Writing COVID-19 Lives examines how people turned to life writing—often in fragile, makeshift forms—to make sense of the pandemic. Across poetry, memoir, autofiction, photography, sketchbooks, diaries, postcards, and digital storytelling, the collection traces a pandemic aesthetic marked by brevity, fracture, and pause: an autobiographical “I” that is unsettled, doubled, or dispersed. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief, “you learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” That grasping—the search for a voice that could still speak—threads through these essays.

Spanning case studies from Canada, the United States, China, Latvia, Peru, the United Kingdom, and Spain, the volume situates these works amid uneven conditions of care, precarity, surveillance, and loss. We encounter poetry written into silence; memoirs shaped by Zoom-mediated mourning; autofiction working through trauma; and photographic diaries—such as Marvin Heiferman’s Photographic Shiva—that turn domestic objects into charged residues of grief.

Rather than offering a single story of “the pandemic,” the volume assembles a textured archive of how lives were written—tenderly, urgently, and sometimes beautifully—under unprecedented constraint.

Irene Gammel, FRSC, is Professor of Art, Literature, and Culture and Director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research explores life writing, trauma narratives, modern literature and visual culture, and the performance of self in public. She is the author and editor of fifteen books, including Looking for Anne of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery and her Timeless Heroine (2025), I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (2020), winner of the C. P. Stacey Award, and Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (2002). She has coedited many books including Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022). Her work investigates how individuals narrate personal and collective histories in times of crisis and cultural change.

Jason Wang’s research explores how modernist and contemporary literature and media encode power, politics and social values. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Urban Walking: Configuring the Modern City as Cultural and Spatial Practice,” explored the aesthetics of spatial politics and the politics of spatial aesthetics in urban literature and culture from the early twentieth century to the postindustrial period. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022). He has contributed chapters to Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (2019) and Confluences 2: Essays on the New Canadian Literature (2017) as well as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Wang is a Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Fashion.