Jo Ann Beard’s essay collection, FESTIVAL DAYS, fixates on the strange flexibility of time. Through nine pieces --- wildly different in genre, length, topic and tone --- she unravels the mysteries of experiencing time through moments of change and crisis. After a year defined by such moments, these essays are a compassionate companion.

The opening essay, in which Beard writes about waiting for her beloved cat to die, feels at first like she is clearing her throat. Time stretches and contracts around the incident. According to the clock, the whole ordeal takes place in one evening, but considering the sensations and sadness described on the page, it lasts much longer. As we reach the conclusion of this four-page essay, not much has changed in the subject, the narrator or the reader (the piece ends before the cat passes). But Beard squeaks open a door to a rich world of people and experiences where time is elastic and everyone seems to know it.

“Werner” retells the harrowing story of a man’s near-death experience in a burning building. Beard takes us into Werner’s intense moment, illustrating how time slows to a glacial pace like it does in our memory when we feel the end threatening to consume our present. While debating how to escape the flames and smoke, Werner “was completely in the moment, experiencing instead of anticipating. Time stretched like rubber. Fascinated, he wandered around inside each moment as though it were a cavernous room.” Using the timing, imagery and syntactical maneuvers of fiction, Beard suspends time in a way that feels like a catch of the breath before a yawn.

"Although the book in no way directly addresses the strange mental tax of a year of a pandemic, it feels like the perfect companion for our collective crisis."

Werner escapes his smoke-filled room not a minute too soon, and time speeds up again “pushing him forward into something new and unfamiliar.” The whole experience is a mediation on the elasticity of time, the numbness of crisis and the aftermath of trauma. It may not have been written to process the current pandemic, but “Werner” and the entire collection reads like a timely take on the temporality at the center of our recent history.

Beard achieves a similar effect in “Cheri” by describing a woman experiencing cancer “crowding her out of her own body” in colorful present tense. In doing so, the author digs into the mechanics of how our world changes around us. She points out things that often go unnoticed but, in an instant, become significant for the scenery of major life change. She puts the bookmarking ability of the human brain under a microscope and sees a complex but not unknowable structure. She articulates the common sensations of time passing and beautifully narrates the connection between the suspended moments and everything that leads up to them.

FESTIVAL DAYS includes fiction pieces that seamlessly flow from the nonfiction and memoir that dominate the majority of the pages. These genre pivots emphasize the theme of time. Both “The Tomb of Wrestling'' and “What You Seek Is Seeking You” begin with a scene that chronologically would be in the middle of the narrative. Both end back where they began after meandering through all the memories that inform the characters’ behavior in that first scene. In these pieces, time is less a rubber band stretching and contracting, and more a kaleidoscope where present, past and future tessellate on top of each other.

“Close” and “Now” meticulously examine the writer at work. These meta musings on writing follow the pattern of suspending and manipulating time. Written to describe a musician, Beard actually sums up the effect of her own art. Reading FESTIVAL DAYS feels like witnessing Beard “moving the drapes of time and space and color and light.” This comes clearly into the fore when she speaks on her process. Fellow writers know the kind of time travel that occurs as one meanders through the halls of thoughts and connections and words. Beard reassures kindreds that “if you muse long enough, you get to it.” If we can only sit in the present moment and allow both memories of the past and visions of the future to come freely, we will get to whatever our “it” is.

Although the book in no way directly addresses the strange mental tax of a year of a pandemic, it feels like the perfect companion for our collective crisis. I’m writing this on the eve of daylight saving time, a moment when even in “normal” years it feels like the time on the clock doesn’t mean much. The paradoxical fact and fiction of time is something that we experience non-linearly, non-logically and nonstop. Beard’s prose is very much aware of this.

As life is speeding up along with the soon-to-be-vaccinated world, it’s nice to sit in that unbearable stillness for a little while longer. For many, myself included, it has become a familiar home. Like the man who saved his life by leaping from a burning building, soon we will leap into yet another season where time passing feels so normal it is easy to forget how to travel within it. FESTIVAL DAYS will be there to remind us.