A beloved dog begins to turn in circles and cannot stop, will not stop. “It was like putting your hand on a spinning top,” Beard writes, attempting to comfort the animal. If it was, and it has been, it is no longer the tail-chasing variety of circles, animal-spun with delight, but something darker, unrelenting. A disorientation, maybe. A motion sickness. A sickness caused by an incongruity: a difference between the expected and the actual. Motions seen but not felt, motions felt but not seen that rack the body with nausea.
This is the motion that turns Festival Days into gear. Her dog has a brain tumor. We learn that a marriage has ended. The narrator does not ask how or why. “It wasn’t time,” she thinks, in the vet’s office, anticipating the news. “It might be time,” the vet says, shortly after. “Is it time?” the neighbor, watching the narrator put the dog in her cars. She turns a corner. Then another. Then another and stops the car. “It’s time,” she says.
Festival Days is the third book by Jo Ann Beard. The first was a collection of essays published in 1999 called Boys of My Youth. The second was a novel called In Zanesville, 2011. Festival Days came out in March of this year.
Beard writes sparingly. Both in the sense of her style and her output. There is the starkness of her prose, and the humor she layers through that starkness, a staple of her earlier work that I was relieved to encounter within the first two pages of Festival Days. As in: “It was winter, but the neighbor was wearing flip flops. Arent your feet cold, I asked her. Yes, she said, and went home.”
And then there is the fact that Beard does not really publish all that much. Beard has mentioned elsewhere in interviews that parts of “Cheri,” the second essay in the collection, were started in 1999. “Werner,” the third essay was published in 2007, and was included in that year’s Best American essays judged by David Foster Wallace. So not that much, but when she does publish, as some of y’all know, they are some real bangers.
Her subjects share a predilection for event or encounter stark circumstance--which is maybe part of the reason for the stretches of time between them--a near drowning, a near car crash, a near death by burning building, a leap from a burning building into another life; a near death by strangulation; the dissolution of marriages; the deaths of family and friends and beloved pets--this may be the prompt: a terrible sadness, grief, and disorientation, yet each essay also functions as something of a renewal of vows. Vows toward beginnings and bloomings and bonds, especially those between women--mothers, daughters, sisters, the friends who have stood and who remain by our sides until the very end. These bonds are some of the brightest constellations of this book.
“I became an essayist by default,” Beard writes in the introduction to Festival Days. “My first love was poetry, my second love was fiction, and my third and lasting love was the essay. It’s like a third marriage--you know where you’re staying, where you’re going to work out your issues, for better for worse.” Though on that note, she adds that the book also contains some stories, writings that were first published as fiction. Those stories, she writes “are also essays, in their own secret ways, and the essays are also stories.
She has run into her fair share of opposition here, though from her intro, I sense she is at peace with her decisions. In one of her interviews recounting how the New Yorker was disinclined to publish “Cheri,” a retelling of the last days of Cheri Tremble, one of the last patients of Dr. Kevorkian in the mid 90s, Beard said:
As a writer, the problem was this: If I called it fiction, pretended Cheri Tremble was a figment of my imagination, it wouldn't be interesting to readers, and if I treated it as journalism and wrote just facts, it might have been mildly interesting to readers but not at all interesting to me as the writer. So, since I'm the one doing the work, it's best if I do it my way, and let them take the highway.
Beard points to this “problem” directly in the short essay that follows “Cheri,” and precedes “The Tomb of Wrestling,” which was published in 2016 as fiction, and whose narrator is Joan, not Jo Ann. In that short essay, “Maybe in Happened,” Beard recounts a childhood scene, every sentence beginning with Maybe, It’s Possible, Perhaps, and It’s likely.
Maybe on those hot summer afternoons, when coffee made women languaid, when the scent of trellis roses mixed with the scent of ammonia, when girls pretended they were mothers while mothers pretended something else entirely, perhaps anything could happen. But then again, it’s maybe possible, perhaps likely, that it never did.
I see this move as both a nod and a crafty middle finger. As if to say: real or not, bitches, it’s all true.
Autobiographical sketches and dramatic reenactments have been thrown around as alternate terms for both her stories and her essays. But genred or not, all of her writings share a home in the scene, and she re-creates them, from her own life, and from others, vividly. And the movements between them are never straightforward, because it seems for Beard, circuitous paths and winding roads of memory and association are also something of a home, even as they lead us, and I imagine, her, to some unexpected places. Returning to where we started though inevitably changed, feels to me something of her signature. Cruel Festival Time is the book Beard takes her epigraph from.
The geographies and characters and motifs are fabric throughout--the Midwest and New York; Mothers, sisters, friends, husbands; beloved animals, and those somewhere between wild and domestic. I did not try to map the connections between these things.
I chose to focus on the movements / guiding metaphors each essay / story revolves around, isolate them, and arrange them in a video montage. Time is the axis of every essay in this collection, but each piece seemed to have a driving movement / metaphor, in order to relate something about it.
For each essay, I chose the action that felt most present, but of course, many of these motions are woven and overlaid and echoing throughout. Because memory and time and recollection are the vehicles / driving forces for each piece (travel and transportation also play heavily in the literal sense), I chose to use only archival footage. Most clips are taken from the Prelinger Archives, which is a collection of films “relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life, and social history.” All of these videos are now in the public domain. Since most of these clips come from home movies or advertisements / propaganda, their subject matter is often portrayed lightly. This plays conceptually into what I wanted to show here. Beard, in my opinion, is a master of the undercurrent, the cruelty and threat and disorientation coursing beneath surface of levity and and play and thrill and visa versa.
Last Night / Spinning
Werner / Jumping, leaping
Cheri / Being in transit, Passing
Maybe It Happened / Learning to walk, falling, hearing the baby cry long after she stops
The Tomb of Wrestling / Wrestling
Close / Sledding, wrangling vehicles and words, being in and out of control
What You Seek Is Seeking You / Climbing, descending, meeting halfway
Now / Bumping, colliding of people and memories
Festival Days / Spinning, staring, drifting, departing, Arriving
Song Cred: Hala Strana (Steven R. Smith) | Stouthrief | Untitled | 2003