The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard: Compelling blend of essay and fiction

A writer’s writer, Jo Ann Beard is “a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of”, Mary Gaitskill has said. This is especially true outside the US, a knowledge gap Beard’s UK commissioning editor attributes to her genre-bending blend of essay and fiction. “You can’t just make up stuff willy-nilly, refuse to call it fiction, and not run into some opposition,” Beard conceded in a Bookforum interview.

To redress the oversight, Serpent’s Tail is releasing the extraordinary short story Cheri as a novella alongside The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, comprised of two collections previously published in the US: The Boys of My Youth (1998) and Festival Days (2021). (A novel, In Zanesville, was also published in the interim, in 2011.)

While Cheri is included in The Collected Works, with the lapidary quality of Claire Keegan, it is powerful enough to merit its own volume. First published in the now-defunct literary journal Tin House as Undertaker, Please Drive Slow, the story boldly imagines the inner experience of a terminally ill woman, from diagnostic mammogram to her final breath. It is dedicated to Cheri Tremble, a woman who died aged 47 from metastatic breast cancer, whose friends and family members Beard interviewed after her death. Unable to tolerate pain medication and told she might suffer paralysis, Tremble contacted Dr Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia advocate who offered physician-assisted suicide.

Despite the pain, Cheri is able to appreciate absurdity in the unfathomably grim road trip to “Dr Death” in Detroit. She remains dazzled by the world around her: “And this, of course, is when the world turns glamorous,” Beard writes of the moment of the terminal diagnosis. “Her daughters look like movie stars in their low-slung pants and pale autumn complexions. The trees on her street vibrate in the afternoon sunlight, the dying leaves so brilliant that she somehow feels she’s never seen any of this before ... It’s all lovely beyond words, really.”

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Other standout pieces in the Collected Works include The Fourth State of Matter, first published in The New Yorker in 1996, a personal history of a shooting in the physics department at the University of Iowa by a disgruntled PhD student. Beard, who was working as an editor of the physics journal, happened to go home early that day. Although she counted one of the victims as a close friend, the grief, which bifurcated her life into a before and after, is presented as part of a larger collage of life, nestled into scenes of her incontinent dog, needy estranged husband, and the ex-beauty queen who comes to remove the squirrels infesting her home.

A doyenne of descriptive detail, “every writing effort can contain interstellar dust, luminous patches, and areas of darkness”, writes Beard, who teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence. Death, or near-death, is a theme throughout the collection. In Waiting Beard and her sister leave their mother’s deathbed to choose a coffin. Last Night recounts putting down a beloved dog. In Werner a painter makes an improbable escape from a New York tenement fire by diving through a closed window in a neighbouring building. The O Henry Prize-winning story The Tomb of Wrestling is about a violent home intrusion. Beard finds humour even here, as the narrator, fearing for her life, is embarrassed when the intruder finds her secret stash of processed cheese.

Beard captures the elasticity of time particular to moments of shock, slowing the pace to show the mind dancing between the present and the past, tragedy and comedy, the transcendent and the banal. “He was completely in the moment, experiencing instead of anticipating,” she writes as Werner faces the fire. “Time stretched like rubber. Fascinated, he wandered around inside each moment as though it were a cavernous room.”

In an author’s note Beard thanks the editors of the much-missed Tin House “for their willingness to publish my efforts without undue fretting over genre”. We shan’t fret over it either, instead we can marvel at the result. A poet by training, rejected by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s fiction programme before being accepted to study creative nonfiction, she brings to bear a poet’s precision, a novelist’s empathy and an essayist’s concentrated thought.

While the stories featuring dramatic events are the most gripping, the quality of Beard’s attention makes even everyday recollections of life growing up in the Midwest – from startling memories of a doll in a crib to adulthood – compelling. In Now, an essay on craft, she explains that her technique is “simply thinking, focused thinking, with words attached to memories attached to images and the images linked to form the elusive, still-blurry idea at its core”. If only it were as simple as Beard makes it seem. It’s a valid lesson for life as well as art: “Every moment of your life brings you to the moment you’re experiencing now,” Beard writes. “And now. And now.”