The chill of immediacy

Jo Ann Beard

For the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Tomorrow, 8:30 p.m.

Frick Fine… Jo Ann Beard

For the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Tomorrow, 8:30 p.m.

Frick Fine Arts Building, Room 125

Free

Tomorrow night, the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series will host Whiting Award-winning essayist Jo Ann Beard. The series has been responsible for showcasing a wide variety of talented novelists, poets, and essayists over the years, and this week’s reading should be another memorable one.

Beard’s book “The Boys of My Youth” is a beautiful example of what literary nonfiction should strive to become. This collection of personal essays is full of poetic language and emotionally complex subject matter. Beard is able to navigate the present tense with graceful ease, sliding momentarily into both past and future flawlessly. She creates a sense of immediacy that is at times chilling.

Even the subject of death is something Beard can navigate with grace, refraining from melodrama, allowing us to provide the emotion for each situation. Speaking of her dying mother, she wrote, “There is a long pause, with only the needles and the tedious breath, the sterile landscape of cancer country.”

“The Boys of My Youth” rests much of its focus not on the men in Beard’s life, but rather on the women. This book is a window into those relationships, the ones between women and the power they possess. In fact, for much of the book, Beard’s own husband remains a nameless, faceless entity – an anonymous man we never fully see.

Beard describes everything from childhood allergy attacks to desert camping trips to a dying pet with the same painstaking attention to language. Her prose is rhythmic and inviting. Even a fishing trip, the ultimate in mundane, becomes something miraculous when Beard takes hold of it: “In the cold dark water, a long fish with a tattered tail discovers something interesting. He circles once and then has his breakfast before becoming theirs. As he breaks from the water to the air he twists hard, sending out a cold spray, sparks of green light.”

It is writers such as Beard who display the ways nonfiction writing can be as much an art form as any other medium. Beard is a memoirist, an essayist and a lyricist. Like many great artists, she refuses to be confined to any one label; she transcends them all, and the result is breathtaking. Her reading promises to be powerful.