How are you making sense of the experience of losing this sports season? After dreaming and planning and working at their craft for years, athletes at all levels suddenly found that their season was gone. Some might have been in the best shape of their lives, others might secretly and guiltily feeling grateful for more time to recover from injury. Some might have recently to forgo their final year of eligibility to graduate and move on-- making the difficult calculation that it would have been too much to extend out academics to return for that last season. All are likely experiencing ebbs and flows in the motivation to keep training at the highest level, day in and day out, with no specific goal, or hazy ones at best. Our hope is that contributing to the project will serve as an exercise to deal with the tough stuff and opportunity to process, emote, and heal. Athletes are so great -- the best -- at tuning out distractions, turning off negative thoughts, redirecting to the positive, and making the most of things. But that is often in "normal" times when we have a clear sense of what the future holds and can plan for upcoming competitions. And in this atypical moment, many of the things we turn to when we need support aren't available to us-- mainly, playing our sport which we love, with our teammates whom we love.

So we'd like to hear your stories. Share you your stories with the Journal of the Plague Year. We will capture, curate, and archive them. We will share them with the world, so that the many people who look up to and learn from young athletes, can draw strength from your experiences and stories -- the good parts, the challenging parts, and everything in between -- of your lost season and the pandemic.

We seek first-person accounts of the impact of the Pandemic on your life and/or the life of your institution. 

What are the image of your institution's closure to the public? What will the "new normal" be once your institutions welcomes its communities onsite again? 

We are also seeking submissions related to the materials that you might be collecting that relate to the pandemic.  Are you undertaking rapid-response collecting? Are you exhibiting work by makers that responses to Covid-19?  

Upload your submission to the Share Your Story Page!   If you have any questions, please reach out to Juilee Decker who is the museums lead for our curatorial team: jdgsh@rit.edu

Share stories about what your summer plans were and how the pandemic has cancelled or altered those plans. 

Additionally, share stories about how you/your family/friends are creating alternative vacation ideas while in quarantine.   Or, perhaps you're ignoring social distancing guidelines; tell us about your party.
 

 

 

We invite you to share your commencement story!

Faced with the inability to gather in person for commencement ceremonies, communities across the country have found ways of carrying on cherished traditions and have invented new ones. A Journal of the Plague Year Archive wants to share YOUR commencement story. Stories are welcome from colleges and universities, high schools, middle schools, and grade schools. How are you celebrating your graduates this year? If you are a graduate yourself, let us know what your experience of commencement was like — what did you enjoy? what did you most miss? did anything surprise you?

We welcome reflections of all kinds and images to accompany them. We want to help share your commencement story on our archive!