Field Notes from Grief: The First Year

A story of love is encapsulated like a seed in a story of loss and then blooms on Judith Stitzel s pages, accompanied by Claudia Giannini s gorgeous images. Grief requires its own syntax and vocabulary, Judith tells us in this chronicle of the first year after her husband s death, and then proceeds to learn the language like a native. She rejects the clichés customarily offered to and by the bereaved, instead gleaning her own complicated, honest, and resilient art.

- Natasha Sajé, author of Bend

Without being overly (and therefore unbelievably) encouraging, Field Notes from Grief affirms the reader through humor, honesty and attention to the emotional contradictions of loss. Different people need different things when they are grieving. But, as much as anything else, they need evidence that they will once again want to go on.

- Stephanie Savitch, MS, LPC

Judith Gold Stitzel is a retired professor of English and women’s studies at West Virginia University, where she was the founding director of the Center for Women’s Studies. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism in Colorado Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, College English, Green Mountain Review, and others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College and has twice been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.