Christie Robb is a writer and editor trying to process and find some meaning in the COVID pandemic. She created Hey, Can We Talk About COVID? to serve as a virtual kitchen table where folks can gather to share the absurdities, epiphanies, missteps, trauma, victories, and generally weird shit related to the ongoing COVID pandemic.

Why?

It’s likely to be a defining event for several generations. Infection will have long-term consequences for some (maybe all). Gathering the histories of survivors seems important.

The pandemic is part of our shared life experience now. And maybe something we don’t feel we need to talk about cause we’d like to get on with other things, or we feel everyone has more or less the same story as us, so it’s a given, why talk about it? But time moves on. One day our lives will be other people’s history. And the primary sources we leave behind will be the raw materials by which they understand it. Academics and such will observe the pandemic from a distance, analyze events, and retell them to an audience unfamiliar with what it was like to be there.

But we are there.

If we write our stories, create poems, make art, bury time capsules with ephemera, etc. we can give folks in the future a better sense of what it was like to be where we were. Where we are. Having multiple diverse, perspectives will give them better context, illustrate complexities, expose contradictions, illuminate patterns, spur critical thinking.