Greetings! I am Joy. I write many words. If you’d like to read some of them, you sure can.
The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God…
…a line that inhabits my soul and animates my work.
I write under an expansive sky in southeast South Dakota, and I grew up under a similar expanse in southeast Nebraska. I have always been nourished by books and fiercely read them. I now seek to offer my words back to the world.
Here is my first collection of poems, published in 2023.
Here is my next collection of poems, published in 2026.
In other news
I’ve had poems and essays published in various regional and internet-based journals and magazines and I’m currently working on a middle-grade novel set in Nebraska in the 1990’s. I have a BA in Spanish from the University of Nebraska (Go Big Red!) and a law degree from Georgetown. I mother 3 children, occasionally teach at my local law school, and generally seek peace.
My mind and habits have been formed by the people of the Plains, and the many folk I have encountered by living in and visiting other places. I find people and this earth endlessly fascinating. Like Simone Weil, I think the good is “continually fresh and surprising” while "no desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil.”
“For one of the most important and most hopeful signs of the times is in the fully determined efforts of a small minority of men to recover some kind of contact with their own inner depths, to recapture the freshness and truth of their own subjectivity, and to go on from there not only to an experience of God, but to a dialogue with the spirit of other men.
Thomas Merton, Art and Spirituality
Pictures by Jenny Rawson Photography