Writing into the Pandemic

The shock to the system we've lived through during the time of covid affects artists in such different ways. Some artists I know were so saturated with jangly, existential dread for months on end (during peak lockdown months, pre-vaccine), they had nothing left in the tank, physically and emotionally, to create new work.

I shared the existential dread, but my way of coping was to channel my thoughts into building fictional worlds and wrestling with the knotty problems that come with trying to shape a novel. By placing my mind in other worlds, I could temporarily ignore the frightening developments in the real one.

"The Potrero Complex" grew out of a kind of dual existence: living through the pandemic in real time (is there any other way?), while trying to write new worlds into existence. It turns out I married those preoccupations, and ended up writing about a fictional post-pandemic world.

I could have made the story scarier, more apocalyptic, but I wanted to hold onto a sense of reality. What might actually happen if we were to emerge as a society from a pandemic even worse than the one we've lived in? This led me down some dark paths...toward despair, trauma, and fascism in a world where people grew willing to sacrifice freedom for safety.