‘Sheffield in virus time’: Forms of writing, reading, living

Abstract

This article considers the experience of writing a daily journal, published daily via a public social media site. The journal began on 31 March 2020 as an attempt to account for the suddenly changed experiences of my personal and professional life (as an artist and lecturer) in the early days of the first UK coronavirus lockdown; it is still ongoing. After producing 700,000 words, this project has come to be understood as having shifted my writing in creative practice to writing as a practice for creating life. An expansive readerly engagement with a variety of creative and critical diarists provides generative perspectives for rethinking life and work. This latter part of the article’s structure considers the ‘Sheffield in virus time’ project in relation to poet Kumiko Hahn’s characterization of the zuihitsu as a fungal form. This Japanese genre (translated as ‘following the will of the pen’) develops casual, loosely connected fragments and ideas, often in haphazard order, a form well-suited to the ongoingness of writing life.