Lives InterruptedThe Year in Canada Alana Bell (bio) Though a recent CBC News article claimed that "compared with its peers in Europe and North America, Canada's pandemic experience has been less intense—and less deadly," the lifewriting texts produced from March 2020 onward suggest that COVID-19 has affected the everyday lives of Canadians profoundly (Dyer). Canada has so far produced few book-length publications about the pandemic, but life writing in the more immediate and fragmented forms of newspaper and magazine articles and social media posts has abounded, and these texts are crucial to our understanding of this moment. Here, I consider texts that may be predictive of the retrospective, book-length Canadian pandemic life writing to come, either because they are written by established writers or frontline health care workers experiencing a sudden celebrity. They offer a window into the COVID experiences of Canadians from various backgrounds and geographic locations. All are crisis texts in Susanna Egan's use of the term, narrated in the midst of an "unstable condition seeking change" (5), but in these narratives, the unstable condition is often the radical change itself brought on by lockdowns, public health measures, and mass casualty events. As Carolyn Hughes Tuohy writes in the Royal Society of Canada's COVID-19 series, "How we move through and emerge from the current COVID-19 pandemic will depend in large part on the stories we tell about it." Written primarily from March to August 2020, these narratives offer the earliest representations of selves experiencing this once-in-a-century crisis, and provide the first windows into where we might go from here. Perhaps most predictive of the long-form life writing to come are the short narratives of some of Canada's award-winning writers collected in the three volumes of Telegrams from Home, a special edition of the Toronto monthly independent community newspaper West End Phoenix. Founded in 2017 by writer and musician Dave Bidini, West End Phoenix began by covering local stories, but has since expanded its focus to people and events across the city, and in some cases, the nation. Telegrams from Home, the first volume of which was published in print in [End Page 31] May 2020, marks a departure from the WEP's usual format in that it includes stories from people across Canada, and the paper partnered with Kobo, a Canadian e-reader company originally established by Indigo Books, embracing technology to reach a wider audience. Though each of the three volumes in the collection addresses a different moment and focus in the pandemic, all three were published between May and August of 2020—years apart in early pandemic time, but retrospectively from the same general era of the COVID-19 crisis in Canada. I focus primarily on volume 1: Life Under Lockdown, but I also look at volumes 2 and 3, exploring the collection thematically rather than chronologically. Roughly speaking, the first volume addresses the shock of going into lockdown, the second documents Canadians' gradual adjustment to their pandemic situation, and the third, released on July 29—the day Ontario, one of Canada's hardest hit provinces, moved to Stage 3 of reopening—looks at where we might go from here. In the life writing collected in all three volumes, writers negotiate the sudden rupture in the day-to-day, describing an altering of time and space that challenges narrative voice and affects social and work routines. They seek to understand their current situation by connecting the crisis with past or ongoing trauma, and they acknowledge that with the tremendous loss associated with the pandemic have come unexpected gains. Many of the narratives feature technology, either rejecting it for more analog pursuits or embracing its possibilities for sharing stories. Collected early in our nationwide lockdown, the first volume of Telegrams from Home describes moments of shock and anxiety caused by the sudden shift in day-to-day experience and resulting in a loss of narrative voice. In her introduction, editor Melanie Morassutti admits that she initially hesitated to request stories from writers, and when she did reach out, the response was tentative at best. "I have no narrative voice right now...