Mary Chapin-Carpenter
Caroline B. Cooney
Paula Danziger
David Diaz
Mem Fox
Kevin Henkes
William Joyce
Kathleen Krull
Han Nolan
Gary Paulsen

Interview by Ellen Kanner

Once upon a time, Jo Ann Beard was a secretary working 40 hours a week. When she wasn't working, she wrote personal essays that were both funny and horrific. She sent her book to various publishers and it came back. And back. And back. And then, "The 'New Yorker' passed their wand over my head and suddenly my work had a credibility it didn't have before," says Beard. After the "New Yorker" published her riveting "The Fourth State of Matter," her book of essays "The Boys of My Youth" became a reality, and Beard became rich and famous and lived happily ever after.

Okay, not quite. Although Beard is at last receiving the recognition she deserves, she is a most uneasy Cinderella. Speaking from her home in Ithaca, New York, she says, "I have lots of friends who are better writers than I am and they're standing by the wayside watching my book get published. In that way, it's changed my life in a way that's more negative than positive."

Success has not been easy for Beard, perhaps because it's new to her. Her life, as portrayed in her work, has had its fair share of woe. Woe is something Beard takes in stride. Though her essays discuss divorce, growing up with alcoholic parents, and, in "The Fourth State of Matter," a mass murder, the author feels she has in no way cornered the market on pain. "I don't think I've had any more of that than any other citizen walking the street." This detached, no-big-thing attitude pervades her writing, and makes the losses she confronts in her work all the more poignant.

Big, bad things happen in Beard's essays, but they're only part of the story. Her essay "The Family Hour" starts with Beard as a little girl engaged with her sister over "a territorial dispute over where the line down the middle of the bed really is." This childhood memory shifts to the time Beard's father got drunk and drove his car off the road and into the water. "People think that he was a pall cast over my family. We didn't experience it that way," says Beard. "My father was a drunk, but he was a great guy and we truly loved him."

Similarly, murder isn't the focus of "The Fourth State of Matter." Instead, the essay recalls how Beard's collie suffered after a series of strokes and how Beard herself was suffering as her marriage fell apart. The murders come as a weird and unexpected crescendo. "Six dead people will eclipse a dying dog and a deceased marriage, but that's not what I intended. That's just how life happens," says Beard.

Her work evokes the rhythms of life, which is why reading Beard makes you feel you know her. People who read her work often send her letters, and while Beard loves that, "I'm an extremely private person," she says. So how can she write about herself as she does, stripping herself bare? It is, for her, a thing apart. "It seems a completely different entity having less to do with Jo Ann Beard than you might think."

Beard blends fiction and nonfiction techniques in her essays, creating "a gray area in between." Her book's disclaimer says, "The events described in these stories are real. Some characters are composites." Beard tweaks at the facts in order to create a larger truth. "I don't adhere to the truth 100 percent," she says. "Only when it's more interesting than something I could dream up."

Inclined even as a child to embellish the facts, Beard is by nature a fiction writer. "I wanted to be a fiction writer. I tried to be. I lived in Iowa City and I wanted to go to school. I couldn't get into their fiction program, I applied over and over, and at some point, I decided I would take my little short stories that were about me and applied at the nonfiction program. They welcomed me."

It meant, however, that Beard had to set aside the novel she'd spent five years writing. She plans to come back to it in time but "if you read that poor, pathetic novel, you'd be embarrassed," she says. "I cut my teeth on those first 400 pages. I'm a better writer now. The nonfiction program was very kind to me -- it wasn't a dog-eat-dog workshop. It was very nurturing."

Also nurturing and necessary to Beard are writers colonies. Like Iowa's nonfiction program, writers residences gave Beard the chance to develop her craft. "The great thing about the writing colonies I visited is they didn't require I have a book or a list of impressive publications. That went a long way toward building my confidence. At that time in my life, I needed it very badly. Getting into Yaddo meant more to me than selling my book."

Publication, says Beard, "is a lottery. I'm good at what I do. But I was good at what I did five years ago." Though plucked from the ranks of unappreciated, struggling authors, Beard is still in the habit of self-deprecation. "My book is a very modest contribution to the world of literature. It's just a small book. It's just my life."

Beard's life is one of family fights, redeeming friendships, crank calls to the boy next door, messy hair and messier relationships. "These are our trenches," says Beard. "Men have always had their war stories and now we're getting to tell ours. 'The Boys of My Youth' were really the girls of my youth. My enduring relationships have been with females. That doesn't take anything away from men, but our experiences were, and are, different." If Beard takes pride in "The Boys of My Youth," it is because through her writing, she can speak for others, particularly other women.

Still, success isn't liable to go to her head. "Being interviewed by magazines, having my picture taken -- it's very scary, it's like an out-of-body experience. I feel this immense privilege but I still have my job, I still have an overflowing cat box in my porch, I still drink too much coffee."

The release of "The Boys of My Youth" isn't Beard's happy ending, only a nervous-making beginning. And nervous is something Beard can handle.

Waiting for something

The family vacation. Heat, flies, sand and dirt. My mother sweeps and complains, my father forever baits hooks and untangles lines. My younger brother has brought along his imaginary friend, Charcoal, and my older sister has brought along a real-life majorette by the name of Nan. My brother continually practices allstar wrestling moves on poor Charcoal. "I got him in a figure-four leglock!" he will call from the ground, propped up on one elbow, his legs twisted together. My sister and Nan wear leg makeup, white lipstick, and say things about me in French. A river runs in front of our cabin, the color of bourbon, foamy at the banks, full of water moccasins and doomed fish. I am ten. The only thing to do is sit on the dock and read, drink watered-down Pepsi, and squint. No swimming allowed.