Picky Hunting: A Journal of the Plague Year

Picky Hunting: A Journal of the Plague Year is the first volume of Hugunin's Picky Papers, the pandemic-era project he would carry across three full-color books and more than eleven hundred pages.

Picky Hunting, a recently widowed retired psychoanalyst with degrees in English literature from the University of Chicago, leaves the Chicago area for Santa Fe to find solace in nature, study Indigenous culture, write, take up photography, and possibly find a new love interest. Within six months COVID forces a lockdown, blunting her drive toward new experiences just as she is beginning to make friends, join a NewComers Club, and respond to online dating postings. Her loneliness is held off mainly by two black-and-white, scotch-label-looking dogs. Taking her cue from Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Albert Camus' The Plague, she begins a daily journal, all the while haunted by her late husband's death, which she cannot settle as suicide or murder.

The diary form is Hugunin's ludicakadroman in its most personal register: a playful autotheory in which lived memory sits beside borrowed texts, and the act of writing the day becomes the way of surviving it.

This is volume one of Picky Hunting's Trilogy of Journals of the Plague Year: 2020-2022.