Jo Ann Beard – remembering Redmond

The following remarks were given by Jo Ann Beard at the celebration of Redmond’s life, March 29, 2025

I think my first correspondence with Redmond was in 2017; we were sharing our work, both writers, and both concerned with how to translate life into language.  We kept in loose touch, writing letters on email or catching up with each other at various gatherings on various patios.  Once he offered to come over to my house and help me deal with a roiling mass of garter snakes that had moved into a stone wall I had to walk past every day.  I didn’t take him up on it, but we talked about it later:  “Yeah, I really don’t like snakes,” he admitted.  But he was his mother’s son, and felt a sense of responsibility to look out for me if I needed looking out for.  He understood how to be helpful and he also understood how to ask for help.  

“How do you deal with feelings of inferiority?” he asked me once when we were talking about the struggle involved in being an artist.  

I had taught fledgling writers for decades at that point, every one of them, or at least the best of them, struggling with that issue of inferiority, but not one had ever spoken it out loud, in such a matter of fact, and sincerely curious, way.  So, we talked about it, and I shared with him a quote from the writer Colette:  Who said you should be happy?  Do your work.  

Redmond loved that—the unsentimental bluntness of it, the hard edge of her will.  He knew how to be with, and to get along with, hard-edged people.  We live fairly soft lives here, but Redmond traveled extensively on his own, living a big life, taking jobs that required a kind of physical and emotional strength and dedication that was unusual for someone his age and demographic.  He got along well with everyone, living in the close quarters required of people working on crews in remote locations.  He could easily work a twenty-hour-a-day job, months at a time, so I admired him not just for his intellect, but for the way he was pursuing a personally-challenging and profoundly interesting life while also keeping his art, and his artistic vision, alive.   

The last time I saw him was on Janice’s deck, on a warm fall evening, we were drinking beers and he was catching me up on some dark adventures in Germany.  He was just planning his trip to Southeast Asia then, and was explaining to me the where and why and how of it.  In the course of our conversation, he gave me an in-depth tutorial not just on the politics of every region he would be moving through, but on the history, the minutiae of the governments, the small but mighty militia groups.  How do you know all this? I asked him.  Reading, he said.  But it was more than reading, it was broad and deep knowledge combined with keen interpretation.  

He was brilliant and he was wearing this beautiful beaded bracelet.  When I admired it—worry beads for the worrier—he gave it to me.  They aren’t really worry beads, he told me gently, but you can definitely use them for that.  

A few years ago now, he sent me an amazing recording called “Sleeping in Clouds.”  It was an audio work sample for Transom, a small perfect story that he created for his application material.  I would tell you what it was about but I couldn’t – in the way of the best art, you had to be there, listening and feeling it:  two people climbing a mountain in San Bernadino, camping in the wilderness, open to their surroundings, awake and aware in the way of young people.  The piece is narrated by his friend Isa, but it’s created by Redmond, and is acutely his voice heard ‘through’ hers, observant, and as always hyper-aware of the story running under the surface, those invisible connections that are everywhere if you look for them.  

It’s so polished, and professional, confident:  first we hear Redmond’s voice and then Isa’s, climbing a mountain, into a populated neighborhood and then up, beyond.  Throughout you hear a crisp recording of human chatter, and then the quietest sounds of nature—a rabbit’s footsteps, a whisper of movement, leaves or a breeze—and then a sudden heightened-awareness moment of realization:  that they are actually inside a cloud, and in there with them…somehow, inside the mist…is a coyote.  Beautiful and otherworldly.  When it happened it was magical, mind-blowing, art-inspiring—but today, with all of you, it’s also metaphorical.  I love imagining them both now in that landscape together, as wild and intelligent as the coyote, engulfed by a passing cloud, and by their own sense of wonder.  

Thanks for listening.