Pandemic pivots and accidentally publishing a poetry archive

So how do I account for the hiatus in blogging during the pandemic? Was I busy baking banana bread and binging boxsets? Absolutely not.

I accidentally published a poetry archive

I was in lockdown two weeks before the rest of the country because my son had managed to get out of Madrid the day they announced the national emergency, remember when it was the hotspot of Europe? Around the same time, everyone in Ireland was sent home and the schools and shops closed but we didn’t yet have the 2k travel restrictions. I remember thinking to myself how fast people were adjusting to this ‘new normal’ with zoom gatherings, click and collect and all that jazz. I remember thinking that it’s happening so fast and we have to record this because we’ll forget about this when we bounce back to our old ways. Obviously I, like everyone else, had no idea we were in it for the long haul. I approached some friends I had met at the John Hewitt International Summer School the summer before about an idea to build a website to publish peoples’ immediate response to the pandemic and thankfully, they joined me on that journey and so Pendemic.ie was born.
We didn’t start out with a master plan but for some reason the concept took hold and they came, shared their stories, left comments on posts, and chatted away on social. I am very proud of the sense of community that Pendemic created even though it was dog work, up to 5 hours a day reading and posting submissions and replying to the contributors. Then UCD approached us about archiving the entire collection within their Special Collections. Ruth, Liz, and Niall (the other co-founders) are blue bloods of the Irish literary scene with all the letters (M.A./PhD) and publications that go with that so they understood immediately the meaning of such an approach. I don’t have a background in the humanities but I will admit to having a knot in my throat during one of our zoom calls with the team in UCD when they referenced writings they had persevered from ordinary people during the civil war. So the penny finally dropped and I realised what small part we played in documenting these ‘unprecedented times’ for generations to come. Apparently, they plan to house it for 50-100 years. That’s pretty cool. I particularly like the idea of some of the primary school contributors taking their grandchildren to see their entries 50 or 60 years down the road. Anyway, it’s in UCD’s digital repository now but you can still see our humble little site and all the submissions over on Pendemic.ie. Happy Reading.

Here is a radio clip from RTE Radio One’s Arena show of me talking about the project along with some readings by the contributors.

Conclusion

So I didn’t clean or declutter my house. I didn’t binge many boxsets, ok I’ll admit I watched Tiger King with my son and I’m still traumatised and sickened myself with about 50 hours of Billions in early 2021. I did take a few months off that turned into a year after finishing a long-term project which I called my gap year even though I was housebound for most of it. In October 2021, I enrolled in a printmaking course to get ideas for a wee greeting card company I own but neglect. However, I ended up discovering a passion that you can read about in the printmaking category.