An exploration of how distance and solitude can spur the literary imagination and how 2020-style social distance can kill it. Part craft talk, part Zoom performance, part lecture on literature, part creative self-help for the quarantined. Addressed to creative writers and readers of all stripes. Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Denver. His first book, AERIALISTS (Bloomsbury 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and his stories have been published in American Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review, Guernica, the Iowa Review. He is an Assistant Professor of Fiction Writing in the University of Memphis MFA.