List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Writing COVID-19 Lives
Irene Gammel and Jason Wang
PART I LIFE WRITING AS PANDEMIC SELF-EXPLORATION
1 What Is a Pandemic Good For? Blurred Days and Live Memories
Julia Watson
2 “I Imagine the Circumstances of My Death”: Life Writing as Radical Absence in Kate Baer’s COVID-19-Era Poetry
Irene Gammel and Jason Wang
3 Aftershocks: “However Did I Pass the Time?” COVID-19 Autofiction as Trauma Narrative
Marjorie Worthington
4 Beyond Wuhan Diary: Rethinking Autobiographical Norms Amid COVID-19
Marjorie Dryburgh
PART II LIFE WRITING AS ARCHIVAL TESTIMONIES
5 COVID-19 Pandemic Diaries: Tracing Conditions of Appearance and Disappearance
Julie Rak
6 Crowdsourced: COVID-19, Life Writing, and Collective Memory in Latvia
Sanita Reinsone, Ilze Ļaksa-Timinska, Haralds Matulis, and Elvīra Žvarte
7 Postcards From Lockdown: Women’s Pandemic Lives
Kristina Bhaun and Irene Gammel
PART III LIFE WRITING THROUGH MEDIA ECOLOGIES
8 Fragments of Care: Hassan Akkad’s Refugee Testimony in a Time of Crisis
Ana Belén Martínez García
9 Being the Comic Art: Loss, Creation, and Lessons Drawn From COVID-19
Christopher J. Gilbert
10 Worlding the Post-Pandemic: On Documenting, and Enduring Lockdown
Brent Luvaas
Coda: I Am Here, This Is Happening: Life Writing and the Pandemic’s Echoes
J. Michael Ryan
Index
Biography
Irene Gammel, FRSC, is a professor of art, literature, and culture and the director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research explores life writing, trauma narratives, modern literature and visual culture, and the performance of self in public. She is the author and editor of 15 books, including Looking for Anne of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery and Her Timeless Heroine (2025), I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (2020), and Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (2002), and the winner of the C. P. Stacey Award. She has coedited many books including Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022). Her work investigates how individuals narrate personal and collective histories in times of crisis and cultural change.
Jason Wang’s research explores how modernist and contemporary literature and media encode power, politics, and social values. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Urban Walking: Configuring the Modern City as Cultural and Spatial Practice,” explored the aesthetics of spatial politics and the politics of spatial aesthetics in urban literature and culture from the early twentieth century to the postindustrial period. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022). He has contributed chapters to Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (2019) and Confluences 2: Essays on the New Canadian Literature (2017) as well as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Wang is a lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Fashion.
