Baldwin writes, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

*March 25, 2020*

Leo yesterday had a Zoom meeting with his teacher. The same Zoom software I am using to teach my class at Wesleyan, except it’s not AT Wesleyan anymore.

He’s above average in reading and likes Math a lot, so perhaps we are lucky in some ways because I don’t think he will miss out as much as one might fear.

Nonetheless, a part of me grieves that he’s been robbed of the fundamental social nature of school, particularly as an only child.

Yet I am always of two minds – literally always, before coronavirus and probably always, and I think of it as an occupational hazard as a journalist.

He should be in school but in MY HOME SCHOOL he can rock in his chair or even slump (for a while at least), he can stand up to do math problems, he can walk around the computer room on the third floor while he explains fables to me. Oh, and we have gym every day, multiple times a day.

And yet – the other mind weighing in again – he has not played with a friend in a week.

-30-

Review: A GIRL RETURNED by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Finally, my review of one of the best Italian novels of 2019 has run! You can find my whole review of A GIRL RETURNED here on the Kenyon Review's site, and a short excerpt of the piece here below:

"In the gripping new Italian novel in translation A Girl Returned, a young girl’s adoptive parents suddenly bring her back to her birth mother, thirteen years later, as if she were an expired item. Adoptions are typically permanent, no? Not in this novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, who deftly grapples here with the holy trifecta of human emotions (and thus, fiction): love, longing and loss.

"The stunning turn of events propels the girl into a new world. The first person she meets in the other home is Adriana, a sister whose existence she has heretofore known nothing about. The move to the new house forces her to exchange life as an only child for a home where she shares a bedroom with four siblings, including three teenage boys. Her sense of alarm (and the reader’s) is underscored when she tries to escape by pretending she has left something in her adoptive father’s car. Once inside the car, she activates the locks, begging him to take her back. As he forcibly removes her, the narrator comments, “In his grip I no longer recognized the hand of the taciturn father I’d lived with until that morning.” It seems an act of unmitigated cruelty by the father—and in one way, it surely is—but maverick plot twists revealed later in this startlingly suspenseful book will somewhat attenuate that verdict."

-30-

From the Leo Journal: ROAR!

Feb. 22, 2017

2:17 p.m.

While he plays by himself, I overhear him as he says again and again one word: “Roar!” He loves to pretend he’s a baby puma. Whence the obsession? Also, who cares?

Hearing a child yell "roar" must be one of life’s tender mercies. Oh wait, there's more. It’s my child, the one I think hangs the moon.

***
Dept. of Lost Diary Entries

This one's for Brenda and Eddie (or post-Italy blues)

Driving home in a trance from JFK, some 20 hours after leaving our hotel in Rome, Mike prowled the radio dial for anything that would keep him awake while behind the wheel. Before long, the unmistakable bars of Billy Joel’s "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" came across, serenading us through our disorientation and regret as only the Piano Man can. Oh it felt right to this former Long Islander. Just as Brenda and Eddie went back to the green (even though “you can never go back there again”), we, too, had returned. To our green. Italy. 

Billy got it wrong – you can go back, but you probably can’t stay. That’s the catch. And fate will have you driving across the Whitestone Bridge, commiserating with Brenda and Eddie – who started to fight when the money got tight and just didn’t count on the tears – but it will be another grievance that you’re nursing. 

A grievance that torments inasmuch as it pulls you in two different directions at once. 

Forget time travel. I want to be here – and there. Qui ma anche lì. At the same time. And 20 years is a long time to be pulverized by this particular type of Italian torque. 

So what will it be, a bottle of red or a bottle of white?

***
Lost diary entry