Word Soup

Last night I had the opportunity to hear Jo Ann Beard read from her upcoming new untitled book. I hadn't heard of her, so I took the time to read her heart-wrenching short story The Fourth State of Matter before I left. She refuses to be pigeon-holed as either a fiction or non-fiction writer, which I think is fantastic.

From a piece on her at Metroactive:

"ONE AFTERNOON IN 1991, Jo Ann Beard went home early from her job as managing editor of a space-physics journal at the University of Iowa. While she was agonizing over her unfaithful husband, her beloved dying collie and the family of rambunctious squirrels nesting in the upstairs bedroom, a deranged graduate student walked into the physics department at the university and opened fire, gunning down six of Beard's colleagues, among them her boss, a close friend.

This horrific event lies at the heart of Beard's story "The Fourth State of Matter," which appeared in the June 1996 fiction issue of The New Yorker under the rubric Personal History. The piece was also selected for Best American Essays of 1997 and probably won Beard a contract for her first book, The Boys of My Youth, a collection of autobiographical narratives in which "The Fourth State of Matter" shimmers like a jewel in a spindly tin crown."

Last week I attended a reading by The World According to Garp author John Irving, who told the crowd he writes his novels by coming up with the very last sentence first. According to Irving, story elements may change several times over but this final line never wavers.