Project Bloom: Diverse Reflections on Surviving the Pandemic

By Lisa M. Alexander and Joshua Potter-Efron

Project Bloom: Diverse Reflections on Surviving the Pandemic, edited by Lisa M. Alexander and Joshua Potter-Efron, provides one window into the experience of the pandemic in the United States. The voices in this book are those of persons whose stories have gone untold. Twenty-four artists, poets, and writers, from California to New York, share their experiences during isolation, discrimination, illness, aging, disability, and more. Contributors include Dr. Joyce (Joy) Balls-Berry, Bonnie Burgeson, Kay Campbell, Carol Coussons de Reyes, Rebecca de la Motte, Jill D. Flagel, Heidi Gumz, Ray Lacina, Tone Lanzillo, Peg Carlson Lauber, Jerome Lawrence, Autumn Mirassou, Kristina Orr, Karla Pizano, Katherine Schneider, Adrian Spratt, Nena Sylvia Toy St. Louis, Peggy Trojan, Michael Warner, Dr. Kyle Whipple, and Nga-Wing Anjela Wong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Introspection Editing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005368548

Book preview

Project Bloom

Project Bloom

Diverse Reflections on Surviving the Pandemic

Lisa M. Alexander and Joshua Potter-Efron,

editors

Smashwords edition

Copyright  2021 by the authors.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. For permission to reprint or feedback about the book, please contact Lisa Alexander at [e-mail].



Blooming Inside Out

by Carol Coussons de Reyes

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

The Bloom of Covid-19 (Joshua Potter-Efron)

Partings (Peggy Trojan)

Loneliness, Despair, and Recovery in Covid-19 (Bonnie Burgeson)

(In)Visibility: Letter from an Asian American Mother to Her Multiracial Baby (Nga-Wing Anjela Wong)

The Old Woman Speaks (Peg Carlson Lauber)

Then and Now (Lisa Alexander)

Making the Invisible Visible: A New Normal in the Face of a Pandemic (Joyce E. Balls-Berry)

What happens next. . .  (Jill D. Flagel)

Perspective (Jill D. Flagel, April 2021)

Detour  (Ray Lacina)

Just Breathe (Heidi Gumz)

Still Breathing . . . (Heidi Gumz)

Horror Story (Rebecca de la Motte)

The Long Haul (Rebecca de la Motte, April 2021)

Social Distancing When Blind (Katherine Schneider)

Are You Listening? (Michael Warner)

Moving Forward from Here (Kay Campbell)

Hope (Kay Campbell, April 2021)

Restarting a Heart in the Age of Covid-19 (Autumn Mirassou)

My Coronavirus Diary (Nena Sylvia Toy St. Louis)

My Shield is My Surrender (Ray Lacina)

My Hope Is to Stay Alive (Jerome Lawrence)

Drifting at Sea before Covid-19 (Karla Pizano)

A Different World (Tone Lanzillo)

The New Normal (Kyle Whipple)

Here I Am (Kristina Orr)

Advice (Adrian Spratt)

Inciting Incident (Ray Lacina)

I’m Not Ready (Joshua Potter-Efron)

One Year Later: Still Coping and Hoping (Katherine Schneider)

Contributors

Mission Zer0

Acknowledgments

This has been an endeavor of the heart, with heartfelt support, passion, creativity, and encouragement. Creating this book has been a journey of five souls with diverse perspectives uniting in inclusive story.

I offer my thanks to the twenty-four contributors who volunteered their stories, poems, and art for this anthology. They have shared with thoughtfulness and vulnerability. I hold deep respect and gratitude for every one of you. Thank you.

Thank you to the Project Bloom team. Joshua Potter-Efron facilitated many of our connections and communication. Joshua, as an editor of the project, read all of the essays and provided in-depth critiques and insight about each contribution.

Jeremy Rehwaldt’s editing and gentle presence graced our group. Your countless hours of editing and formatting are received as a precious gift. Thank you, Jeremy. Namaste.

My dear friend Carol Coussons de Reyes helped us think outside of the box and brought me fuel when my energy dwindled. Thank you, Carol, for our cover art.

Finally, words are not enough to express gratitude to our consultant, Dr. Katherine Schneider. Katherine gave this group structure, connections, and expertise. Most of all, she believed in the project, and when the group needed direction, she readily jumped in. Thank you.

I am grateful for those who have donated money in order to get this volume published. Their donations inspired us and provided needed practical support. This couldn’t have happened without you. Thank you.

Foreword

During the spring of 2020 I was already envisioning the bloom within the pandemic and the change offered by the Black Lives Matter movement. I became dreamy at the thought of it—that in the midst of all this illness, death, fear, violence, tension and social unrest there would come a bloom captured in this anthology. And then a friend said to me, halfway through the project, I’m not seeing the bloom. I agreed.

Sometimes blooms are magnificent: our hearts swelling, our bodies leaning toward the sweet smell of relief. The bloom is the happy ending. But after hearing my friend’s proclamation, I realized she was right too. Everything continues to die without flowering; There’s no bloom, and maybe no bloom will be coming.

Merriam-Webster’s secondary definition of bloom defines bloom as a state or time of high development or achievement, and also a glare caused by an object reflecting too much light into a television camera. It is here that I smile and think how far beyond ourselves we have gone searching for the rose. For the respite. For the happy ending. But instead we get the glare of cell phones and computer screens. Growth hurts. The possibility of change makes use ache. We ache for the way it used to be, and we ache that it will always be this way and that what we have achieved will go unnoticed.

The authors in this anthology depict development, achievement, self-awareness, and community. We have evolved both as a society and as individual people. We continue to move forward. The common thread in these essays: we bloom.

For me, this book is the beginning of a bloom. I want to build this with you. This exponential bloom. I want to move with you from fear and fatigue to curiosity, self-realization, and friendship. By sharing our stories we come to know each other and we become known.

This world is sobbing. Let our arms stretch to hold this Mother of ours until she breathes again on her own. Until her womb grows life and not destruction. This is our exponential bloom. I invite you to actively engage in this growth. Face the fear of the unknown and come along for this new journey as a participant, not a passenger. Search for awe and humanity. As you read, I invite you to note what is said and what is absent. I invite you to explore with curiosity and wonder.

Lisa

I acknowledge I live on land that is located on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of Indigenous people, including Ojibwe people, Dakota and Northern Cheyenne people, and other Native peoples from time immemorial.

The Bloom of Covid-19

Joshua Potter-Efron

What is submerged

Emerges in the silence

Beneath the bloom

Of our frantic efforts

to find purchase

in empty soil

somehow the flower still emerges

winds with small tendrils

across barren fences

becoming a canopy

sunlight shining in the dark hours

amidst the quiet eruptions of death and decay

the things we cannot face

push upwards through our soul’s soil

making themselves known

transforming us

shaping us

deforming us

or growing us

What is submerged

Emerges in the silence

this is the Bloom

in the shadow of Covid-19

Partings

Peggy Trojan

Many years ago, when David and I were young and eager, we promised to stay together, until death do us part. Never over the next six decades could we have imagined that our first parting would be the slow death of David’s memory, diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia in his early eighties.

As David’s dementia progressed, I began to lose my lifelong partner. He no longer enjoyed activities we once shared. I gradually became his caregiver.

Our second parting was the difficult decision to put him in memory care. We moved back to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, two hours south of our seventy-acre property in Brule, Wisconsin. David had been a professor at UWEC for twenty years, and it was where we lived while raising our six children. I rented an apartment and began my daily visits. I would stay for much of the day, made sure he ate lunch and dinner, played classical music thru Alexa, brought him his favorite cookies, and held his hand to comfort him while he slept. I remained an important part of his well-being.

Although he never fell during my visits, his lack of balance was profound. Over the next four months, he suffered countless injuries from falls. He had several stitches, a staph infection, and eventually a two-week stay at the hospital for two broken ribs, a broken wrist, and a punctured lung. By the end of his hospital stay, the memory care facility did not want to take him back because of his fall risk—I was forced to transfer him to new caregivers. He was doing well in his new home, relatively speaking, when the Covid-19 pandemic reached the United States.

Our third parting came one evening, during my visit with David. I was feeding him a bedtime snack when the supervisor informed me that due to the virus, they would no longer allow visitors. I was asked to leave.

Without any preparation or warning, my in-person contact with David ended. We were limited to telephone calls. I was also allowed closed-window visits for a short time, but these were eventually discontinued due to Covid-19. Now I had to call the staff for updates. This was woefully inadequate and didn’t compare to spending time with him.

I called daily to speak with David, which required staff to bring him to the communal phone. Our calls were limited to yes/no questions. He did not offer much on his own, except to ask when I was coming to visit him. One day he pleaded, Peggy, I want you to come home! That was the moment that I actively considered making a huge change.

As the world realized the devastating effects of the Covid-19 virus, it became clear that David’s illness was progressing and that the restrictions would not allow me to visit him unless it was the last forty-eight hours of his life. I decided for both of us that it would be better to bring David back to my small apartment, to be together for whatever time he has left. With the help of hospice care and family we are managing. David and I are together again, for better for worse!

Loneliness, Despair, and Recovery in Covid-19

Bonnie Burgeson

March 15, 2020. My sixty-eighth birthday. A longtime friend took me out to Valentino’s, a local pizza place, for Sunday brunch. The next day nearly everything shut down. My birthday friend and I did not see each other for quite awhile. We were both by ourselves in self-imposed isolation. I had no visitors and visited no one.

A musician