Truth & Death with Writer Jo Ann Beard

Cultural Mixtapes

On today’s episode we have writer Jo Ann Beard. She is the author of the essay collection The Boys of My Youth, the novel In Zanesville, and her latest collection Festival Days was published in 2021 by Little Brown and Company. She has won several awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Her essay “The Fourth State of Matter” on the University of Iowa shooting, was published in The New Yorker in 1996 and is taught in creative writing programs around the country.

Beard’s writing occupies a liminal space, as she melds together personal essay and fiction. While reading her work, after a certain point, you stop trying to figure out whether she’s telling a true story or not, and simply surrender to the meditative prose. Beard takes you through the inner lives of several interesting characters—many of whom are herself—and her writing tugs at the rawest of human emotion, as she chronicles the ordinary and extraordinary, talking about death, taking care of animals, the art of writing itself, and country life, amongst many other subjects. We sat down earlier this month to talk through her creative processes, her unique approach to subjects often impossible to write about, and the abilities of writers to illuminate certain aspects of the human experience, unavailable to the outside world. This conversation changed the way I approached both fiction and essay writing, and even inspired me to put some words down on the page.

Before we begin, Some background info for you: We discuss two of her essays in considerable detail. The first one called “Werner” is about a man named Werner Hoeflich who was caught in a burning building, and was able to jump and save his own life at the last minute. The other story titled “Cheri” is about a woman who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and decided to take her own life with assisted suicide. We also briefly speak about the writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, who is known for her set of six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle. All the writers mentioned are in the show notes.

"The Fourth State of Matter"

Jo Ann's Books

Writers Mentioned
- Annie Ernaux
- Karl Ove Knausgård
- Paula Fox

Recommendations
- An Immense World by Ed Yong
- Fresh Air with Terry Gross