Deborah Shepard Books
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Conference Paper
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Writer's Stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
    • From Being Mentored to Book Publication
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact

In the time of coronavirus

A collection of stories submitted by the public on their experience of living through the time of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives. Globally the scale of human suffering as a consequence of Covid-19 has been very great. Everywhere people are now reflecting on what this major and previously unimaginable global crisis means for us, as individuals, living in the 21st century. This forum offers a space for writers to reflect on their experience in Aotearoa and to consider questions such as: What might we need to remember and preserve? What has been my experience, my observations, how might my priorities have shifted, in a good way, as a result of the lockdowns? If you would like to contribute to the re-collective effort through any of the following life writing formats — journalling, nature writing, memoir, commentary, poetry, notes on work in progress during lockdown… — please make initial contact through my contact page. Next prepare a page of A4 writing, starting in the present moment and moving where you need to into the recent past and forwards from that point, with a title, brief bio, photo (optional) and your contribution will be added to the repository of important writings flowering in this space.

“Securing the memory of COVID-19 is the minimum we owe to each other in the aftermath of this catastrophe.”

Richard Horton, “Covid-19 and the Ethics of memory", The Lancet , 6 June 2020
Picture

Rooms by Edna Heled

27/10/2021

0 Comments

 
Edna is an artist, art therapist, counsellor and travel journalist from Auckland with an MA in Art Therapy (overseas) and a BA (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Auckland. Her writing includes short stories, travel writing and non-fiction. Her poems have been published widely including The Poetry NZ YearBook 2021 and Poetry for the Planet Australia.
 
Our records show
   you are due
for your eye check  
                     you are due
         please ring our rooms     to make an appointment
                     for your eye check
very important that you have this check
or you risk becoming 
blind
don't you freeze now - 
ring
come to our rooms
our rooms are relatively safe
we are doing our best 
PPE and the rest
because we know 
you might catch the virus and die
but at least
you will be looking death in the eye
        because you are due
for your eye check
           when the world is frosted glass
and you only want black in front of your eyes
the records show
you are due
to check your eyes 
so you can
see
0 Comments

Locking Down by Paddy Richardson

13/10/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture














​


















​Paddy Richardson is the author of two collections of short stories and seven novels. She has been awarded four Creative New Zealand Awards, the University of Otago Burns Fellowship, the Beatson Fellowship, the James Wallace Arts Trust Residency Award and the Randell House Residency. Paddy is a mentor and assessor for NZSA. Her latest novel, 'By the Green of the Spring’, will be published early next year.
 
I am picking up my grandson, Oli, from his drumming lessons. While I wait, I listen to National Radio. Today, there has been one covid community case found in Auckland. On the drive home I tell Oli and he tells me how Covid attacks the body, how anti-bodies ‘go nuts’ trying to fight it and how they end up destroying the body they’re trying to protect. We talk about vaccination, about anti-vaxers. We talk about the right to choose but how personal choice might affect other people. He’s a twelve-year-old boy, immensely interesting, in his knowledge and humour and ideas. We talk idly. One case in Auckland doesn’t seem all that significant.
 
But it is. There’s a press conference. Jacinda’s steady, confident voice contrasts markedly with the visible concern on her face.  It looks as if Delta has made it to New Zealand.
 
And here we go again. Lockdown. The one o’clock conferences, where we watch as the numbers climb and now, dammit, it’s spread to Wellington. The analysis. The clamouring questions from the gathered media. Do they really want answers or are they merely trying to make a point? Never mind. Everyone’s excitable. Everyone’s stressed. It’s a bit of light relief when somebody asks Jacinda about the safety concerns relating to sexual intercourse during hospital visits.
 
As for me, I’ve not long returned from clearing out my mother’s house in Nelson after her recent death. I was looking forward to coming home, being with my own family again, catching up with friends. I thought, maybe, I’ll get some writing done over lockdown. Instead, I find myself languishing on a sofa like a Victorian invalid.
 
Clearing out Mum’s house was physically challenging, the emotional journey harder still. Tucked away in her drawers were her swimsuits. Until the last year of her life, Mum swam every day from Spring to late Autumn in the sea at the bottom of the street. We both loved swimming, both loved the sea. '
 
It was the china, crystal, embroidered linen, silver, the ornaments, that I found hardest.
So many precious possessions which had accompanied her from Northland to Christchurch to Nelson to Dunedin. And back her treasures came again to Nelson, when she and Dad moved into their house - (brand new!)- to reside, finally, in the glass-fronted cabinets. The pretty tea-sets, the pieces of Wedgewood, the embroidered table and tray-cloths I could remember Mum working on at night. Listening to serials on the radio in our house in Christchurch, the hoop with the fine linen stretched across it as Mum created tiny flowers from bright-coloured silks. I found her wedding dress, exquisitely hand-stitched.  In her wedding photos, Mum is beautiful, radiantly smiling.
 
Mother-daughter relationships, though basically loving, can be tumultuous, frustrating, distressing; there is the urge to both connect and to pull free. As I drove away from Mum’s house in Nelson and began the long journey to Dunedin, I felt overwhelmed with sadness, anger as well. Was it her or was it me? We so rarely understood each other. So often, we disappointed each other. And now, now, I ’d given away so many of her precious things.
 
But it was the good things Mum’s precious belongings, those which signified our closeness I chose.  In level three, the boxes arrived. My Nana’s beautiful Royal Doulton bowl, the pretty cup, saucer and plate set I bought Mum for Mother’s Day from Woolworths for two shillings and sixpence, the tea-set made from frail, see-through china Mum and Dad were given as a wedding present, the small crystal glasses they brought back from London after their long- awaited overseas trip to Europe. The tall, multi-coloured glasses they bought in the ‘sixties when they discovered Pimms was a much nicer evening drink than sherry. Ah, such sophistication. 
 
And Nana’s bowl. From Devon, to Tangowahine, to Christchurch, to Nelson, to Dunedin. And to Nelson again. In every house it was placed on a table in the hallway. Always filled with flowers.  My mother loved flowers. And now it’s here with me in Broad Bay, Dunedin.  Vibrantly coloured in deep blues, greens and gold, it has survived and witnessed much. I have it beside the window in my living room, facing the sea. I’ve filled it with orchids.

1 Comment

The Flowers Told the Story by Sylvia Nagl

6/10/2021

0 Comments

 
Sylvia is a scientist who grew up in Europe and in her writing is particularly interested in the impacts of large world events on the lives of individuals.

It was the 26th of April 1986, my mother’s 60th birthday. A day of hiking in the mountains had been her special birthday wish. So here we were, on an exposed track through a large pine plantation that had just been clear felled. As we were nearing the summit, my mother was turning east, towards Russia. She said: ”I don’t know what it can possibly be, but there is something really wrong. I can feel it.”

​This was the day that reactor number 4 at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded. Later it was said that the radioactive contamination ejected was five hundred times greater than that released by the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
           

My parents lived about 1,000 km west of Chernobyl. This felt alarmingly close. At the same time, it is an enduring mystery to me how my mother could have sensed serious, intangible danger from this distance. But she did.

Over the next days, we were locked down like we are now, but could follow the ominous radioactive cloud growing and drifting across the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, the Baltic states, Finland, Norway and Sweden on the evening news. Then it was further advancing across Europe on its unrelenting westward progress. As bad weather set in and rain came down, the radioactive fallout came down too. All we could do was shelter in my parents’ home.

Growing up in Europe during the Cold War, I had lived with a potential radioactive cloud over my head every day of my life. The numbers of accumulated nuclear weapons on either side of the Iron Curtain were beyond comprehension. We all were acutely aware that we could be annihilated at any moment, either through a nuclear accident or an act of war. Now, our worst fears seemed to have materialised. But then, in the following weeks, it emerged that the wind and rain patterns in this fateful time seemed to have largely spared my hometown, so very close to the Iron Curtain, from the fallout.

But the living world had not been untouched. As spring turned to summer, my mother’s carefully tended organic vegetables in the garden and the flowering plants in the forest she loved developed strange mutations. Spiders were building asymmetrical webs. The ordered geometries of nature’s forms were lost and what had taken their place was chaotic. It was an overwhelming experience, although it happened almost imperceptibly. It was like an apocalyptic horror movie without special effects. One had to observe closely to realise the monstrous events that had taken place. It was a catastrophe at the level of the molecules that make up life.
0 Comments

Poets are Meant to be Neurotic by Piers Davies

6/10/2021

0 Comments

 
​Piers Davies has been a poet for many decades and a scriptwriter of feature films in New Zealand and Australia. He is co-cordinator of Titirangi Poets. As poets seemed to be especially affected by Lockdowns, Titirangi Poets are producing Ezines that mirror poetic feelings during COVID-19. This poem from March 2021 reflects the influence of a survey of great American writers of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries which found that playwrights are more likely to be alcoholics and poets neurotic.
 
POETS ARE MEANT TO BE NEUROTIC
 
My obsessions are getting worse
at first it was the choice of cutlery
then glasses and Crown Lynn plates
and what about the 2 white ducks
splashing through the poisonous creek
can they survive the toxicity
who will feed them during Lockdowns?
 
Now I scroll the internet obsessively
for every COVID mini-update
checking that everyone scans in
and keeps their social distance.
 
It would be so much better
to be an alcoholic playwright
lost in a befuddling whisky haze.
0 Comments
    WRITING GUIDELINES

    Archives

    February 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020

    Authors

    All
    Abby Letteri
    Anissa Ljanta
    Anita Arlov
    Annabel Schuler
    Anna Fomison
    Brian Sorrell
    Catherine Moorhead
    Cath Koa Dunsford
    Cynthia Smith
    David Arrowsmith
    David Hill
    Delis Pitt
    Diane Brown
    Edna Heled
    Elizabeth McRae
    Estelle Mendelsohn
    Eva De Jong
    Faith Cleverley
    Fiona Kidman
    Fredrika Van Elburg
    Gregory O'Brien
    Helene Connor
    Jane Bissell
    Janet De Witt
    Janine
    Jeanette De Heer
    Jicca Smith
    John Adams
    Julie Ryan
    Keith Woodley
    Leigh Burrell
    Liz March
    Liz Wilson
    Lora Mountjoy
    Margo Knightbridge
    Marilyn Eales
    Mary Elsmore-Neilson
    Megan Hutching
    Michelanne Forster
    Paddy Richardson
    Pamela Gordon
    Pat Backley
    Philip Temple
    Piers Davies
    Rex McGregor
    Robyn Welsh
    Roger Horrocks
    Ruth Bonita
    Ruth Busch
    Sandy Plummer
    Silvia
    Siobhan Harvey
    Sue Berman
    Sue Fitchett
    Sylvia Nagl
    Tessa Duder
    Tony Eyre
    Trevor M Landers
    Yvonne Van Dongen

    RSS Feed

Deborah thanks Rangimarie Kelly and Pikau Digtal for website design and artist Karen Jarvis for her image ‘Writers at the Devonport Library,’ (2023)
Writing Memoir
Defining Memoir
The Participatory Model
Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
​From Writing Course to Book Publication
Your Writing Space
​Writing on a Theme
Reviews of Memoir
Writers Stories
​
Events
​About
Testimonials
What People Say

Media
​Contact
Copyright © 2023 Deborah Shepard
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Conference Paper
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Writer's Stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
    • From Being Mentored to Book Publication
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact