We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Martha Greenwald. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Martha below.
Briefly introduce yourself to our readers:
I’m a writer and editor originally from the Jersey shore but I’ve lived in Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco, Iowa, and North Carolina, before landing in Louisville, Kentucky 25 years ago. My identity was forged early (first grade!) when I can still remember being pulled out into the hall and being introduced to other teachers as the kid who wrote a little book from the first person P.O.V. of a plane being hijacked. I was a literary magazine editor kind of kid in high school and a few years after majoring in English and Art History in college, I was offered a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. Later, I taught English, Creative Writing, and ESL at the University of Louisville for eighteen years. I believe that all these experiences, and having been able to live all over the U.S., are essential to this project I created. I’m able to relate to more people and empathize with multiple points of view – though maybe not aircraft.
Many people believe the pandemic is over. Why is the WhoWeLost Project still necessary?
The WhoWeLost Project is a website, and a book, that invites people to write stories and poems about those they’ve lost to the pandemic. There are no comments or judgments allowed on the site —your story is your story and that’s it. This offers a welcome respite from the ongoing bullying and comorbidity shaming rampant on social media. One can write and remember without even mentioning Covid if that is what the writer needs. Our site is full of memories and treasured anecdotes. I like to say that we shelter all the stories that would have been told at the funerals and wakes that didn’t happen.
Is this still needed? Well, just yesterday, I was at a substitute teaching gig and I got into a conversation with a man at the school who does IT. He asked me a few questions about what I do and then told me about his mother, who had died due to Covid two years ago. We discussed the political divisions in his family and how it has affected him. He didn’t want to stop talking when the bell rang and sought me out later to chat more. He had a lot to say and it was clear that his sorrow is profound and unaddressed.
This was not an isolated incident. In the past few weeks, I’ve had at least ten conversations with people who have either lost someone due to Covid or have been affected by the pandemic in other ways, such as being a healthcare worker. As a society, we would like to believe this is all over but of course it isn’t and ignoring or glossing over these large losses will only make the grief fester and secretly grow. WhoWeLost addresses the need to speak and be safely heard.
How did you come up with the idea for WhoWeLost?
I live in Kentucky, where our Governor, Andy Beshear, created a remarkably empathetic environment for remembrance, even at the very beginning of the pandemic. We were regularly asked to pitch in and be good citizens but I hadn’t figured out what that would mean for me until one afternoon during a press conference, the state’s commissioner for public health, Dr. Steven Stack, asked Kentuckians to write and send him snail mail reflecting on their thoughts about the pandemic. Listening to him, I had a true, clichéd, lightning-bolt idea moment. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced anything like that before. As someone who taught writing for two decades, I knew what I had to do. And I did – I wrote letter after letter explaining my concept. Eventually I heard from folks who encouraged me to go forward.
So, I taught myself WordPress and launched the site, just for Kentucky. We gathered stories and had an accompanying radio show on WUKY Public Radio Lexington. Soon, our success resulted in a story on the entire project being featured on National Public Radio. After that lucky moment, I received messages from people all across the country who also wished to remember their loved ones on the website. I realized then that the project needed to transition to a national endeavor. After seeing the progress over a year, I began working on a book proposal as I always had felt that the stories needed to exist in a volume as well as online.
After nearly four years of working solidly on this project, I can say that although my initial spark of inspiration was swift and seemed to come out of nowhere, I know now that the idea comes from deep within my soul and is the result of a lifetime of loss, love, and experience. I doubt I could have created this project in my twenties, thirties, or even forties.
The WhoWeLost Project is emphatically not social media yet you use Instagram and Facebook to support both the website and the book. How have you navigated that paradox?
One of the few free ways to get the word out about the project is via social media. So, what I have tried to do is create posts that don’t look like other Instagram grief accounts (there are so many) by only utilizing original images, not recycled memes and overused templates. I type micro memoirs on a vintage typewriter, all abstracted from stories published on the site, and then photograph them within DIY collages that hopefully visually capture the essence of the narratives. This is where my history as a poet has really been an asset. I focus on concrete details and stories that speak to the universality of loss in ways we can all identity with. My hope is that this draws folks in, no matter which political Covid camp they belong to. Our fathers are our fathers. Our mothers are our mothers. No red, no blue distinctions needed.
Please tell us about your hopes for the project’s future and how resilience is an essential aspect to its longevity.
The key to this project’s survival has been my personal belief in its importance and the solidarity and generosity of the writers who have trusted in the website and accompanying book to be a safe space, a place where the politics and divisive vitriol surrounding the pandemic are not welcome. WhoWeLost is one of the last remaining ongoing pandemic remembrance projects and I have no intention of it ever going away because it is a vital archive and must be preserved. I will continue to seek out grant opportunities and perhaps corporate sponsorships because I want to expand in a way that welcomes more and more people to write and remember in our precious safe space.
The WhoWeLost Project is a non-profit 501(c)(3). All of my countless hours of labor have been voluntee. I believe that my approach to depoliticizing an emotionally charged topic is innovative and can be applied to many other groups and situations. My goal is to work with others who could benefit from my new, comprehensive set of skills. Sadly, we live in a world full of conflict —and I would like to help.
Contact Info:
Website: https://whowelost.org
Personal Website: https://marthagreenwald.net
Instagram: whowelostusa
Personal Instagram: marthagreenwaldwriter
Facebook: whowelost.org
Linkedin: marthagreenwald
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