It is fitting that as I write this, Idaho is entering the first stage of reopening the economy, easing off the Governor’s complete stay-at-home order. I believe this blog has served as a valuable way to help me process different elements of the self-isolation experience, on an emotional, physical, and social level. By using the structure of a blog, I was able to experiment with different mediums, from images, to narratives, to personal and social analysis.
This multi-faceted approach has been inspired by the diversity of Virginia Woolf’s writing career, as she enlisted the help of so many different types of writing to capture and engage with human life. By pushing myself to grow past an exclusively academic viewpoint, I have explored how to express myself visually and artistically as well. Woolf’s writing style, even in her non-fiction works, like Three Guineas, she approaches her subject-matter with an artist’s eye, fully utilizing her skills with beautiful and powerful words. This is not always the accepted approach for current academic writing, and pushing myself to pay attention to the ideas and the form in different ways has been a growth experience for me.
Along with this, I have tried to pay special attention to the physicality that Woolf often embraces in her work. Rather than elevating the mental or spiritual in her writing, she prioritized depicting the embodied reality of life. As a result, I have tried to do the same in my writing on this blog. Rather than only analyzing my experiences, I have tried to dwell on the physical sensations themselves, giving weight to even the smallest of details.
This project has not only created a sketch of life in April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been an opportunity to process and analyze these historic weeks. It has been a chance to end my Master’s degree with a reminder of the different forms effective writing can take. It has been away of engaging with Virginia Woolf that has helped me begin to see the world as she might have.