Literature’s best kept secret Jo Ann Beard on 30 years of writing at a snail’s pace: ‘I finish what I start, even if takes forever’

In three decades of writing, American author Jo Ann Beard has produced just 21 stories. She talks to Nick Duerden about patience, productivity and why her moment may now have finally arrived

Jo Ann Beard’s ‘Cheri’ recounts the last days, minutes and seconds of a woman who elects to undergo assisted suicide (Profile Books/Franco Vogt)

One of America’s finest writers might also be its slowest. Jo Ann Beard is an essayist who merges fact with fiction until the boundaries blur, but does so at a snail’s pace. “I’m slow!” she admits. Over a 30-plus year writing career, she has produced just 21 stories. Each, however, is worth the wait. Though The New York Times has called her “a towering talent”, she remains literature’s best-kept secret, but now, at the age of 68, she might just be about to have a moment.

This month, the UK publisher Serpent’s Tail publishes The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, comprising her two essay collections to date: The Boys of My Youth, first published in 1998, and Festival Days from 2021, which between them have received rhapsodic praise, and whose stories are set texts in creative writing schools around the world.

“I’m really happy right now,” Beard says over Zoom from her home in Rhinebeck, New York, her shoulder-length hair framing an inquisitive face dominated by designer glasses. “One of the things that plagues me is how slowly I write, and also how rarely. So the idea of a Collected Works, and it being as big as it is [438 pages]… well, maybe I should stop feeling bad about my lack of productivity, and just start realising that I have actually produced a body of work – even if,” she adds, “it isn’t quite as much as I wish it was.”