What I Miss About Libraries

 

 

Ah! The feeling of a hardbound book in my hands! The rows upon rows of texts, stacked five high! The quiet, studious atmosphere!

If you’re like me, you are surely missing your local library. With the pandemic, my library has been closed for months. It seems like an eternity. In these days of Zoom meetings and digital readers, here are a few things I miss about libraries:

 1)      Librarians: Yes, Google helps me track down reference materials, but search engines are only as smart as I. Many an instance, librarians have taken my searches in directions I didn’t imagine and found surprising answers to my questions. And I can have a conversation with a librarian; the computer remains mute.

2)      A place to concentrate: I write at home. But, like most writers, I need to get out regularly for the creative juices to flow. At home, distractions abound: the television, family members and even the dog. At the library, it is just me and my thoughts, and ideas flow so much more easily.

3)      Conversations. This might contradict the previous point, but one of the things I enjoy about libraries are the random conversations with interesting persons. Yes, they can be distractions if overdone, but are refreshing and energizing if done intelligently.

         4)      Cozy corners and enchanting places: This is especially true with old libraries, with their long wooden tables and reading chairs hidden in unexpected places. These places transport me into a mood where, unsurprisingly, I become easily absorbed in my reading.

        5)      Heading home with a stack of books: Somehow, there is a special feeling of contentment and fulfilment in spending a couple of hours in the library, wandering through the stacks, exploring dozens of texts, choosing the appropriate ones, checking them out and planning which one to read first.

             Hopefully these dreadful pandemic restrictions will end soon, and we can all get back to our normal lives. And with any luck, my local library will open soon!

 

            Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation" a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

Will we write about the pandemic?

 

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When I attend Zoom meetings with other writers, someone always asks if we'll write about the current pandemic in our fiction. Invariably a couple of people reply they're so so tired of COVID-19 that when it's over they won't want to write or read anything about it. They hope to move on and write stories that imagine the pandemic hadn't happened.  

 

Given publishing timelines, most novels published the past year were written before the authors knew about COVID-19 or anticipated its enormous impact. This winter I've read a few novels set in our contemporary time and have had no trouble reading about people meeting in restaurants, attending parties and generally living like it's 2019. The only novel that jarred me was one that specified the year was 2020 and mentioned COVID-19 as a past event. I assume the author added this topical reference on the assumption we'd be done with the pandemic by the book's fall release. My conclusion is you can write a contemporary novel that ignores the coronavirus, but it's best to either keep the year vague or indicate that it's set before March 2020, when only someone living a cave would have missed the great changes to our society.     

  Timeline of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, January - April, 2020  

Other writers in my Zoom meetings expect they will explore the pandemic in their fiction, as they would do with anything that affects them profoundly. Some have already written short stories and poems about it. COVID-19 can be central to a story or simply part of the landscape. Your protagonist might be working from home, instead of going to her office. She might engage with friends and family on Zoom, in addition to the usual phone calls, letters, emails and text messages. When she does meet someone in person, his mask--or lack of mask--becomes a descriptive detail like his hairstyle or baseball cap. She might suddenly realize she's standing too close to him and leap backwards. The pandemic could provide our stories with fresh descriptions, until they become overdone because everyone is writing about COVID-19. There's a risk of saturating the market with too many coronavirus stories for readers who will have largely put the pandemic behind them. 

  

Writers can avoid dealing with all this by setting their stories after COVID-19, which, hopefully, won't be far in the future. But, in the post-pandemic world people won't necessarily be partying like it's 2019. How soon will it be before we're comfortable shaking hands with strangers and hugging acquaintances we meet? Will we stop doing these things for good to avoid catching all kinds of viruses? The common cold can drag someone down for weeks. The regular flu can kill. Is a handshake worth the risk? For these same reasons, will stores maintain some of their protective measures--plexiglass at the checkout counters, socially distanced lineups, one way aisles and hand sanitizer stations? Will buffet dinners be a thing of the past? Will airlines require passengers to keep wearing masks on planes or will most passengers choose to to wear them to avoid sharing diseases? Writers will need to know these details if they send their character to an exotic location or to the grocery store.     

 

This makes me think that writers of realistic contemporary fiction will have to deal with the pandemic, whether they want to or not. I suspect that when we're over COVID-fatigue most writers will find themselves processing the experience in their memories and work. Already, I feel a bit of nostalgia for the early days of COVID when few people wore masks in public and grocery store shelves were often picked clean of canned goods, frozen vegetables, milk, eggs and, of course toilet paper. One store I went into had a clerk guarding a stack of toilet paper to make sure no hoarders grabbed an extra package. That's a detail future readers of COVID-19 stories will find bizarre and informative about our pandemic.                             

 

 When will we feel comfortable in crowds like this?

 

Angels in the Architecture

 

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Happy New Year, dear readers.

I love New York City. Since I was a child, it has always been a place of mystery and wonder. On our way to visit my grandparents’ apartment, I would stare in wonder at the tall buildings, vast avenues, steam coming out of worksites. My parents would point out the West Side tenements where each had been born. My father would give us a nickel so we could ride the Staten Island Ferry and get a close look at the waters around and Miss Liberty shining her light from the harbor. Free Shakespeare performances in Central Park and my first Broadway show made me a lifelong lover of theater.

Angel in the architecture, New York City

The last time I was there was Valentine’s Day, 2020.  My husband and I traveled down by train from our home in Vermont to see our son performing in an off-Broadway play. The play was about love in all its forms and complexity and was the perfect date. Afterward, we walked to Greenwich Village and had a lovely late night meal together. We should do this more often, I thought.

Back in out tiny hotel, I looked across the street from our 8th floor window and noticed a building had been converted from its previous incarnation as a church. Some of the details remained intact, including a beautiful concrete angel, recently sand blasted clean. There are wonderful surprises like that, even in this city that is forever re-inventing itself.

I’ve thought about that angel often over this year that’s followed, here in our quarantined Vermont. That angel has looked over a city crippled by a deadly virus (which our son suffered with and survived) a shut down, and political mayhem. 

I hope she will guide us all to follow the better angels of our nature.

Travel Ban

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 Life in the time of pandemic has changed.  With children and grandchild living on another coast, my biggest challenge has been not being able to travel to see them.  

                                missing this little California fellow!

My husband and I share a love of travel, of seeing the world from a new perspective, learning about  new cultures, people, history. Here in Vermont we share a border with Canada and have beloved cousins there. No go, though only a few hours from the border! Our European dreams have been feasting on Rick Steves’ travelogues through beautiful counties on the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and along the Arno, Rhine, Danube. We now count on documentaries with drone flights across jungle claimed lost cities and imaginatively drained oceans in search of ancient cultures and shipwrecks.

                         guiding art lovers along trails that painter Thomas Cole hiked

Once upon a time, we conducted art tours through the mountains loved by the Hudson River School artists. Now we head to remote state parks and find beaches too crowded for us to get out of the car.

                                           The Piddocks have a lovely spot

Lately we’ve found a cure for our wanderlust...we've been taking walks through local graveyards and cemeteries, in search of lives that genealogists are trying to track down. You can find lists of such requests on FindaGrave.com.  Claim them to start your search. The oldest gravestones in our area are in church yards. We have seen some beautiful stone carvings from early America and our Federal period.  And the names! Sometimes the stones even the stories of lives well-lived or cut short by childbirth, disease, sudden violence. 

                                         The Ellis grave includes their wedding date...

Later in the the 19th century cemeteries were established in garden-like settings, for picnic visits with deceased loved ones. We found ourselves talking to the people on our lists, scraping away lichen from their stones to make out their dates. We were rarely in the company of the living except for an occasional groundskeeper or romping dog.  Ah, socially distanced mask freedom!

                                           keeping watch over fallen comrades

When we return home, I go on FindaGrave.com and log in our images of discoveries. 

A pleasant surprise? Within hours, my email inbox is usually full of messages from far-flung relatives with profound thanks.  

We recommend grave hunting to everyone.

The Kansas Flu Pandemic?

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COVID-19 piqued my interest in the Spanish flu, which devastated the world from 1918-1920. This led me to place library holds on several e-books about the subject. The first one available was More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War by Kenneth C. Davis. This short book, aimed at young adult readers, turned out to be an excellent primer on the pandemic. It taught me a lot I didn't know.

The Spanish flu was first noticed in Haskell County, Kansas in January, 1918. Two months later an outbreak appeared in a Kansas army training camp. More outbreaks erupted at other camps in the United States as the country prepared to enter World War I. US troops brought the disease to Europe and passed it on to other allied soldiers and civilians. German soldiers picked it up from allied prisoners they released.

Crowded sleeping area at Naval Training Station, San Francisco, California

Both sides in the war supressed news reports on the disease, to keep up morale and not let the enemy know their troops were weakened. Spain was neutral in WWI, which freed journalists to broadcast reports on the new disease striking their fellow citizens, including the king of Spain. The name Spanish flu stuck. To this day, Spain would like that error fixed. I might suggest calling it the Kansas flu pandemic, but the World Health Organization now recommends that we no longer name diseases after places to avoid the negative effects on nations, people and economies. To add to the controversy, some researchers speculate the Spanish flu originated in France, China or the eastern USA. Recent studies on recovered samples of the virus suggest it was initially transmitted by a bird.

Unlike most viruses, the Spanish flu, H1N1 influenza A virus, attacked a disproportionate number of healthy, young adults. One theory for this is that their strong immune systems overreacted. Another is that an earlier strain of the virus gave many in the older generation immunity. It's now estimated that the Spanish flu's four waves killed close to 100 million people worldwide , about 1/20th of those alive at the time. It is history's second most lethal pandemic, after the Black Death. 

Sprinkled through More Deadly Than War are stories of historical figures who contracted the disease. In addition to the Spanish king, Walt Disney and artist Edvard Munch recovered. US President Donald Trump's grandfather was an early victim. According to the family account, Frederick Trump was walking down a New York City street, when he suddenly took ill. He died the next day. The cruel virus tended to act swiftly. Some called it the three day fever. 

Was Edvard Munch's agonized painting "The Scream" partially inspired by his suffering from the Spanish flu?

The primary advice in 1918 for escaping the Spanish flu sounds familiar to people living through COVID-19 today. 

• Wash your hands. 
• Maintain a social distance. 
• Avoid crowds. 

A friend sent me links to my home city Calgary's history of the Spanish flu. We know the precise day the disease arrived - Oct 2, 2018, when a train from eastern Canada brought patients to Calgary's isolation hospital. Unfortunately, the measure didn't isolate the disease from Calgary residents. An estimated 38,000 people in our province of Alberta contracted the Spanish flu; 4,000 died.

Poster in 1918 Calgary, courtesy Glenbow Museum

Will my interest in the Spanish flu filter to my fiction writing? I'm mulling potential ideas for my next Calgary mystery novel.  

How a Pandemic Inspired my Writing

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In 2009 my husband Will and I spent a month in Italy. I hadn't been to Europe in fourteen years 

and was eager to return to its history and culture, but a little anxious about the adventure. Shortly before we were due to leave, the swine flu hit Mexico and the United States. Unlike most flus, including the current Coronavirus (COVID-19), the swine flu (H1N1) didn't largely kill the elderly and sick. A strain of the 1918 Spanish influenza virus, many healthy, younger people succumbed to H1N1, which quickly spread to Europe. People talked of a worldwide pandemic. And here we were setting out on a plane into this risky situation. I thought of cancelling the trip. But, out of my anxiety came an idea for a short story. A man, grieving the death of his wife, travels through Italy, worried about catching the swine flu. I'd call the story "Pandemic."

2009 H1N1 (Swine flu) Pandemic - laboratory confirmed cases and deaths

In the Rome airport, I noticed several people wearing surgical masks. This struck me as unusual, but now would be common for travel at any time. When I later wrote the story, I included this detail along with others I wrote in a journal I carried through Rome, Venice, Tuscany and Sorrento. Will and I rented weekly apartments in these locations, as did Tony, my story protagonist. I took photos and made notes about our residences, which were part of the story landscape along with the tourist attractions that Tony, Will and I visited.. "Pandemic's" first turning point occurs when Tony is impressed by Bernini's sculptures in the Galleria Borghese Museum in Rome. Tony thinks, as I did, that he is witnessing genius. How did Bernini make a pinch of skin on a marble thigh look soft and real?

Aside from occasional sightings of surgical masks, I forgot about the swine flu while absorbing Italy's museums, eating pizza and drinking wine in cafes, exploring ancient sites and warrens of medieval streets. After our trip, The World Health Organization declared H1N1/09 a Pandemic. It was tragic for the people who died. They were far fewer in number than those who die annually from a seasonal flu, and this is expected to be the case with COVID-19.

At home, I returned to my novel-in-progress, but Tony's story kept churning through my mind. Eventually, I sat down and wrote "Pandemic," my first work of fiction set in another country. Aided by my photos and journal notes, I found setting descriptions easier to write than ones in my stories set in Canada. Tony's encounter with two sisters while climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa felt fresher than scenes of people meeting in ordinary, North American restaurants. I've sometimes thought of  "Pandemic" as part story, part travelogue.

In "Pandemic," Tony and the sisters take comical photos of each other 'holding up' the Leaning Tower of Pisa

"Pandemic" isn't published yet. At almost 12,000 words, it's too long for most short story markets and too short for a novella, much less a novel. I've broken "Pandemic" down into four standalone stories, set in the different Italian locations. The Venice standalone is titled "Gondolier Groupies;"  Tuscany is "La Brezza." Still no luck with publication. Now, COVID-19 has prompted me to dust off  "Pandemic" and revise the whole story again.

I find it interesting to work on a story that aligns with the zeitgeist. Today's constant news and worry about a pandemic infuses Tony's actions and the story descriptions. I'd have thought that immersing myself in the fictional world of a crisis similar to COVID-19 might make me anxious about our present situation. Instead, it's a release from concerns of impending disaster, and this is one reason writers write.

In Venice, Tony embarks on an ill-fated adventure with two young women and a pair of gondoliers