 See what's new on the Burlington waterfront. Everybody, my name is Melinda Moulton and I'm your host today for On the Waterfront with Melinda. And my guest today is Joy Cohen. Hi Joy, how are you? I'm doing really great. Thank you Melinda. How are you? I'm fine. I want to thank you so much for spending a half an hour with me and my viewers to talk about you and to talk about your new novel. So let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. So Joy Cohen is an award-winning writer, educator, yoga instructor, playwright, and you grow and prepare plant-based foods. And these are just a few of your many, many accomplishments. So I want to talk all about you Joy and share with my viewers all about you and your new book. So let's start in Brooklyn. Talk about where you were born. You were born in Brooklyn and tell us a little bit about your childhood growing up. Oh well I was born in Brooklyn but by that time my parents who had grown up in Brooklyn had already moved to the promised land of the Long Long Island. So I actually grew up on the island, the first town outside of city limits. So I had kind of the benefit of the, you know, ultra-new suburban experience with a 20-minute train ride into the city. And I loved it. I also really longed for quiet and nature. So as soon as I graduated high school, it's funny, there's a passage we're going to read today is actually about these vacant lots I used to go to because I would, I even in the midst of development I really longed for nature and so as soon as I was able I came up to New England, I went did undergraduate work at University of New Hampshire and then University of Vermont. I've been in Vermont since 78. But my childhood was a fairly typical suburban Long Island Jewish upbringing. I actually still am very close with the people I went to kindergarten with. We just zoomed last night. We've been doing monthly zooms all through COVID. People I went to elementary school, high school with some college and it was a close knit community. It seemed it was very kind of in my memory sort of idyllic. But as you get older and you reflect upon things, you realize the dysfunction of so many aspects, whether it's in your personal life or systemically what was happening. So that was kind of the basics of my childhood. So a typical upbringing. Well listen would you I'm sure that you could share with us the person in your life who most inspired you to become the woman that you are today. Who would you give credit to that? Oh my goodness. That's such a difficult question. I think there were many. Well I had very strong women in my life, my mother and my grandmother. I had other grandparents but I was mostly close with Grandma Eva who was from Poland and she clearly had suffered a lot of difficult times. Left Poland when she was 17, never saw her family again. You know had to leave the pogroms and we never really knew what she had gone through exactly and we had ideas. So I think her resilience and strength in the face of the challenges coming to a new country, not speaking the language, being extreme poverty, losing her husband early. My grandpa Joe who was her husband died while my mother was pregnant with me. So I named after him. My my Hebrew name is Josepha and I never knew him but he was young. He was 63 when he died and then she lived till I think in her 90s. So just kind of all of the things that particularly strong women go through and just cope with and thrive really. I'd also I do want to give a shout out to two other things. One would be my teachers. I I think my teachers were so instrumental in providing me with an idea of what was possible in the world. I'm the first of my family actually I'm the only one of my family to actually have graduated, gone to college and graduated college. You know my mom was second generation American and they didn't know. They didn't know about academia and I'm kind of I call myself a recovering academic overachiever. So I I do think my teachers all the way from elementary school. I have incredible respect for what they did, the librarian in my elementary school and some really amazing teachers through high school and then the last part is the community of friends that I was very fortunate to both fall into and nurture from a very young age all the way till today and I I don't know where I would be without my friends and my sisters. My sisters are part of that group and again a lot of women. Well it's so interesting because you became an educator and the teachers in your life are really instrumental in that. So you you are an educator and you taught science to grade school children and you also taught at UVM and you are a yoga teacher so you're an educator. I actually I'm also I was certified K to 12 science and K to 12 art. I spent the last 14 years teaching art at Hunts Middle School in Burlington. I never intended to be a teacher ever it was not even part of the things I fantasize I always all I really ever wanted to be from a young child as an actress and I started college as a theater major but had a change of heart and that kind of fell into teaching. I actually was just finishing up my first master's degree in natural resources and I realized I didn't really want to do the computer simulations that were at the time what was being funded and a high school biology position came up at Middlebury Union High School. I didn't I wasn't certified had never taken an education course but I went I got an interview and I I guess I interview and they hired me and back then you could get certified by evaluation so after I had all the science credits but I didn't have any education any studies and educations but I was kind of a natural teacher so after the year of teaching there I became I got certified and I also had a bunch of I had many many art credits because I've always been an artist and that's how I got certified to teach art. That's so interesting so talk to us a little bit about some of the work that you've done as a playwright and some of your past works and some of the awards and the recognition that you've received because you've done several plays a few of them you've done at the Black Box Theater. So talk about a couple of your plays that you've done. It's very interesting Melinda I have to say that as I just said I started off life wanting to be an actress which would be someone that's on center stage and then I became a teacher so I also was always very much comfortable kind of here I am but over the last decade I really transitioned I'm a writer I spend most of my time alone and creating so this talking about myself and kind of you know it's it's it's funny I mean I'm fine with it but it's not I'm not used to it anymore used to be something I craved and I really no longer crave that. You have to do that but you have to do that in promoting right because you're a natural I mean I'm I think I think there's a little bit of you and me and me and you because I get it and yet I'm and yet I'm an introvert people say you're not and I'm like yeah but I am right but I see a little bit of us in each other and so I get I get what you say but in promoting the work that you do you need to be out there. So I would like you just talk a couple of a couple of seconds about the plays that you've written because this is your first novel this is your breakthrough novel. My debut novel. You are a playwright and that ties into your desire to be an actress. Well it started off actually you know Stu McGowan he was my business partner I was developing a program for the National Science Foundation called the Grow Lab program it's teaching hands-on science and science through hands-on gardening and I very randomly met this very dynamic man and we were looking for a video producer to do our educational video so I hired Stu and then we worked together on those videos and decided to start our own video production company. So we I left teaching we had our video production company which was all educational videos around the country for places like the Department of Education US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation and our our tagline was videos made for, by and with children or kids and which was very unusual back then because this is when you had big video cameras so we trained kids how to use the video cameras you know it was way before cell phones. So I started to write the scripts for those so that's really that was my entree into kind of this idea of writing for a camera and I really had a screenplay in mind so I wrote the screenplay and it's you know it's kind of a I like to dabble so there were screenplays there were teleplays there were theatrical plays the two that I was very fortunate to have produced at the Blackpox Theater which I love that theater thank you for all you've done in Main Street Landing it's just such an amazing resource to have. The first one was called Anna's Journal and that was actually I adapted it from a screenplay I wrote and it's the one screenplay that I am still trying I want to get it produced as a film I would love to direct it myself if possible it's a story that you know but all of my pieces pretty much everything I write go back and forth between two time periods and I do that on purpose both because I'm fascinated with different time periods and also I just love to show the parallels between different time periods it's kind of like not to get into politics but when everyone was so up in arm about our last administration yes horrific things happened but I as you live through Nixon Agnew you know when they were very similar you know Kent State all of that kind of stuff so there's just there's been a divisiveness and I think it's important to understand historically that this has been the way the world has run and we do then survive and move through it. So Anna's Journal takes place in the weeks following 9-11 and it's a story about a young Jewish girl in Vermont rural Vermont who has a very intimate connection with a young black Muslim teenager and what their individual story does parallel to the what's happening in the world with Islamophobia and you know everything that happened right after 9-11. In addition the young man has a website which was also pretty new back then and he is trying to develop a website about tolerance and human social injustice and he starts to find out a little bit about Anna's grandmother and through a lot of research and a lot of evidence he uncovers what he believes is the truth that the grandmother is actually Anne Frank who never died and there really is it was all based on real evidence because they never found her body. So there's that's underlying this fantastical component of the story so it goes back and forth and I actually thrilled I had to send the screenplay to the Anne Frank Foundation and they gave me permission to use Anne Frank's dialogue at it. So we have scenes of Anne Frank speaking with her I know I'm getting goosebumps just by looking at you with her diary with Anna today with her journal and kind of the parallels of that. Fascinating for my viewers out there I'm talking to Joy Cohen who is an award-winning writer educator yoga instructor playwright and we're going to talk about we're going to move now into your new novel your breakthrough novel entitled 37 here it is and I want you to briefly tell our viewers about this book that you've just released on October 1 and it's getting rave reviews and is highly acclaimed and I want you to just share quickly with our viewers about your new book 37. Thanks so much Melida and if I could just I just really want to quickly also just mention that I was commissioned to write a play about Burlington's lost shool mural that if people don't know about it I not just about my play but about the mural it's an incredible piece of history international history that is right in Burlington and I was incredibly fortunate to be commissioned to write a play and that was the other play that was at the Black Box Theater so we can talk about that. Well and I think that they've removed it and restored it and Madeline was involved she called me about it and so yes I just wanted to make sure people knew thank you for that. Sure um well this novel I I don't know how much time I have to kind of give you the backstory but we have about we have about you know 16 minutes left and I know I want to read something from it so and I have a few I have quite a few other things that I want to cover with you because you're fascinating but if you go over I don't care you deserve it you deserve it so go for it. Well I'll tell you what we can basically the novel is about a woman who is at a crossroads in her life her her mother has she's in her 50s her mother had just died the year before she had a kind of cold and relationship with her mother her father shortly thereafter came down with Alzheimer's so he's really not someone she can communicate with right after the funeral her brother who was her closest confidant kind of cut her off she doesn't know why her only daughter is living abroad in Spain and her she is divorced so she's and and her job as a local reporter is feeling unfulfilling to her so she sets out on a journey to both try to find out what was going on in her family what was happening with her mother why her foot brother has cut her off and just to try to find herself and for some reason she keeps running into characters events stories that happened in the year 1937 and she decides the first one she decides to write a short story about this particular story and the characters and so embedded in the novel and it is fairly a unique structure I my publicist is calling this inventive fiction literary fiction yeah sure inventive literary fiction combined with contemporary and historical fiction so let's move include this in your discussion okay my next question and and and they call it cloud atlas meets eat pray love so the the thread of the novel is a contemporary like a woman self-discovery like eat pray love but the short stories are all literary fiction so there are nine short stories embedded in the novel that take place in different locations around the world Palestine because this was 1937 Tibet Chicago the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Vermont and others and through the the stories that this woman writes about all of the the people and their own struggles and their resilience and the oppression that had happened back then and today she finds her own truth and that's kind of the basics of what the novel is about thank you can I ask you is this somewhat autobiographical it's a great question um it's not but it's going to be well I was I was wondering wondering how how much of you is inside of Polly um you know there are there are little snippets of course as a as a writer as an artist I'm also a visual artist but as just a creative person I find that the more I stay present the more I observe I've taken so many aspects of the world that are taken in through my senses so I'm always aware of the light and how it's hitting something I'm aware of a snippet of conversation I hear and I have a pretty good memory for that stuff and I also keep gobs of notebooks so the things that come out in the story are certainly pieces of either things that I experienced myself or that I observed the character herself is not very much like me although close friends who have read it said oh my god I was cracking up at that part I could just hear you saying that joy and I don't think of that but of course you know I write again so it must be someone me so would you like to read from your book a snippet we found on page 101 it would be an honor read from your book for my thank you thank you and this is part of the thread of the novel not the literary fiction in the short stories I made my first pinhole camera when I was about eight the cardboard insert from dad's dry clean shirts were just the right size we lived in a new suburban development and I'd go into the nearby vacant lots the ones that hadn't yet been covered with Ray's ranch style number three rick siding instead of wood and a lawn thick enough to erase the owner's memories of the gray urban past they thought they'd escaped I take my notepad invisible ink pen and dad's like a flex he had bought me a brownie fiesta but I quickly outgrew it along with my pinhole I took artsy shots of weeds growing out of the asphalt or action shots of our pet tabby stalking the crickets I used to pretend my neighbor Mr. Goldblatt was a tribal chief I wanted to enter the life photography contest with the shot I got of Mr. Goldblatt kissing Mrs. Goldblatt in her floral moo moo a real Aboriginal moment mom wouldn't let me one evening I hid behind the fence and took pictures of chief Goldblatt grilling lamb chops in his low-slung cabana shorts he caught me snapping the camera and chased after me yelling Aniston get the hell out of here I tripped and broke my front tooth on the concrete curb and went home limping proud to show off my hardcore field correspondent wounds mark was ready to go kick some butt and I was ready to follow him but dad held him back I couldn't tell if dad was angry with Mr. Goldblatt or me marked it a clumsy juvenile war dance and the harder mom tried not to laugh the louder her snorts became she looked at him with complete adoration and as usual he didn't seem to notice mom was oblivious I was hurt but it didn't bother me blood was still dripping from my chin when I told them I'm glad it happened and I was that was when mom started calling me Polly short for Polly Anna Anna being my real name it wasn't until years later that I realized she was using the name of that sweet optimistic little girl in a pejorative sense dad gave me a copy of the classic for my 11th birthday the year I was the same age as the fictional Polly Anna that night I braided my hair and put mom's eyeliner on my face as freckles mom dad and mark were sitting at the table when I theatrically marched into the kitchen misquoting Porter when you look for that in mankind expecting to find it you surely will right on cue mom replied when you look for the good in mankind expecting to find it you surely won't oh lanie that's not nice dad said it's true though mom mark admonished she'd listen to him in true Polly Anna fashion I ran over and hugged mom it's okay I know you don't mean it she didn't hug me back thank you thank you for that so share with our viewers how long it took you to make 37 and what was your inspiration to do so was it because because of the four years that we endured with our politics that had you go back to this time in history what was your inspiration and how long did it take you to write it joy well what happened was I was going to the Dominican Republic on vacation with my then husband and we went and we loved it and we thought about buying a place there so there's actually a whole story one of the stories Shabola in the book which I was going to we were going down there and I started to wonder if there would be other Jews in the Dominican Republic which was kind of odd I mean I've been living in rural Vermont it's not a very big you know not like I grew up in a close knit Jewish community but I just started to wonder about it so kind of what I usually do I just do some research and I found this just fascinating story about a community of Jews that had left Eastern Europe when they were being oppressed in before the World War II broke out and at that time Trujillo who is one of the world's worst dictators accepted Jewish he was the only world leader Rose even Roosevelt wouldn't accept Jewish people in but he accepted Jewish men and it's a whole longer backstory of and if you read the book you know it was basically to breed with the people so that exactly make them why do you want it he wanted to lighten but I mean it's the end of the people it was just so twist right yeah right exactly twisted the right word so I went down I did interview in the book his name is different but it was Lewis Hess is his real name and a fascinating beautiful man and been hours with him and I was just so blown away by his story that I wrote a short story about it but as I sat with that short story of course I did more research into the time period because as a writer you want to fill in backstory and details and you know again those sensory details and the more I found out more I was just fascinated by this time period so that's kind of how it all evolved that's how it all came to be yours that's so interesting your style of writing is entertaining instructive and illuminating so do you believe that your training in years as an educator helped you to define your writing style oh that's an interesting question um as I said I'm kind of self-taught education I went back to school after after I did my first masters I went back for masters in curriculum and instruction so I did take some incredible education courses you know Melinda it's life you know in life we meet so many people we we I learn from everybody I mean some of the most probably informative conversations I've had have been sitting on a park bench and talking to a man in his 80s next to me or on a train the train from New York to you know Rouse's point sitting there or to s-exjunction a nine and a half hour train ride so I it's not I never really had formal training in it I think it is just a broad spectrum of being open of my own travels of being someone who tries to always think about what if you know what did this landscape look like 200 years ago what did that build it what happened and you probably see a lot of things in architecture in my book you know like I'm always wondering when you're walking up the stairs who walked up those stairs and and so it's just a lot of I'm I'm fairly curious person and I think the other thing I used to say that I'm never bored but I realize that I'm pretty much often bored so in order to counteract the boredom my mind is always imagining things and I'm always I need to create you know I paint or I'm fiddling with something so I think all of those informant um so Polly is seeking to find her own truth throughout this novel did you find your own truth while writing it I'm still on that journey I'm still on that journey yeah I mean I you know there have been a lot of transitions for me personally over the last decade you know life is a bunch of transitions I know that's kind of just the way it goes but a lot of loss a lot of change I've been living alone for the first time in my life and so it's an incredible gift to to finally get to know myself because you know you go you grow up and you have relationships and you have friendships and then you have children and you have full-time jobs and you don't most people don't have chance or don't take the opportunity to pause and really know themselves I found um right after my recent divorce I was having a very hard time making decisions and I'm usually a very decisive person and I had a wonderful conversation with someone and through that conversation I realized that I've always it's been so easy for me to make major decisions about my for what was best for my family what was best for my spouse what was best for that but never just what was best for me so this has been an interesting thing so I am really trying to find my own truth I'm not quite there yet but I'll let you know exciting I can't wait to see what you do next I mean quite frankly so I I feel like you are truly a Renaissance woman you have so many talents and passions and you possess an intellectual brilliancy you are gifted in so many areas and so if I were to ask you to describe yourself in a few words for our viewers could you do that because you are are uniquely uh remarkable um in all of your gifts um could you do that for us you're making me get all choked up or as you might know the word all for clumped so thank you thank you Melinda it's really means a tremendous deal coming from you I would say I use the word curious and I think that's probably something I'm I'm someone that's very curious about life I'm passionate very passionate I like to be engaged in whether it's in my own mind and but anything creative and and that's whether it's experiencing it by doing it hands on or appreciating others creativity and I'm of all about connection I think that's probably the main thing I like to connect ideas I like to connect people and I'm probably missing some things but that's you know it's just about about a mutual support I love a mutual supportive community my my community of my sisters and by sisters it's wider you're now included in one of those people um I I think I think just being reflective but also being able to connect those truths with others we have a very short time on this planet I'm realizing it the older I get and I don't want to waste time with not that I of course I feel deeply sadness and loss and all of those things but that's part of the human experience and I will get back to it I think that's one of the things I was trying to do in this was just show that the human condition no matter who we are no matter what time period we lived in no matter where what culture we're from we share this human condition of of just trying to be the best person we can be and create a life that's now we lead with love that's it to me that's it's the simple lead with love lead with kindness and just do the best we can given the knowledge we have in any moment well what a way to end our interview so to my viewers joy thank you so much um stay on after I after we stop recording because I want to chat with you for a few more minutes but for my viewers who have been listening to joy co and talk about her new her life for extraordinary life and her new novel 37 you can get her book at all independent bookstores everywhere and if you're into shopping local I suggest you give a call to phoenix books they can send you her book or you can stop in at the store on the several locations here in vermont at phoenix books um so joy thank you so much for your time and for this book and I just can't wait to see what you do next it's been an honor melinda and I do want to say if anyone has a book club that they this is a really great book for book clubs and I have book club questions I would be happy to either if you're local I'd be happy to come to a book club meeting or come in via zoom so whatever you'd like so that's another what a great option for people and let me share your your website it's joy lisa cohen cohen.com and so go to joy cohen's website and you can also at jernica additions.com which is the publisher of your book g-u-e-r-n-i-c-a additions e-d-i-t-i-o-n-s.com um visit those two websites um to learn more about joy and her work and about her new novel 37 so joy i'm going to go back to our view where we thank you together so that I can see you um and and thank you for your time it I just I just have loved everything about our time together and I wish you all the best I cannot wait to see what you do next and to my viewers thank you for tuning in and I'll see you soon take care thank you so much been an honor thank you