Creativity in the time of COVID

By Erin Schulte

May 19, 2020

I live two blocks from a large acute-care hospital in New York City, where the death rates in April were six times the normal level and sirens wailed outside all day, every day, for weeks. I haven’t read a book since the pandemic began; even TV shows I enjoyed in the before hold little appeal. The only activities I’ve found any flow in are playing the piano, and putting together two massive, difficult jigsaw puzzles: one of all the exhibits in the Metropolitan Museum in miniature, and another of the front page of The New York Times from July 19, 1975, the day I was born. The city was in a fiscal crisis, the mayor was weighing a 10% salary cut for city employees, and garbage pickups were being cut in half. Oh, to have such problems. These puzzles mean both nothing and too much to me, I realized the day my son broke one all over the floor before I had glued it, and I started bawling. Though it probably really wasn’t about the puzzle.

Jigsaw puzzles are not creative pursuits, they are exercises in maintaining focus and discerning infinitesimal variations in color, type, and shape. My husband keeps telling me this would be a great time to write a book, start a company, launch some new creative enterprise so when this whole thing ends we’ll have something impressive to show for it. OKAY! Back when this started, I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker that made me laugh in recognition: a person in a lifeboat frantically rowing through dark, stormy seas and a lightning storm, with a laptop on the boat’s bench. The caption, as I recall: This is it…the time to finish your novel. That’s where I’m at.

Luckily, other people are still making stuff, and I am in awe of those people, like Elizabeth Spiers, the creator of Quaranzine, a “zine about our new socially-distanced surreality” that is vulnerable, funny, and beautifully illustrated. I very much recommend that you read them all, and subscribe.

Elizabeth said she starts each Quaranzine during “martini hour” and finishes it the next morning at breakfast. Here on top of everything else she is good at (including publicly skewering Jared Kushner), she can use ink and color to both make a murder hornet look sympathetic AND crack a devastating Stephen Miller joke:

I love Julia Wertz and Roz Chast and Alison Bechdel (I’ve never cried so hard at a theater performance as I did at Fun Home) and have spent many hours admiring and pondering their work; to have this zine thrown into my lifeboat to help process—with intimacy and humor—our current times felt like a gift, and maybe a bit of inspiration/motivation to get back to some non-puzzling pursuits.

Witches, you never cease to amaze.

Are you a life-boater or an aspiring martini-hour artist? Is there witchy work getting you through this that you think deserves a boost and a share? Let us know @TheEvilWitches

Erin Schulte is an editor and writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. Another COVID comic she loves is this one by Emily Flake.

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