Joyce Sweeney still remembers the 8-year-old girl who looked out of a window at the Museum of Natural History in Ohio spellbound.

“I saw birds, wildlife and nature. Sitting down right there, I began writing. I don’t remember much, but that is the first poem I wrote,” said the Coral Springs resident.

Much has happened in her life since, including success as a fiction writer for young adults, but Sweeney has now let her first love reclaim her. “Impermanence,” her first collection of poems, was released recently.

Sweeney felt poems “coming to her,” when her mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease in 2005. “That put me in a much more serious frame of mind," she said. "I had much more serious emotions. I couldn’t write fiction. It did not come to me, but poems did.”

Kathy Macdonald, who is a member of the writing group that Sweeney teaches Thursday nights in Fort Lauderdale, praised her mentor. “The poems are beautiful," she said. "She has a strong narrative voice completed with a lyrical sensitivity. Of the poems in the collection, 'Mother’s Day,' and 'Lost Horizon' are my favorites.”

Read the complete article in the June 19 issue of the Coral Springs Forum.