It was a stellar panel. Online, of course, at the Library Journal Day of Dialogue. Not that my personal zoom square was stellar, since I’d looked at the weather forecast that morning and seen that the day was supposed to be cloudy. My father-in-law was a meteorologist so I trusted the forecast, and didn’t move my laptop from its usual position on my desk, where on sunny days a skylight casts a bright light behind me. Instead I ran around the neighbourhood doing errands, arriving back at my laptop just in time to sit down, take a deep breath and smile at the camera. 

As, of course, sunlight streamed down from the skylight, looking like a beam of revelation that had just missed me.

This was a panel on historical fiction, where the other writers—New York Times bestselling authors all—looked far more poised and professional. Alka Joshi sat in front of poster blow-ups of the covers of her two more recent novels, including her latest, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur. Susie Finkbeiner and Patty Callaghan Henry smiled out from their lovely houses. (And isn’t this the new delicio, to snoop out people’s houses on zoom?) Sandra Brown, who has written an astonishing seventy-one bestsellers, sat perfectly made up beside a tasteful tableau of a lamp and a plant, leaving her many fans unable to glean personal details of her home. Speaking of pros. 

I was there to talk about my novel, Time Squared, which will be out this fall. I mention the title now because this is something else I learned from Sandra Brown, who mentioned the name of her latest novel, Blind Tiger, at tactful intervals. You should do that more often, my husband told me afterward. (Time Squared. Time Squared.)

I have to admit, when I do these panels I find it hard to concentrate on the other speakers until after I speak myself, and in this case I was the last one to introduce my book. But after I did, moderator Julie Kane, head of collection services at the Washington and Lee University library, asked a question that has stayed with me. 

“Each of your books carries the weight of grief along with a thread of hope or faith in something larger or beyond oneself,” Julie said. “Grief is something that has pervaded our collective emotional consciousness with COVID. Can you speak to how current trauma informs a reading of the past?”

A year and a half into the pandemic, maybe we’ve reached the point where we can look back on a very long haul and begin to imagine the After Time. It’s a good moment to ask what has helped us get through it, and the ways in which the pandemic changed society.

Also, as writers, how our work will be changed by what we’ve experienced and observed.

This time, I was called on to speak first. Thinking aloud, with the sunlight streaming down behind me, I found myself saying that in living through an important moment in history, a truly historic time, I’ve learned the importance people attach to everyday life, the small joys and ordinary victories, even when big events batter us. 

“So if we jump ahead to the history books, they’ll say—fifty years later—in 2020 and 2021, this happened,” I said. “Then they’ll give the mortality figures and all that. But of course we’ve lived through a long process, and it’s brought us grief, but also joy.” 

In the future, I think this is what I’ll bring to writing about earlier historical periods. I’m expanding my remarks now rather than quoting from the recording. But I said that what the pandemic has taught me is how insistently people step back from the big picture into dailyness. How they—we—insist on the small joys, and how this has led me to understand the often ordinary nature of an epic emergency. The really nuanced nature of people’s lives.

The temptation, when you’re writing historical fiction, is to write your story in the context of the great moments in the time period you’re writing about. Maybe Winston Churchill made a speech, or Hitler, or Cromwell, and how did your protagonist react? But what I’ve learned is how little time most of us spend thinking about the big picture. Instead, unless the bombs are falling right on top of us, we enjoy the beautiful sunset, cope with the kid’s temper tantrum and eat our dinner. Maybe we draw up a budget. Maybe we figure out how to cut it.

In other words, we do the things we do when times are quieter. When we’re not facing immediate violence, a lot of life doesn’t change. Although as writers, we tend to find our drama in what does.

The other panelists broadly agreed. Yet what seemed to strike two of the other writers as important about the past year’s trauma is not just living outside the historical moment, but of escaping it, and the value of books as both distraction and touchstone. 

Patty Callaghan Henry is the author of Once Upon a Wardrobe, a novel about the family of C.S. Lewis. Lewis, of course, was the British don wrote the Narnia series of children’s books, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Patty said his life and works ended up being, for her, a way to keep in touch with her core humanity during the pandemic.

“It’s why we write books, and read books, to find ourselves,” she told the audience. “And in these books, all of them, we find ourselves. We feel less alone. We discover what it is to be human, we have empathy for other people. And with Wardrobe, it was my touchstone every single day during the pandemic. If I could touch that, if I could return to it, I could return to humanity.”

“Well, I wrote Blind Tiger simply as an escape from what was going on,” Sandra Brown said. “I was away from my family when we went into lockdown. I was isolated for two months in a place by myself. The news was so horrible every night. It was taking a beating just to turn into the nightly network news programs because so much was going on in our country. 

“And I thought, Gosh, I’ve got to escape. So, where can I go? I thought, I can’t write about this stuff because everybody was sick of it. I was sick of it. So I had to escape into what was going on a hundred years ago. Then I found the moonshine thing, which at least was something colourful.” 

Sandra’s novel is set during the Spanish flu amid a society of bootleggers. 

“There was certainly bloodshed involved, but at least it was an escape from what we were going through.”

Yet, since it’s set during the last global pandemic, Sandra’s story is also a way to explore our societal trauma at one remove, a technique that makes COVID a little easier to bear. This, of course, is another aspect of historical fiction: how writers can tell a modern story without plunging readers into the raw emotions of contemporary life. 

And as Alka Joshi pointed out, given the circular nature of history, we’re unlikely to run out of material.

“History always repeats itself,” she said. “So one of the comforts I have derived from the pandemic is knowing that it will be over. It will end, and we will survive. And these will come up again and again and again, and we will be able to deal with them. I see the positive in every aspect of our lives. You know, there is a positive, and we can see the joy of life once it’s over.”

And just maybe, as Susie Finkbeiner said, we might finally learn from our mistakes.

In The Nature of Small Birds, Susie has written a novel about Operation Babylift, which brought Southeast Asian child refugees to the United States. The children were adopted by people from different racial backgrounds, and Susie has written about good intentions breeding unexpected trauma and alienation

“I have three kids,” she said. “And, you know, after the Great Depression, they didn’t go back to the way things were before, they reinvented. And so, (in my family), we have been really looking at that and saying, How are we going to go through this and be more resilient and stronger on the other side, and reinvent what life is going to be like.

“And it can be better. It can be.”

That’s us as writers and as individuals. But I suppose the underlying question is whether society as a whole can break out of old patterns or whether we’re condemned to repeat them. Has humanity learned anything from the pandemic? Will it change the world?  

“Human nature hasn’t really changed,” Sandra Brown told the audience, the experience of researching seventy-one bestsellers behind her.

 I’m left to wonder if that’s good or bad. Or whether, maybe, it’s both.