I’m going over and picking apart a pair of short stories from Jo Ann Beard.

The first is Werner, which is an account of a man’s brush with death in a bruning building and his metaphorical and literal leap into a new life. It’s supposedly a non-fiction piece told in third-person, past tense. But Beard manages to put the reader in the center of Werner’s head from the point of ignition to the final loose end being tied up. Which is why I say it is “supposedly” non-fiction. How could anyone get this deep inside of someones psyche? She manages not only to map the inner workings of a mind in a crisis, but to traces the changes over time like a historical cartographer.

here it is if you would like to read it.

The second piece I am reading of hers is The Fourth State of Matter which, is a autobiographical account of a time in her life when everything was crumbling around her. It is also an account of a massacre at a college. These two plots intertwine into a restiform shape that I’m having trouble analyzing as two separate events, which, I think, is the point.

I’ve a link for that story if you’d like to read it

I can’t decide if digging into these stories will help me to become a better writer. Beard is a master of foreshadowing and the metaphor, and it is a bit discouraging. How can I be this good? So I’m going through and marking the pages up with my black pen, trying to make sense of it all. And I can’t help but be drawn out of my analytical mind and into the emotion of these stories. They are, at the same time, both very personal and existential. I’ll have to get back to marking up the pages. I tried to make a thoughful gesture by putting the pen to my lips, but I accidentally drew a John Waters mustache on my face.

Talk about adding insult to injury.