A mentor and dear friend, JoAnne Zywna gave her time and thoughtful responses to my first novel, Summer Blue, and my first chapbook of poetry, Entering Weld (1981). From the late 1970s, we've shared laughter, books, losses, long talks, the Town of Weld, music, and our writing. In the 1990s, JoAnne came to Mountain Valley High School in Rumford (ME) to teach English with me for several years after a long stint at Mount Blue HS in Farmington (ME). We both taught writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. As teachers, we have always placed our students at the center of our classroom lives.
Over the past 50 years, JoAnne has written a poem a day in her daybook. I remember her reading poems to me at her home in Weld. That writing inspired my own, and this past year I decided her poems needed a larger audience beyond the regional magazines and literary journals they had appeared in. So, I offered to edit and publish JoAnne's poems. We worked during 2024, and the chapbook, Once and Gone, has now been published. Our mutual friend, the artist Mary Hart, supplied the cover art for the book, and we're thrilled with the response from Weld and western Maine folks, colleagues, and friends near and far.
JoAnne's residence, American House, a national organization of senior living communities, featured her story in their magazine: The Poetic Life of JoAnne Zywna.
SCENT AND SENSE
The cutting of boughs
a traipsing through soil
softened by early December rain
to study a stand of firs
and making aesthetic decisions
about which branches to remove,
which seedlings to uproot.
A singular scent
rolls up and over me,
the hope of Christmas,
the gift of earth.
The roar I thought was wind
persisted.
I stepped to the deck
to check my senses,
was encircled by a familiar sound,
the one I listen for in April,
the one I approach with shovel,
to re-direct the whirling current
away from my road.
Tonight, January thaw
has loosed the ice
and water plunges and pounds
like tympani avenging all those rests.
My heart skips one, two beats.
Tomorrow, will I have a way out?
–JZ
