ABSTRACT
The notion of confinement becomes something different and altogether more harrowing when we look at it through the lens of illness. What if you had no option but to remain in your room, to linger in your bed or, worse still, to be stuck inside your head, locked in and unable to leave? The examples of creativity spawning from these locked in experiences can give us much to think about during the current pandemic and how writers have still travelled ‘beyond’ their circumstances. Elisabeth Outka writes that the influence of a pandemic is “a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after”. Through viewing how writers who have endured catastrophic strokes, vision impairment, plagues and immobilising pathogens have discovered the importance of writing, this chapter provides a clear connection to the importance of imaginative travel during COVID-19.
