In Conversation with JoAnne Growney
You write in your Deep Beauty essay, "When I am able to be still, I see so much that is beautiful."
During this time, when the pandemic has limited so many of our activities, has it been easier or more difficult to find beauty?
This question resonates with a recent incident with one of my granddaughters:
Late one afternoon, as I was driving 13-year-old Serena to her home after a piano lesson, suddenly she spoke out, “WOW, look at that sunset. I don’t think I have ever seen such a beautiful sunset. I want to take a picture.” Indeed the sunset was a lovely one—and I pulled the car over into a parking lane and paused while Serena got her photo. Later I reflected on the fact that this was an instance of “being quiet enough to see.” So often, Serena is like me—moving too much to allow beauty that is around her to “sink in.”
How and where have you found deep beauty in the past year?
The confinements of the pandemic have removed many of the rush-rush habits of day-to-day life—go there, meet that appointment, attend that event—and this has allowed more reflections on events long ago and on past friendships. When I am quiet for a while, I remember and connect with an old friend. I have been on the receiving end of this beauty, also—one very special event was when a woman who had been my student in a mathematics class in the 1980s found my name online and contacted me—and we have enjoyed some Zoom chatting and comparisons of our experiences and our memories.
How has the pandemic impacted your writing?
April is National Poetry Month—and, confined last April by the pandemic, I began to pay attention to poetry on Twitter—and to make some poetic posts. Here are several samples:
Some of my Twitter stanzas were among those included in an essay, written late in 2020 and accepted by Springer Publishing for inclusion in a collection entitled Math in the Time of Corona; my brief essay has the title “Counting Syllables, Shaping Poems: Reflections” and is temporarily available free online.
In February of 2021, as in other recent years, I served as a reader and judge in an essay contest sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)—a worldwide contest in which students in middle school, high school, and college are invited to interview female mathematicians and to write essays about those interviews. With three rounds of judging, winners are selected and winning essays are posted on the AWM website. I enjoy this opportunity to support and publicize math-women—and good writing.
These days I am not inspired to attempt elaborate creative projects; mostly I am quietly observing, looking for connections among disparate events, sometimes writing about them. Living the life that comes along. Trying to enjoy and absorb. My steadily ongoing writing activity is my blog, “Intersections – Poetry with Mathematics” and my steady source of joy is my grandchildren.
I close with a syllable-square:
