Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota 2020-2022

In 2015, Ben Miller and the poet Anne Pierson Wiese moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to explore their midwestern roots and to focus on their writing careers. Working a day job in a hospital, Miller had a front-row seat to the COVID-19 pandemic as it moved from the coasts to the urban Midwest. Pandemonium Logs casts an unflinching eye on the state of the worker in the US health-care system during a global pandemic, giving voice to the doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and families caught in the complex swirl of daily dilemmas and crucial choices.

In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of COVID on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters--from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses--he explores the human complexities of the crisis: a doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodgepodge of telehealth apparatus, a Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job, a vice president of corporate hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them, a ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age.

In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Ben Miller is the author of the memoir River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout, 2013). He has published in AGNI, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Raritan, Salmagundi, One Story, and other magazines. His essays have been reprinted or noted six times in Best American Essays, and his awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. He was a creative writing fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2015. See his blog here: www.riverbendchronicle.com