How have you been coping with the novel coronavirus and the worries it’s raised?

You may have typed a poem. You may have turned to paper and pen. If you don’t consider yourself creative, you may have taken to cleaning the home, reaching out to your neighbors or just trying to stay sane.

How have you managed as the world contends with a global pandemic?

That’s the question three local libraries hope to answer through their collaborative effort, a project known as Carbon County Sheltered Stories.

The Palmerton Area Library closed in mid-March due to COVID-19. Shortly after the doors shut, Rachel DeMicco, the library’s programs administrator, started to think not just about the virus, but the long-term effects it would have on Carbon County residents.

“I started to get really inspired and fascinated by what it could mean as far as people embracing and using this kind of shelter in place, this time, to make things, or create things, or use their time in different ways,” DeMicco said.

“I started to have a big ‘what if’ idea, especially as a librarian, that this was going to be a singular time in our lives and in our local history, and that we really needed to document it,” she went on.

“There’s a really personal aspect to this.”

DeMicco took her idea to the Carbon County Community Foundation. She was directed to one of its funds, called the Carbon County Creative Arts Fund; the three-year-old fund gives out annual endowments to artistic projects in the county.

DeMicco ended up submitting a proposal, and she won. As a result, a $2,000 grant will be split among Palmerton Area, Lehighton Area Memorial and Dimmick Memorial libraries.

Kathy Fallow, founding donor of the Creative Fund, said DeMicco’s proposal “really struck a chord with the board.”

“It was almost a slam dunk as far as we were concerned,” Fallow said.

Fallow said the Sheltered Stories project does exactly what art is meant to do: It makes people mindful of what’s happening around them.

“This is such a unique time in the nation’s history and the world’s history,” Fallow remarked. “The ability to document it - that’s what artists do. They make us aware. They provide a perspective for us.”

The project has a one-year timeline. DeMicco said the libraries will spend the next few months collecting written, audio and visual documentations from residents about their COVID-19 experience.

Those materials will be organized into a digital archive, which DeMicco wants to introduce to the public in spring of 2021.

Her hope for Sheltered Stories is that the narratives of current Carbon residents living through this epidemic are remembered long after them.

“Our historians might look at some of the reporting data and the hard facts of this time, but really, they also rely on the anecdotal evidence from the people who have lived it,” DeMicco said. “That’s really important and valuable to our legacy locally.”

“You know, we’re a small county,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean our people aren’t affected, both positively and negatively, by how they’ve spent this time. I want to make sure in another 50 years, another 100 years, our story remains.”

To learn more about Sheltered Stories and how you can participate, look to the Carbon County Sheltered Stories Facebook page.

To support the Carbon County Creative Arts Fund, or any other funds under the Carbon County Community Foundation umbrella, visit www.cccfoundpa.org.