The Pandemic Diaries

The Pandemic Diaries
Wellesley 
Summer 2021

The past year has been extraordinary. The COVID-19 pandemic has utterly recast all our lives—how we work and learn, play and pray—and it has been going on so long now that in the United States it has begun to feel, if not normal, at least “ordinary.”

“We love, we hate, we covet, all in privacy and solitude,” Daniel Defoe wrote, of the alienation that stems from isolation, in his novel/memoir of the London Plague of 1665. One way humans have tried to fill that solitude is through personal journals. Many of us found ourselves in the early days of lockdown searching for solace in the great literature of pandemics. Sales of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’ The Plague (another novel in the style of a diary) soared, as have recent novels that chronicle pandemics, including Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Severance by Ling Ma. Some of us began keeping diaries, or, if we were already diarists, we began keeping them religiously.

For Wellesley anthropology professor Anastasia Karakasidou, the personal journal is an important tool both for people trying to make sense of their place in the world and for the academic trying to make sense of a society at a particular moment in history. For nearly 20 years, Karakasidou has made use of journals as part of her teaching and research into the cultures of cancer, drawing participants from Wellesley, China, and her native Greece.

So when the pandemic hit, she knew instantly what she must do. “I felt the best way for me to deal with this is to teach a class on pandemics,” she says. “The students are the greatest resources I have in my life right now to make sense of the virus.” 

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Companion Gardening

Invitation Oxford

August 2020

Tucked behind the Old Armory Pavilion, in what was once a little-used baseball field, the Oxford Community Garden has grown over the past decade from a scratchy patch of compacted red soil and Bermuda grass into a half acre of lush flowers, vegetables and fruiting shrubs, thanks to the work of dedicated volunteer gardeners.

On a recent spring day — before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of social gatherings — the garden was bustling with people during its monthly work day. New gardeners were being assigned plots. The old hands weeded a dense row of communal blueberry bushes. Meanwhile, garden member Andrew Gordon sat beneath a honeysuckle arbor plucking a harp for the workers’ enjoyment.

This is a far cry from the garden’s earliest days. The seeds of the idea to start a garden anyone in the community could join began with Oxford resident Susie Adams. On a trip to Finland for work, Adams saw her first community garden.

“People had their chairs out there and their kids out there and they were hanging out and they had art in the garden,” Adams said. “It seemed like such a neat community place. I thought, ‘We have to do this in Oxford!’”

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Home School

Home School
Wellesley Magazine
Fall 2018

On a recent morning, I walked into my living room at 9 a.m. as I always do, ready to start the day, only to find that my three children had already started “school” without me. My oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, had dragged a small chalkboard easel up from the basement and was demonstrating simple addition and multiplication problems to his 6-year-old brother and 4-year-old sister, who sat on little chairs behind a child-sized table. I sat down on the couch, dumbfounded.

Although I have homeschooled my children for the past three years, this scene bears little resemblance to how I teach. My method, insofar as there is one, is more open-ended—learning as a natural part of life, not the study of clearly delineated subjects. Aside from the birdsong streaming in from our open front door and a cat walking on dirty paws across the table where my younger children sat, this scene looked a lot like a traditional classroom.

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On the Re-launch Pad

On the Re-launch Pad
Wellesley
Summer 2016

Re-entering the workforce after time away can be daunting, but many alumnae have found that with some honest self-assessment, networking, and the willingness to take some risks, it’s possible to wind up on a better career path than before their break.

In the years after she graduated from Wellesley, Danya Underwood Rivlin ’99 put her professional life on hold to be home with her children. But after seven years as a stay-at-home mom, she was ready to return to the workplace and began interviewing. Last November, having been passed over for a couple of jobs for which she was well-qualified, Rivlin wrote a self-described “cry for help” on a popular alumnae Facebook group. “Can I still have a rewarding professional life ahead of me?” she asked. “Where do I start?”

Rivlin was in good company. She was one of the more than 2 million American women between the ages of 24 and 54 who the United States Department of Labor says are unemployed and looking for work.

Of the dozens of alumnae interviewed for this story, many chose to take time off to care for a child or a sick parent. For others, it was a necessity driven by the high costs of child care or the inflexibility of the work world around the responsibilities of family life. It was a conflicted decision for many, who spoke of their alma mater’s emphasis on women’s professional success and the pull of the College’s motto to minister to a wider community. And whether they saw their time off as a luxury or a necessity, all of them acknowledged it as a privilege not shared by most working women. For Rivlin, even the term “time off” is a misnomer. “Time off from what?” she asks. “I feel like I’ve worked harder in the last seven years than I’ve ever worked in all the rest of my life combined.”

Whatever their feelings about their career breaks, at some point they all wanted to return to work. The statistics, however, can be discouraging. The Center for Talent Innovation, founded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and author of the book Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, surveyed thousands of “highly qualified women” in 2004 and again in 2009, after the economic downturn. The latter survey found that 89 percent of respondents said they wanted to return to work, but only 73 percent of them succeeded, and only 40 percent found full-time jobs. A CNN headline in 2013 put the case more bluntly: “Moms ‘opting in’ to work find doors shut.”

Of course, re-entering the labor force is not an issue only for mothers—or even only for women. In today’s economy, career breaks of any sort can seem insurmountable. But just as Wellesley alumnae have earned a reputation for being successful at launching careers, they have proved no less successful at relaunching them.

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Food Blogging for Native Son Farm

Native Son Farm Food Blog
www.nativesonfarm.com
April 2016-present

Since April of 2016, I have written, photographed, and produced a food blog for Native Son Farm, a certified naturally grown vegetable farm in Tupelo, Mississippi. This is a project near and dear to my heart because I love food—and photographing food—and am passionate about supporting sustainable local agriculture. Native Son Farm is real asset to north Mississippi, where fresh, locally grown, pesticide-free produce options are scarce. But I am also particularly proud of this project because it was an idea I pitched and built from the ground up, and it has really taken off.

In the blog's three farm seasons, I have shepherded it through a redesign and help grow readership into the thousands. It serves as a clearinghouse for information about the farm's community-supported agriculture (CSA) program as well as a way for CSA members to share their favorite tips and recipes. I have also solicited, edited, and produced several guests posts from area members, chefs, and restauranteurs. My fourth season as editor of this blog begins tomorrow, and I am really excited about where this blog is going, as well as some bigger longer-term projects I have planned with Native Son Farm.  Here is a sample of recent posts:

Beer Nuts

Beer Nuts
Hendrix magazine
Spring 2015

Meet the growing number of alumni who are tapping into the craft beer movement

The first thing I notice about Lost Forty Brewing is its size. Although technically a microbrewery, everything about the operation is big. Towering over its entrance, in a former warehouse district just east of Little Rock’s River Market, is an enormous grain silo that holds the 48,000 pounds of malt that will be used to produce some 3,000 barrels of beer this year. The day it opened last December, Lost Forty because one of the biggest breweries in the state and one of the most talked-about dining venues in the city.

Although new to brewing, co-owner John Beachboard ’01 has been a big name in central Arkansas food and business circles for years. He and partners Scott McGehee and Russ McDonough would seem to have a Midas touch, having rolled out one hit restaurant after another: ZaZa in 2008, Big Orange in 2011, followed by Local Lime in 2012. Now the trio, who joined with businessman and “serial entrepreneur” Albert Braunfisch ’86 on this venture, are making a big splash on Arkansas’s burgeoning brew scene.

But Beachboard and Braunfisch are just the latest among a growing number of Hendrix College grads who are ridding the tidal wave of craft beer that is washing over the state: including Evan McDonald ’03 in Fayetteville, and Ian Beard ’02, Patrick Cowan ’03, and Ida Mehdizadegan Cowan ’05 in Little Rock. So what’s causing all this brew-ha-ha?

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The Expert: What I Know About ... Body Odour

The Expert: What I Know About … Body Odour
Avenue Edmonton
June 2015

Who: Rachel McQueen

Age: 40

Job: Assistant Professor of Textiles Science at the University of Alberta

Experience: Rachel McQueen grew up on the South Island in New Zealand, where her father ranched about 1,500 Perendale sheep on 300 acres of land, which may explain her love of wool. As an undergrad at the University of Otago, she got turned on to textiles science. “What I liked about clothing was the science, but also the social aspects as well.”

In 2007, she moved to Edmonton to take up her current position as a professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta, one of the only university in Canada with such a program. In addition to teaching, she studies the retention of odor in textiles—“Why does this T-shirt stink and the other not?” is a question she often finds herself asking—and works with several manufacturers of sports apparel.

Her research involves a lot of “wear trials,” where volunteers sniff the sweaty underarms of other people’s clothing, and her findings on stinky garments have generated interest, from Scientific American to Cosmopolitan.

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