COVID-19 – Becky Levine

What Will We Do with May?

Posted on 1 May 202018 Jul 2020 by beckylevine

It’s May Day.

March was chaos. March was crazy. It seemed like I heard a new announcement of some significant change every day. I watched the COVID-19 counts climb and climb. All the Zooming for work and the Zooming with family and friends made me feel like I was literally zooming through every minute of every day. March felt like forever.

The four weeks of April haven’t lasted half as long as those two weeks of March. I cheated on March 31 and got my son with an early April Fools joke. Then suddenly, it was tax day, and it felt weird and irrelevant, because all the deadlines had been pushed out until July. Then, suddenly again, I was hitting end-of-month work due dates & realizing it was time to look at next-month due dates. April was the first full month of working remotely and of sheltering in place, but it felt like it came and went in 15 minutes.

And here we are in May. I am, of course, seeing all this from a place of privilege, but things are starting to feel a little more settled, a little less frenetic. Like I’ve gotten to a “usual,” as much as I wish this was not usual. The thing ism though, that another word for usual is “sameness.” And I can feel the sameness lurking in a corner of my brain, camouflaging itself as less stressful, as a comfortable routine. But I think the sameness is, eventually, going to be the thing that gets to me, that starts to wear on my energy and my optimism and my cheerfulness. Because while actively setting up a daily patterns for yourself can feel good, it’s very different when that pattern shows up to greet you every morning, whether or not you’ve invited it in.

So I’m saying to myself, What am I going to do with May? What am I going to do with June, if it comes into view looking identical to May? What new thing can I add to my days, to my nest up here on our hill, that will at least make one month’s usual look different from another’s?

I can do my work in a new spot in the house. I can do my work outside the house. I can look at recipes and see if there is anything that sounds easy and fun to make, so every meal isn’t peanut butter or quesadillas or scrambled eggs or yogurt. (Nope, not going to make sourdough.) I can tiptoe out of my humor-only reading place and see if my brain is ready to branch into something else . I can get out my drumsticks. I can learn how to knit socks with a “magic loop.” I can invite my husband to join me in a month-long cribbage tournament; we can invite our son to play Apples to Apples or Yahtzee over Zoom. I can pick something new-to-me to play with in a picture book: a biography, a concept book, or even some rhyme. (Hey, I said I could play with it; I didn’t say I had to show it to anybody.)

This is a surreal time, and yet it brings back some of the feeling I had when my son first moved out of the house–what was I supposed to do with that “extra” time? It nudges me to dream a little bit about what retirement might look like–what might I choose to bring to those days? More than anything, I wish I hadn’t been handed this time to practice, not as a result of this pandemic, not while so many people’s lives are being turned upside down with fear and pain. But this time is here, and I can choose to let the sameness take over, or I can decide to push it away with variety, change, newness.

That is, I hope, what I’m going to be doing with May. How about you?

COVID-19, Creativity

Sheltering in Place: In Which Pooh Searches for Clear Boundaries Between Work Space and Creative Space

Posted on 18 Apr 2020 by beckylevine

I suspect I’m going to start many posts over the next few months, if not all, in the same way: with a list of the ways in which I know how lucky I am. Possibly unnecessary, but a good exercise in gratitude for myself and (hopefully) a counter to anything I write here that leans toward whining. So…I am healthy; my family and friends are healthy. I have work and my husband has work; we are both being paid. I am not trying to juggle caring for and educating my child in the midst of all this craziness.

And, most relevant to this post, I have a my own home office in which to do both the work of my day job and my own writing. When we bought our house almost 30 years ago, there were two spaces that we could convert into offices and I ended up with the room that former owners had used as a dining room. For years, it was a wonderful place to write and when, last year, I finally picked the perfect colors, it became my dream writing space.

Right. Lucky.

Still, now that I’m working remotely, I’m finding it challenging to use the office both for my day job and for my own writing. the nonprofit for which I work started the remote thing about a week before most other organizations, and we’ve been incredibly busy dealing with our response to the pandemic. For very good reasons, I’ve been working long hours, and–when I’m not working–I struggle to shift back to creative mode.

I’ve been doing things like taking my work laptop into another room on Friday, so that the day-job air in my office has a chance to “out-gas.” When my day-job work spills over into the weekend, I’ve tried to get all that work done first thing Saturday morning or leave it for last thing Sunday. I’ve tried to transition to creative time by knitting for an hour while listening to an interesting podcast; I’ve started my creative time by reading a stack of mentor texts. Everything helps a little bit. Well, okay, trying to leave the day-job work for Sunday afternoon does not help–it just hovers in my brain all weekend like a guillotine ready to drop.

None of us know how long this state of affairs is going to last; I actually have “hopes” that we can stick it out longer than not, so that scientists and state & local governments have more time to do comprehensive testing, to study the results of the tests, and to at least closer to an effective vaccine. This week, I’ve been thinking that I need to get a bit deeper into acceptance that this work-at-home thing is going to be my normal for quite a while. And I think that means experimenting with some better ways for the work part and the creative part of my life to share the beautiful space they’ve been given. Otherwise, my mind is going to stay in this mode.

I’m sure I’ll be playing around with it for a while, but the first thing I’m going to try is to set things up so I can more quickly and easily put away the tools of one type of work and bring out the tools of the other. Right now, no matter what I’m trying to do, I always feel like I’m working amidst clutter. I’m looking at piles of project files or I’m bumping up against my work laptop. I’m moving stacks of mentor texts from couch to floor and back again or I’m hunting around for the latest WIP brainstorming that I put somewhere safe and now can’t find. In an odd way, what I need to do is make more room for my day-job. I need to clear out a couple of the trays in the stacking organizers on my desk for work folders. I need to create a place where I can easily tuck away my work laptop and just as easily pull it out again. I need to take time at the end of each day, not just Fridays, to actually use those spaces and put the day job away. And I need to make sure I do that with my creative work as well.

I’ll be getting these things set up this weekend and, hopefully, seeing a positive impact soon. After that, I don’t know. I might need to start listening to different music during day-job “hours” than I do during my creative time. I might need to do a few minutes of meditating or a set of jumping jacks to help transition from one head space to the other. I might need to walk out the doors of my office, do a short loop around the house, and come back in again so that I have a “commute.” Who know what will help and what won’t. All I know is that, as I said, it’s time for some experiments.

COVID-19, Kidlit, Kitlit, Uncategorized

Creatives in the Time of Social Distancing

Posted on 1 Apr 2020 by beckylevine

Crazy times, right? Hard, frightening times for some more than others–if you’re sick or know someone who’s sick, if you’ve lost your job or have to take time off without pay, if you’re trying to juggle anything with caring for children–homeschooling or not. I’m counting myself on the incredibly lucky side–I have work, I can do it at home, I’m being paid, and my family and friends are very much able to social distance and are taking it seriously enough to reduce my worry.

And in the midst of everything you/we might be going through, there’s trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, to stay committed and attentive to the things we have always tried to spend time with, keep focused on. For me, that’s writing; for you that may be writing or something else creative–painting, crafting, playing an instrument, cooking. It’s not easy, right? But it’s possible and–at least in the kidlit world–there are lots of creatives out coming up with ways to support us. Because creatives create.

If you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen a lot/most of these opportunities. But I’m going to list a few here that I’ve noticed that may give you a few moments or even a few seconds of beauty, peace, inspiration. I’ll try to keep the list updated as I see more. Also, please add any of your own discoveries in a comment.

Erin Dionne has a couple of things going. If you follow her on Facebook (and you should), you may have seen her Captain’s Log posts the past few winters–posts that led to her recent picture book Captain’s Log: Snowbound, She’s started up the posts again, bringing humor and empathy to the current state of things. She’s also started sharing a Friday video on her Facebook post–unfortunately, I don’t seem to be technically savvy enough to post a link here. They’re definitely worth scrolling through her page, though.
Susan Taylor Brown has, for a while, been posting daily on Facebook about things that are making her happy. Recently, she’s been adding photos to share “a pause to breathe.” Her work is lovely–follow her and start seeing them on a regular basis.
SCBWI is, as usual, making sure we’re taken care of during this time with a series of free digital workshops. They’ve also launched SCBWI Connects.
Not specifically COVID-19 related, just a tip from me to other picture books writers: If you write picture books, this may be a good time to go back and read through Storystorm posts at Tara Lazar’s blog.

We can also do a lot to support other writers and illustrators who may be hitting their own bumps right now. Book Riot has a list of ways we can do that. And you can always support authors, illustrators, and bookstores by shopping at your indie’s online site.