Writers of Color Reflect on Isolation

Since the onset of the pandemic, isolation has been, for good or bad, a major feature of life. Here you’ll find reflections from several writers of color, shared by POC United.

How do you write when the world is trying to destroy you? How do you maintain the community that holds you accountable to the page when isolation is the thing that will keep you alive?

As writers of color who created our own artists’ collective called POC United, we understand the need for isolation and normally welcome it as a respite from busy lives that can deplete us, leaving us less available for the blank page. Most writers dream of time alone. But when forced upon us, isolation is different from space we might actively seek.

Isolation as a theme draws upon multiple concepts—isolation during a global pandemic, isolation of the writer working diligently at their craft, but also isolation for the writer of color asked to write toward a lonely place, which is the center of the literary establishment. Our aim is to refute this isolation by gathering overlooked voices and stories to a new center.

With the support of the California Arts Council, we will host a virtual reading on May 13, 2021, with acclaimed and emerging writers of color on the theme of “Isolation.” In this 90-minute event, writers of color will share works honoring the pain, joy, injustice, comfort, and trauma of isolation. This reading will feature poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

We asked the event readers to tell us how the past year of isolation has affected their craft. Their answers made us want to laugh, dance, eat, shout, and reflect on the importance of building community wherever we can find it.

-Pallavi Dhawan and Tamika Thompson

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While worldwide catastrophe raged, as the death toll rose and fell and rose again, I was gripped with the dread that took everyone’s throat. I had moments and weeks of deep depression. But also: perhaps no one is more prepared for a year of deep isolation than a writer. Cushioned by the privilege of being able to shelter in place, keep my job and isolate with a partner, I was able to write. I don’t know if I wrote more than I would have without the pandemic. What I do know is I was able to write despite the pandemic. Mostly I wrote alone.

In the last few months I’ve been writing on Zoom with two writers based in New York. Their 10 a.m. is my 7 a.m., which means I roll out of bed and start working. We talk a bit but mostly we write. It’s been a huge boost. I think we are recreating that old and beloved ritual of writing in a coffee shop. All to say I’m at the latter stages of editing my third novel and am so very grateful to have the bulk of the work behind me.

-Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us

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The initial lockdown led to binging TV news, strategizing when to don masks and gloves and wait in the long socially-distant lines at the grocery store, and listening to friends on the phone crack jokes about Shakespeare writing King Lear during a plague. Fear and isolation turned writing into a distant dream encased in ice and fog. Then, my literary community stepped in and quelled the loneliness and the anxiety by initiating almost-daily check-ins on Zoom. Soon, a small group of writers met virtually several mornings each week. Timed writing sessions and small goals saved me. I kept the promise I made myself: write one sentence a day. Frequently I met that goal (after all, some sentences are two words long) and wrote past it. It’s how I inched along on my second novel, CIRCA, which will be published in Spring 2022. I have my fellow writers to thank—I couldn’t have finished anything without their encouragement and support.

-Devi S. Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues

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I’ve done little writing during the pandemic, mostly because I’ve been too busy questioning every decision I’ve ever made. Writing often requires self-reflection, and quite frankly, I couldn’t handle looking inside and acknowledging my feelings. The overwhelming disbelief and grief from the intersection of the global pandemic and our country’s political and racial reckoning during the past year needed to be parsed. Therefore, I slowed things down and indulged: I slept half of most days, watched countless hours of TikTok and YouTube, ingested pot gummies, and sipped wine and martinis. There was even a short stint when I ate a bagel with each meal. Yes, a bagel with each meal, not for or as a meal but in addition to whatever I was eating at the time.

I’m happy to report I’ve made it to the other side. By doctor’s order, I am eating low-carb, balanced meals and calorie counting. More importantly, I am trying to write again. Grateful with my two vaccinations under my belt, I’m ready to enter post-pandemic life as a lighter version of myself—untethered by hope for our collective futures, free of expectations for myself, and fifteen pounds (of twenty) down from my gastronomic peak.

-Tom Pyun, Writer

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Si del cielo te caen limones, aprende a hacer limonada.

That’s how Covid-19 and isolation have been for me. During, since Covid-19, I have been writing more and began new art projects. Everything got slowed down. I was no longer running to catch a train to make it on time to pick up my kids from school. I was no longer running to gigs. Instead, I was home, then walking or biking ten minutes to my mom’s in Bushwick to check on her. Biking around, I noticed the gentrification of Bushwick (where I grew up) in buildings and faces. I began taking videos and documenting what I saw. Feeling stifled inside my railroad apartment, I sought refuge on my roof where I danced to songs of resistance that I then shared on Instagram. I shouted out speeches by Puerto Rican revolutionary, Pedro Albizu Campos. I wrote, memorized and performed a salsa, titled “Juana Peña Revisited”—on my roof.

That’s what I did with Covid-19. I squeezed it. Squeezed the pain of television dead bodies by the dozens in the parking lots of forever forgotten. Squeezed lemons to sweeten sadness. Only ten cents a cup. But if you’re broke, I will write you a poem for free.

-Alba Delia Hernández, Writer

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We hope you’ll join us on May 13. Remember to register here!