• In this Story... with Joanne Greene

  • 著者： Joanne Greene
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In this Story... with Joanne Greene

著者： Joanne Greene
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  • Joanne Greene shares her flash nonfiction, each essay with custom music, showcasing tales and observations from her animated life. Her book, "By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" is now available as a paperback, e-book, and audiobook from Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent book seller.
    GreeneCreative
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Joanne Greene shares her flash nonfiction, each essay with custom music, showcasing tales and observations from her animated life. Her book, "By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" is now available as a paperback, e-book, and audiobook from Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent book seller.
GreeneCreative
社会科学
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  • My Relationship With Words

    My Relationship With Words
    2025/04/04
    In this story, my relationship with words. I’m Joanne Greene.
    When I was 2 years old, they couldn’t shut me up. I babbled with unintelligible sounds until I landed a few words and, from then on, it was Chatty Cathy. Continuous communication. By the way, Chatty Cathy was a doll in the late 50s early 60s who spoke when you pulled her string, a doll my parents would not let me have, for obvious reasons. They didn’t need more words. To save their sanity, they sent me to preschool at age 2 which, in 1956, was damn near revolutionary.
    Words have always been my jam. Numbers were taken by my math majoring siblings and bookkeeping mother. I, on the other hand, was excited to discover that bookkeeping has three double letters in a row (two o’s, two k’s, two e’s.) And that’s where my fascination with bookkeeping ended. I passed notes to my friends to get through long afternoons at Hebrew School, sent letters all summer to anyone whose address I’d snagged, and kept diaries from the time I could hold a pen. Words have always served me. I could turn them inside out, make them rhyme, and express my deep inner thoughts even when alone in my room. I fancied myself a writer, which was why, in high school, when I was NOT accepted into theAdvanced Placement Creative Writing class, I thought my future was shattered.
    The hopefuls were gathered into a classroom, after school, and given 20 minutes to write an essay, a poem, or whatever else based on a one-word prompt: CRYSTAL. That’s it? I gulped. Crystal? And then I got to work.
    Somehow, the lined notebook paper on which I wrote has survived all these years. At the very top, under my name, is the date: March 26, 1969. At the risk of hopelessly embarrassing myself and in the hope of giving the rest of you a good laugh, here goes:
    My Crystal.
    My crystal: a multitude of purpose
    A many-sided reflection
    A king of schizophrenic hypocracy (misspelled) of a cut up being
    An ice cube melts to droplets and, like my crystal, reveals transparency.
    I see the reverberating pierces of ambiguity (did I mean pierces or pieces?) and vision….through reality unto my dreams.
    Me as a whole is many times duplicated, and I begin to interpret…a bit.
    But then I re-look…re-see…and reconsider. (re-look is not a thing)
    Ah, it isn’t solely me who is cut up…and reappearingly formulated (also, incorrect)
    It is also my eyes.
    And since my tools of vision are reflected also, then I can’t see through to the end.
    My crystal is useless, for there is no meaning.

    You can see why I was rejected. Undaunted, I kept writing…and also correcting people who made glaring verbal grammatical errors. What’s worse, nails on a chalkboard, or having to grit your teeth when someone says “her and I went to the movies”? EEEEEE There’s a difference between your sandwich and you’re like a sandwich. A lot is not one four letter word. Than and then are not one and the same. You get the point. My nieces and nephew called me a grammar nazi. Thankfully, I was able to make the point with my two sons that incorrect grammar can lead to (obviously incorrect) assumptions about your intelligence, your education, your knowledge base. Their grammar, I breathe a sigh of relief, is not a problem.
    The thing about words…as wonderful as they are for expressing our thoughts, creating beauty and meaning, addressing societal needs, helping people to cope and move through challenging times, is that they, words, can heal and they can hurt. I’ve learned, over the decades, that sometimes…every now and then…it’s best if I just listen and keep my words to myself.


    Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at joannergreene@gmail.com or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
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    5 分
  • Escaping Flames

    Escaping Flames
    2025/03/21
    In this story, I escape some flames. I’m Joanne Greene.
    It was 1979 in San Francisco, and I was flying high as a news anchor at the legendary FM radio station, K-S-A-N, affectionately called KSAN. I was in love with Fred Greene, morning show producer and part time jock, and my career was the envy of aspiring radio journalists. Metromedia, KSAN’s parent company, had brought in a new General Manager from Los Angeles to “right the ship.” He’d successfully turned big profits at KMET in LA and the suits in NY thought his approach would work in SF. However then, as now, LA and SF are very different beasts.
    It took one, maybe two, officious memos from the new GM, for the staff to start revolting, some more dramatically than others. On one particular day Thom O’Hair, longtime San Francisco air personality, had taken a tab or two of acid. He and my news partner Chris Stanley were on a tear about the new GM whom they’d renamed from L. David Morehead to El Nuclear Warhead. Taking their loud protestation outside the station, they quickly found themselves pounding shots at the Financial Corner, the bar on the next block.
    The combination of LSD and alcohol wasn’t new to O’Hair, but I was concerned that the results would be unpredictable at best, particularly since I was to anchor the news in his afternoon air-shift. They returned from the bar at 2:55 and Tom went directly into the studio to cue up his first record. As I walked into the studio to deliver the 3pm newscast, I saw something different in O’Hair’s eyes. He’d often displayed a mischievous glint, but this was something else - something maniacal, diabolical. Oh no. What’s he going to do? I held my breath, and my stack of papers. Would he turn on my microphone and let me do the newscast? Would I be able to do my job and leave the studio without incident? Instead, as the song was ending and I was gathering my stack of notes and miscellaneous wire copy from which I would tell rather than read the news as was our signature KSAN style, O’Hair grabbed my papers, flipped a Bic lighter which he pulled out of nowhere, it seemed, and set my news copy on fire.
    Oh. My. God. I was holding a torch. News flambe. My eyes doubled in size as my jaw dropped in shock. In a nanosecond, I started blowing and by some stroke of luck, I apparently had enough air in my lungs to turn my news copy into charred ashes just as the record ended. Tom opened my microphone and walked out of the studio chuckling. Somehow, somewhere, I found my voice.
    “It’s 3 o’clock and this is KSAN, San Francisco,” I heard myself say. And then I went on to ad lib a newscast. It wasn’t pretty, but I made it out of the studio five minutes later with a shred of dignity, a healthy dose of anger, and the knowledge that, like my ancestors fleeing persecution in Europe, I was a survivor.



    Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at joannergreene@gmail.com or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
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    5 分
  • What to Take When Forced to Evacuate

    What to Take When Forced to Evacuate
    2025/03/07
    In October of 1991, we lived in the Oakland Hills…the area in which the tunnel fire, also known as the Oakland Firestorm, killed 25 people, injured 150 others, and devoured 2,843 single-family dwellings and 437 apartments. Thankfully, our home was unharmed but the same could not be said for many of our friends. Before the fire was controlled, we were briefly allowed into our home to salvage precious belongings. We took videotapes, photo albums, and journals – irreplacables. We thought about taking the bird but concurred that having our family and dog at my sister’s house was enough of an imposition. We loaded up Birdy’s food dishes and wished her the best. I thought of that day recently as the Palisades and Altadena fires raged in Los Angeles. What would I take today if we were evacuated?
    Most of our photos and videos reside in the cloud; most, though not all, of my writing is safe in Dropbox. I would still grab my oldest journals, the small books that recorded my eighth-grade thoughts on racism, the agonizing wait for my high school boyfriend to call, the fear of losing my identity during my first pregnancy (how, I couldn’t imagine, would I still be me and be a mother?), and the anticipatory grief as my mother and sister simultaneously moved closer to death. These are bits and pieces of me, glimpses into my unfiltered musings, that occasionally ground me and remind me that at my core, I’m still that adventurous, imaginative, outraged, loving, anxious, creative little girl.
    I wear the jewelry that carries meaning – my wedding ring, an identical twin to Fred’s, that was created from gold from our previous lives and shaped into interconnecting infinity signs; my mother’s engagement and wedding rings, soldered together to give them added strength having been worn by her, or me, for nearly 100 years. I would grab my earliest photo albums, with pictures of my parents on their honeymoon, of my siblings and cousins before I was born, of my 9th grade classmates, of my bunkmates in pajamas, of my dorm room at Northwestern.
    I would bring my dog, Moxie, of course, because the thought of life without her unconditional love and big brown eyes, her annoyingly endless licking of my face, would be impossibly challenging if we were in exile. I would grab enough pills to get me through a week, maybe some fruit and nuts, and as much water as I could manage, and a first aid kit. I’d wear low rise hiking boots to keep my feet dry and my body safer if falling on uneven terrain, plus layers of clothing and a waterproof outer layer.
    I understand that my clothing, as well as my new Vince sneakers and comfy navy boots, can all be replaced…..that books, while incredibly meaningful, don’t need to be owned….and that art, while unique and inspirational, can be made again.
    All of what I’ll bring will fit easily into either of our cars. But what will Fred bring and how in hell will I convince him to leave the bulk of his precious possessions behind? I console myself with the thought that each of us gets to choose what to bring, even if we can’t come up with a reason. And if I didn’t have even a moment to gather the items that cannot be replaced, I would assure myself that surviving a disaster with my family intact is really all that would truly matter.

    Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at joannergreene@gmail.com or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
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    5 分

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