Too Soon?

In spring 2020, as the world shut down, we all learned that William Shakespeare penned King Lear while hiding out from the plague. Some contemporary artists responded to the 500-year-old news with anger: oh, the pressure to be productive! Angry or not, people certainly wrote during the first wave of COVID‑19 — a lot. Literary journals were flooded with submissions, and projects to record those early weeks sprang up overnight. If anything, this pandemic has been meticulously over-documented. But do any of us want to read about it anymore? Has the time come to sit back and reflect, or would we rather leap forward into hedonism and amnesia?

Chronicling the Days came off the press as Quebec exited its third wave and stumbled toward a summer of relative release. The book is a print version of an online project, launched by the Quebec Writers’ Federation in April 2020, that...