Dear Joe
Joyce Lott
COOL WOMEN PRESS
Hopewell, New Jersey
ISBN 978-0-9979994-1-9
Poetry/$12.00
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Dear Joe began as a letter scribbled spontaneously while on a ferry from Long Beach, California – Joyce Lott’s hometown of less than three years – to Catalina Island. Lott scribbled this letter on the back of a hotel reservation. She continued to write Joe letters for almost two and a half months after that. She didn’t know why she was writing them or how many she would write. Ultimately, they followed her to Australia where she boarded a cruise ship traveling around the continent “down under.” Joe had never been to Australia and Lott didn’t want to spend the holiday in their apartment alone.
Joyce Lott’s letters turned into a book about love, death, life, and the journeys in between. Here’s what people are saying about Dear Joe:
Just a few months after her husband Joe dies, Joyce Lott begins writing letters to him. Her first discovery: “I like talking to you on paper.” Easy for many of us to imagine finding sorrow but also sustenance and consolation in this intimate act. But as Lott revisits the life she and Joe had together and gives him details of the new life she is making for herself, she confronts the inevitable question, Who am I now? Readers who have lost a long-time partner, or wake at night imagining such a loss, will resonate to these letters and to Lott’s lively curiosity, speculations and humor in the midst of sorrow. At times, as in the final letter where she contemplates a sculpture called The Waiting Woman, part of a monument to a lost ship’s crew, her voice becomes sheer poetry: “Sobs welled up inside me. We women, left grief-stricken, wait and search the harbor. But in our bronze solitude, we continue, the names of men floating in the ocean around us.”
Judy Rowe Michaels, poet, teacher and lecturer
Losing someone we love need not be the end of a relationship, as Joyce Lott conveys through her intimate and heart felt letters to Joe, her late husband. Despite the loss of Joe’s physical body, Lott invokes a connection to the soul of her beloved through correspondence with him. In her letters, she describes and reflects on the days following Joe’s death. Dear Joe is a comfort to anyone who is grieving the loss of a dear one. It sparks hope in the possibility of an everlasting love that can continue to support and inspire new life.
Carina Nickerson, Founder of the Embodied Mindfulness School
In this series of letters to her deceased husband, Joyce Lott emotionally, sensitively, and vulnerably reflects on love that goes beyond death and re-awakens the true meaning of human connection. Her book breathes life into the intricate web of accepting, compassion, and love.
John Biroc, Ph.D.
A Teacher’s Stories:
Reflections on High School Writers
Joyce Lott
Foreword by Carolyn Foote Edelmann
ISBN-13: 978-0-86709-331-5
1994, 168 pages
Paperback, Boynton/Cook
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A Teacher’s Stories is an outgrowth of Joyce Lott’s journal, in which she scrutinized challenging classroom problems—cultural clashes, disparity in skill levels, gender issues, and fluctuations in growth rate—problems that inhibited student productivity. Replaying critical classroom incidents, the author invites teachers to ask the questions: “How well did I handle this situation?” “What happened, and why did it happen?” “How could I have improved my performance or my students’ performance?” “What can I learn from this experience that will enter into my decision-making in the future” Readers will begin to question sacrosanct methods. They will learn more about the importance of journal writing, the pros and cons of cooperative grouping, integrating portfolios effectively, establishing a classroom environment where students and teachers have time to reflect, play with language, make many starts, and accomplish work that matters to them.
Those thinking about becoming teachers and those already studying to become teachers will read about Joyce’s dilemmas, analyze her solutions, and perhaps, transform their work. Longtime teachers looking for a role model will read about Joyce’s willingness to risk a different approach and insist themselves upon the right, the courage to begin again.
Dear Mrs. Dalloway
Joyce Greenberg Lott
ISBN-13: 978-1932755411
2004
Paperback, Finishing Line Press
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At once unflinching and tender, the poems of Joyce Greenberg Lott register the whole range of poetry’s changes – from the sensual to the meditative, from the in-love-with-life to the blue stain of mortality. This book records a life and reminds the reader how much a poem can do in its seemingly small ambit. Over and over these poems do a great deal as they register true feelings in perfectly apt words.
– Baron Wormser, Maine’s Poet Laureate and the author of 6 collections of poetry. His most recent book is Teaching the Art of Poetry the Moves, with David Cappella.
These poems are heart-felt, heart-aching meditations on love and inevitable loss. In the face of grief the poet’s fine attention is still turned to the things of life, to what is cherished and mysterious. This is a book of sorrow that somehow also celebrates the spirit’s great renewal.
– Cynthia Huntington, New Hampshire Poet Laureate; professor of English and Director of the Program of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
An Unexpected World
Joyce Greenberg Lott
ISBN 1-59924-325-3
ISBN 978-1-59924-325-2
2008
Paperback, Finishing Line Press
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Joyce Lott’s new poems begin in the shock of loss, but they do not ask us to grieve. Vivid and understated, poignant and exact, they muse with faintly pained wonder on a world suddenly made clear. “Do you understand how living / in the present requires empty space?” she asks, letting the past go. And there she is, without expectations, unexpectedly poised, and just herself.
– James Richardson, Professor of English and Creative Writing; Acting Director, Program in Creative Writing, Princeton University
Joyce Greenberg Lott writes poignantly about her husband’s death and the time following, describing the process of living through grief and emerging into “another autumn.” In “What It Would Take To Make Your Husband Happy,” Lott displays her wry wit: “To cheer you up,/he turns on a ballgame/in the TV room he planned to finish last year./ You sit on a ladder; your feet on a paint can…You know/ The names of all the players and cheer on your team/ which happens to be his.” And in “That Room,” a spare, elegant poem of regret, she writes, “I wish/ I’d loved you/ in that room/ instead of thinking I didn’t.” These are clear, accessible poems that address the experience of love, loss, and “The Unexpected World” that is always presenting itself to us.
– Ellen Bass, Co-editor of the groundbreaking book, No More Masks! : An Anthology of Poems by Women and five other volumes of poetry