Despite our name, we are a writers' group born of the pandemic but not particularly devoted to writing about Covid 19, rather, we write because of Covid and an escape from it. Following Kim De Bon's final memoir class at the Burlington Seniors' Centre, one fateful Thursday in March, 2020, two of our members discussed the unpromising future. Our forecast was that our wonderful Seniors' Center would be one of the first institutions to close and the last to fully re-open. Our forecast...
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Despite our name, we are a writers' group born of the pandemic but not particularly devoted to writing about Covid 19, rather, we write because of Covid and an escape from it. Following Kim De Bon's final memoir class at the Burlington Seniors' Centre, one fateful Thursday in March, 2020, two of our members discussed the unpromising future. Our forecast was that our wonderful Seniors' Center would be one of the first institutions to close and the last to fully re-open. Our forecast was fulfilled. We felt abandoned and alone. What were we going to do about it? Keep on writing, of course! And that is what we did, taking turns to suggest topics.
Scribbling five days a week, the two of us produced some sixty written pieces each within a few months. Once, short of ideas, I espied two small potatoes on the kitchen counter and off we went. The potato originating in South America; relative of the tomato; and how the great famine in Ireland resulted from the over-reliance on one kind of potato and so on....
Soon, we were joined by two more veteran writers and not long after by another. We had all met at the centre as our paths crossed. Each week, we wrote a piece and then read our work over lunch, maintaining a social, in-person contact in a bubble, observing official protocols for the most part. We were aware of the fate of unfortunate seniors living in congregated settings, unable to socialize and force to live apart from each other like solitary confinement, cut off from loved ones. Other folks trapped alone at home without friends and family, isolated and cut off from human contact. We considered ourselves to be lucky to have each other.
In that great 14th century work of literature, The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, the tales are told by a group of friends isolating from the Plague, now called the Black Death. These stories were told to entertain. They were ribald, salacious, humorous, witty but not about the plague itself. Let us try to emulate them.