Items

• 
  2021-08-06

  Covid Gardening Story and Okra Recipe

  I chose to focus on my garden and our chickens that we began right before the pandemic hit. I never realized how lucky I was to live in a rural environment until Spring 2020, when living in the country meant having a bit more freedom than in the city. Our garden and chickens provided us with foods that sometimes were out of stock in our small, local store. However, we also faced other things in our community that made the psychological aspects of the pandemic really hard, such as living with those who deny the reality of the disease and mitigation efforts that people like my husband promoted, as an ER physician. I suppose this story is a bit of a love letter to our little property out in the country, despite the differences in values that we have with our town.
• 
  2020-07

  Silence and Isolation

  This is important because it speaks to the daily struggle of living through the pandemic. I was not touched by the disease itself, but my life was changed by it. My submission describes my sensory experiences of isolation during the pandemic as I moved to a new city for work. It expresses how the pandemic brought more than health issues but social issues to society as well.
• 
  2020-03-18

  Covid in Jax

  Covid took away the freedom to hangout with friends.
• 
  2021-02-24T13:24:52

  A 2020 Senior's Experience

  Link to my Story https://eaglefgcu-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/vdearmas2389_eagle_fgcu_edu/EfbXTEMivQhBlns1iufe0PUBKjsdXqzsQvBkamaxWh4YAg?e=IwR5k3
• 
  2020-06

  June of 2020: a quarantine journal

  This past June, for the first time in my life, I began keeping a daily journal—composed in formally identical declarative sentences—as a record, not only the events of the world that were on and affecting my mind, but also my domestic observations of home, of family, the creatures in my yard, the blooms erupting throughout the garden. In a season of isolation and upheaval, it in many ways helped to keep my brain from total dissolution into quaking depression. Once this month-long record was complete, I launched a Kickstarter campaign in support of the limited publication of *June of 2020: a quarantine journal*, with all profits being donated to Black Girl in Maine, a social-justice blog founded by writer, educator, and activist Shay Stewart-Bouley. While my skill has always been the construction of narratives that allow the reader to feel what it’s like to experience the characters’ experiences, Shay’s talent lies in taking the complex abstractions of social justice and explaining them in a way that is not only immediate and concrete, but also grounded in the experiences of both herself and her audience (in other words, she takes the cultural phenomenon at large and makes it directly relevant to you and your life). She has an ability that I lack. So I’m using my abilities to help support her and her work.