Write On, Colorado

We’re living in a historic time. 

Not this age, not this millennium, but right this minute. We haven’t been touched by a pandemic of this magnitude for more than 100 years, and as we incorporate social distancing — a phrase not in such common use just weeks ago — and face the potentially life-altering consequences of the coronavirus, we live in the knowledge that our world may look very different when the danger passes. 

Now, as so many of us live under near-quarantine conditions, working from home — or not working at all — while hoping to quash the march of COVID-19 across the country, we’re bound to find ourselves in moods of reflection, uncertainty and hope. There is much to contemplate. 

And so The Colorado Sun is asking all of you, anyone with the capacity and the willingness to commit your thoughts to print, to share your observations of the many aspects of this remarkable period. We’ll publish select pieces periodically — an ongoing time capsule of sorts — as we confront the challenges ahead of us.

Leading off will be Colorado author Laura Pritchett, a Colorado Book Awards winner who also teaches writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Colorado Western University. Appropriately, she chose for her essay the importance of writing at a time like this.

In fact, we’ve adopted the title of her piece as the literary call to arms for our project. 

So if you feel the need for a therapeutic outlet, the desire to put thoughts to keyboard and tackle any pandemic-related topic — personal or societal — that reflects the tenor of these times, put your essay in an email and send it to kevin@coloradosun.com.

Include your name, address, phone number and a photo. Please limit submissions to 1,000 words.

The coronavirus pandemic is one of those rare, universally shared experiences — though its impacts will be as varied as our population. With Write On, Colorado, we hope to capture, in real time, snippets of what one day will be our history, through the eyes of our community.

See all of our Write On entries below.

• A poem gifted to me by coronavirus
• The pandemic is overwhelming. Maybe humanity could use a big time out.
• The shutdown has triggered a lot of feelings for us. So we did what we do: Wrote a song.
• Rural and alone during Colorado’s coronavirus outbreak, not much is different. Except for the will on my coffee table.
• The coronavirus confronts each of us with a question: What’s essential?
• In Colorado’s coronavirus battle, we must arm ourselves — with empathy
• What a zombie apocalypse, plus Aristotle, can teach us about friendship in the time of coronavirus
• I’ve fled many Colorado disasters. Now, with coronavirus, I find myself preparing instead to stay home.
• Write On, Colorado: In these trying times, change is hard. Writing helps.