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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.
We are now safely through the first phase of response to coronavirus in New Zealand and people are reflecting on what this major and previously unimaginable global catastrophe has meant for us, as individuals, in the 21st century. Globally the losses and the scale of human suffering have been very great. This forum offers a space to reflect upon the experience and to consider questions such as: What are we learning from the pandemic? What might we need to remember and preserve? Through the alert levels our prime minister said repeatedly, ‘Stay safe, be kind.’ What was your experience, what did you observe, what mattered and how might we re-imagine a better direction going forward? If you would like to contribute to the re-collective effort please send me your reflections, observations, journal entries, stories to my contact page... just a page of A4 writing, with a title and a brief bio and they will be added to the repository of important writings flowering in this space.

The search for knowledge is.. an exercise in reminiscence, that is, an effort to recall and recollect that which we once knew.

Ahsivai Margalit quoted in Richard Horton, “The Ethics of Memory,” The Lancet, 6 June 2020

In the bubble with Janet by Gregory O'Brien

2/8/2020

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Based in Wellington, Gregory O'Brien is a poet, artist, essayist and art curator. His most recent books are 'Always song in the water' (AUP 2019) and Melvin Day--Painter (VUP 2019). An exhibition of his paintings, 'The wading birds of Drybread' opens at the Ashburton Art Gallery in August 2020. His art is also included in the group exhibition 'Wai--the water project' at Pataka Art Museum, Porirua.

 
Janet Frame’s The Carpathians will be the last of the novels published during her lifetime to be translated into French. Esperluete will be releasing the book early in 2021 (a few months later than planned) in a translation by Pierre Furlan. It was Pierre who contacted me in March this year to see if I was interested in doing cover artwork for the French edition. The last time I provided cover art for Esperluete had been a few years earlier—for John Mulgan’s Man Alone (‘Seul’), also translated by Pierre.
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During the course of my correspondence with Pierre concerning the cover, he asked me a few questions about Janet Frame and some minor linguistic details of the book which were perplexing him. After what must have been a useful exchange of emails, he mentioned to the publisher the fact that I had visited Janet Frame a number of times while she was drafting the novel. As a result, they asked if I would be interested in writing an ‘Afterword’ for the forthcoming edition, offering a personal response to the book and possibly a way-in for French readers who, they suspected, might struggle with the strangeness of the novel and the unfamiliarity of its setting.

So it was that, during the Covid-19 lockdown, I found Janet Frame was very much in my bubble. I re-read Michael King’s biography, and I spent many hours mulling over two novels in particular--The Carpathians (‘Les Carpates’ in the French edition) and A State of Siege— both of which felt disarmingly attuned to the present global crisis. To be honest, both novels felt darker—and, certainly, more real—than when I last read them. Janet’s accustomed themes of social disintegration, dysfunction, toxicity, sanity, health and states of well-being had never felt more relevant. She remains, inarguably, the New Zealand writer most attuned to individual and societal manifestations of fragmentation and collapse. Towards the end of The Carpathians, the residents of Kowhai St in Puamahara (a thinly veiled Levin) are swept up in an apocalyptic course of events. It’s easy to start thinking that Janet Frame’s Memory Star, which is to blame for the empty streets and the altered ‘reality’ later in the book, is a precursor of the coronavirus: Covid-19 reconfigured as a satellite or asteroid. Her prescient novel has much to say of our current predicament and how we might eventually come to terms with it: ‘The inner tempests of a street, a town, a country, a world may be sensed, perhaps measured and recorded by poets and other artists, and later by historians, but it is certain they are not announced at the time of their happening.’
 
Gregory O’Brien

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Copyright © 2017 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 >
      • 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
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact