Elise Eystad
When the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire went fully online last spring semester, I moved back to my parent’s house. Day after day was spent in front of my laptop screen, either in a Zoom meeting for work, an online class, or finishing a paper. It felt like every day blurred together with all of my screen time, yet I also felt as if the majority of the days were wasted, since I almost never changed out of my pajamas. At the end of the night, however, I would curl up in the living room with my parents and watch BBC shows; they had just gotten a BritBox subscription on Roku to fill our quarantined nights. I watched every British period piece that I could, then also re-read Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen became my best pal and quarantine companion. While this evening practice didn’t help me feel any more productive, I was comforted. It was fun to laugh at British slang with my dad and swoon over Darcy and Knightley with my mom. The period pieces also made me thankful that I was stuck inside with my phone, TV, and plenty of books, instead of having to resort to a “turn about the room” in my boredom, like a 19th century heroine.
Cesar A. Cruz said that “art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” While I don’t know if “disturbed” is the first word I would have picked to describe our collective state during the Covid-19 pandemic, I do believe that we are all fairly disturbed, disheartened, and in need of comfort. And whether it be a movie, book, album, or visual piece, art has a way of comforting us, even while the reality of our own world seems uncertain and harsh.
With that in mind, I asked four local people in the arts about their own “Quarantine Comforts”: What art has helped lift their spirits in the time of COVID-19?
Thank you to Angela Hugunin, Michael Perry, Stephanie Turner, and Rebecca Mennecke for contributing!
Angela Hugunin: student, Editor-in-Chief at NOTA
“I found that it informed my now more frequent strolls and helped deepen my appreciation of the natural world around me—I’ve been grossly underestimating trees! ”
Like many others around the world, I’ve seen an exponential jump in my screen time over these past months due to a shift in working conditions. This shift has brought me a newfound longing to spend time outdoors. I’ve found myself drawn to nature in new ways, and this has shown up in the art I’ve taken in. I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees over the summer, and for me it brought a perfect mix of wit and discovery. I found that it informed my now more frequent strolls and helped deepen my appreciation of the natural world around me—I’ve been grossly underestimating trees! I also really enjoyed Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King, which I got through the Dotter’s Books subscription (hooray for local bookstores!). Moore’s novel took me to faraway places, challenged my understanding of the history of colonization (in a good way), and had me rooting for the characters’ superhuman abilities and resilience. Both books expanded my thinking and buoyed my spirits.
Michael Perry: writer
“‘art’ doesn’t always have to spell itself with a capital ‘A’ to improve the world. ”
1) This is irredeemably self-centered, but honest: my own work has been a source of retreat, if not comfort. I don't mean reading my own work and going ooh, aah, I mean cranking it out. As a freelancer and a performer I've had to redouble my writing production to counter income lost from the road. This has included some self-published projects. The side-benefit of writing and writing and writing, is that I am able to disappear into the work. Even if I'm just editing a revision, taking pen in hand and bending to the task literally allows me to duck and cover. I am also very grateful that in writing my books, turning in my columns, recording audio, I am allowed to work through hope and unease in real time. And it's a chance for me--overtly and between the lines--to acknowledge and thank those people out there striving for good amidst the grim.
2) Given all the home time, I finally finished reading Voltaire, the biography by Jean Orieux, and Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford. It was dreadfully fascinating to observe as Voltaire navigated social unrest and upheaval mirroring much of what we're observing or at the precipice of today. Again, I wouldn't say this lifted my spirits, but there's always something grounding about reminding ourselves that human behavior has been twisting itself into confounding knots forever, and in reading histories like these we are given clues as to how best adjust our own course. And even more importantly, how history will judge us.
3) During the earliest months of the pandemic, my daughters hooked my wife and me into streaming the detective comedy-drama Psych. It is a silly show and I would never have chosen it for myself, but it quickly became a shared and goofy joy that we looked forward to on those dark early nights. Its implausible plots and running gags remind me that "art" doesn't always have to spell itself with a capital "A" to improve the world. The creators of that show gifted us with a nexus for cheer, and we needed it.
Stephanie Turner, UWEC English Professor
“Nothing ever goes away. Trouble circulates, manifesting first as a strange new virus, reforming into civil unrest over police murders and mask mandates, escalating as anxiety over returning to work and school.”
You Can Go “Away,” But You’ll Always Be Somewhere
In grade school, when it seemed everyone was sporting sew-on patches with all the latest slogans, one of my classmates sewed a skull-and-crossbones “POLLUTION” patch to the seat of her pants. She had the right idea. The slogan her patch and its placement evoked was “there’s no such thing as ‘away’.” When you throw something away, like waste, it just ends up someplace else, in some other form, like the unthinkable things piling up in a landfill or bubbling through the sewage treatment plant. It’s a simple law of physics.
Our shared crises during the pandemic remind me of this fact. Nothing ever goes away. Trouble circulates, manifesting first as a strange new virus, reforming into civil unrest over police murders and mask mandates, escalating as anxiety over returning to work and school. To get away from it all, I watched the Netflix series “Away.” In that series, a small group of humans with big differences work together to solve a common problem: how to reach Mars safely. If only it could be that easy here on Earth. Here, there’s no “away.” We are the common problem. Still, we’re finding out way through it with our forms of expression. In my visual rhetoric class, students are looking for iconic images that creatives are remediating to comment on the present time. Thus, Edvard Munch’s classic painting “The Scream” appears on a face mask; the man and woman in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” stand the requisite six feet apart in a cartoon.
I find comfort in exploring these extremes. “Away” streams into my living room; iconic artwork is used to comment on our times everywhere else. Challenging inertia, another law of physics, we change direction, pick up speed, create away.
Rebecca Menneke: Associate Editor at Volume One
“Art inspires art. It’s others, truly, that inspire me.”
“Arts, culture, and creativity are one of those three key sectors that drive regional economies,” said Jo Ellen Burke, the president of the Eau Claire Public Arts Council. “Any lasting damage to the creative sector will drastically undercut our culture, wellbeing, and quality of life.”
I’m not sure many people would consider my line of duty “art.” Though I’m a writer (thereby, creative) reporting on often the artistic elements of the community (thereby, creative), it rarely feels like an artistic endeavor to write about the hard-hitting nooks and crannies of the community. Lately, I’ve covered how racism has impacted the Chippewa Valley, the ways in which people of color have had to tirelessly work to recreate unjust systems that unfairly benefit white people, how COVID-19 has impacted the arts, local farmers, how mental health has taken a solemn hit during these – dare I say it – unprecedented times. To say that writing about these challenging topics is “art” seems to undercut the depth and complexity of these issues. But that’s precisely what I consider my line of duty: art. And discussing these nuanced issues is, in of itself, a form of art. When interviewing Jo Ellen Burke about the recent profusion of public art in downtown Eau Claire, or Wayne Marek at the Eau Claire Children’s Theatre about how theatre is impacted by a pandemic or Bre Ferraro at the Eau Claire Film Festival about filmmaking during these times, I’m constantly reminded of how the arts thrive during challenging situations – they were made to thrive – and it encourages me to create my own art during these chaotic. And my art is this: I’m taking the complex issues of the day and making them less complex, more accessible. By writing about the new murals going up downtown, I’m creating my own art. And, to be completely honest with you, it gives me a sense of purpose and meaning. Before I got my job as associate editor at Volume One, you could most likely find me in my parents’ basement, watching yet another episode of Forensic Files, still in my pajamas, bundled under a blanket and feeling purposeless – defeated, uninspired. Now I feel I have an important mission: to tell the important stories of our community and to do those stories justice. Art inspires art. It’s others, truly, that inspire me.