Finding Community in Quarantine
In the more than four months that my husband and I have been homebound, we’ve developed a sort of running joke about his social life. Namely that quarantine may just be the best thing that’s ever happened to it.
For Emmett, isolation has provoked a new level of proactivity about staying in touch. He gets on Google Hangouts with his high school besties. He hosts trivia nights with his friends from when we lived in Toronto. He voluntarily wakes up at 6am to play virtual golf with one of his buddies who lives in Australia. Emmett ‘sees,’ it’s no exaggeration to say, far more of his friends now than he did pre-COVID.
Isolation has made me proactive too, albeit in a different way. My calendar has filled not with social engagements or online games, but with writing and reading groups. I even have two, stacked back-to-back, every Thursday night.
Some of these groups started before the pandemic struck. My Vicarious Reading Book Club, for example, has limped along virtually, though in-depth discussions once had at on-theme restaurants have been replaced by Zoom chats where the ratio of book chatting to life bitching has tipped firmly in favor of the latter.
And my emerging writer’s workshop, which met just once at The Wing pre-virus (and pre-scandal), has gained a ton of momentum online. What began as a bunch of women gabbing about our writing goals has, thanks to the group’s virtuoso organizer Courtney Young, expanded to include free books (pictured above), complimentary subscriptions to The Paris Review, author interviews, workshopping, and even a quarterly stipend. Through this group, I’ve interviewed New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins, gained a mentor in author Courtney Maum, and used the first installment of my stipend to hire an editor for a manuscript I’ve been working on.
Other groups, meanwhile, got started after isolation began. At work, my department has started an anti-racist book club to help us rise to the challenge of being better citizens, activists, and allies. Last month, we discussed Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race? and Ibram Kendi’s Stamped From The Beginning. This month, I’m journaling my way through Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy.
Finally, two weeks ago I joined Writing Through Motherhood, a workshop that, as the name implies, is tailored to the creative challenges shared by mothers. Nine of us gather each Thursday evening, often with small children in our laps, to talk about the strangeness of trying to balance our roles as parents, workers, and (wannabe) writers. Though it hasn’t yet spurred me to new levels of proactivity, it has made me feel a little less alone.
And as time stretches on, into an infinite landscape of sameness punctuated by the occasional Seamless order or package delivery, these groups have become the biggest source of growth, community, and diversion in my otherwise unchanging days. So my advice to you? Get yourself a writing group and sign up for a book club. Or, if you prefer Emmett’s approach, there’s always 6am virtual golf.