I published my first book right before a pandemic. It was weird.
Before I left for my first, possibly only, book tour in February 2020, I got a flu shot at the pharmacy around the corner from my house. I waited in a non-socially distanced line. I did not wear a mask and neither did the pharmacist. She wrapped a plastic band round my arm, injected the vaccine into the crook of my elbow and stuck a Band-Aid across the welling pinprick of blood.
“I’m going on this big trip,” I explained, like she had asked, “I’m just trying to be safe.”
“That’s good,” she replied warmly but absently, before going to help the next customer in line — an elderly gentleman also in search of a flu shot. “This corona virus thing is really scary,” I overheard him say to her. That’s what we were calling it back then: corona virus. It wasn’t COVID-19 yet. It wasn’t a public health emergency that destroyed economies and unraveled the social contract. It was still something we might combat with a flu shot and a small bottle of hand sanitizer.
Writing and reporting my first book, The Imperiled Ocean: Human Stories from a Changing Sea, took me the better part of the last five years. People like to remind you, in the publishing industry, just how lucky you are. You are lucky to be paid, lucky to be published, lucky to be heard. This primed me to feel eternally grateful at every step up the ladder, but a book tour made me feel especially lucky, lightening-strike lucky.
After the first reading at a small bookstore in Vancouver’s Chinatown, I couldn’t fall asleep. Everything went well, perfectly even. The host was wonderful. The audience asked sharp questions that I felt prepared to answer. Lying on my friend’s couch later that night, I couldn’t come down from the high. My mind replayed the evening again and again and again. It was midnight, 2:07, 3:14. My alarm was set for 5:30 to catch an 8am flight to Calgary.
I switched the light on and padded over to my friend’s bookshelf, pulling down a copy of Severance, by Ling Ma: a pandemic story set in New York City. “Probably not the best time to read that book,” my friend said earlier that day when I asked what she was reading. Online the news stories about COVID-19 were growing, metastasizing, crowding out all other coverage, and yet we knew so little back then about how deadly it was, how the virus spread through aerosol droplets floating through the air. I cracked open Severance and began to read. The beginning of an outbreak story is always the best. There are hints of the sickness spreading: a wan person, a cough, but no one feels the ground shaking beneath their feet. The book scared me a little, but in a distant way that I liked. Sometime later, I fell into an exhausted sleep and then I was back up again, scrambling to turn the alarm off before I woke my friend’s baby in the next room, then I was out the door in the same clothes I had worn the night before.
In the cab to the Vancouver airport, the driver would not stop talking. I sent all the signs that I was not in a chatty mood. I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, gave one-word responses, but just he kept talking. He told me about a passenger he picked up from the airport yesterday: a woman from Hong Kong covered head to toe in plastic, face mask, gloves, the whole deal. “It’s a very cautious culture,” he explained to me and then he started to laugh. At the end of the ride, the woman wouldn’t take his pen to sign the receipt. “You’re afraid of me?” he laughed incredulously. “I’m afraid of you!”
From Calgary, I fly to Winnipeg where similar scenes flashed past. On the flight out of Manitoba, I looked out the window at the vast snowy tundra before a man in the row ahead of me caught my eye. He appeared to be wearing a full-face mask connected to its own air supply bag. “Seems a bit much,” I thought. After the final book event in Halifax, I capped off the tour with a weekend in New York City. I went to MOMA twice, wandering through galleries gazing at works of art. I ate a street pretzel studded with glittery rocks of salt. I packed into a crowded bar, ordered a cocktail and packed into an even more crowded backroom to watch a live acoustic set. I went to cafes to meet editors. I went to Manhattan office towers to meet more editors. I went to a Broadway show, Central Park and to Penn Station where I caught a train to Newark and flew home — first whirlwind book tour completed.
Immediately after I arrived home, the world began going crazy for toilet paper. Every house, every apartment, every family turned inward, stocking up and sealing itself off from the invisible threat. I remember marveling at my luck once again. Not only did I get to tour my first book, I did it right before the world closed down. That fit within my wider experience of the publishing industry, which has all the energy of a desperate hustle toward a departing elevator.
I wrote this essay for a small literary festival I was supposed to attend in the summer of 2020 when we were still deep in the COVID-19 pandemic. That festival got cancelled, and so they invited me to write a short reflection on the pandemic and what I had lost. The original ending to that essay went something like this: that we never realize how lucky we are until it is far too late. That ending is of course still true. I was lucky to go on that tour, to publish a book, and to have survived much of the last two years (relatively) unscathed.
For some reason, that ending doesn’t match my mood anymore. I don’t feel thankful. I feel restless: to move on, to forget, to get out into the world again. I hope in my rush out the door I’ll remember the turmoil of the last two years, the death, the sadness, the sacrifices, how unexpectedly fragile everything became. But I expect the ending to this story will just keep changing as the pandemic recedes farther in the rear view mirror. It was a turning point, that much feels sure, but to what? A harder, more honest world, I hope, that asks more of us each and every day.
