Letters from the Pandemic by Sasha Colby * Editor’s note: we are pleased to introduce Letters from the Pandemic: A 30th Anniversary Commemorative Public Writing Project of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program of Simon Fraser University (SFU). Sasha Colby, Director of Graduate Liberal Studies, provides an introduction (below) to the Pandemic Letters project. The letters…
Read more Letters from the Pandemic: Welcome
Letters from the Pandemic 20: Two Sisters From Alabama by Tom Morton * When I think about 2020 two events come to mind: the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Both events share stories of humanity, sacrifice, and death. When I think of the Covid-19 pandemic my mind does not focus on the…
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Letters from the Pandemic 19: My Dearest Maddie by Cindy Li * My Dearest Maddie: When your dad and I learned that we were expecting you, I could not in my wildest dreams have guessed what kind of world you would be born into. On February 22, 2020, you were born at BC Women’s Hospital….
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ESSAY: Walking in the time of Corona by Nina Watts * It was a Friday morning in May and I had arranged to meet my friend on a street corner close to her home in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver. We were planning an urban wander with no particular destination. As I walked west from…
Read more 1015 Letters from the Pandemic 18: Walking in the time of Corona
Letters from the Pandemic 17: Dear Antoinette by Jennifer Martin * Dear Antoinette, I saw a red dress today, made entirely of flowers, leaves, and branches. There is a wildness in this dress, with its hem of berries, grasses, and cedar, and I thought of how much it would become you. While I cannot admit…
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Letters from the Pandemic 16: Dear Percy by Jane Frankish * Dear Percy, In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, dated November 9, 1818, you write, “You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object….”[1] With this in mind, I would like to share with…
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Some overheard Hesiodic musings for recent times by Jerry Zaslove Dedicated to Graduate Liberal Studies Students Then and Now * Does Life without the Internet make one afraid? Maybe Life with the Internet makes one feel . . . “like” alone On the busses I hear “like” uttered often: it’s an interject. I wonder did…
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A Madeleine Moment by Kerstin Stuerzbecher * I have spent this year of the pandemic “in search of lost time.” Some formerly automatic moments melted away from my presence: the daily commute, the take-away coffee in a traveller’s mug, greeting friends with a hug. Other moments formed in their novelty: walking the long way around…
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ESSAY: Letters from the Pandemic 13: A window with a view by Adam Karolewski * Unless your income reaches the top 1 percent per mil, so you can afford a penthouse with a helicopter pad, living in downtown Vancouver doesn’t necessary come with a spectacular view. Often the view is of the side of the…
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Letters from the Pandemic 12: Dear Lucy <lucy.lius@gmail.com> by Joanne Crozier * From: L. Anna Seneca <romanophile123@gmail.com> Sent: January 1, 2021 8:36 PM To: Lucy <lucy.lius@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Felix Annus Novus! Lucy, “Judging from what you tell me and from what I hear,”[1] we greet the New Year from the same boat. Ten months have passed…
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Letters from the Pandemic 11: Dear Sam by Cathy Joyce * Dear Sam, As a whole civilization muddles about individually bewildered, bumping into themselves while trying to stay safely apart, I wonder if a wry smile might have flickered on your etched features because you already knew, and have already precisely documented, just what happens…
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LETTER: Ms. Mary Wollstonecraft c/o The Disputatious Hereafter by Reema Faris * My dearest Mary, It’s been over five years since our encounter at Gunnebo House on the outskirts of Göteborg. Pushing the door ajar for me was such a kind gesture on your part. Luc, 14 at the time and with all the certainty…
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Letters from the Pandemic 9: Resolution by Bob Crockett * A pandemic cannot stop an active GLS mind. I am an avid reader, theatre goer, and amateur musician. So I decided to use this time to write my own play. Later, as I brought in some old song ideas, it morphed into a musical. They…
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LETTER: Dear Readers of History, and all that Jazz by Mariken van Nimwegen * What does the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan’s hefty 2015 book The Silk Roads have in common with “Vancouver man about town,” Andreas Nothiger’s skinny 1984 synchronoptical World History Chart? I think I have a case, and a story. Frankopan gives us…
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Letters from the Pandemic 7: Dear Roger and David by Max Wyman * This letter to his childhood friends in England by Max Wyman is one of a series of Letters from the Pandemic published in the Graduate Liberal Studies Journal, hosted by The Ormsby Review. The entire series of letters can be seen here….
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A letter to William Wordsworth, my favourite wordsmith by Natalie Lang * Dearest Will, Today, the gloom has overtaken me. I can no longer picture what tomorrow will bring; every tomorrow for months has led me further away from the life I knew and even more far flung from the one I had been working…
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Thank you, Victor by Sarah Freel * Dear Victor, I think I had COVID-19 in March. I steamed with rosemary oil. I didn’t go to the hospital. If I had IT, I didn’t want to give IT to the health care workers. Workers? Sounds like a hive. Healing people. I couldn’t cheer for healing people…
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Dear Diary by Bob Foulkes * I am approaching the mid-point in my GLS program; by April 2021, I will be three-quarters done. I am devouring courses. They are my lifeboat in the storm of the pandemic. They give me purpose, discipline, structure, puzzles, and paradigm shifts to fill the emptiness created by our temporary…
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Dear Thomas King by Thomas Girard * Dear Thomas King, Pandemic. I live in a room. In the room there are objects. And by way of you, the objects have stories. We all know objects to have stories. We choose them, buy them, include them in our lives, and continue to include them or discard…
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Letters from the Pandemic by Sasha Colby * Editor’s note: we are pleased to introduce Letters from the Pandemic: A 30th Anniversary Commemorative Public Writing Project of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program of Simon Fraser University (SFU). Sasha Colby, Director of Graduate Liberal Studies, provides an introduction (below) to the Pandemic Letters project. The letters…
Read more Letters from the Pandemic: Welcome
A Letter from the Pandemic: Losing My Mother by Cathy Patel * Dear GLS Family, In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” I miss my mother. In the early part of the year of the pandemic, she died,…
Read more Letters from the Pandemic 2: Losing my mother