A Conversation with Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard's essay "The Fourth State of Matter," about a workplace shooting in the University of Iowa's physics department where she worked, put the then forty-something writer on the literary map. Shortly after The New Yorker published that piece, her book of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth (1999), came out to much acclaim. Laura Miller of The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles."

Today she is recognized as a writer who merges fiction and nonfiction techniques, creating an art form that lies somewhere in between. Beard's work has also appeared in Story, Tin House, the Iowa Review, Best American Essays, O magazine and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Whiting Foundation award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has just completed a novel, In Zanesville, which will be published by Little, Brown in April 2011.

This interview was conducted by telephone in June 2010.

Amy Yelin:

In The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts writes of your first book, "I have in front of me a copy of Jo Ann Beard's book The Boys of My Youth and what a baffling item it is." Was it baffling to write?

Jo Ann Beard:

No. But I like the word baffle, the way it sounds and what it means, and I also like referring to the book as an item. It makes for a nice, surprising sentence. That said, I'm surprised anyone would think that book was baffling.

Yelin:

Well, I think it's the way you break rules. The way you jump around in time, jumping decades on occasion, without even a paragraph break; you do it so well the reader hardly notices. You also shift point of view, in one instance even taking on the point of view of yourself in the womb! Perhaps what Birkerts meant is that trying to analyze your work is baffling.

Beard:

I know Birkerts's work, and I am interested in the issue of time in memoir, but I need to avoid overthinking my own work, and so I may have avoided the book for that reason. But let me go back to one thing you said and clarify: there are no rules in writing. There are no rules about time. Or about point of view. None. Writing is about doing something new. Please try not to think of it in terms of rules and breaking rules.

Yelin:

I guess I mean more playing with form. Abigail Thomas and Joan Wickersham are two other authors I read recently who play with traditional memoir form and create something unique and wonderful.

Beard:

I love talking about how other people do the work—people like Abigail Thomas and Joan Wickersham especially. But I just don't think it's wise to do that with my own writing. And not quite as interesting either, when we could be talking about how Annie Dillard writes "Living Like Weasels" or how E. B. White writes "The Ring of Time." Those are much more instructive and illustrative of how good essays operate.

Yelin:

The piece that launched your career: "The Fourth State of Matter." How long after the actual shootings did you begin to write that piece? And was writing it difficult, or healing?

Beard:

As I said, every piece I write is difficult to write. And no, it did not feel healing because I wasn't wounded. I write in order to make art, not to pursue or banish personal demons. And not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody gets "healed" from a mass murder by putting black marks on a white page and asking strangers to read it.

Yelin:

There's a moment in the piece when you're looking up at the sky and you say, "No matter how you miss them, they never come back once they're gone." I know you're also talking about your mother at that point. Was that...