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Penn Students Travel Cross-Country to Collect Pandemic Stories

caption: Max Strickberger, C’22, and Alan Jinich, C’22. Photo by Eric Sucar.It was toward the end of their 7,300-mile journey across 23 states, on a quest to interview young adults about how the pandemic has changed their lives, when the two University of Pennsylvania students were faced with a decision: Should they go to the high school prom in Circleville, Utah? 

Yes, they did at the invitation of a local farming family, joining most of the town, population 600, that spring evening. The prom was one of dozens of unexpected experiences shared by Penn seniors Max Strickberger and Alan Jinich—best friends and Penn roommates who grew up on the same street in Chevy Chase, Maryland—during their journalistic endeavor. 

They traveled the country seeking the stories of a diverse range of people, 18 to 25 years old, to create an archive of the pandemic experience. The resulting website for that archive, Generation Pandemic, will feature about twenty 1,500-word oral history narratives and podcasts drawn from the interviews, photos, and videos they gathered on their journey. They also have a Generation Pandemic Instagram page.

Mr. Strickberger is an English major with a concentration in creative writing and Mr. Jinich a neuroscience major and English minor. Both, in the College of Arts and Sciences, are back on campus this fall for their senior year. Faced with another semester of virtual courses this past spring, they decided to take a chance and take the semester off from their Penn classes to pursue their Generation Pandemic project. But they prepared with Penn professors and kept in touch with them along the way. 

“I wanted to do something. I felt like I was living in history and I wanted the chance to capture any part of it or play a more meaningful role in what history was like for me and for people of our age,” Mr. Strickberger said. 

Mr. Jinich, a photographer, said he wanted to pursue a long-term creative project, and get out of the bubble of reading everything through his phone screen. “We wanted to work on something together and so we decided, just two weeks before the spring semester started, to take it off and take on this project,” Mr. Jinich said. 

They started by reaching out to several Penn faculty, including Kathy Peiss, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History; Margo Natalie Crawford, professor of English, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence, and director of the Center for Africana Studies; Jean-Christophe Cloutier, associate professor of English and comparative literature; and writer Sam Apple, who teaches creative writing.

Mr. Jinich had taken Dr. Peiss’s class, Modern American Culture, and she agreed to collaborate on this project, creating an eight-week syllabus of readings and meeting with them virtually once a week. They read several classic texts and recent writings, including Studs Terkel’s books Working, first-person interviews with a variety of workers in the 1970s, and Hard Times, first-person accounts of daily life during the Great Depression. “We wanted to do that kind of oral history with personal narratives, but specific to our age and about the pandemic,” Mr. Strickberger said. “We wanted the peoples’ stories to speak for themselves.” 

Dr. Peiss said she chose readings to help them think about how to position themselves as interviewers, how to relate to new people and places, and how to deal with their own assumptions. They also often spoke with Dr. Cloutier, who taught Mr. Strickberger in his courses Jack Kerouac & Postwar Counterculture and Post 45 American Literature & Film.

“I see some tendrils of Kerouac and the Beat Generation in Max and Alan’s project,” Dr. Cloutier said. “They’re combining forces to try to understand and diagnose a moment in time for a certain generation. And of course they’re going on the road—they seek actual encounters.” 

Mr. Strickberger and Mr. Jinich had taken a creative writing course, Extreme Noticing, taught by Mr. Apple, who suggested they read Eli Saslow’s column in The Washington Post, “Voices from the Pandemic.” “We read it and realized that is exactly what we wanted to emulate,” Mr. Strickberger said. “We wanted to do more serious interviews that aren’t just a snippet of someone’s life, but a more sustained engagement with what was going on in a particular moment during the pandemic.”

They used a demographic GIS map, Social Explorer, to determine a route with geographic and socioeconomic diversity, down through the Deep South, out west through the Rockies, and back through the Midwest. 

“We were looking for different kinds of places, big cities, tiny towns, places with racial, ethnic, political, religious diversity,” Mr. Jinich said. 

The pair set out on April 8, both fully vaccinated against COVID-19, driving Mr. Jinich’s mother’s SUV, with a plan to stay with friends and family in combination with Airbnbs and car camping. The first week was loosely planned, and the rest unfolded as they went along. The first day they made it to Chattanooga, Tennessee and conducted their first three interviews, prearranged through a friend from Penn. But after that, they would pull into a new place and start asking strangers who looked like they were in the age range if they would be willing to be interviewed. 

“I’d basically say ‘Hi, my name is Max. I’m working on an oral history project, talking to young people all over the country. We just got into the area. We’d love if you’d be interested in taking some time to speak with us.’” Mr. Strickberger said. “And they’d tell us no, or yes, or I can but not right now, or I’m not in that age range but try the church down the street, or the hotel, or the grocery store.”

The first big test was in Greensboro, Alabama, a town of about 2,500. No one would talk with them, but then a grocery store manager agreed to help and went up and down the aisles asking people their ages, introducing them. 

Their goal was to get a total of 50 interviews in six weeks, and they conducted 80, some as short as 15 minutes and others lasting for several hours, with the average being about an hour and a half. They did most interviews together but would frequently split up and take to interviewees alone. In pursuing the story of Jesus, a cattle rancher on the Texas-Mexico border, Mr. Jinich’s interviews spanned several days.

They asked each person to write in a notebook the answer to the question: “After the pandemic I want to…” Mr. Strickberger said he got the idea from a conversation with novelist Jennifer Egan about the project. 

The pair spoke with Ms. Egan the night before the trip. “She got us interested in this topic of futurity, looking down the road,” Mr. Strickberger said. “We had every single person we interviewed fill in the blank, in their own handwriting. We wanted something tactile, something more physical in that way. And that ended up being a really meaningful part, seeing young people writing while envisioning what life would be like after the pandemic.”

Dr. Peiss said this type of first-person archive is important for historians. “I think an archiving and interviewing project like this will be looked at many decades hence,” she said. “We’ll want to know what this time was like, just as people in the 1930s were trying to understand the Great Depression by interviewing people, by photographing them, and creating a record of that experience that we still draw upon today.” 

Early on they decided not to seek out interviews with people who were full-time college students like themselves, and instead looked for people who represented other experiences. Some stories they didn’t realize they needed until they found them, like Faith, a woman they encountered in Utah who told them she was the first person in her county to contract COVID-19. “She spoke with us about being treated like a pariah, about how rumors were spreading about her family and herself in this small town,” Mr. Strickberger said. “Once she got out of quarantine, everyone kept at a distance until the sheriff hugged her.” 

They went to many small towns, but also to several cities. In Chicago they were rejected by everyone they approached in Chinatown. “Then all of a sudden, I hear this guy on the street speak Spanish,” Mr. Jinich said. “So I started speaking to him in Spanish and we just bonded as Mexicans. I started interviewing him about his job and it ended up being my favorite story of the entire trip.” Fernando’s was one of several interviews that Mr. Jinich conducted in Spanish, his first language.

One of the most powerful interviews was with Sharon, a young woman in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who came back to live with her mother and older brother and his baby during the pandemic, struggling to help them while trying to keep up with college classes. Her brother was addicted to heroin and her mother, who did not speak English, was trying to navigate the court system for custody of the baby. 

The pair arrived back in Philadelphia on May 17, the day of Penn’s Commencement, and reconnected with many of their friends. During the summer they edited the narratives and photos, working with Penn alumnus Daniel Fradin to build their website. 

As they settle into their senior year at Penn, they are continuing work on the Generation Pandemic archive. Dr. Cloutier sees many possibilities. “Who knows how this will percolate in the long run for them: exhibitions, photographs, maybe works of non-fiction down the road? Maybe even a novel based on these experiences? Maybe an archive that will go on to inspire others and launch new endeavors?” he said. “Who knows? It’s exciting.”

Adapted from a Penn Today article by Louisa Shepard, October 11, 2021.

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