The Toronto International Festival of Authors annual conference returns this year after its last staging before the global pandemic — this year’s discussion focuses on the effects of COVID-19 on the creativity of authors.
The pandemic caused shifts in how people conducted their work with the majority of people having to work remotely.
Being stuck inside left people with spare time to fill and find new ways of being creative. For author Rebecca Rosenblum, this was done by writing about her pandemic experience.
“This book did not start out as a book but as a genuine day-by-day set of posts, reaching out to friends and associates and hoping for a response,” Rosenbaum said.
“As a very social person deprived of actual society, social media became my creative space.”
Rosenblum said that documenting her own personal experience during the pandemic helped her tremendously, and encouraged others to at least “give it a shot.”
Rosenblum’s novel These Days Are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown is a recording of her own personal account of her experiences during the pandemic.
“It’s definitely different to bring out a book in the world now that we have encountered such a radical shift in our perceptions of health and vulnerability,” she said.
Exclaiming her adaptability, Rosenblum said it was through this global experience she was able to shift her writing to be more modern and creative.
“My last book came out in 2017 and there was no such thing as a virtual or hybrid reading then for most of us, and now it’s pretty common,” Rosenbaum said.
Some authors were already in the midst of writing their next novel prior to the pandemic and decided to incorporate this global event into their world of fiction writing.
Eva Crocker freelance writer and PhD student shared her experience while she was caught in the midst of lockdowns when she moved to Montreal from Newfoundland and Labrador in 2019.
“I was trying to capture Montreal at a moment when the boom of the tech industry was threatening the city’s relatively affordable rental prices,” Crocker said.
Her novel Back in the Land of the Living brings speaks about the life of a young queer woman who moves to Montreal in the fall of 2019 after encountering life-changing experiences while living in St. John’s. Alone in a big city on the brink of the COVID-19 lockdown,
“When the lockdown happened it further impacted the housing crisis so it felt important to include that in the novel as well,” she said.
When asked about the effects of the pandemic on her creativity as a writer, Crocker said she had started a virtual creative workshop in Montreal called Fundamentals of Short Fiction, which she said is still active today.
The workshop is open to writers of varying experience levels who wish to receive feedback and have their content read.
For novelist Clara Dupuis-Morency, the pandemic has changed the way she and many other authors work, even if they do not have the hindsight to describe exactly how.
“We reorganized with Zoom — new modes of communication and now we’re always ‘zooming’ instead of going to see each other,” she said.
“I feel it has shifted the way that artists interact,” Dupuis-Morency said.
The festival is set to close its doors on Oct. 1.