Creative and Non-fiction Writing during Isolation and Confinement

Imaginative Travel, Prison, Shipwrecks, Pandemics, and War

Ben Stubbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000593907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines writing that has been created in isolation and confinement, and it explores the stories, characters, and situations that have arisen from these states throughout history. It offers a deeper understanding of how others have found inspiration, purpose, and clarity in these difficult and challenging conditions.

By traversing the narratives of writers, wanderers, mariners, prisoners, recluses, and soldiers, this book offers writers and readers a chance to re-think the parameters of their own circumstances. Exploring a broad range of themes, from writing during a pandemic (COVID-19), travel writing, writing from incarceration, and writing within war and conflict zones, each chapter will look at historical contexts as well as contemporary examples within these themes to demonstrate the rich history and current relevance of writing during confinement and isolation. The book also contains tips and exercises to help develop writing skills during restrictive circumstances.

This is a valuable resource for scholars seeking to observe how writing has developed through various themes of isolation in the past, as well as students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of creative writing, communication studies, and journalism seeking to learn through lived experiences how to hone their writing during challenging times.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003243267-1

As the pandemic of our time locked down normal life around the world again and again, the notion of what the future would hold was as milky as a clay cup of Indian street chai. Unsurprisingly, I concluded that I’d never travel again. Even going to the shops to search for toilet paper became an outing worthy of recording.

I had made a career from travel writing where the status of my achievements buoyed me from one journey to the next: seventy countries! Forty-eight hours on an Indian sleeper train! Twenty-four hours awake in Madrid! Once upon a time my travel itineraries for a year might stretch across three continents and my travelling apparel would include hiking boots, anti-malaria medication, SLR camera, maps, and guidebooks. I was quietly chuffed with my worldly ability to say ‘If I eat nuts, I’ll die’ in multiple languages.

As I sat at my desk writing with the standard COVID-19 wardrobe of a two-day old hoodie and slippers, unsure when I would be able to flake the mud from my boots again and start spinning the globe on my desk in anticipation of a new trip, the slow dripping of time started to reveal different layers of my travelling past. At first, I would spend my Saturdays sorting through old travel pictures—of my brother and me on a snowy peak in Kanchenjunga in northeast India, of my wife and me in the Paraguayan jungle or with my children wearing woollen jumpers during a Scottish winter. Then I would start re-reading the travel books that I loved from the past to keep that enthusiasm ticking over—Paul Theroux’s train journeys through China in Riding the Iron Rooster, Christopher Kremmer’s encounters in Kabul rug stores in The Carpet Wars and Robyn Davidson’s desert sunrises with her camels in the Australian desert in Tracks. Still, lockdown continued and my gradual mourning for travel expanded. I would wear the football jersey I bought at a Buenos Aires market and start to question what the point of it all was anyway. So much of travel is rooted in the anticipation of the event, not the living of the experience: planning the trip, booking the accommodation, organising the route, waiting at the airport, and buying yet another set of universal electricity adaptors before departure, squirming in the plane for 12 hours, arriving at a strange place gripped by jetlag and secretly pining for the familiarities of domestic ritual once the initial buzz of the unfamiliar fades.

And then, one morning, just like the final stage of grief, I began to accept that the notion of travel was different, and it might always be so. During ‘the’ virus, many of us have become much more well acquainted with our immediate surroundings—I’ve had more time to ponder the DIY tasks around the house I should complete—the sagging window sash I gaze beyond each day and the sad flower baskets in need of replanting in the courtyard. Alongside this, though, I’ve realised how much I love the view from my living room, looking out across the misty, winter trees to the Adelaide Hills, and I appreciate the discoveries I’ve made in my own little plot—which revealed the deeper history of the place I live and the stories existing here beyond my own narrative.

From this moment it became clear that during isolation, while we all experience life behind closed doors during the pandemic of our age, there is an opportunity to look closer and to think more deeply about many things, including the notion of what travel could be in this new world. It made me realise that the ‘status’ of travel achievements, especially my own, is largely empty unless we remember why we’re doing it in the first place. As Karl Stern once wrote, we “seek in the distance what usually lies right in front of us” (cited in Stiegler, 2013, p.48). Perhaps there is some good to come from the pause that COVID-19 has allowed for our travelling selves?

This also poses the question that even though much of the world has realised that travel is ‘dead’ as of 2020–2022, perhaps it has been a corpse for much longer and we haven’t realised it as we tread and re-tread the same tropes, trips and trails again and again?

* * *

“Remember: the importance of elsewhere is predicated upon the preponderance of home” wrote Professor Randy Malamud (2018, p.18) somewhat fortuitously. As a result of the rapid impact of COVID-19, the entire world had to re-think what travel meant as we grappled with life lived from our home offices and kitchen benches. While many cancelled treks to Nepal, put dreams of Venice on hold and wondered what could be substituted for a tropical beach escape at Christmas, it’s worth remembering that we’re not the first who have had to rethink the concept of travel.

To expand this mourning for travel further, I began to realise that firstly, we certainly weren’t the first group of humans to have quarantine imposed on us and to have to rethink the parameters of travel. This has been happening for hundreds of years. Second, I realised that despite these historical lockdowns and bouts of enforced isolation, due to pandemics, personal illness, being shipwrecked, stuck in a trench during a war or locked in a jail cell, people have also found ways to write, and to transport themselves beyond their confinement. Whether it be to make a record of their experience, to find creative inspiration or to simply help them survive the slow passing of each day, there is a precedent for both our inability to travel, and the usefulness of writing in helping us move, both literally and metaphorically, in some cases, beyond our immediate surroundings. The most pressing purpose for this book, written across 2020 and 2021 during my own lockdown in Australia, is to collate and reflect on writing, creativity, isolation, and confinement, and how it might help us think more profoundly about the notion of travel and the boundaries of travel writing as we move beyond COVID-19 and it becomes something that is also written about and reflected on from a distance.

As such, this book acts as not only a response to the isolation of COVID-19 and as an auto-theoretical response that allows consideration of the broader motivations for tourism and travel in the first place, but it acts as a literary journey through time, space, culture and genre to observe and appreciate how others have written about and lived through isolation, as writers wanting to transcend their situations—in both voluntary and involuntary isolation, and how they have travelled, most often symbolically through their isolation. While this might be the first time most of us have experienced seclusion in this manner, my hope is that by observing how, where, and why people have endured isolation and written about the experience, that we might find some perspective and some hope for thinking creatively about our own confinement; and that the various manifestations of desperation, enlightenment, acceptance, madness, and romance might be useful in this context if we write about them.

While the predominant way many people appreciated travel pre-COVID was as a global, wide-reaching, and diverse endeavour, there is now a chance to consider the act of travel from a more humanist perspective. Malamud writes that humanism in this context, “is proximate, intimate, local, contained” (Malamud, 2018, p.6). There is an opportunity here to embrace the humanist constraints of COVID-19 and to appreciate travel anew, where the pre-COVID value of international tourism—worth $1.7 trillion to the global economy (Blackall, 2019)—can be reconsidered for the negative impact this over-tourism also created. With this pause in travel, and travel writing, there is renewed attention on the ethical perception of what we should do as travellers, and “further investigation into how we can think about this more imaginatively is required” (Stubbs, 2020, p.11).

While COVID-19 is the most significant period of forced isolation in modern memory, the notion of writing and confinement is nothing new. This book will examine writing that has been borne through isolation. It will explore the stories, characters and situations which have arisen from confinement throughout history, as a way of looking closer, thinking more creatively, and understanding how others have found inspiration, purpose, and clarity while quarantined, when situations might otherwise seem mundane and hopeless. It will also look at what we can learn from these writers about their approaches to confinement, how their styles and psychologies have been influenced by their situations and how their voices have been carried through within their iso-writing.

While the current political environment might seek to diminish creative outputs and relegate writing and creative endeavours well behind those of infrastructure, finance, and industry (Pennington & Eltham, 2021), this book will claim the opposite, that writing is as important now as it has ever been. Writing behind closed doors gives us a reason to keep going, it allows us to impose structure on days without end and it gives us glimmers of hope and fires imaginations that might otherwise diminish. Writing and reading behind closed doors can allow us all to travel in more imaginative ways and to appreciate the journeys we do take with renewed vigour.

Writing within confinement offers both writers and readers a chance to re-think the parameters of ‘travel’ in their world no matter what the era or the manner of restriction. It did this for Xavier de Maistre who was sentenced to house arrest for six weeks in 1790, and he chose to write a travelogue about the contents his room; it also provides a sturdy rock to cling to for those battling illnesses, both internal and external, which seeks to drag them under—such as Elisabeth Tova Bailey as she documented the tiny world of the snail she discovered beside her bed as she lay in her white-washed apartment for months on end rendered immobile by a neurological pathogen. Writing provides purpose and structure for what exists beyond the walls of confinement, as it did for Australian journalist Peter Greste, as he completed a Masters degree using pencil and paper for his essays as he was imprisoned in Egypt for 400 days. As we all now exist in the shadows of the coronavirus, this is a theme, and an exploration that we all unexpectedly now have a stake in. While the impact of COVID-19 will change over time, the importance of the stories and histories of isolation before now, so we might learn from them, reflect on their impact or gain inspiration, does not.

The chapters in this book examine the themes of travel writing, castaways, incarceration, illness, war and conflict, and writing and COVID-19. Each chapter will look at both the historical context and contemporary examples within these themes to demonstrate the rich history of writing and creativity behind closed doors and the enduring contemporary relevance.

By exploring the narratives of writers, wanderers, mariners, prisoners, recluses, and soldiers, this book will look closely at how writers deal with the obstacles of captivity and how individuals have used writing as a means to explore their own isolation. This collection puts forward the premise that by looking closer and more creatively at the world during these periods, we may find greater navigation for the future and a way we might travel without necessarily leaving the rooms of our confinement.

Beyond the exploration of writers in varied circumstances and how they have approached their isolation, the book will also look theoretically at how these narratives inform our broader understanding of our existence within space. Examples include the analysis and experience of ‘vertical’ travel, as demonstrated by Alphonse Karr in Tour Around My Garden in 1845 as he explored every plant in his garden in Montmartre with his pet monkey Emmanuel and the emergence of the ‘from below’ perspective as theorised by Darnton (1984) as an addition to traditional historiography. It will also explore the answers that these writers searched for and discovered as they lived through their confinement, with analyses of the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual elements that writers contended with during their captivity.

When we think about it, the act of writing and creating nearly always happens behind closed doors, though the main element here for most of us is choice. We choose to close the office door or retreat to the quiet bedroom to write. All of a sudden the notion of not having a sense of choice and being thrust into a set of circumstances and a solitary world is something that all of us have in common, something we maybe couldn’t fathom before all this. This could be the most extreme form of incarceration, the musings of a travel writer in his room, or someone finding joy in their world from the confines of their sick bed, though what is clear is that writing in isolation is nothing new, and suddenly it is something we can relate to.

So, while we all appreciate the notion of being behind closed doors in a manner none of us could have predicted or chosen, the opportunity to consider the creative significance of this as proximate travellers is more telling than ever.

References

Blackall, M (2019). Global tourism hits record high, but who goes where on holiday? Guardian, 19 July. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jul/01/global-tourism-hits-record-highs-but-who-goes-where-on-holiday (accessed 22 October 2020).

Darnton, R (1984). The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. Basic Books.

Malamud, R (2018). The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist, Humanist Tourist. Intellect Books.

Pennington, A & Eltham, B (2021). Creativity in Crisis: Rebooting Australia’s Arts and Entertainment Sector after COVID. Centre for Future Work and the Australia Institute. Retrieved from https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Creativity_in_Crisis-_Rebooting_Australias_Arts___Entertainment_Sector_-_FINAL_-_26_July.pdf.

Stiegler, B (2013). Traveling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel (trans. P Filkins). University of Chicago Press.

Stubbs, B (2020). Close travel: On the ethics of writing about the near-at-hand. Ethical Space Journal, 17(3), 11–17.

2

Travel writing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003243267-2

While conventional travel was curtailed in 2020 and 2021 as we became more well acquainted with our significant others’ habits than we ever thought possible, there is a precedent for thinking about journeys and how they are written about in a more imaginative sense—travel and the near-at-hand.

From this prompt comes the notion of ‘close travel’ a mode of looking around us and within our environments more thoroughly before venturing across the globe in search of adventure, encounters with the ‘other’ and cultural immersion far from the places we call home.

This pause in our ability to travel also allows for a re-thinking of the increasing irrelevance of traditional travel writing. Not only has the world been thoroughly explored, the historical hangover of imperialism, orientalism, and capitalism has left travel writing as a poorly regarded cousin of journalism. The imposition of COVID-19, where travel has been largely impossible, could be said to have sped up the inevitable death of the form. Curiously, though, this is where a focus on close travel, which is essentially travelling without travelling, could be the saviour of the genre. It affords a re-focusing, a new opportunity for narrators and a chance to look closer in a manner that has not been considered, at least as its central concern, before now.

This idea of more ‘vertica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Travel writing
• 3. Illness
• 4. Incarceration
• 5. Castaways
• 6. Writing, isolation, and war
• 7. Writing and COVID-19
• Index