EXPRESS YOURSELF

Why Writing Matters, Even in a Pandemic

We won’t forget all the mundane intricacies of life during the time of Covid-19 — thanks to the personal essay

Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918. / Photo: Library of Congress

The reliance of contemporary journalism, particularly online journalism, on the personal essay has been the subject of criticism and sometimes revulsion — often with subtexts about generations and gender, navel-gazing youth taught by years of therapy to look within for the most important subject.

Then the pandemic happened.

When it did, a lot of us looked back to the last similar pandemic, in 1918, to see what life was like when the whole world was vulnerable, when people were masked and cities stuck in a cycle of shutdowns and reopenings. And a lot of us didn’t find very much, a phenomenon that was baffling historians who had been looking at it long before Covid-19 sent readers reeling back through the pages to get a sense of how to get by and get through.

Photographing a Year in Quarantine