Interview with author Joanne Greenberg

By Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 5, 2008 at 3:28 p.m.

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Photo by Javier Manzano © The Rocky

Joanne Greenberg

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Rocky books editor Patti Thorn chats with Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and other stories, about her contribution to A Dozen on Denver and her writing life.

Tell us why you chose the 1880s.

I ended up with the 1880s because all the other decades had been chosen. ... So one thing led to another, and I happened to have a book with pictures of Larimer Street in the 1880s, and here I see that Larimer Street is THE big street: It was full of buildings and wide streets and activity ... and I thought, "Well, here I am in the catbird seat."

I thought it was interesting that you made the Angel of Death so concerned with the comfort of those fated to die. What was your thinking in making him so sympathetic?

He is (sympathetic), isn't he? (Laughs.) I think he is. ... Remember that he only works the Colorado area, and remember that that makes him feel a lot better than his previous posting. All the more reason to be good, feel good.

Your story is filled with great period details. Was there anything you discovered in your research that surprised you particularly?

Well, yes. (I read in a book) about women not wanting to go out at certain times because the men spit on the street; they hawked and spit. (Charles) Dickens' mother was here and she said that it was a swamp of tobacco spit and detritus of God knows what, dead animals lying in the street. Well ... women would sew cloth around the bottoms of their dresses so that they didn't have to have that (spit on the bottoms of their dresses). They would baste (the cloth to their dresses), then pull the basting, wash this thing and put it back on.

That sounds pretty disgusting. Maybe now is a good time to switch topics! You'll be forever remembered for I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the novelized account of your struggle with schizophrenia as a teen. Has that been a blessing or an albatross?

I think I would be one vast, great, fat, obese ingrate if I wasn't grateful for what happened with Rose Garden. Yes, it's true that I am in a ghetto — the ghetto being YA, young adult. That means that (people perceive me as) a kid's writer no matter what I do. But I'm in a helluva good company. I mean, there are terrific writers who are YAs, and it would be a very bad thing if I felt bad about that. ... Albatross? A live albatross is a harbinger of good luck, which is why killing them is bad.

Do you hear from kids who are reading the book these days?

A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150

We asked 11 authors to pick a decade in Denver's history and turn in 2,500 words of fiction set in the city. Each week we've featured a new story and an interview with the author. Today, look for a special section in print compiling all the stories, plus one additional piece: Heirlooms, by Robert Pogue Ziegler, the winner of our story contest.

Some. Unfortunately, the book is often assigned. (Kids say) "my teacher made me read this." It's being reissued by Holt soon, and I'm hoping for good things for it. I have a strong desire that it be out there because I've heard one too many times that schizophrenia is incurable and that only drugs — heavy, heavy lifelong psychotropic drugs — will ensure remission. That's sheep dip. About a third of us get up, spit out the carpet and continue.

By the way, I'm not against drugs. I think they take the heavy off, I think they take the violence off, I think often they open a way to help. But I've got friends walking around with Tardive dyskinesia — twitches you get from being overdrugged — and then they wonder why their brains give up.

So you think Rose Garden might offer hope to a new generation of schizophrenia sufferers?

Yes.

You once told me that you mostly see the flaws in your work. When you read Rose Garden now, what do you think of it?

I haven't read it in a long time. (Recently, a woman I met) said my work was seamless. What I see are all the seams — where it's patched, sometimes where sentences go clang! Occasionally I'll come on a very nice paragraph, never longer than that, and I'll think that's nice, that's good, it has a rhythm to it, it coheres, and guess what? I wrote it. Oh, and then boing! (laughs), here comes a seam.

Of your 17 books, is there one you're most proud of?

I think I like No Reck'ning Made, which may be (me being) the mother who looks at the poor, lame duckling and loves it all the more because it got no help from anybody. It had three editors, which means two shotgun weddings: two editors had to take it on as a job they didn't want, so they didn't press for any kind of marketing so it laid there and died. I started to call the book Winchester Cathedral because of all the shotgun weddings. I like it. I think it's well written.

That brings me to the subject of publishing. Today the industry seems so geared to finding the next blockbuster. Established writers like yourself, who haven't had recent best-sellers, often find it hard to get attention. Does that trouble you?

Trouble is a rather sweet word. Everything you said is true. That's where it is. Too bad, but that's where it is. That's where baseball is, that's where tennis is, that's where writing is. The big noise, the big focus. But I can only think of this in my own metaphor: Sometimes when you're singing a very good piece of choral music, and the altos and sopranos and soloists are singing away, underneath it all is this little strand of music that the chorus is singing that's very, very beautiful and if only you had ears to hear it, it would elevate you ... Every single day we've got beautiful, beautiful writers (producing work) and, yes, their books are coming out from Bunny Rabbit Print Publishing Co., little one-lung publishers ... (but it's) marvelous, marvelous writing. We are so rich and the table is so loaded that stuff falls off the edges. That's too bad, but it only testifies to our immense wealth when it comes to writers, artists, musicians.

You have led such an interesting life. You've been an EMT, a volunteer firefighter, a teacher. Do you have any overarching life philosophy?

Overarching philosophy? No. I once heard a lady from the women's movement who said to follow a life plan. (But) anything I ever did I fell into backwards. A lady called me up and said there's nobody to fight fire here during the day. Three years later, I was a fireman. My kids had to be bar mitzvahed, so I fell in love with Hebrew and taught that. I started moaning and groaning that there was no anthropology being taught at the Colorado School of Mines (even though) they were sending people out all over the world, and zip, I became a teacher at the School of Mines. It all depended on: a) other people; and b) falling backward into the whipped cream.

But also being open to all those things ...

Some call it open and some call it stupid (laughs) ...

Can you tell us about what you're working on now and what adventures might be in your future?

What is coming out is a novel called Miri Who Charms. It's a novel about friendship among women and mistakes. And what I will do in the future, I haven't the faintest idea. Somebody will call and say, "Why don't you take up baseball? Why don't you ... " Oh dear. There's more, there's more.

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