Statement of Record

Corona Issue

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A selection of the Corona Issue is published in Writing the Virus, a New York Times Sunday Book ReviewNew & Noteworthy” title of 2021

Statorec inaugurated its Corona Issue on April 16, 2020 with an essay by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Andrea Scrima, titled Corona Report. Returning from Italy at the end of February 2020, just as the first lockdowns went into place, she reflects on the beginnings of the pandemic and on the Bergamo/Valencia soccer game in Milan, the biological bomb that led to the virus’s rapid spread throughout northern Italy. The hallucinatory prose in William Cody Maher’s Double Featurepublished one week later, gropes its way through a labyrinth of internalized fear as human encounters are measured in terms of physical distance. In late April, Statorec editor David Dario Winner’s Daisy Assassin followed, which exposes the uncomfortable barriers of ethnicity, civic cooperation, and racism as experienced by someone going out for what is no longer an ordinary run. In Windows, Beverly Gologorsky’s quiet meditations probe the geography of pandemic isolation, while in Excerpts from Another Love Discourse, taken from a novel-in-progress, Edie Meidav weaves the virus’s sudden appearance into a larger narrative of love and loss. German jazz pianist Christian von der Goltz’s Halted Time listens to what’s behind the eerie silence of the virus’s global spread; Matthew Vollmer reflects on some of the quirkier aspects of lockdown in his kaleidoscopic Quarantine Diary; and Aimee Parkison’s dreamlike riff Masks and Guns captures America in all its dangerous absurdity in a cops and robbers game gone horribly wrong.

KIRKUS WRITES: “VIVID TESTIMONY TO THE DEPTH AND BREADTH OF SUFFERING DURING THIS UNIQUELY STRESSFUL TIME.”

As the pandemic made its way around the globe, the end of May saw the publication of former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief Joan Juliet Buck’s Corona Diarywhich masterfully assesses the wear and tear on the psyche as we attempt to navigate this strange time, while Alice Stephens’s After Ginger reflects on anti-Asian and anti-Asian-American sentiment in times of Corona—and how some things don’t seem to change. In Rooms and Clarinets, Clifford Thompson reflects on Covid, racism, Malcolm X, lockdown, and discovering a new room within to make one’s voice heard; Alexander Graeff’s Perpetuum Mobile describes long-distance love and patriarchy in times of pandemic; and Scott Martingell’s Poems in Times of Corona expose the little hypocrisies spoon-fed to us by the powers that be. As the Black Lives Matter protests flared up in early June, Nigerian-American poet Uche Nduka’s Speaking of Which: Work in Progress probes racism’s dark and violent undercurrent in American society, while Rebecca Chace’s Masks and Gloves looks at white privilege and “I can’t breathe” in the Corona crisis. Barbara Fischkin’s essay Autism in the Time of Covid details one man’s lockdown in disabled housing, and Jon Roemer’s Uncertainty Ever After explores what it means to be a writer in precarious times.

THE LITERARY REVIEW WRITES: “TRUE STORIES OF EXTREME DISTANCE AND EXTREME INTIMACY, SO THAT WE MIGHT REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF OUR EASILY DISTRACTED MINDS, THIS MOMENT OF UNCERTAINTY.”

In her provocative essay White Fantasy: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Covid, and the Myth of Self-Sufficiency, Joan Marcus unmasks the unsavory sentiments behind one of America’s most-cherished narratives—the conquest of the West—while Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer’s We Are Dreaming of the Future Season chronicles the author’s escape from Manhattan to the comparative, albeit unsettling, calm of Maine. In Between Two Worlds, Cheryl Sucher investigates the stark differences in the way the Covid-19 pandemic has been handled (and virtually eradicated) in her second home of New Zealand, while practicing physician and writer Christine Henneberg’s Pain and Coping describes women’s increasing vulnerability to mental and physical pain during and after an abortion procedure. Caille Millner’s Something New appeals to the power of love in the Black community as our strongest and most promising force for change; Mui Poopoksakul’s The Blue Vial delves into the psychological aspects of what appears to be an anti-Asian hate crime with a curiously absent culprit; and Zeynep Camuşcu’s Corona in Istanbul highlights the unerring behavior of a city’s irrepressible inhabitants. In Flattening the Curve, John Casquarelli and Aydin Behnam imagine a dystopian future in a haunting counterpoint of poetry and prose, while Saskia Vogel’s Around the Bend looks at new motherhood and the reconfigured geometry of transatlantic family ties in times of pandemic.

WRITING THE VIRUS, ED. BY ANDREA SCRIMA AND DAVID WINNER. (9781944853754, 280 PAGES, $18.50 PBK, OUTPOST19 BOOKS). 

In response to the Black Lives Matter protests, Roxana Robinson has written a powerful essay on the post-Cold War militarization of the police and the racist roots of police brutality. Militarizing the Police traces the history of armed police in the US from the peacekeeping forces in colonial times and the slave patrols of the American South to the preventative violence practiced by white militias in the post-Civil War era that could not endure the sight of armed Black freedmen. Cecilia Hansson’s My Body Has Failed Me and Now I’m About to Die revisits the lung ailments of Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka as she suffers through a debilitating period of viral infection with SARS-CoV-2; Tiffany Winters’s Hope Interrupted: Organ Transplantation in the Middle of a Pandemic details the unknowable in an essay on grief and the incomprehensibility of medical decision-making; and Liesl Schillinger’s Hope in the Age of Covid probes fact checking and the mined landscape of hope in perilous times. To conclude StatORec’s Corona Issue, Joseph Salvatore’s In the Time of “In the Time of”—a brilliant and moving work of literary criticism, linguistic essay, and personal testimony in one—asks when we will be able to mourn the Covid deaths, when we will be “allowed to grieve and mourn the loss of our old lives.”

THE CORONA ISSUE WAS PUBLISHED BETWEEN MID-APRIL AND late September 2020.
AS WE UNDERGO A GRINDING DOWN OF REALITY IN THE PROCESS OF ADAPTING TO UNIMAGINABLE CHANGE, WHAT MOTIVATES US IS THE FEELING THAT THERE’S A FRAGILE CHANCE TO BE SEIZED, IF ONLY WE CAN SUSTAIN OUR ATTENTION AND BELIEF LONG ENOUGH TO ACT ON IT. 

Statement of Record

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