JoAnne's Book

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