Jory Post, our beloved friend and colleague, passed peacefully on January 16th, 2021.
Jory, we celebrate your life, your art, and your friendship.
Three years ago, when our friend and fellow writer, Jory, announced that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, our group became witness to a spectacular blossoming. While Jory did everything in his power to heal from and survive cancer, he simultaneously rocketed into life anew. He embraced new passions, he invited the world inward. He took classes, wrote volumes of poetry and plays and finished novels using self-imposed month-long challenges. On visits when his home was host to our regular Monday night meetings, you might walk by a set of golf clubs one week, a poker table the next, art dioramas of extinct birds in between, and discover a new Korg drum machine he’d purchased to jam with new friends he’d met in ever widening literary circles. All the while, behind the scene, he and his soulmate and wife, Karen, would grapple with profound human questions of living and potentially dying. When the pandemic entered our lives, Jory quickly gathered the writing community together into weekly Zoom Forward! readings. Effectively, he’d wrapped his arms around the world and gave us a place to be every Friday at 5pm; a place to feel safe, a place to feel anchored. You’d see people from Santa Cruz to Tokyo and beyond. His granddaughter, Hannah, will carry onward his many literary endeavors, including Zoom Forward!
Our small playwriting group watched Jory live fully, and while he did so, he opened himself to each of us. He was courageous, vulnerable, direct, inspired, perceptive and generous in every way and every deed. While we take a moment to mourn the loss of our dear friend, we realize that Jory Post is a gift that keeps giving, as his legacy lives in his words of wisdom, his art and in the unconditional love he gave to each of us. We are so grateful to have known you, Jory.
36North presented Side x Side, a Zoomed play reading of three short plays written by Jory Post.
This was the first in a quarterly series of script-in-hand online readings by 36North playwrights.