Festival Days

by Jo Ann Beard

A searing and exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville , who “honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life” (Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award   winner for The Friend ).

A New York Times Notable Book
A  New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Boston Globe  and  LitHub  Best Book of the Year

When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New Yorker , Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form.
 
Now, with Festival Days,  Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work. In these nine pieces, she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instants when life and death hang in the balance, ranging from the death of a beloved dog to a relentlessly readable account of a New York artist trapped inside a burning building, as well as two triumphant, celebrated pieces of short fiction.
 
Here is an unforgettable collection destined to be embraced and debated by readers and writers, teachers and students. Anchored by the title piece––a searing journey through India that brings into focus questions of mortality and love— Festival Days presents Beard at the height of her powers, using her flawless prose to reveal all that is tender and timeless beneath the way we live now.

Genres: Essays, Short Stories, Nonfiction, Memoir, Contemporary, Animals, Literary Fiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 16, 2021

About the author

Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I downloaded this book on a whim after reading in The Guardian that Colum McCann was recommending it. I read her two previous books, "The Boys of My Youth" and "In Zanesville" and admired both of them. Then, because I wanted to wait a couple of days before starting another novel, decided to get started on these essays/stories.

Getting started meant getting finished, as her writing left me no choice. These are mostly autobiographical, with a couple of stories thrown into the mix. She writes like a demon, starting a sentence simply, then leading you where you never expected to go, but it turns out to be perfect. I started a couple of pieces wondering whether I really wanted to go there, but had no choice because I couldn't stop. When I realized I was starting the last essay, I panicked because I wasn't ready to lose her voice, this woman who so easily became my friend through her words. So I immediately ordered her first book of essays, "The Boys of My Youth", which I no longer owned, so that I could reread them after so many years.

I'm glad I took Colum McCann's word in his praise of this book, and glad I read it right away instead of consigning it to my tbr shelf.

[Kristina Coop-a-Loop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Festival Days, the latest book of essays and stories by Jo Ann Beard, is a difficult, emotional, harrowing read. Do not step into its pages lightly. It is a book primarily of loss—loss of life, loss of love. The words on the pages are beautifully, deliberately written, but they are painful. Humor is present, but it is dark and sad and when I laughed, it was because I recognized the pain the character was experiencing because I, too, had experienced something similar. I would like to thank Hachette Book Group for sending me this complimentary copy.

The title, Festival Days, is misleading. One glance at the beautiful, atmospheric cover featuring bird cages hanging from wires strung with lights against an overcast gray sky should be one clue that this is not a book about a week of parties. The second clue is the small snippet of a poem quoted before the essays begin: “One of these days/I’ll look at your face and find/The sad detailed imprints/Of the festival days.” This is a collection of creative fiction, or fictionalized nonfiction. Beard has taken events from her life and the lives of others to create these essays/stories. She writes very stream of conscious—one thought or image leads to another thought or image and the images and thoughts circle back on themselves and repeat. As each thought of image repeats, Beard also manages to move the story forward.

“Last Night,” the first essay in the book, is beautifully told but really fucking sad. Seriously. Beard doesn’t mess around—she hits readers right in the throat. It’s her warning: if you can’t take this, stop now. If you’re brave, you move onto “Werner,” the story of a man whose apartment catches fire and to survive, he has to risk death and jump:

There was no oxygen between the particles now, no way to negotiate anything out of it. The opposite, in fact; if air equaled life, then non-air equaled death, but this was a step beyond—it was non-air with poison.

In the stopped, strangled moment that followed, another thought burst loose and hung there, pale inside the black swirling column.

He would have to jump.

Five stories was too far to fall; he’d never survive it. He’d done it once long ago, a forty-five-foot drop, not onto concrete but into deep, still water. The bridge over Fall Creek, east of Eugene, a wood trestle built into bedrock, the surface of the water below tense and glittering, huge smooth boulders on either shore, his striped towel and white T-shirt draped over one; he would claim them after the jump, when the next guy was standing there poised to sever his spine. He had looked down at his feet, which seemed delicate at that height, wet sneakers sagging. Somebody hollered, “Hey, Werner,” and then an obscenity, and others laughed. He thought he heard sympathy in the shouts, but that was useless, the sympathy of men (19).

The story is tense—while Beard dips in and out of Werner’s head and he’s debating the jump, calculating his odds of survival and linking images to events in his past, the reader is frantic with worry. But if you read too quickly, you miss the story. So you read as fast as you dare, hoping he’ll be okay, hoping his cat will be okay, but suspecting no one will emerge unscathed—including yourself.

“Cheri,” the next story/essay, is based on one woman’s decision to kill herself rather than allow the cancer that’s overtaken her body to slowly and painfully finish the job. Cheri and her family contact Dr. Kevorkian, aka Dr. Death (if you remember this from news stories from the late 1990s), and he agrees to help her. This story contrasts sick, dying Cheri with healthy Cheri and her journey from one state of physical being to the other. A lump in her breast is discovered by a technician during a routine mammogram:

And that’s how everything changed, not with the pronouncement, even, but with a woman’s disengaged expression. The room was engulfed in a tinny silence as she worked, arranging Cheri like a mannequin, folding her against the stainless steel, placing an arm up here, a breast in there, sending her home. Once, a long time later, when Cheri’s life was passing in front of her eyes, she caught a glimpse of it again—saw the bright yellow cartoon feet of the technician and then saw her own naked left arm, in slow, muted motion, rising obediently to embrace the machine (42).

If you are a woman, this scene holds a particularly vibrant familiarity, the mundane (and somewhat ridiculous) squishing of your breasts between two plates of glass, holding your breath, and knowing that everything will probably be fine, there’s no way you have cancer…right? This essay/story (difficult to know what to call these finely worded gems of pain) is actually one of my favorites from the book. The author imbues Cheri with a dark sense of humor and I admire her bravery in the face of death…if that’s the right word. Cheri decides to keep living until she decides to die.

I don’t care for “Maybe It Happened.” I see what Beard is doing—one possibility leading to another possibility, maybe this happened, then maybe this happened—but used as device to tell an entire story (even a very short one) got on my nerves. It’s probably just me and maybe if I read it again in the future I’ll appreciate it more. Maybe.

“The Tomb of Wrestling” resembles “Werner” in that something very bad is happening in the present requiring the character to take action, but the character’s thoughts circle back to past events and images. These memories then loop back to the present. This one is also a tense read but with a less definitive ending. After reading, I had a whole lot of questions which are doomed to remain unanswered.

“Close” is the author discussing the art of writing. I liked this essay because (for the most part) I agreed with her. Her writing thoughts are similar to thoughts I’ve had regarding writing, what I’ve learned from taking writing classes (and despite taking writing classes) and what I’ve learned about writing by writing. There’s nothing new under the sun, Beard writes (and then admonishes the reader against using clichés). In order to create something new, “we have to have insights, which means we have to think, and that means we have to work to create art out of life, to bring something new to each sentence, a surprise for the reader. Not in a pyrotechnic way, but through intelligence, through our powers of imagination, and through the rigorous refusal to waste a reader’s time” (134). She thinks learning to write comes from reading, not from having your work critiqued by a teacher or editor or peers. I agree with that 100%. If you don’t read, and don’t read extensively, how can you learn to write? How can you learn dialogue? Character development? How a story is constructed? I’ve learned so much from reading good books (classics), popular fiction, and I’ve probably learned the most from terrible books—books so badly constructed I could pull them apart, see how the author lazily stitched everything together, and understand why the story and characters are unconvincing and flimsy. Beard agrees:

“Learning to write comes from reading, both the work of published writers and of our peers, and from using one’s powers of insight and creativity to analyze what one reads and figure out why it works when it does and what is missing when it doesn’t…Because a good essay—for that matter, a good short story, memoir, novel—is about ideas, that’s how it elevates itself beyond and above its nominal subject to illuminate something universal. Literature instructs, which means the writer has to be wiser and more knowledgeable than the reader…Making art is in fact difficult, is supposed to be difficult. Writing school isn’t any easier than med school; it’s just shorter” (135, 138-139).

“Now” is Beard putting herself directly into the essay; using stream of consciousness to string together one impression/image/thought to another. I’d call it controlled or selective stream of consciousness because while the essay does flow easily, Beard also tells the story of her father’s life and death and the speech she is supposed to be writing and while she’s telling you this, she (tongue in cheek) writes: “I don’t know how long this should be, but I could keep going forever, linking one thought to the next, one image to the other. Ha—I can see the faces three weeks in the future and the collective look of horror at the idea that the speaker’s sheaf of papers might be endless, self-perpetuating. The sheaf is not, but the story is. And I hope you’ll notice also that there is no story. It’s simply thinking, focused thinking, with words attached to memories attached to images and the images linked to form the elusive, still-blurry idea at its core. I can’t yet separate it from the background” (186).

“What You Seek Is Seeking You” is my second favorite story/essay. It’s the story of two people meeting but before they do, you learn about them separately. It’s probably the lightest and most non-dark humor writing in the book. Loss and a haunting sense of sadness are not completely absent (this wouldn’t be a Beard essay otherwise) but if you want to dip your toe in to check the emotional water, this is the one with which to start.

“Festival Days,” the last story in the book, is rather grim. It’s the story of a woman dying and her last journey abroad with friends? Sisters? The relationships are a bit hazy to me. If you’ve read them all consecutively, as I did, you may be a bit traumatized by the time you get to this one. It’s long and the story of the women traveling in India reminds the narrator (the author?) of people and events from her past, particularly a man she is no longer with, a man named M. This man and a woman named P.R. are connected to the narrator and her memories of them (good and bad) surface and repeat during this trip to India. There are also repeated images of unpleasant, apparently mundane cruelties of life in India. I found them very painful and disturbing and skimmed those few paragraphs. “Festival Days” is the most difficult story to read in the book, maybe because it’s the last and by the time I got to it I was a bit exhausted by the stream of consciousness writing and the sadness of the stories. While I did take breaks between the stories, I suggest to future readers: if you are finding yourself disturbed or worn out, maybe read this book over two months.

Jo Ann Beard’s Festival Days is a haunting, painful but beautiful read. It doesn’t waste your time with flippant nonsense (although you may wish to engage in some flippant nonsense when you’ve finished it). It is, despite its deceptively simple and fluid imagery, well-crafted. If you are looking for a challenge, I recommend this book. I also recommend her (much) earlier novel, In Zanesville. It is painfully funny and full of the horrible truths of youth, but won’t leave you traumatized.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars Rounded Up

Jo Ann Beard's latest collection Festival Days is a collection of stories and essays that blend fiction and non-fiction. Her writing at the sentence level is stellar, each sentence near perfect in its composition. Beard's prose isn't flowery; it's clear and direct, all the while evoking whatever vision she is trying to convey.

In "Werner," describing his experience in the fire: "The whole thing now seemed like a succession of moments. In that moment, and the moment before, the smoke had been curling sideways around the building, a bolt of black cloth unwinding. Then it stopped and there was a moment of emptiness before the black current swept upward, and he realized it wasn't like cloth at all; it was dark and viscid, like used motor oil, and they weren't breathing it, they were drinking it."

Beard uses black humor to balance out the serious theme of end of life in "Cheri." "Cheri feels the stirrings of a cough deep inside her lungs. It's the monster locked in the basement, and eventually it will storm up the stairs and burst forth, attacking her in her own home, swinging a mallet at her chest over and over. Once she can breathe again, she makes a joke out of it: I'm Buddy Hackett, I'm Gene Hackman."

Two of her essays, "Close" and "Now" are written in a stream of consciousness style. While I appreciate her technical skill and how she brings all her streams together at the end, this is not a style that I personally resonate with. In "Now" she even includes some mention of her style:

"I don't know how long this should be, but I could keep going forever, linking one thought to the next, one image to the other. Ha--I can see the faces three weeks in the future and the collective look of horror at the idea that the speaker's sheaf of papers might be endless, self-perpetuating. The sheaf is not, but the story is. And I hope you'll notice also that there is no story. It's simply thinking, focused thinking, with words attached to memories attached to images and the images linked to form the elusive, still-blurry idea at its core. I can't yet separate it from the background."

All of her pieces are narratives interspersed with memories, time looping throughout. These memories tie back to the story in the end, and she mostly lands her stories and essays.

The titular essay, "Festival Days," was the longest work included. Here Beard has a more disrupted rhythm and skips around more frequently than in her other pieces. She is writing about the deterioration of a dear friend's health, her memories and heartbreak over the end of a long term relationship, and her nephew's childhood cancer diagnosis. I was fatigued by the end of the more frequent intertwining of several threads. This technique didn't serve her story as well here in my opinion.

I appreciate the way Beard puts her words together and some of her narrative really touches me, though her structure doesn't always work for me. I'm curious to go back to her earlier collection The Boys of My Youth to see if she employs this same technique throughout.

Published 2021

[Ciara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I call this collection, "Jo Ann Beard doing whatever the hell she wants." As she should.✨

[Bonnie G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been thinking for several hours about what I can say about this collection. The only thing I can seem to come up with is "wow." Not very helpful, is it? Still, it covers my thoughts pretty well. Beard was early to the conceit of blending fiction with non, and she does it so well. Truly, I don't generally feel great about this blurring. Often this device seems lazy, but not in Beard's works. She takes truth as far as it can go, moving to fiction when straight reporting cannot tell the true story. For my friends who feel visceral delight when they read great prose, this is indeed an ecstatic experience.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I'm wherever here is." ("Festival Days")

A perfect collection. Fans of JAB's who have been diligent about always picking up a magazine featuring new work from her will find that nothing has gone uncollected here, and there are even a few new essays — or "nonfiction stories" as the publicity copy reads — to round out the rest.

It's worth waiting until March of next year, I swear it.

[Jeanette · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are hugely burdened with hurt and loss. She does essay stream of consciousness to an nth excellent degree.

Emotional always and supremely sensitive at her core and context.. Neither is often not an apt or less punctured path, IMHO. This is much darker than I had surmised from the reviews. Her supreme expression skills work as armor. But at times the armor fails to stop the piercing. She's a much more fragile flower than her voice posits.

Truthfully, I think these are not all 5 stars level but more than several are.

She herself is extreme. Outlier in not only her philosophy either. We are almost the exact age for strong era memory. Her long term elder overlook is daunting but also at points savvy accurate in its senses.

Autobiographical in honest and bluntly poetic sensibilities. The jolly joy or most sublime naive peace of distance for ignoring or not taking detail to heart does not seem to reside in her cognition. Feeling always over thinking.

The Dr. Kevorkian tale was painful to read. A few other just a might less so.

[Susa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Välillä jokin kirja on niin erinomainen, loistava ja ajatuksia kutkuttava, että huomaan sen sytyttävän oman halun kirjoittaa. Päästä edes kokeilemaan, voisiko saada aikaan yhden tai kaksi virkettä, joissa eläisi samanlainen palo.

Tämä on yksi noita kirjoja. Inspiroiva, eläväinen, traaginen, ahdistava, huvittava, viihdyttävä, kammottava, äärimmilleen nautittava. Vähän kuin koko elämä koottuna yksien kansien sisässä.

[Rennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love her, but these are uneven, as opposed to The Boys of My Youth where each piece is consistently outstanding. And it’s unfair to constantly compare an author’s work to one work that was so incomparably amazing, and I know that’s what happens with her, but it’s hard to avoid. I was surprised that the author’s note opens with an explanation that there are several stories among the essays, and how these things intermingle and why it matters or doesn’t here. I read some interviews and articles around it and I’m just not on board. Yeah, fact and fiction intertwine, of course, but the reasoning doesn’t work for me and I wasn’t as impressed with the craft of it.

I dunno. If you’re a fiction reader there’s certainly more appeal there, but I like when she writes about herself, and does that weird thing she does where time bends backward and forward and in on itself, and she loops in lots of different thoughts and scenes and memories and lapses into steam of consciousness until suddenly you realize how emotionally affected by whatever was the story underneath it all. She does that here and it’s amazing and everything I’d hoped for.

Interestingly, she does a good bit of writing about writing here, and I think that might be part of the problem. She’s a slow, careful writer, and doesn’t put out work because you want her to, only when she has something profound to say, it seems like. Not what I expected but still her, so still good.

A little favorite: “Him a man, and me just me.”

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an author’s note Beard expresses gratitude to her publishers, “for their willingness to publish my efforts without undue fretting over genre,” and their “openness and flexibility.”

As a reader, this quality of openness and flexibility in Beard’s work, her freedom, is a big take-away for me – it’s expanded my ideas about form, structure, fiction and nonfiction, and the tenets of creative writing.

Festival Days is a miscellaneous collection of personal essays, vignettes, two short stories, and a few pieces that I don’t think there’s an actual term for. They’re put into the broad ‘essay’ category, but they’re closer to being the inverse of autofiction. They’re works of nonfiction, but thanks to the permission received to imagine her way into the lives of real people and events, given the lit fic treatment.

To me all the pieces in Festival Days are short stories, fundamentally fiction, because to me ‘fiction’ is any prose work in which the writer’s artistic vision is brought to bear on the ordinary, in order to transcend it. Anything that’s artfully crafted and imagined – shaped to illuminate, move, provoke, enrich, expand, and give aesthetic pleasure, is fiction.

The stories here are wonderful, and wonderfully varied. A lot of them are about death. One’s about a man who escapes a burning building by jumping out his window and into the window of another building; one’s about a woman who’s attacked in her home by an intruder, and one’s about a recently divorced and still grieving woman having to have her beloved dog put down. And these weren’t my favourite pieces.

Beard is a gorgeous writer – the prose supple and radiant. Her images are sharp and clear. She makes associations that are unexpected but which somehow achieve the sublime. She has a marvelous internal radar, imbuing the seemingly inconsequential with heart and mind expanding significance.

These stories have magical properties.

[Päivi Metsäniemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suru, menetys, pelko, rakkaus, ihmiselämän suuret hetket, hyvässä ja pahassa. Jo Ann Beardin novellit ja esseet käsittelevät järkälemäisiä teemoja, jotka avautuvat eri tavoilla, eri muodoissa tässä nerokkaassa kokoelmassa. Mukana on tositapahtumiin perustuvia kertomuksia (pelastuminen tulipalosta, kuoleminen syöpään, mutta päättäen itse, koska), novelleja ja esseitä. Novellit usein ohitetaan jonain runon ja romaanin välimuotona, mutta ei kannattaisi; sen muoto tarjoaa erinomaisen mahdollisuuden mikroeritellä elämäntapahtumia ja niihin lliittyviä tunteita - sellaisia, joista ei riitä romaanin juoneksi asti, mutta jotka kerta kaikkiaan antavat ihmisyydelle laajuutta, syvyyttä ja tarttumapintaa.

Rakastin erityisesti esseetä ”Nyt”, joka kuvaa ilmeisesti kirjailijan itsensä työskentelyä; hetkeä, jolloin on prokrastinoitu tarpeeksi, ja ryhdytään tosissaan kirjoittamaan - tässä esitelmää, josta ehkä samalla tulee essee. Niminovelli Juhlapäiviä kertoo ystävyydestä, ja siitä, miten yksi ystävättäristä riutuu ja kuolee hivuttavaan tautiin; mitä kaikkea muuta elämä on, ennen kuin kuolemme, ja miten tärkeää olisi olla siinä kiinni niin kauan kuin se on mahdollista, pelkäämättä, eläen, lähellä toisia. Painihauta on hurja tarina äkillisestä hyökkäyksestä, ja molemmat ”tositapahtumanovellit”, Cheri ja Werner, suorastaan jännityskertomuksia.

Jo Ann Beardin tunnerekisteri, lämpö, huumori ja rakkaus ympäröivät kaikkea kerrontaa. Hahmot ovat kaukana täydellisestä eli täydellisen samastuttavia. Kieli on tarkkaa, kaunista, selkeää ja hengittävää. Suomennos on erinomainen. Toivottavasti saamme näitä lisää - erityisen viehättynyt olen tällaisesta ”kirjallisesta esseestä” joka tulee hyvin lähelle novellia, mutta ammentaa faktojen maailmasta .

[Sarah Paolantonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beard was my first workshop professor in my MFA. She taught a class called "The Brief Encounter" and it was about writing on the sentence level. Our assignments were short--400 words on a tool, 400 words on a phrase. We studied the 'Lives' column in The NYT Magazine, discussing and dissecting how the author fit a short history of, say, baked beans into a few hundred words that also included their legacy of personal meaning. Beard has four rules for every sentence and even though she didn't demand that from her students (she's not one for demands at all) it sticks with me in everything I do. She is the one who taught me that writing is art.

What I wasn't expecting from this book are two short pieces on craft. She kind of dances around them on the page but will eventually get to the point. ("What is this piece about below the surface? ....in any case the reader has to be able to answer the question.") She always talked about how much she hated writing. So when I saw the news in 2020 (at some point, who knows) that a new collection of her essays was due sometime in the next year, I leaped with joy with very few others. Beard is known for The Fourth State Of Matter--an essay that appeared in The New Yorker's fiction issue in 1996--and it turned her into a household name for nonfiction writers everywhere. She exists on the same plane of Annie Dillard in craft, in subject (they both love nature), and in lure. Beard is not as prolific (she joked *often* about hating writing) but when I finished Festival Days, I announced to my living room...she's still got it!

The essays are...a bit... morbid. Two are about watching and participating in the lead up to the death of two very close friends; one is about a friend who saved his life from jumping from his apartment building when it was on fire--they are visceral and alive; there are two on craft; one is a very short voice driven piece, pure experiment; another is about the place between Iowa and Ithaca, NY (Ithaca--a place very near and dear to me, where I went to undergrad and write about often); and all of them are about animals. Beard is a dog lover, volunteers with dogs, has dogs, helps with dogs, and if you know The Fourth State.... her dying dog is a huge part of the story, and craft. In Festival Days there are birds. They move in and out of these pages organically. She knows what she's doing and it's the kind of work you need to read. I don't really know how to explain it. She is in a small class of writers, alone almost, who writes with such intensity that you barely notice the work is there.

A writer's writer, Beard is true to her love of the sentence. She loves a surprise--either subject matter-wise or word choice--and never use the same word twice. Those were two of her greatest lessons to me. And seeing them on the page here reminds me it can be done. She tells the reader she became an essayist by accident. The writing here is reminiscent of reporting, or an observational documentary. Beard watches life happen, picking up its tics and morphing them into something new.

What Beard reveals of herself is vulnerable. Her psyche takes up the open space of upstate New York, the space between New York and Iowa, it takes up Iowa, and then the golden mountains on a trip to India. The personal here remains private. There are small glimpses, rewarding for the reader, of what she's living. Beard keeps just enough to herself. Really... I'm not sure how she does it.

Like all her work, this book will be read and taught, admired and underlined, referred to and recommended, discovered and rediscovered. Learn to write by reading Jo Ann Beard. She is patient in her work, and with it, a reminder I need for my life as an individual and a writer. Take your time and make it count. Beard is a true natural, and acts as a reminder for all writers that living is just as important as writing. You never know when one or the other will pop up.

[Anne Dahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

#matalankynnyksenpostaus

Luin aikatavalla peräjälkeen neljä novellikokoelmaa (Haruki Murakamia, Amy Bloomia ja Lily Kingiä ja sitten tämän Beardin).

Näistä neljästä ”vaikein” itselleni oli Jo Ann Beardin kokoelma. En rakastunut kerrontaan ja luulen, että väsyin joidenkin novellien jaarittelevuuteen. Osa novelleista haiskahti myös essseiltä, eikä siinä mitään, lajirajat on hyvä sekoittaa ja ylittää, mutta uutta lempikirjaa tästä ei tullut. Kelvollinen, hyvä, ihan kiva.

[Janisse Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm wondering if Jo Ann will ever write anything that approaches the stunning & complicated beauty of "The Fourth State of Matter." That was an astounding essay that I continue to teach to my students. Its layering is phenomenal. I found one essay in this collection interesting in a stylistic way (is it really an essay made by stringing tons of images to each other?), and I plan on rereading it to attempt to figure out what she's doing in it. I enjoyed a handful of the others. But I'm really annoyed when people say they may be writing nonfiction and they may be writing fiction. Beard tried to call this "cross-genre" or "genre-bending" work. It's annoying because it's mostly people hiding their personal lives behind the label "fiction." I spent a good deal in this interesting book trying to figure out if "Joan" is "Jo Ann" and what happened in her marriages, etc.

[Amanda Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the essays were a bit too stream of consciousness for my tastes, but in most of the essays and two stories Beard lives up to the sparkling writing and pathos of Boys of My Youth. She’s an amazing writer— one of my favorites.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lunch tastes better when you've been writing. Same hummus as yesterday, same baby carrots, same unacceptable thing that I don't like to tell people I eat. And yet it all tasted delicious like the way food tastes when you've been hiking all day and finally figure out how to get the stove to light without blowing yourself up and you make the freeze-dried plate of slop you bought at REI and even though it's unidentifiable vegetarian gore, it tastes ravenously delicious, and then you toast marshmallows that have been smashed flat in your pack but slowly, through the first course of the meal, expand back up to near-normal proportions so you can char them on a stick and eat the golden-black crust and then char them again. That's what lunch tastes like when you've been doing your writing.

Pringles are the thing that I don't usually admit to" (185).

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtakingly wonderful essays and stories. Beautiful writing without that self-conscious, trying too hard, MFA feel to it. I want to read it straight through again. I borrowed this from the library but will purchase my own copy now. How have I never heard of this author before?

Trigger warning: several stories deal with grief, cancer, hospice.

[Devin Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely a writer's writer. a joy to read.

[Virginia · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Daba igual hacia donde la volcase el mundo, ella sabía enderezarse.»

Es curioso cómo hay momentos de nuestra vida que se pierden en nuestra memoria y otros, cuando presentimos que la muerte está cerca (ya sea la nuestra propia o la de algún ser querido), los recordamos tan vivídamente como si los estuviéramos viviendo en el presente. Estos preciados instantes son los que ha querido capturar Jo Ann Beard en cada uno de estos relatos que oscilan entre la ficción y la no ficción.

Instantes que se suceden unos con otros y así, sucesivamente, construyendo recuerdos que ayudan a sus protagonistas a mantenerse con vida, a amarla desesperadamente y respirar más fuerte. Todo lo fuerte que puedan. A rememorar momentos del pasado que creyeron insignificantes y que, ahora, son lo único que tienen para agarrarse a sí mismos o a la persona que están a punto de perder.

Pero, también, algo que todos estos relatos tienen en común y que me ha gustado mucho, es el amor por los animales. Por esas mascotas que forman parte de nuestro día a día, nos acompañan en los peores y en los mejores momentos, y cómo se terminan convirtiendo en un miembro más de la familia. Y la autora lo podría haber hecho utilizando únicamente la ternura, como es más habitual, pero consigue humanizarlos y darles un papel esencial en cada una de estas historias.

Y es que el estilo de esta autora me ha parecido hipnótico: se deleita en cada momento narrado y lo hace con una enorme delicadeza, honestidad y elegancia pese a la dureza de los temas tratados para facilitar su lectura. Porque es un libro a dosificar, con miedos muy reales y cercanos a todos nosotros como la muerte, la enfermedad, la violencia, la vulneración de la intimidad o el desamor. Pero no lo hace de forma incómoda sino como abres la puerta de tu casa para dejar pasar a alguien y que este conozca lo que otros no saben de ti. De una manera profundamente íntima, como un gran amigo.

No me gusta hablar de relatos preferidos, pero Cheri, Werner y Días de fiesta me han llegado muy hondo. Es muy fácil empatizar con los personajes, principales y secundarios, de este libro porque sus tragedias (y alegrías) son muy cercanas a las nuestras.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Most of the essays were just okay. Though, my expectations may have been too high given that Boys of my Youth is one of my all time fave books. But, What You Seek is Seeking You was transformative and beautifully optimistic while Cheri broke my heart into a thousand pieces. So- there was a ton of range in the collection. I saw a review that said this collection should be called “Jo Ann Beard doing whatever the hell she wants.” And no truer words have ever been spoken. :)

[Karoliina Timonen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5/5

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my introduction to Beard's writing and it did not disappoint. I will have to explore her earlier essay collection and her fiction.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nonfiction/fictionalized essays, pieces, stories, whatever they are called, whatever amalgamated form they take, they are mostly compelling, except for the title piece, the end piece that I just couldn't make my way through. Werner knocked me out.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this was lovely. I am a Jo Ann Beard superfan since Boys of My Youth, and this collection of (mostly) essays hit me exactly right. “Werner” and “Cheri” will stay with me for a while, but the piece I can’t get out of my head is “What You Seek Is Seeking You,” one of two fictional stories in the collection. I won’t spoil it, but it’s equal parts delightful and melancholy, and I would happily read an entire book about its characters. I’ve missed Jo Ann Beard so much.

[Diane Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jo Ann Beard's collection of thought-provoking essays and stories stay with you long after reading them. I've read much of her work, and the mention of dogs and lovers seemed familiar (probably read some of them in literary magazines earlier) and made me curious if this was a new dog, a new lover. The final story, which is the title of the collection, felt not only like an intimate tribute to her friend, but as a reflection of herself, and on this grey first day of a new year, made me think of travels, lovers, friends, and how this collection provided me with much companionship during this rather isolated pandemic.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book destroyed me, both making me cry with emotion and because I was so angry that Jo Ann Beard can write like this. Both in "Werner" and "Cherie," she inhabits the lives and interiority of two strangers so totally that we believe everything she writes completely. Not only that, we feel like we know them, too. She also writes about animals with more empathy and insight than any other writer I've ever read.

[Margerywieder · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had rated this book after reading the first three essay/stories, I would have definitely given it a five. They were so engrossing and beautifully written. Some of the later ones were more stream of consciousness and difficult, sometimes, for me to follow. But in each piece she has an excellent eye for detail, so I'm still excited to read more of her work.

[Amy (Bossy Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the nine essays and short stories that make up Festival Days, the fantastic Jo Ann Beard explores tiny moments that make up a day and ultimately make up a life, as well as enormously important moments of life-and-death balance that can define everything.

Each of these is an essay except for two stories, "The Tomb of Wrestling" and "What You Seek Is Seeking You," although Beard says the stories hold truths as well.

Festival Days is not light reading: "Cheri" delves into the last days of a woman who is terminally ill with cancer; "Last Night" relates the final moments of the author's beloved dog's life; and the backbone of the collection is the title piece, "Festival Days," which centers around a trip through India that explores mortality and love.

But Beard's writing feels like long-form poetry in a way--evocative and anchored in wonderfully wrought detail--and despite the sometimes difficult subject matter, she injects humor and beauty into the disparate scenes and situations she relates.

“I’d always known I’d have to live without her someday; I just hadn’t known it would be tomorrow.”

Festival Days is lovely and sometimes surprising; it feels honest as Beard explores bitterness, confusion, petty thoughts, life-and-death issues, trivial concerns, and intense love and loss. It's also often wryly funny.

The last, longest, and titular essay, "Festival Days," is far longer than the others. It meanders as Beard is unmoored after heartbreak and betrayal, and her dear friend is dying. She reflects on various travels and other measures meant to distract and inspire or comfort—and the disrupted rhythm and skipping around seems to reflect her many fears and concerns.

To see my full review on The Bossy Bookworm, or to find out about Bossy reviews and Greedy Reading Lists as soon as they're posted, please see Festival Days.

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[Marta Fernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro reúne nueve historias cortas, de distintas situaciones amargas. Entre ellas tienen dos puntos en común: el amor por los animales y cómo nuestra mente acude a sucesos pasados (infancia, adolescencia...) en situaciones límite.

En la primera historia, acompañamos a la protagonista durante los últimos hálitos de vida de su compañera de vida, una perra llamada Sheba. El veterinario no puede hacer nada por ella y tienen que sedarla. La mujer no puede creérselo y decide rascar todo el tiempo que puede con su compañera, pero Sheba está sufriendo por su enfermedad. Así que viviremos la pérdida y el dolor de la protagonista hasta que llega el momento final de la inyección.

El segundo relato lo protagoniza Werner, de repente se da cuenta de que su edificio está en llamas. No hay salida y el fuego cada vez lo tiene más cerca, el humo le impide ver y respirar. Consigue encontrar a su gata y la ayuda a respirar. Hasta que no le queda más remedio que saltar.

El siguiente habla de una mujer con cáncer de mama. Se lo detectan en una fase muy avanzada y no hay nada que hacer. Todos sus amigos, familiares e hijas saben que le queda poco tiempo. Y ella vive sus últimos instantes desesperada, con dolor y angustia. Ella quiere vivir y, a la vez, que acabe todo cuanto antes.

Todos acaban recurriendo a momentos felices del pasado, antes de tomar una decisión que será un punto de inflexión en sus vidas.

No os desvelaré el resto de historias para no desmenuzar en demasía el libro, no llega a trescientas páginas y las historias suelen ser breves, excepto dos o tres que son un poco más extensas.

La autora en pocas páginas consigue transmitir la desesperación, miedo, amor y nostalgia de los protagonistas. Cómo toman decisiones en situaciones límites, sin poder acudir a nadie. Por ejemplo Werner tiene que decidir si quedarse en su piso en llamas o saltar desde gran altura, antes de tomar la decisión su mente viaja al pasado, a su familia, amigos y pareja.

No es una lectura fácil porque todas las situaciones que narra la autora son amargas, pero merece la pena leerlo.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess it was Toni Morrison who said "write the book you want to read," if that book doesn't seem to exist yet. "Festival Days" is the book I wanted to read (though didn't know it) as well as write, but as luck would have it, I didn't need to because Jo Ann Beard already wrote it.

A tremendous group of essays (maybe some are stories, fiction) which reminded me how much I love reading books of well-written essays. Joan Didion's work from the 60s-70s like "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album" are also books of essays and are what made me want to write in the first place.

I haven't written essays yet. Maybe I will. (So far just fiction, and one memoir.) But for the reader, these are what I'd call real page-turners, from the one that drew me to the book (an account of escaping a fire, the insanely unbelievable, yet true "Werner") to the title story, "Festival Days," which effortlessly weaves a trip to India with the death of relationships and a close friend, and so much more. "Maybe it Happened" is a terrifying account of a home invasion attack on a single person home alone - which does seem so real and raw it can't be fiction. But I don't know.

In the last year, I have remembered a lot of my dreams, which for me is a bit unusual. Maybe it's the pandemic, but they're infused with anxiety/longing about things past, present and most of all, future. I find that Beard's stories often have this random dreamlike quality to them, and her gift is making a universe that's so rich with the connections. Or maybe it's because we're both Boomers, the same age (if a detail in one of the stories, she being 8 when Kennedy was assassinated, as I was, is true) and there is more past now than future - and the awareness of that colors it all.