Volume 10 • Issue 2 • 2020 • "The Situation" I (Spring)

Editorial

"The situation" as it is right now, in April of 2020 … who among us could have imagined any of this as 2020 was getting underway. When the first science-fiction-like images started reaching us live-streamed from Wuhan in late January — that hospital sized for an army going up in 48 hours? a metropolis-scaled full lock-down? body temperatures surveilled aerially in a population of millions? — no-one would have believed possible what was about to follow. Yet almost overnight COVID-19 changed everything, literally everything. For now, at least.

Below, eleven IWP alumni responded, at short notice, to our many questions. Their answers are arranged in the order received, and reading them that way you can see the curve of threat rising, tensed, arched, then tapering off in the final one, in which quiet personal thanks is given for a gift the virus has given the writer. She isn't alone in turning things upside down: for if the situation around us isn't revolving, revolutionary, what is?

The editor