Hello! Im Jo-Anna Jones
I write fiction, non-fiction, grant applications, big required reports that almost no one reads, idea pieces. I’ve worked with local governments...
I’m Jo-Anna Jones, writer and storyteller.
It’s a vocation and calling, as much discovery as choice. Nature and Nurture, I came up steeped in stories and their magic. My parents’ tiny Brothers Grimm “village” hometown, everybody related, seemed to float in a cloud of family lore and gossip. My dad broke away and into professional baseball, a “love at first sight” body instinct, amazed anybody would pay him to do what he would have done for free. But then he must have recognized another community of shared stories—with statistics added. His real religion, we said. He managed minor league teams, was good with young players just starting out. And we, as children, literally were along for the ride. Our “regular” lives, like anybody else during the school year, bracketed by summers somewhere between running off to the circus and doing junior anthropology. We’d drop into small towns to sample their stories, live in other people’s houses, use their stuff. Later, I picked up a couple master’s degrees—Environmental Studies, Library Science—that helped me frame what I’d already learned. Later still, I moved to Louisiana, and immediately recognized another folk culture, but with much more fun than my parents’ starting place.
Jo-Anna Jones: writer and storyteller. I’ve spent the past year thinking about ways to link stories with movement and dance. It all started with Tai Chi, which gave me a springboard and insight into my dad and what he must have felt discovering baseball. And knew he just had to do that and keep doing it. So perhaps my sense that I need to embody stories is inborn. Breath, Voice, Language, Stories live in our bodies, along with latent movement and dance.
Stories are so basic. As Barbara Hardy said, “We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.” And that began around campfires.
Edward O. Wilson cites anthropologist Polly W. Weisner on Kalahari Bushmen—differences between “daytime talk” and “firelight talk.” First is practical, focused on travel, search for food and water. But “In the evening the mood relaxes. In the chiaroscuro firelight, the talk turns to storytelling, which drifts easily into singing, dancing, religious ceremony.”
Yet, we still limp along with the inadequate model created when Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) decapitated mind from body. The fiction, as in classic economics, is that we are rational beings. But look around.
But what might happen if we try out a few “dance steps” outside old habits? Understand, as per Wilson, that we “have yet to come to grips with the chimeric nature of our minds and creativity. We are ruled by emotions inscribed in our DNA by prehistoric events little known and only partly understood. Meanwhile, infinitely puzzled, we have been catapulted into a technoscientific age that may in time serve instructions to robots well but not the ancient values and feelings that keep us indelibly human.”
Yosef Garfinkel: “Dancing is the oldest and one of the most persistent themes in Near Eastern prehistoric art, and this theme spreads with agriculture.”
Archeological digs have unearthed images of ancestors holding hands, circling a focal point, often those very same campfires. Round Dances Greece—Delphi, Knossos, Eleusis, and other sacred sites. Chorus in ancient Greek drama. Meander of Zig Zag traced on the ground by dance steps. Key motifs: circle, sun, spiral, serpent, butterfly, Tree of Life—encoded information and values—emphasis on unity and wholeness. “Variety of experience—great gift—unity within diversity—spirituality without dogma.”
We have a Basic Template: Sacred Circle Dance. Modern take on Eastern European traditions, pioneered by ballet master Bernhard Wosien in the 1970s and now thriving worldwide community. I’M GOING TO/JUST BACK FROM AND DANCE FESTIVAL IN MEXICO.
Celeste Snowber: Along with our 5 sense, we have 6th and 7th senses—Proprioception (locating ourselves in the world) and Kinasethesia (feeling in our bodies)—”Potential for research of “spirituality” and SOUL through the body and practice, rather than….from a disembodied intellectual place.” Pulse, heart, breath, ground. – personal experience, subjectivity, positionality, worldview, emotions.
Andrea Olsen: “the body is the medium through which we know the world and ourselves.”
I hope this work play might help make a small start on building bridges based in the only thing we actually own—our bodies. “….[Humans] become whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when….the conscious and unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement each other.”
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some facts about me
- I studied journalism at The University of Edinburgh.
- One of my past jobs consisted of designing covers for a magazines.
- I speak three languages: English, Spanish and French.
- Contrary to popular belief, I am not a full-time travel blogger.
- I was a member of the National Swimming Team.
- I`m obsessed with travel and photography.
- My favorite time of the year is fall.