The Authors
Once upon a time, two American artists decided to quarantine together during a global pandemic, after having met in person only once before.
D.R. Lewis is a sculptor. A.K. Williams is a painter. They met at an art show. They had dinner. She left town after the show, but they stayed in touch.Nearly a year later, they decided to quarantine together.This book is a product of that decision. A literary Love Child, if you will.In addition to being award-winning artists in their own rights, both authors are self-proclaimed Top Finalists and Winners of the Great American Quarantine of 2020. It began with one simple question: “Red or green?”
It was a good question. There was no right or wrong answer. But he probably learned more about me than he had bargained for when he posed it. And I learned a lot about how he listened, how he responded to what I had to say.
Then I asked him the same. Probably took us a good 20 minutes to finish our conversation about that one. Maybe an hour.
Maybe we slept on it.
Maybe we didn’t.
More questions ensued. We started keeping track, writing them down. Because damn if these questions weren’t good, and fun to answer, and play with, and come back to. And why had no one asked us these things before?
We realized we were on to something, in creating a rapport that became mutually comfortable, familiar, and, yes - intimate. Very much so.
One thing we had was time. And when we ran out, we created more, and gave ourselves and each other the gift of that time: the time we needed, and desired, to consider, respond, change our answers, change the questions, and all along the way indulge ourselves and each other in really getting to know one another. Really. The no-holds-barred kind of “getting to know you.” Scary stuff. Wonderful stuff. (Wouldn’t trade it for the world.)
We created levels of intimacy that in “real time” would have taken years to establish. And in a gorgeous twist of irony, also learned that true intimacy between two partners has an almost timeless quality to it.
Along the way, the book more or less wrote itself. Will You Be My Quarantine? records the landmarks of our own love story: the places we visited and explored together, without ever leaving home. It’s an expedition into the geography of the heart.
Because toilet paper had somehow become the new currency of the pandemic, and a powerful talismanic symbol with a magical ability to protect us from the virus, this became the obvious theme for all artwork in our book, which we created with materials readily available in the house.
With this book, we now invite you to visit the same places we charted. While the landmarks are the same, your experiences and explorations will be unique to you. We hope that you will enjoy them as much as we have, and that your own discoveries along the way will help you to achieve new levels of intimacy and understanding.