For a moment, the world stood still…

…but our people were forced to stand alone.

And in the midst of this darkness, one Colorado group decided to use art to heal broken hearts.

As mandatory stay-at-home orders continued, it became clear that the Coronavirus pandemic would not surrender anytime soon. Feelings of trepidation and sadness spread like wildfire, and our people grew weary and afraid.

That's when the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University created "The Great Isolation Writing Contest," to take away some of the powerlessness that some were feeling.

Seventeen winners of that competition are represented in this anthology. Writers from different disciplines-nature writing, screenwriting, poetry, and genre fiction-expressed their responses to a world we could no longer understand. And all were gathered and published in a new volume by the Publishing students at Western.

Each entry in this collection is innovative and brings us through emotions that range from exciting, to funny, to reflective. And just as The Decameron became the literary voice of the 14th century's black plague, so too "The Great Isolation" is our collective answer to the 21st century pandemic.

We are, it seems, in this aloneness together.