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Collected Item: “A COVID year...book”

Give your story a title.

A COVID year...book

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Photograph and Audio Tape

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

Being one of two editors for a school-wide yearbook is challenging enough, but when COVID hit, it changed the way that we were able to record our schools history. Events were cancelled, and those that weren’t imposed limited attendance policies, which made it more difficult to take photographs and conduct interviews. To aid with this, we sent out requests to the student body, asking them to submit photos for the yearbook. This relieved some of the pressure, as we now had access to more content, but it still posed challenges. Even with the photos that we were able to obtain, the subjects of the photos were always wearing masks, making it more difficult to identify who was present. Despite these numerous struggles, we were able to complete the yearbook and publish it for the student body to enjoy. To capture the year as a whole, we chose to theme the book after the most prominent event of the school year; COVID.
Each page in the book was designed to reflect COVID in one way or another. Although this implied a more serious tone to this book, my co-editor and I strived to add humor where and when we could. Of these, my favorite was a poem that I wrote, titled “ ‘Twas the Night Before COVID-MAS”, a parody of “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”. While some lines of the famous poem remained the same, I added my own touches to most of them, to better reflect these troubling times. With this story that I have now shared to the world, I have also included an audio reading of this poem. I hope it brings you a few laughs.

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Jeremy Ferguson

Give this story a date.

2021-05-21
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