Dorothy Woodend on COVID Creativity and Other Silver Linings

Dorothy Woodend started the Zoom chat like she’s been doing with friends all pandemic: checking in about hair.

“I didn’t brush mine today,” confessed The Tyee’s culture editor, fluffing the silver curls bursting from underneath her purple headphones. “But I am wearing a bra!”

Woodend is the second staff member to take the hot seat with outreach manager Emma Cooper for Three Things, a new Zoom series that brings readers inside the homes and hearts of the people who make The Tyee.

Like last week’s Three Things guest Christopher Cheung, Woodend started with a humble show-and-tell: a piece of paper that she uses to blot brushes while painting watercolour illustrations for her recent columns.

A sneak preview of her newest sketches revealed a dodo, some giraffes, and a bison wearing a red (MAGA?) hat.

From the looks of these characters, along with the painted map she contributed to The Tyee’s Pandemic Geographic project, you’d never guess Woodend hadn’t drawn much since graduating from Emily Carr University in 1997.

“Just this spring, oddly enough, I started again,” she said. “It was like this reemergence of that way of looking at the world, which is quite different from writing.... It feels very liberating.”

For some, the pandemic has meant more time for creative fun, from kooky projects such as reenacting famous paintings with household objects, to accidentally turning into a potato during a video call and deciding to stay that way.

“She couldn’t figure out how to un-potato herself,” Woodend laughed. “That woman never meant to be art, and now she’s permanently in the meme hall of fame!”

Woodend has been trying to tap into this explosion of creativity — the more amateur and personal, the better. “The stakes are quite low at the moment, so you can do all kinds of goofy stuff and share it with the world.”

She said she’s appreciated having extra time to sketch, think, feel and really look at the world.

For an essay about her new obsession with sniffing things, she walked outside every morning to take a whiff of fresh air. When she sat down to paint a bunch of cherries to accompany the piece, she looked at those cherries in a whole new way.

“The more deeply you look at something, the more unbelievably beautiful everything becomes,” she said. “The sheer excess of beauty is just overwhelming sometimes.”

Taking her time has also meant acknowledging what’s been bothering her, like the phony pandemic advertising campaigns about being “all in this together,” which inspired a popular Tyee essay about COVID’s ring of liars.

Tapping into presence is the opposite of being a “pit pony,” Woodend said, referring to another recent essay that took its inspiration from an old made-for-TV movie about a Nova Scotia work horse whose only function was to slave away in a coal mine.

She hopes, post-pandemic, that we’ll maintain some of the openness, honesty and generosity we’ve cultivated, as well as the understanding that there’s more to life than work.

“I don't really want to go back to working like a pit pony,” Woodend said. “I want to be free in the field frolicking.”

Don’t miss the next edition of Three Things with Tyee reporter Katie Hyslop. Hyslop will discuss how the pandemic is affecting our school system as well as family and child poverty. Sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop about these events and more.