In this episode, Gail, Catherine and Joyce discuss Joyce’s love of teaching and writing poetry, her attachment to rural life, and her decade-long experience living with Parkinson’s. Farm girl becomes college professor becomes Minnesota Poet Laureate. In her eight published collections of poetry, Joyce meets head on the challenges of living and dying, conveying beauty and peace, love and acceptance. Listen to Joyce’s reading of Crossroads about the second half of life, and How I’m Doing about her reckoning with Parkinson’s. Joyce has been heard to say, “I never want to know what the last line will be….”

"Poetry is my way of finding out what I think."

Take Aways

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  Follow the thing you love the most, using the means you have

  
  
  
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  Body behaving badly—understand, accept, maintain it

  
  
  
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  Poems tell us things in a language we didn’t know we spoke. They say things in ways we didn’t know we knew.

  
  
  

Contact information:

jsutphen@gustavus.edu

Joyce’s latest publication:

Sutphen, J. (2019). Carrying water to the field: New and selected poems. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

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