How I Spent My Pandemic

Sheri Nault is an artist and activist in Canada. They’re of mixed Métis and European descent and very active in the Indigenous Two-Spirit community. Sheri speaks to John Seven about how they didn’t take the pandemic very seriously at first, but once they understood what was ahead worked to meet the challenges of continuing their creative work and activism in a form that was possible during a lockdown. How do you reach out while staying in?

Brian Walker is a singer/songwriter in Philadephia who performs as A Day Without Love [https://www.adaywithoutlove.com/home]. He’s also the host of the podcast Dreams Not Memes. Brian speaks to John Seven about his approach to living through lockdown, an outlook that taught him just because the world seemed to come to a halt that didn’t mean his own creative abilities had to do the same.

Whit Taylor [https://www.whittaylorcomics.com/] is an Ignatz Award-winning cartoonist and contributing editor at The Nib, but in 2020 she added another role to her repertoire — mother. John Seven talks with Whit Taylor about her experience of not only giving birth during the original height of the pandemic in the spring, but how raising a newborn during the pandemic has been very different from what we think of as normal, and has also presented challenges to her creative life.

When filmmaker/videographer Joe Aidonidis [http://greatsky.media/welcome] saw the pandemic disrupt plans and obstruct opportunities, he pursued another course — continuing his work documenting the opioid crisis as it existed in his home in Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts. Making a documentary during the pandemic offered its own particular challenges and Aidonidis speaks to John Seven about jumping those hurdles and the state of life for people with an opioid addiction during COVID-19.

Here in the west, the exact pandemic situation in Russia isn’t always clear, but Angelina Lucento, assistant professor of history and art history at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, has had a ringside seat to the response in her city as well as Ukraine, where Lucento was on a research trip when the pandemic began. Lucento got much closer to COVID-19 than she ever expected and she talks to John Seven about that experience and more, offering insight into the pandemic response in Moscow.