Literature’s best kept secret Jo Ann Beard on 30 years of writing at a snail’s pace: ‘I finish what I start, even if takes forever’

One of America’s finest writers might also be its slowest. Jo Ann Beard is an essayist who merges fact with fiction until the boundaries blur, but does so at a snail’s pace. “I’m slow!” she admits. Over a 30-plus year writing career, she has produced just 21 stories. Each, however, is worth the wait. Though The New York Times has called her “a towering talent”, she remains literature’s best-kept secret, but now, at the age of 68, she might just be about to have a moment.

This month, the UK publisher Serpent’s Tail publishes The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, comprising her two essay collections to date: The Boys of My Youth, first published in 1998, and Festival Days from 2021, which between them have received rhapsodic praise, and whose stories are set texts in creative writing schools around the world.

“I’m really happy right now,” Beard says over Zoom from her home in Rhinebeck, New York, her shoulder-length hair framing an inquisitive face dominated by designer glasses. “One of the things that plagues me is how slowly I write, and also how rarely. So the idea of a Collected Works, and it being as big as it is [438 pages]… well, maybe I should stop feeling bad about my lack of productivity, and just start realising that I have actually produced a body of work – even if,” she adds, “it isn’t quite as much as I wish it was.”

Has she felt bad about her lack of productivity?

“Oh yeah. There are many things I feel bad about in life, so I don’t know where this falls in the list of everything else, but deep inside I know that the best thing I do in the world is to engage with my writing. And so I have to ask myself: why don’t I do it every day?”

The answer?

“It’s hard.”

Jo Ann Beard first came to prominence in 1996 with her essay The Fourth State of Matter. Five years previously, she’d been an editor of a science journal at the University of Iowa when a shooting – one of the US’s first mass school shootings – took place. In a story that spans just 22 pages, she catalogues the horror of its unfolding alongside the earlier, quotidian normality of what had just been another day shared with colleagues, some of whom would not make it to sundown. Like all her work, the story is riven with granular detail that forces upon the reader an extreme close-up of events. This is what she’s so good at: detail. Elsewhere in her Collected Works, she writes: “Every essay can be deepened through observation, can be made evocative, can contain interstellar dust, luminous patches and areas of darkness. There’s transcendence to be found in these connections, if we have the patience to wait for them.”

Patience, for Beard, is the key component.

“Oh, all my stories take forever to complete,” she sighs. Three years is pretty average, she says; the longest took 20. “That’s why I make my living from teaching. I wanted the kind of job that used my intellect rather than just my clerical skills, but then I also just flat-out love literature. To be able to teach it feels less like a job and more how I should be spending my life.”

Her writing features recurring themes: unsuitable men, devoted dogs and a deep love of friends, some of whom grapple with illness and die young. Many of her stories – about love, about disappointment, about seeking purpose and direction – revolve around herself. “I used to avoid the term autofiction because I thought it sounded sexual,” she says, laughing, “but I guess autofiction is what I write.”

Whenever she’d finish a story – presumably euphoric at its blessed completion – she’d send it off to august literary magazines like The New Yorker, but would routinely receive summary rejections. “They never knew whether my stories were fact or fiction, and never knew quite what to do with them,” she shrugs. She never let it bother her, though, and kept going. It was only when The Fourth State of Matter was accepted by The New Yorker, and subsequently hailed a masterpiece of controlled writing, that other publishers became belatedly interested in the rest of her work.

The Boys of My Youth was a critical smash in the US, and sold well, but a novel completed 13 years later – In Zanesville – wasn’t, and didn’t. (It doesn’t feature in the Collected Works.)

“I couldn’t for the life of me find the plot,” she says. “But then life doesn’t really have plots, does it? You have to apply plot to life.”

When I ask her whether she ever wanted to be famous, or perhaps prize-winning, she scoffs. “I never had one iota of interest in that. I just feel lucky when I finish something. It’s like I’ve added another little drop into the great lake that is literature, as one of our great writers once said.”

Despite the novel’s failure to connect, other stories since have caused wider ripples. In particular, Werner and Cheri, both of which are more straightforwardly non-fiction (and are plot-driven). The first concerns a New York visual artist, Werner Hoeflich, who jumped out of a burning building and somehow survived. In Cheri, Beard recounts the last days, minutes and seconds of a woman who elects to undergo assisted suicide rather than suffer any more pain from her terminal cancer. After finishing both these stories – which took years, of course – Beard presented them, respectively, to Hoeflich and to Cheri’s relatives, looking both for blessing and approval. She didn’t get it.

“They didn’t really like the stories, but then I understood that. It’s difficult to be written about,” she says evenly.

This is where Beard’s patience came into play. She waited a few months, and then resubmitted them to see if they’d changed their minds. Both had, which allowed her to have them published.

It’s this most singular approach to her craft – the total dedication, the stealth – that makes her such a fascinating proposition, and so beloved by fellow writers, among them Jeffrey Eugenides, Geoff Dyer and Anne Enright. Sigrid Nunez, a New York author whose books include the 2018 bestseller The Friend, is much admiring.

“She commits herself to the sentence, and she immerses herself totally,” Nunez says from her home in Greenwich Village. “And of course she makes it – the finished product – look easy, but then that’s just part of her process. I think that’s fascinating, that everything she does is to serve the writing. She could win the Pulitzer tomorrow, and it would change nothing. For Jo, it’s about the work. She’s obsessed with the craft.”

“I write,” Beard says, “because I was born to do it. It requires that I go deep inside my own imagination, and then follow an idea to its absolute, natural, inevitable conclusion, no matter how long it takes. But then that’s what writing is all about: it’s about discovery. All you have to do as the writer is to sit in the driving seat and drive, knowing that you will get there in the end. I love that feeling.”

Beard, who lives with fellow writer Scott Spencer and their two dogs, hasn’t written anything for a long time now, but the imminent publication of her Collected Works has lit a small creative fire within her. For the past few decades, she’s written at a particular US writers’ colony, convinced that it’s only here she can access the necessary headspace. But when she recently applied for another residency, she was rejected. Rejection seems to be a theme of her writing life, I suggest.

She smiles. “Perhaps, yes, but do you know what? I think there’s something galvanising in rejection. In my opinion, the colony was wrong to turn me down, but it incites me somehow. I know now that at some point another short story will present itself. And at that point, I will write it. And I’ll finish it, too. I always finish what I start, even if it takes me forever.”

The Collected Works is out now. Jo Ann Beard is interviewed online by Catherine Taylor on 23 August in her exclusive UK event with Fane Productions Online