article, part 1

Remaking Our World: Coronavirus, Hope, and Future Society

*Written by Cristina Deptula, from Authors Large and Small


Coronavirus has radically shifted our lives and schedules. Now that we’re three months in to shelter in place in many metro areas, people are beginning to speculate on how society might reshape itself after we survive this pandemic.

A few of the authors we represent, as literary publicists with Authors, Large and Small, have written pieces inspired by the psychological experience of quarantine. Some look to the big picture and speak out on ecology and economics, while others look inward, seeing this as a time to process and heal personal and communal grief, and to reconnect with neglected aspects of our lives.

In this 4-part series, I give these writers space to share their thoughts.


Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, librettist, and the editor of San Francisco’s literary magazine Caveat Lector. His latest work, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at the Liars’ Café, is available here from publisher Regent Press.

Here is what he has to say:

I believe this is an extraordinary opportunity to remake, not reconstitute, our world.

Before the coronavirus struck, our world was heading blindly toward an ecological catastrophe on several levels (of which the climate crisis is only one) that is likely to make this pandemic look, when we look back at it, like a childhood disease that got terribly out of hand.

We are, in more than a rhetorical sense, facing nature's call, her challenge, and her dare: we can change the bases of our entire civilization - from the ecological disasters created by industrialism to the vast inequalities caused by capitalism, from a grotesque celebrity culture of unleashed individualism to ecocide and a suicidal triumphalism - or we can return to the multiplying horrors of the world we have just been forced to cast from us like a robe on fire.

We now have a chance to reorder the world along lines that are, at one and the same time, more just economically and more sustainable environmentally, if we will have the courage, patience, skill and determination to let nothing stand in our way.

We will not have many chances to rebuild global civilization from the ground up. This is one of them.

Will we take it?

Mark Gunther is the author of Without Jenny, a novel of love, grief, and touch-and-go resilience. He’s an avid cyclist and an activist on behalf of educational and other opportunities for girls, inspired by the memory of his own daughter. Without Jenny is available here.


From Mark:

San Francisco has been shut down for nearly eight weeks. Day after day of clean, sharp, pollution-free air and traffic -free streets.

A fragile peace limned with overwhelming loss. Our grief is real; the brutality of so much death and dislocation, the simple but sad losses of restaurants and coffee dates and birthday parties.

But restoration is inevitable. Even here the streets are coming back to life. We must live, after all, and trust the wisdom of the commons to teach us to be kindly though distant, to be welcoming behind our masks. Our communal fate rests in the generosity of spirit that’s at the core of human resilience.

We will have dirty air and clogged up streets again, and likely will welcome them, but life still will be lived person to person, encounter to encounter. A paradigm is shifting; whatever new normal will emerge, peace is still quilted with loss, while grief forever dances with gratitude.

May this smallest of truths be the largest lesson of the pandemic.

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