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Vicki Joseph: Work in Progress
Victoria T. “Vicki” Joseph called herself, “a waiting writer.”
“I am a waiting writer. That’s not to say that I’m waiting to write; that’s not to say anything about writing at all. That’s only to say, I’m waiting and I’m writing. In fact, I’m writing furiously, as though there were no five-year plan. As though there were not five years. As though I won’t be there or here at all,” she once wrote.
Joseph had multiple careers in a rather short lifetime. She was a librarian, a criminal defense attorney, a paralegal professor, an associate academic dean, a playwright and a novelist.
She was also a passionate advocate in the search for a cure for Alpha-1, the genetic disease with which she was born. As the recipient of a double lung transplant, she was a fervent supporter of organ transplantation.
But her passion for writing was cut short when she died of chronic rejection of her transplanted lungs on Aug. 2, 2009.
Joseph was 54. She died at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH, where she had received her double lung transplant in November 2006.
Her husband, David Brown, decided to honor Joseph on what would be her 56th birthday, April 7. He took the many different writings that she had compiled over the years – both finished and unfinished – and published them on a website that he calls Vicki Joseph: Work in Progress.
The website celebrates all of Joseph’s achievements.
“Almost all of her writing that has survived dates from the last few years of her life – some of the most significant at the time of the end stage of her disease in 2006, before the transplant – and none of it has been published in print,” Brown says on the website.
It opens up a world of plays, short stories, excerpts from novels, autobiographical fragments, Joseph’s reflections on her life and how she lived with her illness, and a bit of poetry.
Read Joseph’s Obituary
Read Write to Live, an Article first published in Alpha-1 magazine in Spring 2009
