Writing as Inquiry During a Pandemic

Abstract

Standing on a knife’s edge is to write words that cut. We can enter such spaces by witnessing and encountering the COVID 19 pandemic’s devastating impacts. The suffering that ensues may lead to an emptiness that feels as if words have abandoned us. These unspoken words may build up inside, and eventually explode like a full dam, it’s power, bursting a hole in the fabric of our lives. The release can be experienced as a loss that becomes an opening. Riding this intense wave of affect to wherever it takes us, is to write as inquiry within a pandemic.