Writing in the time of Coronavirus

Dear Friends,

It's March 2020, and the world is in the grip of a pandemic. No one alive today has been through anything like this, the last similar virus was in 1918, over 100 years ago.

So we're all watching the news, reading the reports, trying to stay calm in the face of the worst kind of news imaginable: this virus is a super-spreader, it kills somewhere between 2% and 6% of those infected, older people aged 60 and up are more likely to develop serious illness and die. If there is any good news, children are largely unaffected, but remain a reservoir of disease, so should avoid older people.

In Canada, and in Toronto where I live, we've all been asked to self-isolate for two weeks, even though the numbers of infections in Canada remain low at least for now, at under 200 confirmed cases and one death in B.C. (a man in his 80s) as of today. Schools are now closed, large gatherings, conferences, sports events, libraries, and much more are closed down. We are living in our homes, hoping we have enough frozen vegetables to last the storm which authorities assure us is about to come.

We believe them. Just look at poor Italy, South Korea, and China. It's coming, all we can do is hold on. The idea now is to "flatten the curve" of infection by self-isolating, so hospitals don't become overwhelmed with the sick.

I lived in Toronto when SARS came through and claimed 44 lives in 2003, but this is much worse. It's worse because it is ALL of us. Everywhere.

Oh Earth, what have we done to ourselves?

As a writer, my job is to look around me and make predictions about what I see. In 2015, five years ago, I started writing a dystopia for children, ages 10 and up. I wanted to tell a story about love, and equity, and also about the collapse of our society through environmental crisis, loss of bees, and yes ... pandemic.

My book is OCULUM (2018, DCB), which has been nominated for two awards (thank you SYRCA and OLA) and has been optioned for television and audio-book. In this story, two separate groups of kids interact 80 years after the collapse of society. They either live a comfortable life inside a domed, dystopian world with robots and peaches, or they live a hardscrabble existence outside the dome in the rubble of the cities.

This may seem gloomy for children, but the main message of my book is one of hope and love. The story is a very loose echo of Shakespeare's Tempest, which is ultimately, a story of love and community.

OCULUM is a story about how we have each other, and we are better together, no matter what happens. The final words of the book come from one of the first-person narrators, Mannfred (Mann for short). He is dreaming about the orchards he is going to plant once he gets to the farm.

He says, "It'll take a long time, my whole life and then some, but I got only one wish: one day, when I'm a man, me and my friends, my family, everybody there is, will pick peaches big as barrels, sweet as honey, from trees tall as the sky."

That's my wish for all of us today and in the weeks to come: that we may plant, grow, and enjoy the bounty of this amazing planet together again one day soon.

In the meantime, I'll be reading, writing, and thinking about spring. Hold fast everyone, hold each other, just hold on.

With love for all of you,

PD

More about OCULUM
FREE Teacher's Guide for OCULUM
Goodreads Reviews
More about Oculum on this blog