CORONAVIRUS 5

According to the Castro Valley Patch today: "There were 399,979 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States and 12,912 deaths as of Wednesday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University. 452 of those deaths were in California. The U.S. has the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the world." There's so little access to testing; numbers might not mean much, but the death statistics should be accurate. Governor Gavin Newsom says California's early shelter-in-place efforts are flattening the curve. Since virus cases increase exponentially, even a day or two makes a tremendous difference. New York started later.

I opened up a folder on Blackboard for students to post paragraphs about how they're doing, where they are, with photos (most chose themselves with their pets, someone posted a waterfall from a hike, another posted a picture of the banana bread she made). I'm so touched by what they're writing. No one reports illness yet, but not everyone has posted.

I think particularly because I'm not writing (I can't remember a meeting of my writing group like tonight's where I didn't have something ready to submit, and that's in nine years), I'm particularly touched by mentions of my work. Cathy Ulrich posted links to my flashes in WIGLEAF (last week) and MATCHBOOK (this week), and several people retweeted them. Someone out of the blue posted my microflash in BENDING GENRES on twitter and people retweeted that. There's a great flash audience on Twitter, but it's unusual for folks to post past publications..

​One of my students on Blackboard said he was reading THE MISSING GIRL and really liked it (especially "Something Like That"). And Genia Blum in Lucerne posted a 3D picture of pandemic reading with a foil-wrapped Easter Bunny on top that included THE MISSING GIRL ("Easter Leo-Bunny has read and munched on books by Jacqueline Doyle, Maria Kuznetsova, Paul Lisicky, Scott Manley Hadley, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and more").

Come to think of it, I did write a new essay, for Genia Blum, for the chapbook at QUEEN MOB'S TEAHOUSE that she's curating. I've been editing it, on and off, and it's almost ready to send to her. I'm still a writer, even though I'm writing much less, and slowly.