by Rachel Cohen, Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago

 

December 18, 2020

 

We welcome you to the Writing in Crisis magazine. Writing in Crisis was an advanced creative writing workshop for graduate and undergraduate students held at the virtual University of Chicago in the eventful fall of 2020. It was our collective idea to create a document of this time, a time of crises, when we were working on writing without knowing any of the endings – in the pandemic, in electoral politics, in the struggle for racial justice, the epoch of technological transformation, the era of climate change, and in our own individual progress. It was my privilege to be the professor of this extraordinary group of students and writers.

 

The ten members of the Writing in Crisis collective were in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. They walked their neighborhoods, read variously, kept notebooks, conducted interviews. Some of these interviews – with children going to school remotely and in person (interviewed by Brooke Werdlow), with a worker at Café 53 in Hyde Park (interviewed by Susie Xu), with a public school teacher (interviewed by Alisa Boland) – are included here. Other short pieces catch a quality particular to this time: the struggle to find literary domiciles that will hold our racing minds as we pickle beets, visit our aged grandparents, order takeout, take our medications, go for a drive, walk, try to write, walk, try to write.

 

As we worked, week by week, despite the intense isolation of these months, the members of our class found many kinds of common ground. Indelible experiences of the pandemic were captured – through glass in Lucy Ritzmann’s poetic “East Meadow,” as an inventive play in Alisa Boland’s “Scenes from a Pandemic,” in the ominous co-presence of the police and the virus in in Marie-Capucine Pineau-Valancienne’s “A Walk in the Park,” and in the brilliantly relevant world of werewolvery in Brooke Werdlow’s “How to Become a Werewolf (Revised for Safety During a Pandemic)”.  It was of help to us all that the tactile world did continue to exist, and the still-possible-to-plunge-one’s-hands-into was given new form in Hannah Judd’s contrapuntal “Clay Bodies,” and in Maya Osman-Krinsky’s brave and quiet “On Shaping.”  As we tried to see what writing may do and aspire to, we found ourselves reflecting on unrepresentability in different media. Members of our class thought about this with sharp political analysis, when taking photographs at a racial justice rally, in Spencer Gordon-Sand’s “Fits Well with the Narrative;” and when studying photographs of climate change in Anthony Karambelas’s “Portrait of a Mother.”  In another variation on mediation, Jenna Routenberg’s strong, original voice reflects on the televised understanding of presidential office in “A Reason.”

 

Throughout our time together, we were grounded by reading – reading one another’s work, and reading the work of writers we admired. This helped us hold on to a sense of the longer continuities we hoped to return to and to reach towards. In Susie Xu’s meditation on time and mortality, “If the Air Stops Rising: on stretching and pausing time,” she tells a story of a light kept lit for 600 years in Ahmedabad. I think this beautiful paragraph from her essay suggests something of the hoped-for purpose of a documentary collection like this one we have made:

 

If one chooses to believe, time does not emphasize ideology, but indexes all that comes and goes. Just as lights depend on burning, years are only possible when they’re filled with sprouting and wilting, riots and wars and floods and rain. “600 years” is all that happened in those years, with all its happiness and hardships. After all, ignoring the specificity of the number shortens the depth and weight of histories; to erase time is to forget all those who came and went—the burning and light.

 

—Susie Xu, “If the Air Stops Rising: on stretching and pausing time”

 

 

Thank you for joining us in the ether.

 

 

                                                                                                — Rachel Cohen

                                                                                                     Professor of Practice in the Arts

                                                                                                     University of Chicago

https://www.rachelecohen.com/