Review: 'Festival Days,' by Jo Ann Beard

"Werner," the first piece in "Festival Days," Jo Ann Beard's new collection of essays, relates the experience of a young man caught in his apartment when the building catches fire. It is intimate, reflecting Werner's thoughts, flashing back to the high school gymnastics that prepare him for his desperate leap. It is charged with fine detail, like the "sprig of cloth-wrapped wire" that "sizzled and then opened, like a blossom" three floors down. And if I hadn't seen it in "Best American Essays 2007," I would've sworn it was fiction.

The same holds for many of the other pieces in "Festival Days," which helpfully hinges on an essay about writing essays. Though this piece, "Close," has a whiff of composition-about-writing-my-composition about it, Beard is so good at what she does that it's nice to have a key — step-by-step directions to take us from the short-story-like pieces like "Werner" to the long, clearly memoiristic titular essay that concludes the book.

The collection moves from Iowa, where "there was no subtext, nothing to break the furrowed monotony but subtle geographical undulations," to Ithaca, N.Y., which "truly did live up to its bumper stickers — it was gorges." People shuttle back and forth in memory and real time: a mother dying of cancer, a woman assaulted by a stranger in her house, a divorced wife trying to start a new life.

"Festival Days," the final essay, is an elegiac account of losing a close friend to cancer. Interwoven with this loss are many others — the loss of aged dogs, perfidious husbands, luminous moments of friendship and youth, all reconceived and reanimated in the telling, which makes them resonate with one another and become something new — the essay, of course, but also a feat of memory conferring meaning.

The first thing Beard tells students, she tells us, "is that there's nothing new under the sun (second thing is not to use cliches)." Thus, to make art means finding "new and surprising ways to convey our insights. That means we have to have insights, which means we have to think." Simple, right? Anything but.

In Beard's book, writing works like compound interest, each experience building on the last, which built on the one before, till "nothing new" — all the dying dogs and aging friends, abandoned houses and abandoned women (and cancer, which pervades this collection) — is something new, something more, and "every moment of your life brings you to the moment you're experiencing now. And now. And now."

Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, "World Like a Knife." She lives in Wisconsin.

By: Jo Ann Beard.
Publisher: Little, Brown, 272 pages, $27.