Picky Hunting's Trilogy of Journals of the Plague Year: 2020-2022

Picky Hunting's Trilogy of Journals of the Plague Year: 2020-2022 collects James R. Hugunin's complete Picky Papers in one place: Picky Hunting, Picky Unchained, and Picky's Constant Conversation.

The arc runs across the pandemic years. The first journal follows Picky, a widowed retired psychoanalyst with University of Chicago degrees in literature, fleeing the Chicago area for Santa Fe just as COVID locks the world down. Picky Unchained records a new love, Mark, found online against a backdrop of climate disaster and the January 6 insurrection in Washington. Picky's Constant Conversation follows the relationship maturing into collaboration, the two of them editing a dialogue-format bulletin called The Daily Carrot, their lives and their texts converging.

Across all three, this is Hugunin's ludicakadroman, his term for a playful autotheory in which lived memory is one material among theory, artworks, and other texts. The diary becomes a way of thinking the years in real time.

Read together the three books trace one consciousness arriving in a new town just as the world shuts down and writing its way back into another life; the single volume opens that arrival, the trilogy follows it through.