Kelly J. Beard’s first full-length memoir, An Imperfect Rapture, won the 2017 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. Before becoming an author, Kelly practiced employment discrimination law in the Atlanta area for two decades, during which time she received multiple awards for her legal and community service, including being recognized as a “Super Lawyer” and receiving a certificate of recognition from the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence for her service. In 2016, while continuing to practice law part-time, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work appears in literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Santa Ana River Review, Five Points, Bacopa Literary Review, and others. In June of 2019, Kelly won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Memoir.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your book, An Imperfect Rapture, was recently launched by Zone 3 Press as winner of their Nonfiction Award. Tell us more about your journey to publication. What advice do you have for emerging nonfiction writers who are sending their work out, whether it’s a book project or a journal submission?
Kelly J. Beard: Thanks for asking that question, Kristina. As you might suspect, it’s the one I hear most from writers who haven’t yet found their venues. No doubt it’s the one I asked most often before winning the Zone 3 Award. I always felt a little let down with the answers I received, and I hope that isn’t the case with your readers, but in truth, the journey to publication felt a bit like searching for the holy grail. But here’s what I did: after hiring (this isn’t cheap, but it’s worth it) a professional editor to give my “final” manuscript a holistic review. It bears noting that I’d been working on the manuscript for at least 5-6 years, and it had been critiqued previously in whole or part by multiple advisors during the MFA process. Not to digress too far, but it also bears noting that finding a good editor can be its own leg of the journey. My advice on that aspect of it is to (after researching the editor and her work) ask for a free or reduced charge consult on 5-6 pages. That seems to me to be the safest way to get an editor you can trust, meaning an editor who understands your vision of the work and offers you advice you find relevant and helpful.
Once I had that (edited) final in hand and felt ready to send the manuscript out, I started out with a bit of a scattershot approach, querying agents and small or independent presses listed in the Writer’s Market. After a few dozen rejections by agents and presses, I found QueryTracker, which allowed me to target my queries a bit better, i.e., to find agents actively soliciting submissions in memoir. During this time, I also attended a couple of writing conferences that featured one-on-one or group discussions with agents. This turned out to be enormously eye-opening. One agent told a story about a manuscript (a novel) he really wanted to place. He said it was the “most gorgeous” writing he’d ever read, and he worked his heart out to place it. He told us that the big publishing houses refused to consider it because the subject matter dealt with poor whites in a rural area, and they all told him some iteration of, “In this political climate, we are not interested in publishing work about (or presumably by) poor whites or anyone else who might have helped elect Trump.” The agent said the story was written by a progressive woman he knew quite well and that the manuscript was in no way a nod to Trump, but there was nothing he could do. It never found a home. While I have a long history of working for progressive causes and would rather chew glass than vote for Trump, given the fact that my story deals with the American shadowlands of poor whites and fundamentalist Christians, I took his story as a cautionary tale and pivoted to researching small, independent, and university presses. These were the venues I already felt drawn to because of their commitment to keeping books in print, so it was perhaps more of a clarification of vision than a pivot. So, I started paying attention to the Presses who were publishing books with an aesthetic that resonated with my work, while also keeping an eye on contests with judges I thought might not be frightened of my story.
KMD: Your memoir, An Imperfect Rapture, might be described as lyrical prose. I admire the way your writing uses musicality, and the texture of the language itself, in service of narrative. How do you balance the formal structures of narrative with the beauty of the language?
KJB: I love that description. I’ve always reveled in sound. Music, words, bird-calls. I read a lot of work (or at least parts, when I love the way the writer uses language) aloud just to savor the feeling and sound of the words. And, as you know, I studied music as an undergraduate, but was torn about whether to study music or poetry in graduate school. Just before I’d planned to start studying with Allen Ginsberg, I suffered the loss of a loved one. My response to that loss, in part, was to forego entering the writing program. I continued to write poetry (and play the piano) but ended up going to law school instead of studying creative writing. While practicing law I didn’t have the time or space to write poetry, but I continued to read poetry (and envied my poet-husband for being able to read and write it!) and briefly considered studying poetry rather than CNF when I finally entered an MFA in 2014. By that point, though, I thought the story I wanted to tell more suited a longer form, i.e., memoir, than poetry. That said, I often read poems and think of them as perfectly condensed crystals of memoir.
But I digress. To answer your question more directly, I tried to write without worrying about the formal structures in the first few drafts. Some people will say that’s not the best way to do it, but I really didn’t know where or how the story was going to end. For me, I couldn’t approach the process with a structural or fiction-writer’s kind of orientation. I was lucky or blessed in that the structure began to appear as I worked through later drafts, and then I was able to enhance what I’d found. It sounds confusing, I fear, but it wasn’t a process of imposing a structure on the piece, which might not have worked, it was more a process of finding what the work was hinting at structurally, then honing and enhancing those areas.
KMD: An Imperfect Rapture also makes expert use of silence, white space, rupture, and elision. What practical suggestions do you have for prose writers who struggle to leave some things unsaid within a narrative?
KJB: One of my advisors used to tell me to trust the reader, to trust that the reader is at least as smart as I am, and to make sure I’m not “talking down” to her. That was great advice, and I can’t tell you the number of times I edited with this in mind and thought, ah! I don’t need this, or this needs to breathe, or that sounds stilted. The impulse to overexplain, in particular, seems the worst. It not only deadens the prose, but it robs the reader of the joy of discovery.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a writer, you also practiced law in the Atlanta area. What has your work outside of the literary realm made possible within your creative practice?
KJB: I’ve always admired writers who have (or had) “real” lives outside their writing lives. Especially the writers who had to struggle to make ends meet for decades while somehow, sooner or later, getting to the page. At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I think the “literary world” tends to be a bit precious about the life of the writer. With few exceptions, writing is hard work and low pay. Day after day. And no one in this wide world (other than you) cares whether you write that next essay, poem, or story. I suppose that’s one of the true gifts of having practiced law. I worked with real people in real crises. That may have something to do with why, when I hear people whining about how hard it is for them to write, it sounds so privileged and unaware it makes my head explode.
KMD: Tell us who you’re reading. Also, I’d love to hear about some distinctly non-literary texts that prose writers can learn from.
KJB: I’m on a bit of a kick about listening to great books I’ve already read. I just finished listening to James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Now I’m listening to “The Overstory”, by Richard Powers. I’ve read each of these – from years to months ago – but they are each so hauntingly beautiful I felt drawn to revisit them. I walk my dog in the evening and soak in the language of these distinctly different voices. Since I’ve already read them, I don’t have to fret if my mind wanders a bit (this does tend to happen with audio books for me, ergo, I tend to listen to books I’ve already read). I also just finished Denis Johnson’s “Largesse of the Sea Maiden”. (This one is in the audio queue next.) I just noticed that these are all fiction, which is unusual for me. I’m typically more drawn to memoir, but maybe I read so much memoir during my MFA stint, I was ready for a different fare. Of course, all of these works (with the exception of Powers’) read like thinly veiled memoir to me.
I have a list of favorite memoirs as long as Tennessee, but a few that come immediately to mind are “House of Prayer No. 2” (Mark Richard), “Little Boy Blue’ (memoir in verse by Gray Jacobik)
“Crazy Brave” (Joy Harjo), Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”, Janisse Ray’s “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood,” and “The Boys of My Youth” (Jo Ann Beard – not related).
The list of nonliterary texts I’ve learned a lot from (related to creative writing and otherwise) is pretty long as well, but here are a few favorites in the craft category: “The Art of Slow Writing” (Louise DeSalvo), “Writing the Memoir, From Truth to Art” (Barrington), “The Art of Memoir” (Karr), and “Fearless Confessions” (Sue William Silverman). Nonliterary, non-craft texts I treasure and keep returning to: “Black Elk Speaks”; “Boundaries of the Soul” (June Singer); “Ensouling Language” (Buhner), “Beyond Words” (Carl Safina), “Peace Like a River” (Leif Enger), the Psalms, the Gnostic Gospels, and everything David Foster Wallace ever wrote.
KMD: What other readings, events, publications, and projects do you have in the works? What can we look forward to?
KJB: I just returned from spending 10 days in NYC and Upstate NY, where I was thrilled to read at Forever Coffee in Manhattan (thanks to my writing partner and BFF, Judy Padow), as well as in Hudson as part of the Volume Reading Series at Spotty Dog Books and Ale. Jo Ann Beard was in the Spotty Dog audience, which made me a teensy bit nervous because she’s one of my writing idols, but she was lovely and generous. (Now I adore her and her work.) I’m hoping to get to Montana (where much of the memoir is set) for a few readings and a Festival in the fall. In terms of projects, I’m working on a collection of essays that explores themes in my life-as-it-is-now as opposed to the story in “An Imperfect Rapture”. My writing partner and I have an idea for an anthology, as well, but we’re keeping mum about that until the idea gels. I’ll keep you posted!