It's been more than 20 years since the publication of Jo Ann Beard's collection of personal essays, The Boys of My Youth, one that included the classic "The Fourth State of Matter," the terrifying account of a mass shooting at her University of Iowa workplace. In Festival Days, Beard returns with a set of diverse pieces that sometimes challenge the boundary between fiction and nonfiction but that are consistent in the intensity of their perception and their vivid prose.
Most prominent in this genre-bending category is "Cheri," the story of the title character's two-and-a-half-year battle with metastatic breast cancer. Beginning as a deeply reported piece of personal journalism, it shifts almost imperceptibly into the territory of the imagination, without sacrificing any of its integrity purely for emotional effect. "Werner," which describes the artist Werner Hoeflich's escape from a deadly fire at his Upper East Side apartment building in 1991, relies heavily on its subject's recollections of his near-death experience, but Beard's keen eye for novelistic detail subtly transforms pure fact into art.
"The Tomb of Wrestling," a short story that displays Beard's talent as a fiction writer, is no less intense. In it, an artist named Joan engages in a life and death struggle with a man who invades her upstate New York home. The story's well-timed transitions from the violence of the encounter to Joan's memories heighten the pure drama of what happened.
Beard hints at her approach in "Close," explaining how she aspires to a "lofty goal, to imagine translating one's own personal experiences in a way that instructs and illuminates, moves and inspires, another human being." In "Now," she begins with reflections on a craft talk, then moves into stories of her father's service in World War II. "You let the writing lead and you simply follow," she writes, "letting the memories and the images and the language take over."
Festival Days concludes with the collection's bravura title essay. Beard travels to India (with her friends Emma and Kathy, who is terminally ill), Arizona and Portugal (with an ex-lover), but those physical journeys don't begin to capture the piece's emotional scope, as it recalls the funeral of John F. Kennedy, Beard's childhood memories of her "Barbie Dream House" and her contemplation of suicide and the "erased chalkboard of the rest of my life." On whichever side of the fact/fiction line she acknowledges for her is sometimes "permeable," Jo Ann Beard's stories fall, they undeniably resonate with the feeling of truth. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Vital and diverse, Jo Ann Beard's second collection is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction.