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Galen Bunting is a doctoral candidate. In his research, he analyzes war writing and Modernist literature, tracing textual representations of trauma and gender in the aftermath of the First World War. He has contributed to the Women Writers Project, worked as an editorial assistant for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and currently teaches at Northeastern University in both the Department of English and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. He holds a master’s degree in English from Oklahoma State University. His article "'Fragments of A Great Confusion': The Psychological War Sketches of Mary Borden" can be found on the peer-reviewed web publication Lost Modernists; his qualitative study, “‘Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!’: LGBT Writers, SafeZone Tutors, and Brave Spaces Within the Rural Writing Center,” can be read in the pages of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. His poetry can be found in the pages of the Minnesota Review.
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Orion's Belt:
Walking Through a Pandemic
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent a lot of time walking. "Orion’s Belt: Walking Through A Pandemic" is a literary meditation on loneliness, snow, and illness, documenting the night before I was diagnosed with COVID-19 last February. In her essay "On Being Ill," published in 1926 in The New Criterion, Virginia Woolf muses, "it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” In this essay, I consider illness as a state of mind, witnessing what it means to go through graduate school during a global pandemic.