Where the Stories of the Pandemic Will Live
Last February, the birds still looked like birds. Then in March, they swung through the air, gilded and strange. We stood at our windows, marveling as their wings lifted them above human miscalculation, away from the deadly virus. Lucky, mythical creatures. Now, a year later, we humans are still grounded and mortal, sliding along the undulating sine curves of the pandemic — fear, panic, coping, rejiggering expectations, finding light, holding on. Through this process we are being transformed, by a moment in history we are certain we will never forget.
Somehow, we forgot the last pandemic. The 1918 flu was conspicuously downplayed in medical records, did not fill the pages of the newspapers, and was omitted from personal journals. We cannot locate the cacophony of beleaguered voices; we will never know what they felt, what the flu did to them. There are theories as to why: it was upstaged by the horrors of WWI; it pulled the rug from under the belief in the advancement of medicine; it was too overwhelming to reiterate. Citizens, soldiers, doctors, they did not want to face it, or couldn’t. Why extend the dastardly thing’s lifespan by writing it down?
Disease. We are sick. Dis-ease. We are unmoored. This time, every aspect of our experience of the pandemic is being documented. Stories of COVID-19 command our media, calling out the complexity of our situation. We expose the egregiousness of the privileged, the plight of the vulnerable, the skewed range of humanitarian efforts stemming from our communities and our governments. And, with all of this spinning around us, we lay bare our own stories.
Since 2020, not long after the pandemic began, the Berkeley, CA based StoryCenter has been welcoming peoples’ COVID-19 stories, offering supportive, online spaces “where personal struggles and moments of courage” are shared, and virtual communities are cultivated. They provide inclusive and specific workshops — some for women, one for people of color identifying as queer or trans, others for nurses and other health workers. They offer webinars to help organizations, groups and individuals collect their own stories, and created an online space for publishing this writing– to serve as an archive of feeling, of everyday pandemic moments, in contrast to the crush of the newsfeed, the unfurling numbers of those who test positive, those who have been hospitalized, those who have died.
The organization began in 1994 as the San Francisco Center for Digital Media. Its founders wanted to explore how digital media tools could be used to empower personal storytelling. Since then, its staff and facilitators have worked with nearly a thousand organizations around the world and trained more than fifteen thousand people to share stories from their lives. They use trauma-informed methods to support people as they unravel and unveil their stories, and help people to heal, grow, or just be, during this catastrophic global event. Their organization’s motto is a reminder and a request: Listen deeply…tell stories.
A storyteller and a listener each have work to do. We are all, in sociological terms, “situated,” in the midst of our beliefs, biases, and histories. Telling, and listening, to peoples’ stories is a careful process of acknowledging these influences, and reminding ourselves that we may not realize their effects on us. StoryCenter’s approach honors this. In her paper Digital Storytelling for Gender Justice, StoryCenter facilitator Amy Hill writes, “engaging workshop participants in conversations that encourage them to critically analyze and contextualize their own memories can lead to nuanced stories that don’t take “experience” at face value…” She would rather they feel that their stories are continually “unfolding” within their particular social contexts. There are a multitude of truths to be aware of, even while we are being true to ourselves.
In February, 2020, curators at the National Museum of American History had been planning an exhibit about pandemics called “In Sickness and in Health.” They were not yet finished in March, when they heard about a deadly, new disease carving its path across the planet. Suddenly, they found themselves living the very story they were gathering. They pushed back the exhibit opening to 2022 and shifted gears, collecting, struggling to capture this zeitgeist. How, and what, might we want to remember? Which objects, which words, could possibly convey a broad and layered spectrum of human experience? They needed to evoke, to trigger, to remind, and were aware of the complexity of this task.
The careful, empathetic efforts to preserve this era’s stories will help future generations to look back and see us, situated, in this place and time. If the hope is that they will glean lessons, change approaches, do better (and it is), they’ll need to dig into mountains of our stories to see a whole pandemic, and do the work of reflecting. For us, March has arrived again. We trudged an arduous arc around the Sun, carrying a weighty virus on our backs. We will be living in its midst for some time yet, and our healing, future-thinking work will be to tell our stories, to listen to others’, and to keep creating the spaces to hold them all.
(To listen to COVID-19 stories shared through StoryCenter’s programs, you can join them for a free showcase, A Year in the Life of a Pandemic, on March 26.)
