A Transcript of our Conversation with Joy Jones--a Repost
With Hosts Elizabeth Bruce and Michael Oliver
If you would like to read a transcript of our conversation with Joy, you’re in luck. Below is the opening with a link to the whole conversation here.
Joy is the author of five books. Her most recent is the Young Adult novel Jayla Jumps In. She won the 2022 PEN Phyllis Naylor Grant for Children’s and Young Adult Novelists for her then work-in-progress, Walking The Boomerang. She has received fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, and is currently co-authoring a biography with Tom Adams of the couple that co-founded AA and Al-Anon, respectively, Bill and Lois Wilson; A Marriage That Saved The World,
Joy is also a playwright, an educator, a public speaker, a daughter, a Double-Dutch expert, and a dear friend.
For more information about Joy, click here and here.
Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I'm Elizabeth Bruce.
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Michael: And I'm Michael Oliver.
Elizabeth: Today is our good friend, Joy Jones, who is a novelist, a playwright, an educator, a public speaker, a daughter, a friend, a double Dutch expert, et cetera, et cetera. So, thank you, Joy, and welcome.
Michael: We like to start our interviews with a couple of questions. And the first one is the role that creativity plays in your life, but specifically, what aspects of your life do you think creativity have had the greatest impact?
Joy: Obviously my writing, I've known since third grade that I wanted to be a writer and always liked coming up with [00:01:00] stories and wanting to show everybody—my parents, my classmates, my teachers—what I had written. And so, finding a way to make that happen required creativity in the traditional sense of actually inventing stories and using your imagination, as well as trying to be inventive and imaginative about getting leads, sustaining rejection, connecting with others in the field, finding your tribe, getting your work out in the, your work out in the world, et cetera, et cetera.
Michael: Okay. Yeah, I hadn't thought about the creativity of enduringrejection.
Elizabeth: How to imagine life beyond rejection.
Joy: Because I knew I wanted to be a writer at a young age, I learned at a young age that rejection was part of being the writer's, on the writer's journey. And so, that has helped me not be too shaken when I get the rejection letters. For me, one strategy I have is I apply for something and then I forget about it.
Joy: And a lot of times when someone does say yes, I'm like, [00:02:00] I don't even remember... I don't remember submitting this story, I don't remember applying to this opportunity. And I have to sit with the letter or the email like really search my mind ‘cause I have really let it go. I apply, I submit, I make the attempt, and then I forget about it until—
Elizabeth: Send it out into the universe.
Joy: That's right. Until they say yes or no.
Elizabeth: You've had a lot of happy surprises on that front and we'll get to that.
But, as Michael said, we deal with creativity in a number of ways. One of the ways is through the definitions of creativity. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—I think I'm getting to say this right; it's the very long Hungarian name of this erudite gentleman that begins with a “c”—anyway, he has written numerous books on creativity, particularly flow and creativity in which he focuses on acts that advance a particular field of endeavor like fiction or engineering, or double Dutch, perhaps.
Conversely, in his book, Human Motivation, the [00:03:00] author Robert Franken focuses on creativity in relationship to problem solving and communication. Now, in this project, we lean a bit toward Franken's definition in that we feel that to be creative, quote, “you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective.” Close quote. Joy, how do you personally view creativity or the creative act.
Joy: Ah, I would like to take slight issue—perhaps that's too strong a word—with the second definition in that, for me, I need to not necessarily look at things in a different way, but I need to not look at them at all. I need to create a void. I need to create an emptiness so that new vision can present itself to me. It's akin to what I was discussing about rejection. I don't need to think a whole lot about whether a particular person or company or opportunity is going to say yes or no to me, I just need to do the footwork and then let it go [00:04:00] and allow something else—a different way of looking at things, a different opportunity, a different mindset—to sort of catch me by surprise and tap me on the shoulder. You mentioned double Dutch. That's a prime example. I can't say that I ever thought as a child, or especially as an adult, that I would have a career jumping rope. Never entered my mind.
Elizabeth: It wasn’t on the aptitude test—
Joy: Not at all!
Elizabeth: --college application or whatever.
Joy: And I liked jumping rope a whole lot as a, but I have jumped double Dutch more as an adult than I did as a child. I wasn't that good at double Dutch. But I loved jumping single.
And the double Dutch opportunity, all of those opportunities, came through the back door. Certainly it’s—I feel like I've been creative with making the most of those opportunities, but it was not a logical planned process for me.
When I was in my late twenties, early thirties, the other women on the job I was working, we were always talking about losing weight. Always talking about—
Elizabeth: Of course. Yes. Yeah. This is [00:05:00] the constant, one constant in a woman's life is you’re always try to lose weight.
Joy: Indeed! And I worked on Pennsylvania Avenue at that time, and Pennsylvania Avenue is a broad boulevard with large sidewalks, lots of space. So, I said, why don't we get a jump rope and jump double Dutch on our lunch hour? I thought that was a great idea, but my coworkers said, oh, no, I'm too old. Mind you we're in our twenties and thirties. Way too old to be doing that now. And so, I never did it. And I let the idea go, but I thought it was an idea that had legs, maybe not in real life, but I could make up a story.
So, I ended up writing a play called “Outdoor Recess” about a group of adult women who form a double Dutch team. And, in the play, a Washington Post reporter sees them and writes a story about them and wonderful things happen.
Elizabeth: Oh, this is in the play. This is in the play. Your imagination.
Joy: This is my imagination. Yes.
Elizabeth: Oh, this is art imitating life.
Joy: No, it was life imitating art—
Elizabeth: Or life imitating art.
Joy: And so when the play—and this is taking place over a period of years—when [00:06:00] the play is up and running and I'm promoting it, someone says, You ought to actually do that. You ought to get some women together and have them jump double Dutch. In my mind, I'm like, okay, I tried that once. It didn't fly. But something made me say, why not? And so, the recreation center in my neighborhood—which is right across the street from me, which is why I chose it, not a long commute, I can just walk out the door across the street and I'm there—they said I could have double Dutch there. And so, every Friday I would. I put the word out and some women actually showed up.
Elizabeth: How old were you at this point?
Joy: I was in my forties.
Yeah. And after a period of time—I was working at a hospital at the time, and so I had a lot of contacts in the health field—and someone called me and said, Why don't you come and bring your double Dutch team to our health fair and do a demonstration?
Elizabeth: Okay.
Joy: And then, someone else said, Why don’t you come do a street festival? And I said, do you have any money? And they said, Sure, we'll pay you. And I'm like, oh! [00:07:00]
So, we started getting these invitations. Why don't, you know, our school needs an afterschool program, can you teach jump-rope? So these things began to unfold. And ultimately, then I started writing grants to formalize the process. We'll do somebody's program if you pay us to do X, Y, and Z, blah, blah, blah.
And then one day we were doing a street festival—I wasn't even at that particular event—and a Washington Post reporter happened to be there. He wasn't there working; we were in his neighborhood. He saw what was going on and he wrote an article about the group. A woman who was affiliated with the State Department saw it and contacted us. She would arrange for artists to perform abroad. And she was really excited about the prospect of bringing double Dutch because, unlike musicians who need amplifiers and expensive musical instruments to be transported, et cetera, et cetera, all we’d need is a flat surface and a rope.
Elizabeth: You can go through security, no problem!
Joy: Precisely. And so, we ended up being Goodwill [00:08:00] Ambassadors to Russia several years ago.
Elizabeth: Oh, yeah, I remember that.
Joy: Evidently, we were, our goodwill wasn't that great given there are still—
Elizabeth: Oh, oh, true! I didn’t even consider that. Double Dutch and diplomacy is very much in need right now.
Joy: But, but we were very well received while we were there. Had a great time. Some of the people we met have since come to Washington, D.C. And they shared their cultural experiences with some of our friends and family members. But, so, none of that was planned. None of that was on my radar.
Elizabeth: Except that you foresaw it in your play. It’s a—
Joy: I was just, my imagination was making up something farfetched. Not something that—
Michael: The person in your play didn't end up going to Moscow, did they?
Joy: No, they didn't. They didn’t go to Moscow.
Michael: Otherwise, you're a prophet!
Elizabeth: That was in the Chekhovversion. [In Russian accent:] I want to go to Moscow.
Michael: That's a fascinating story. Wow.
Elizabeth: Oh wow. Oh, I wanna hear—
Michael: But it is a [00:09:00] great story about, just, I mean you had the impulse to, what, lose weight, nobody really wanted to do it, so you wrote a play about it, and then ultimately you did it, and then the Washington Post reporter does show up, and then you go to Moscow! So it's all, it's just fascinating.
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