Baltimore magazine piece (Dec 2020) describing my family's stay in a penthouse above the Lord Baltimore Hotel Triage, Respite, and Isolation Center during the summer of 2020. Below us, "hot floors" with quarantining residents and "cold floors" with medical professionals and hotel staff were part of the frontlines of Baltimore's COVID response effort. Then, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, which occurred just weeks after the fifth anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department, protesters flooded the streets around the hotel. The fuse to the powder keg that Baltimore can be seemed primed to be lit. 
 

Converting Nonfiction Project into a Novel
“Hotel COVID”: A Novel by Gregg Wilhelm

After developing a lengthy nonfiction proposal on the amazing and singular story of the Lord Baltimore Hotel Triage, Respite, and Isolation Center (LBH TRI Center), I have decided to recast the narrative as a novel. Since May 2020, the LBH TRI Center has worked on the pandemic frontlines in Baltimore preventing thousands of hospitalizations and untold deaths among the city's most at-risk residents. The nonfiction book proposal can be read in its entirety via the attached PDF.

Converting a nonfiction project on the real LBH TRI Center into the fictionalized “Hotel COVID” also makes for interesting narrative possibilities that might restrain literary journalism and certainly straight-forward reportage. That said, the project entails significant research and reporting in a documentary sense to ensure that the story is told authentically.

This freedom is most evident in the choice of narrator: Sadie, the ghost of an 11-year-old girl who died at the Lord Baltimore Hotel in the late 1920s. Given its popularity upon opening in 1928, followed soon after by the stock market crash of 1929, the 23-story hotel was the site of several suicide leapers. Sadie’s parents were among them, and perhaps she died of a broken heart, but hotel guests have since claimed to see a mysterious red ball, just like the one Sadie was known to play with, roll unattended down hallways. The hotel has actually been the subject of ghost tours and broadcast investigations into paranormal activity. Such an omniscient narrator allows access to a variety of events (past and present), private conversations, and inner monologues that take place in the novel.

I also like how the introduction of an other-worldly narrator resonates with the opening lines of a quote from Union Army Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain that was recited at the LBH TRI Center’s May 2021 anniversary commemoration: “In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls.”

Sadie is the lingering spirit that propels the novel’s narrative.

In December 2021, spikes in new COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by the Delta and Omicron variants repopulated the Lord Baltimore to near max capacity. Phones buzz at all hours with multiple daily texts calling for nursing support at the LBH TRI Center. Sadly, the story of Hotel COVID continues.

Abstract for “Backbeat the Waves”

Set in a time between glam rock and filthy punk, “Backbeat the Waves” washes over the summer that changed Mercury Widdershins’s life.  His divorced mother struggles to keep the family bar from sinking.  His strung-out sister bursts like a seagull popping Alka-Seltzer.  His tollbooth-collector uncle stresses over the opening of a new bridge that completes the city’s beltway circuit, which might make his job at the only tunnel through the harbor obsolete.  His extended family of barflies includes a wooden-legged charlatan, a former stripper with dementia, a reporter with literary aspirations, an AWOL sailor of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, arabbers, beat cops, beatniks, and ballplayers.   

Merck’s life completely spazzes when his cousin Nixie arrives from Appalachia for treatments at the prestigious hospital nearby. Girded by a bandolier filled with drawing pens instead of bullets, Nixie brings a weird look, strange words, and ultimate questions.   Together, they discover their own liberating music, recover their adolescences stolen by fate, and muster their separate solutions to what the future holds.  Set in 1977 between the debut of Star Wars, the death of Elvis Presley, and the launch of the Voyager space probes, “Backbeat the Waves” explores moments when people exist between things: city and country, adolescence and adulthood, perseverance and mortality. How, or will, Merck and Nixie reach escape velocity?

For a summer that witnessed the death of a universal “king” and the launch of human culture into outerspace, the most dramatic events happened at home. 

Just let me hear some of that
Rock and roll music,
Any old way you choose it;
It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it,
Any old time you use it.
It’s gotta be rock and roll music,
If you want to dance with me…

-- Chuck Berry
Representing the United States, Voyager 2 Golden Record
Launched August 20, 1977

Five poems published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly. I've written and been published in multiple genres: fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. In teaching, I promote working across disciplines as studying poetry--fiction, rhyme, prosody, economy, etc.--can inform prose on the sentence level; studying character and scene can bring new life to poems; conducting research and examining the self be it memoir or essay lends itself to fiction and poetry.