Bryant University

Bryant University

In these five essays, first year college students in Professor Martha Kuhlman's Writing Workshop 106 class at Bryant University reflect on their experiences under the COVID lockdown at the end of August, 2020. To help students think about how to represent this difficult time, we read “We can’t comprehend this much sorrow” by Teju Cole, which was published in the New York Times May 18, 2020. Cole writes eloquently about his perspective on the pandemic from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a professor of Creative Writing at Harvard. He adopts a diary format, which you will note in these student essays as well, to meditate upon his connections to New York, Nigeria, Cambridge and the rest of the world as the pandemic numbers in New York State rise.

The students responded to the prompt, “Reflect on your own experiences with the COVID quarantine. What was difficult, and what kept you going?” You will hear from a student who had an epiphany about her own personality, a musician whose musical was cancelled, a student who worked at a hardware store, a student from the Dominican Republic, and a student whose mother passed away from cancer. My heartfelt thanks to the students for sharing their personal insights with us.