Stories and Poetry from the Lockdown
In quarantine, almost everything has changed—but it has changed for all of us, all at once. As difficult as isolation is, we all share this moment. We are connected the world-over like during no global calamity that has come before. And our stories can help us navigate this pandemic in this moment. They can help us understand it through other people’s eyes. And they can help us remember how it has affected everyone’s lives.
In these stories, a magical clock that last chimed during the Spanish flu is uncovered; neighbours learn everything about each other through their facing windows; one woman’s quarantine feels oddly like a house cat’s; and ghosts of the past come to dinner when no one else can. The stories in this issue were all composed this year. They sprang from the experiences and imaginations of almost twenty different authors grappling with the pandemic.
This issue presents enchanting and affirming short stories from Yvette Viets Flaten, Emma McKee, DC Van Schaick, Amy Lord, Anna McCarthy, Coles Lee, Miriam Huxley, Gabrielle Mullarkey, Douglas W Milliken, and Rekha Valliappan. It includes moving and inspiring poetry by Victoria Fifield, Nancy Cook, Gerard Sarnat, Katrina Dybzynska, Ronda Piszk Broatch, Jen Karetnick, and Anvesh Jain, as well as art from Ann Marie Sekeres, Brenda Mann Hammack, Laisve Rose, and Leo Wijnhoven. This issue also features interviews with the multi-award-winning author Namwali Serpell, whose first novel, the intergenerational epic, The Old Drift has been called “extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling” by Salman Rushdie; and with Phumlani Pikoli, the author and multidisciplinary artist who’s been cited as an “urgent new voice in South African fiction”.
The work of these authors and artists all bear witness to the greatest health crisis of our times. Through stories, we are deciding what is essential to our lives, we are figuring out what the phrase “the new normal” really means, and we are discovering, we’re all in this together.
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