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Searching for Words: A creative adjustment to life after COVID
Two years ago, there was cause for celebration in the world of poet Rebecca Hazelton Stafford, also an associate professor of English at North Central.
The New York Times Book Review included her book of poetry, “Gloss,” in its New and Notable column among other newly published poetry collections. The Feb. 26, 2019 excerpt said:
GLOSS by Rebecca Hazelton. (University of Wisconsin, paper, $14.95.) Hazelton’s poems cast a teasing light over the surface sheen of social norms, the playacting in every relationship: “Let’s pretend to be with other people,” one ends, “until we’re with other people.” But beneath their own witty surfaces, the poems also brim with loss and serious moral inquiry.
It was the latest in a growing list of accolades for Stafford. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and national magazines, such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation and Boston Review. Her work can be found in the Pushcart Prize anthology and Best American Poetry.
This year, moments of celebration take different forms in Stafford’s life: the victory of a short walk down the block, the energy of her students discussing her reading assignments, and the realization that new forms of creativity are in her future.
Stafford’s life has changed drastically in the past year as she recovers from a bout with COVID-19 in April 2020. In the new language of the pandemic, she’s considered a “long-hauler,” characterized by lingering symptoms and the need for continued medical care.
“Thankfully I’ve been able to teach and do my job because we’ve been able to work remotely,” she said. “I’ve been improving steadily but it’s been incredibly slow.”
Stafford will never know where she contracted the virus but she thinks it might’ve happened while grocery shopping for her family. Soon she couldn’t walk up the stairs of her home without becoming breathless and she was diagnosed with pneumonia. (A COVID test was negative but she later was found to have COVID antibodies). She had daily visits or phone calls with her doctor. She needed a wheelchair to get inside the clinic, and she couldn’t type on a keyboard or form words as simple as “table” in conversation.
She spent the summer months watching television and her doctor eventually prescribed steroids (she’s now had eight rounds), which gave her the side-effect energy to prepare for fall classes—and to stay up nights painting her kitchen and bathroom.
The adjustments to her writing have been both surprising and gratifying. Stafford found that making extensive revisions to her young adult novel was best accomplished with dictation—a new form of “writing” for her.
“The second draft was better than the first,” she said. “By dictating, I was able to get into the voice of the speaker.”
Stafford is now focused on writing a series of essays that respond to misogyny and the #MeToo movement on Twitter. She’s reflecting on what she’s witnessed and the incidents when she’s “looked the other way. I realized that I, too, was complicit. I’m using my own voice in these essays.”
Her students bring her renewed energy as she’s become accustomed to remotely advising the literary magazine 30North and teaching her courses. Her eight-week seminar for students in the North Central College Honors Program explored fictional responses to Anthropocene/climate change.
“One day, I joined the class and they were already discussing a reading,” she said. “I listened in for seven minutes without saying a word. They are fantastic students.
“Seeing them ‘think the big think’ and witnessing their incredible passion—it’s been very rejuvenating.”
READING LIST
Here are the works of fiction Stafford assigned her students on climate change:
“Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler“
The History of Bees” by Maja Lunde
“The Stone Gods” by Jeanette Winterson
“Annihilation” by Jeff Vanderve
