River

Peggy Trojan published her first poem in 2010 when she was seventy-seven and has since been published in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Peggy’s first chapbook Everyday Love , a collection of poems about her parents, placed second in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets chapbook contest in 2015 and was a finalist for the Northeast Minnesota Book Awards. Her chapbook Childhood Memories of WWII was published by Evening Street Press. Peggy’s full-length collection Essence won publication by Portage Press. Her third chapbook Free Range Kids , published by Evening Street Press, won the Helen Kay Chapbook Contest. In 2018, Peggy compiled her poems into a 236-page book called All that Matters so her family and friends would have most of her work in one book. In River , Peggy Trojan's life of growing old with her husband David are suddenly interrupted by his diagnosis of Lewy body dementia.* Through her sparse, honest poems, she takes us from the joys of sharing a bed to the heartbreak of watching her talented, intelligent husband reduced to depending on others for care. David passed away in September 2020. Peggy spends her time between her apartment on the Chippewa River in Eau Claire and the home she built with David in the woods near Brule, Wisconsin. *Lewy body dementia (LBD) is the second most common form of progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s.