Gooney Bird Greene

Gooney Bird Greene is the protagonist of her self-titled story. She arrives part-way through the school year adorned in unique dress and confident in who she is. Gooney Bird’s unique style of dress changes with the days and matches each story that she tells. Her fashion sense is one way she demonstrates her uniqueness and confidence to the world. Gooney Bird is articulate and knowledgeable for her age; she’s well versed in the process and attributes of What Makes a Great Story. She shows off this skill during a week in which each day she tells her class one story of her life before she moved to Watertower. Gooney Bird’s stories are always introduced with some hint of what is to follow and often a misleading word or two to entice listeners and create twists in her narratives. For instance, Gooney Bird says she came from China on a flying carpet, but it turns out that she came from a city named China in the United States. The flying carpet was a figure of speech used to describe an incident where she and her cat fell out of the car while rolled up inside a carpet. She challenges the usual trope of a child who embellishes their life to win the favor of others because, while her stories start out sounding outlandish, most of them turn out to be ordinary—just told in a creative way.

Gooney insists that while everything she says is entirely true, it is just often not true in the way the class or Mrs. Pidgeon assumes. When Gooney Bird tells stories, she is patient and understanding but also firm with her audience. She allows for questions and comments but reminds the class regularly that they must spend more time listening than talking if they want to hear what happens. She demands full attention and commands the room when she speaks, and each story she tells is full of suspense and ends happily. Gooney Bird not only tells stories about herself but also inspires her classmates to do the same. By the end of the novella, she helps them all find their voice and celebrate who they are. She shows them How to Transform Real Life Into Something Creative and teaches the class that any experience can be turned into a great story if told with creative key elements.