The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard (2023)
“My first love was poetry, my second love was fiction and my third and lasting love was the essay.”
Before I dive into this month's book, I'd like to share that the latest issue of TRANSCRIPT is available. If you're new here: TRANSCRIPT is a seasonal magazine that I create with my friend Iris. We feature literary essays, short stories and poetry, as well as visual work like photography or illustration.
This time around, gracing its pages, you'll find writing by Hunter A. Allund, Julie Peters, Luuk Vulkers and Micha Zaat. The beautiful visual contributions are by Bernke Klein Zandvoort and Gabriël Kousbroek.
We've printed 100 copies, and have 62 left at the time of this writing. And, we ship (nearly) everywhere. You can find out more or place your order on our website.
May 2025 • Non-fiction
The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard combines essays from two of her books, Festival Days (2021) and The Boys of My Youth (1998), into one fantastic collection (her novella, Cheri, which I've written about before, is part of Festival Days).
More than a few of the essays found here completely swept me off my feet.
They are (mostly) autobiographical and, mining experiences from her own life in the American Midwest, nearly every one of them reads and feels like a short story. Jo Ann Beard's books, as far as I can tell, have mostly flown under the radar (she was once dubbed “the literary world’s best kept secret”), and I don't understand why: her writing is so brilliant, so lively—I can't remember the last time I read anything like it.
She's a masterful craftswoman. All she needs is a few words to paint the most vivid imagery. A baton hurled into the air hangs there for a moment, “a silver hyphen against the hot sky”; a bar is “dark as a pocket”; a landscape can “levitate with colour”. The five pages that make up Behind the Screen, in which she suffers an allergy attack and is forced to watch 1962's Fourth of July fireworks display from behind a screen door, have circled around in my head for weeks.
In Cousins, she describes time spent with her cousin as a child and as an adult, weaving in the perspectives of both their mothers, too, and the contrast between both time periods works wonderfully. I think she's so impressive whenever she writes from the perspective of (herself as) a child. She does so, brilliantly and believably, in a few of the essays. Reading that writing somehow made long-forgotten memories of my own youth bubble up to the surface.
Much of her writing is melancholic and tender. Many times though, it is brutal.
Last Night doesn't even fill four pages but devastatingly recounts the loss of a pet. In The Tomb of Wrestling, a stranger invades a woman's home and nearly kills her. And, in The Fourth State of Matter, an awe-inspiring essay, she recounts the 1991 shooting at the University of Iowa, where a former graduate student killed four staff members and a student, seriously injured another student, and committed suicide. Beard worked as an editor for a physics journal at the university and knew the shooter and several of his victims, including her dear friend Chris. It's beautifully written, but gut-wrenching: her loss can be felt through every line.
Beard's writing is fastidious, and she takes her time. She put out two collections of essays and one novel between 1998 and 2021 and, until she publishes another book of essays, I know I'll be rereading this collection again, and again, and again.
The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard
Published by Serpent's Tail in 2023
One book recommendation, once per month.
Book #27 • May 2025
