By Lauren Dorsey, Staff Writer
The full impacts of COVID-19 on Vermont will take decades to surface, but the Vermont Historical Society has already begun the work of collecting, preserving, and piecing together the stories of how Vermonters experienced the pandemic’s first two years. The results of its effort will be published on March 25 in the new book “Life Became Very Blurry.”
“The overall goal for this project was to try [to] help people begin to process this enormous historic trauma that we all went through in 2020 and 2021 and that some people are still very much living with today,” Garrett M. Graff, the book’s editor, told the Standard this week.
“Life Became Very Blurry” is a collection of more than 100 oral histories recounting the ways residents, from truck drivers to state officials, navigated COVID-19. State officials interviewed include Sarah Copeland Hanzas (State Representative then and now Vermont Secretary of State), Dr. Mark Levine (Commissioner, Vermont Department of Health), Becca Balint (Vermont Senate majority leader then, and now Vermont Representative in the U.S. Congress), Peter Welch (who represented Vermont in the U.S. House of Representatives and now is a U.S. Senator), and more. The final work also features perspectives from across the state, including a tax preparer from White River Junction and a nurse practitioner from the Good Neighbor Health Clinic in Hartford.
Historians with the Vermont Historical Society started conducting interviews for the book in 2022, and their work was then organized and edited by Burlington resident and bestselling author Graff last summer. “This is about the earliest that you could ever write a history,” said Graff. “The Historical Society really began working on this in real-time after the primary stage of the pandemic. Although, even now, I don’t even quite understand how we’re supposed to talk about [the pandemic’s phases], because it’s never really been over.”
During his career, Graff has worked on a variety of other oral history collections, including books on 9/11 and D-Day. His book, “Watergate: A New History” was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in history.
At left, the cover of “Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID19 in Vermont.” At right, the book has been edited and organized by Burlington resident and bestselling author Garret Graff, whose book on Watergate was a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Courtesy of the Vermont Historical Society
For Graff, oral history was the perfect medium for a work on the pandemic because of the tendency of interviews to capture the human experience, in all of its confusion, chaos, and uncertainty. “One of the things that always surprises me about oral history is the emotion that comes through in some of the stories, and how you can be moved by very simple stories as people tell them,” said Graff.
For example, the book includes the perspective of a truck driver who works for a company that delivers grain from Canada to Vermont farms. “He talks about how during the pandemic, he felt that it was the first and only time of his career that people really appreciated the work that he did as a truck driver,” said Graff. People usually ignore or feel annoyed by truck drivers. “He talked about how, during the pandemic, that changed and people went out of their way to celebrate how truckers are the backbone of the daily American economy,” said Graff.
There were several aspects of the collection and of the pandemic, however, that presented unique challenges in assembling the oral histories, according to Graff.
First, because the book is coming out just a few years after the event took place, the pandemic’s legacy — both in Vermont and across the country — remains unclear. “We are still trying to make sense in our daily lives and in our national politics, the changes that COVID created and drove in American life even as the Historical Society set out to try to capture these memories of at least one distinct phase of the height of the pandemic,” said Graff. This can make it difficult to know which takeaways or turning points to highlight.
In addition, COVID required people to isolate, and as lockdowns and remote work became more common, people’s lives diverged radically. “Your experience through that event was so driven by what job you were in, what your family status was, what your living situation was, [that] it’s really hard to find people who had similar experiences,” said Graff. “Even people living in the same community or on the same block may have had wildly different experiences.”
As a result, Graff took a different approach to this collection than he has in the past. “It just wasn’t this interlocking set of stories in the way that I normally work with when I have done oral histories of 9/11, or D-Day, for instance,” said Graff. “This was a little bit different because it was more thematically linked.”
To help capture the ideas that tied the accounts together, Graff organized the book into chapters focusing on the different themes he saw, including sections like caring for Vermont, stories of the medical profession, schooling, or the legislature. “What I thought was so interesting about a lot of the medical stories, for example, including the VA hospital in White River Junction, was that because the state did such a good job responding to the pandemic and following the public health guidance, it was for the most part not that overwhelming for the medical system,” said Graff. The state had relatively low case rates, so Graff said the hospitals never saw the staggering surges that became common in other parts of the country. “What really was interrupted was a lot of the social services and the social safety nets of the state, so the people who were already having a really hard time had a much harder time during the pandemic,” said Graff.
Graff also underscored the camaraderie and community that pervaded Vermont during the pandemic’s peak. “One thing that really stood out was the warmth and generosity that spread through nearly every corner of the state at the community level, how much people looked out for their neighbors and cared for their communities and supported each other,” said Graff. “In many parts of the country, COVID was experienced as a polarizing and divisive time, but in Vermont, it was experienced very much as a moment of unity and care.”
Overall, Graff said this book is just the first of what will be many histories on the first years of the pandemic. He believes these histories can help people continue to heal, reflect, and process, and will act as a resource for future generations. “There are a couple of places in the book where speakers reference or look back on the experience of the last major flu pandemic in the United States in World War I,” said Graff. “I think the Historical Society’s goal is that the next time we face a pandemic in our country and in our state, that this book and these oral histories will be available as a resource for future generations looking to understand how to live life in a pandemic.”
Pre-order the book at vermont-historical-society-museum.square.