Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Atomic City Girls
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.janetbeard.com/
CITY: Columbus
STATE: OH
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Tennessee; children: a daughter.
EDUCATION:Attended New York University; the New School, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH, adjunct instructor of writing. Previously worked as editorial news assistant for the Palm Beach Daily News, Palm Beach, FL; also worked in Australia, England, and Boston, MA.
WRITINGS
Contributes film reviews to periodicals and websites, including Cineaction magazine and Artfilmfile.com; also contributes to Library Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Born and raised in east Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York City to study screenwriting and went on to earn a master’s degree in creative writing. Beard teaches writing and works as a freelance journalist, primarily reviewing independent and foreign films. “I started my first novel not long after graduating college and wrote most of it while working on my MFA,” Beard told Washington Independent Review of Books website contributor Adriana Delgado.
Beneath the Pines
Beard’s debut work, Beneath the Pines: A Novel, takes place in 1957. It tells the story of Mary Alice McDonnell, who lives in a small Virginia mountain town. Mary Alice was a rebellious teenager when she fell in love with a rich boy who moved into town from the north. Mary Alice’s mother, Lavinia, is a devout Christian who is not happy about Mary Alice’s having feelings for a Yankee. Meanwhile, Mary Alice has become a biology teacher and by 2004 is a spinster who has not spoken with her mother for more than forty years.
When Lavinia dies, Claire, Mary Alice’s niece, inherits the family house and moves to Virginia. Claire’s appearance leads to an unraveling, through flashbacks, of Mary Alice’s past and the boy she fell in love with, Michael Harrison, who is now a famous poet living in New York. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Mary Alice seems content to be “dowdy and prickly, devoted to her mundane, hermit-like routine” until Claire arrives.
The Atomic City Girls
Beard is also the author of The Atomic City Girls, a fictional account of women who worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II. The novel follows June Walker, an eighteen-year-old who, in November, 1944, goes to work on the top secret project, one of hundreds of young women who operate massive machines but have no idea what the project is all about. The only thing they know is that they are not to talk about it to anyone.
When Beard began doing research for the book, she found out that her grandmother, Eunice, actually did administrative work in Knoxville that was related to the project. “Eunice gave me an excellent perspective on what it was like to be a young woman in that era,” Beard told Washington Independent Review of Books website contributor Delgado. Commenting on why history largely focuses on the people in charge of the project, who were men, Beard told Delgado: “The stories of the brilliant atomic scientists, military strategists, and political leaders who headed the Manhattan Project are fascinating. But I’ve always been drawn to the characters in the background, who are often women.”
In the novel, June ends up having an affair with a Jewish physicist from New York named Sam Cantor. Sam is head of the lab where June works and, unlike June, knows what the project is all about. Meanwhile, June’s roommate Cici comes from a poor sharecropping family and is out to nab a wealthy husband. Living in separate facility, Joe Brewer is an African-American construction worker who is happy to be making good money, even though he had to leave his family temporarily behind. “Beard depicts a hierarchical society with distinct classes and differing levels of privilege, security clearance, and hardship,” wrote Fiction Writers Review website contributor Ellen Prentiss Campbell.
Eventually, a security breach occurs that connects the fate of both Joe and June. Furthermore, following the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States, June and her coworkers realize what they have been working on, leading June to question many things about the war and loyalty to her country. The “fascinating narrative brings to life four people with different outlooks and dreams whose fates memorably intertwine,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Noting that “Beard has … injected a human element” to the story of building the first atomic bomb, Stacy Shaw, writing for Booklist, went on to call The Atomic City Girls “approachable, intelligent, and highly satisfying historical fiction.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2017, Stacy Shaw, review of The Atomic City Girls, p. 32.
Publishers Weekly, July 21, 2008, review of Beneath the Pines, p. 141; January 1, 2018, review of The Atomic City Girls, p. 35.
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (February 6, 2018), Deborah Kalb, “Q&A with Janet Beard.”
Columbus College of Art & Design Website, https://www.ccad.edu/ (July 7, 2018), author faculty profile.
Denver Post Online (Denver, CO), https://www.denverpost.com/ (April 5, 2018), Monte Whaley, “Staff Pick: America’s “Atomic City” Draws a Diverse Cast to Create Ultimate Weapon.
Fiction Writers Review, http://fictionwritersreview.com/ (February 13, 2018), Ellen Prentiss Campbell, review of The Atomic City Girls.
Janet Beard Website, https://www.janetbeard.com (July 7, 2018).
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (March 27, 2018), Adriana Delgado, “An Interview with Janet Beard.”
Born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her first novel, 'Beneath the Pines', was published in 2008, and her follow up 'The Atomic City Girls' came out in February of 2018. Janet has lived and worked in Australia, England, Boston, and Columbus, Ohio, where she is currently teaching writing, raising a daughter, and working on a new novel.
Born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Janet lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she is teaching writing, raising a daughter, and working on a new novel.
Adjunct Instructor
CORE Liberal Arts: Writing, Literature & Philosophy
jbeard@ccad.edu
Born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her first novel, 'Beneath the Pines', was published in 2008, and her follow-up, 'The Atomic City Girls' will be published in 2018. Janet has lived and worked in Australia, England, Boston, and Columbus, Ohio.
www.janetbeard.com
https://www.facebook.com/janetbeardauthor/
Born and raised in East Tennessee, Janet Beard moved to New York to study screenwriting at NYU and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her first novel, Beneath the Pines, was published in 2008, and her follow-up, The Atomic City Girls in 2018. Janet has lived and worked in Australia, England, Boston, and Columbus, Ohio, where she is currently teaching writing, raising a daughter, and working on a new novel.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Q&A with Janet Beard
Janet Beard is the author of the new novel The Atomic City Girls, which takes place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II. She also has written the novel Beneath the Pines. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Q: You grew up near Oak Ridge. How did your longtime interest in the area's history lead to your writing this novel?
A: I first learned about Oak Ridge’s history on a field trip to the science museum there when I was around 8 years old and found it both intriguing and frightening. About 10 years ago, I saw a short television documentary that reignited my interest.
As a child, I was mostly disturbed by the idea of atomic weapons, but as an adult, I became more interested in the human stories of the thousands of people who came to work in Oak Ridge during the war, particularly the young women. Those stories became the basis for the novel.
Q: You tell the story from several characters' perspectives. How did you come up with the idea for these characters, and did you write the novel in the order in which it appears, or focus on one character at a time?
A: I always wanted to use an array of characters to capture the different aspects of life and work in Oak Ridge but knew I would focus on a young woman working in one of the plants where uranium was being enriched. So I started with the character of June and worked out from there.
I wanted her to find out what was going on at Oak Ridge and thought she could have a relationship with someone who already understood the concept of an atomic bomb. That character became Sam, a physicist.
I also felt that the African American experience was essential to Oak Ridge, and so I developed the character of Joe and looked for ways to connect his story to June’s in this very segregated world.
I wrote in what I thought would be the order of the novel, but wound up restructuring many times during the revision process. In early drafts, I had even more characters, who eventually shrunk or disappeared entirely for simplicity’s sake.
Q: What kind of research did you do to recreate Oak Ridge in the World War II era, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: My best resource was the oral histories of Manhattan Project veterans that had been collected and published online. Those descriptions of life in Oak Ridge were invaluable and included lots of surprising details that made it into the book.
I also read academic histories of Oak Ridge during the war, and the Manhattan Project more generally. To get the flavor of the time period, I watched movies from the era and loved to listen to 1940s music while writing.
Q: The novel also includes a variety of photos from the period. How did you decide on what to include?
A: The photographs of Ed Westcott were a tremendous resource to me while writing, and I’m thrilled to be able to share them in the book.
The Army hired Westcott to document all aspects of work and life in Oak Ridge, and because no other photography was allowed, these images are the only ones that exist of Oak Ridge during the war.
All of his photos are wonderfully evocative, so we tried to find the ones that best illustrate the characters’ stories to use in the book.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a novel looking back at six generations of women, also set in East Tennessee. Their stories are inspired by folklore, in particular Appalachian murder ballads.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Posted by Deborah Kalb at 7:26 AM
An Interview with Janet Beard
Adriana Delgado
March 27, 2018
The author talks the Manhattan Project, her trailblazing grandma, and the challenge of creating diverse characters.
Not much is said about the many women who worked silently on one of the most secret programs of World War II: the Manhattan Project. Author Janet Beard set out to correct that with her new novel, The Atomic City Girls.
How was the writing process for The Atomic City Girls different from your first book, Beneath the Pines?
I knew a lot more about what I was doing with the second book. I started my first novel not long after graduating college and wrote most of it while working on my MFA. I was learning a great deal as I wrote, and I was able to put that to use in writing The Atomic City Girls.
Your grandmother was one of the women who worked on the Manhattan Project. Was she an inspiration for this novel?
I actually didn’t find out that my grandmother Eunice had worked on the Manhattan Project until I had started researching the book, and she told me! She only did administrative work for the project for a few months in Knoxville. But Eunice gave me an excellent perspective on what it was like to be a young woman in that era. For instance, although she was valedictorian of her high school class, Eunice didn’t even consider going to college because that wasn’t something girls in her world did. That was one of the biggest regrets of her life.
We always hear about the men who worked at the Oak Ridge, TN, facility, but never the women. Why do you think that is?
Generally, history focuses on the people at the top and in charge and, in the past, those people were usually men. The stories of the brilliant atomic scientists, military strategists, and political leaders who headed the Manhattan Project are fascinating. But I’ve always been drawn to the characters in the background, who are often women.
In the novel, we see a wide array of characters from different backgrounds, faiths, social status. How difficult was it to write such varied characters?
It was an exciting challenge. I began with researching real people who had worked in Oak Ridge, and then developed the characters, inspired by what I had read. Once I knew more about who the main characters would be, I had to do another round of research to flesh out their backgrounds. At that point, I had a strong sense of them and their voices.
June is the character who grows most in the book. Would you agree?
Yes. June’s is a coming-of-age story. She begins the book unsure of what she wants from life but deeply curious about the world around her. By the end, she has learned a lot, not only about the bomb, but also herself.
Which character did you particularly connect with?
June is the closest to me in some ways, but I think I became most emotionally invested in Joe. His main motivation is love for his children and his surrogate child, Ralph, and in many ways, the stakes are highest for him. While working on revisions to the novel, I had a child of my own, which deepened my understanding of his anxieties and sacrifices.
While you were doing research for the book, was there something you found out about the women of Oak Ridge that you didn’t know before?
I learned countless wonderful details from reading interviews and oral histories with Manhattan Project veterans. Generally, I was surprised by how fondly many of them remember their war experience in Oak Ridge. Of course, life was difficult, and they were working on something awful, but for many young people, this was their first time away from home. They were in a unique and diverse environment surrounded by other young people. The Army provided roller rinks, bowling alleys, dances, etc., and the young women had a lot of fun. (Many met their future spouses, too!)
Are the photos in the book part of your grandmother’s personal collection?
No, no at all. They were all taken by the official Army photographer of Oak Ridge, Ed Westcott. Because of the secrecy of the project, no one else was allowed to take photos within the military reservation. Westcott’s photos are a wonderful visual documentation of life in Oak Ridge and were a great resource to me in writing. I’m thrilled we got to include them in the book!
What would you like readers to take away from the novel?
I hope they learn something about this unique place and the people who were working in the background of one of the pivotal moments in world history, as well as think about the moral dilemmas provoked by that moment and how they continue to be relevant to us today.
Tell me about your future projects. Is there a new novel in the works?
I’m currently working on another novel set in East Tennessee looking back at six generations of women and inspired by Appalachian folklore — in particular, murder ballads.
Adriana Delgado is a freelance journalist whose reviews of independent and foreign films have appeared in Cineaction magazine, on Artfilmfile.com, and elsewhere. She also works as an editorial news assistant for the Palm Beach Daily News (aka, “the Shiny Sheet”) and contributes to Library Journal.
The Atomic City Girls
Publishers Weekly. 265.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Atomic City Girls
Janet Beard. Morrow, $15.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-266671-0
Beard's satisfying second novel (after Beneath the Pines) gives a human dimension to the lesser-known true-life events that took place in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II. Eighteen-year-old June Walker leaves her family and simple upbringing behind to work at the brandnew Oak Ridge facility (where security is tight and breaches aren't tolerated), learning to turn dials on machines whose function she doesn't understand. Her roommate, the glamorous Cici Roberts, makes finding a husband her priority. In the bare-bones segregated hutments that house African-American workers, Joe Brewer works tirelessly while pining for his family back home. Meanwhile, June starts a romance with physicist Sam Cantor, who is working to produce uranium for the atomic bomb being developed in Los Alamos. As June learns more about the project, she must reconcile her own part in it with her love for the increasingly volatile Sam, who comes from a very different world. Beard's fascinating narrative brings to life four people with different outlooks and dreams whose fates memorably intertwine. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Atomic City Girls." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 35. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522124954/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=166c6d6f. Accessed 28 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522124954
The Atomic City Girls
Stacy Shaw
Booklist. 114.6 (Nov. 15, 2017): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Atomic City Girls.
By Janet Beard.
Feb. 2018.384p. Morrow, paper, $15.99 (97800626667101.
In the WWII race to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project was formed; in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a gated city sprang up to produce the requisite uranium. Beard's second historical novel (Beneath the Pines, 2008) tells the story of that city through the eyes of four interrelated characters. Local teen June Walker, working her first job, rooms with Cici Roberts, born poor but determined to fix this through a rich marriage. Sam Cantor is a lead scientist working at Oak Ridge, and Joe Brewer works on construction of the city while living in the city's inferior, segregated area. These distinct perspectives allow a glimpse at the social hierarchy of Oak Ridge as well as the work done there--for the most part by people who did not know what, exactly, they were working on. Beard has taken a project of momentous impact and injected a human element into it. The workers at Oak Ridge struggle with emotional issues, like love and jealousy, as well as societal ones, like segregation and the moral dilemma of creating a bomb made for wide-scale destruction. This is approachable, intelligent, and highly satisfying historical fiction.--Stacy Shaw
YA: Teen fans of historical fiction will enjoy the perspectives of Beard's young protagonists and her nuanced approach to this monumental time. SS.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shaw, Stacy. "The Atomic City Girls." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 32. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441764/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26bafbbb. Accessed 28 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517441764
Beneath the Pines
Publishers Weekly. 255.29 (July 21, 2008): p141.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Beneath the Pines
Janet Beard. Two Dollar Radio (Consortium, dist.), $15.50 paper(267p) ISBN 978-0-9763895-4-5
An aging spinster biology teacher and her 20-something niece spend a summer getting to know one another in this careful and plodding debut novel. Mary Alice McDonnell fits every stock description of the lonely, middle-aged schoolmarm: dowdy and prickly, devoted to her mundane, hermit-like routine. It works for her until her niece, a perky graduate student named Claire, inherits a house from Mary Alice's recently deceased mother. Mary Alice and her mother had been estranged for 40 years following a mysterious event, dangled through alternating flashback chapters; needless to say, Claire's sudden appearance in the small Virginia town brings back unwanted memories. In an extraordinary coincidence, Claire also reintroduces a piece of her aunt's history: the e-mail address of Michael Harrison, Mary Alice's erstwhile beau, now a famous New York poet. When everything blows out into the open at last, readers may be too wary to notice; too rich with contrivances and expository dialogue, the book falls short of its potential. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Beneath the Pines." Publishers Weekly, 21 July 2008, p. 141. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A181855813/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd1e733b. Accessed 28 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A181855813
February 13, 2018
The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard
"Beard’s story explores a unique domestic backstory in the development of the atomic bomb as experienced by both witting and unwitting participants."
by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
Janet Beard’s new novel, The Atomic City Girls (Morrow), dramatizes a somewhat overlooked chapter in the annals of the Manhattan Project. Though history and fiction often focus on Los Alamos, secret research and development was also conducted at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the clandestine site for the uranium enrichment plants, the liquid thermal diffusion plant, and the pilot plutonium production reactor necessary for the development of the atomic bomb. Beard’s well-researched account of daily life behind the scenes and headlines, daily life in a time and a place that would contribute to changing warfare and the world forever, attempts to inhabit and explore this other side and site of the story.
Oak Ridge, a hastily created facility, was the temporary home to 30,000 individuals. Beard depicts a hierarchical society with distinct classes and differing levels of privilege, security clearance, and hardship. By way of underscoring these distinctions, she tells the story from the perspective of several narrators, each representing a different part of this Oak Ridge community, and each possessing his or her own limited perspective and understanding of the secret goal of the work of the community. The characters’ human-scale stories are also interwoven with the powerful backdrop of a world at war, and the activities at Oak Ridge in the years leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are amplified and influenced by the historical moment.
The primary narrator is June Walker, a young woman from Tennessee who goes to work at Oak Ridge after her fiancé is killed in the war. Secondary narrators include June’s roommate Cici, a social climber enjoying good times at Oak Ridge parties and determined to secure a wealthy fiancé; Sam Cantor, a Jewish physicist from New York; and Joe Brewer, a Negro—to use the novel’s parlance of the time—construction worker. Choosing to exemplify each type, class, or social group with an individual, Beard does run the risk of reducing her characters to stereotypes. But happily, one of the author’s strengths is an ability to develop rounded characters with distinctive personal perspectives, experiences, and convincing flaws and blind spots. She particularly excels at using internal monologue to convey the sometimes contradictory yearnings of each of her point of view characters. No one is as simple as she or he at first seems, nor one dimensional. The most arresting voice and subplot belong to Joe Brewer. The author provides unsentimental, detailed description of the conditions in which Joe lived and worked, the demands and risks he faced, and the inadequate recognition and compensation he received. The prejudice and injustice faced by African Americans participating at home and overseas in WWII is over-looked in popular historical fiction, but not in The Atomic City Girls.
Over the course of the story, each character in his or her way moves from innocence to at least partial knowledge of the ramifications, scope, and impact of the project. Scientist Sam Cantor’s change over time is particularly well-rendered. His mood upon arrival at Oak Ridge is ebullient: “He had the wonderful certainty that he was doing the very thing that he was born to do.” By the conclusion of the book, his response to the news that the bomb has dropped is ambivalent and muted: “Sam had the terrible notion that he might start to cry, even though he hadn’t cried in years.”
I recommend the book in particular to those seeking stories of World War II events behind the headlines, on the home front. Like Women of Los Alamos, by Tara Shea Nesbitt, Beard’s story explores a unique domestic backstory in the development of the atomic bomb as experienced by both witting and unwitting participants. The high stakes of war, the implications and consequences of employing atomic weaponry, remain relevant and resonant issues today. I found this novel an informative portrayal of a significant historical episode often reduced to footnote status.
Happily, The Atomic City Girls is also a good read. Beard manages to imbue this well-researched novel with warmth and charm. The book also feels personal rather than academic or dry, maybe owing partly to the fact that the author’s aunt work at Oak Park. Perhaps by way of homage to her relative, Beard makes the interesting choice of choosing to illustrate the novel by inserting photographs from the Department of Energy archives. While these photographs of Oak Ridge residents at work and at play are delightful and closely tied to the action and themes of the narrative, I found them ultimately a distraction rather than an enhancement. In memoir and biography, and less frequently in fiction, photographs can serve to underscore the author’s accuracy and amplify the reader’s understanding. Here, however, the photographs don’t seem essential to the work. As a reader, I tend to like my fiction straight and enjoy the opportunity to see a well-presented novel’s world like this one with my mind’s eye.
Either way, Beard has a good story to tell, and tells it well.
Staff pick: America’s “Atomic City” draws a diverse cast to create ultimate weapon
By Monte Whaley | mwhaley@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
April 5, 2018 at 5:14 pm
Sign up for newsletters and alerts
Submit your news tips or photos
Most Popular
World’s tallest waffle stack teeters in a Denver backyard
USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor closed indefinitely
Instant Impact: Broncos’ Royce Freeman could follow other NFL rookie tailbacks
Is Denver’s popularity fading? More people looking to move out than in, according to Redfin study
Kickin’ it with Kiz: Is there a difference between Brandon Marshall and Tim Tebow kneeling on an NFL field?
Democrats running for Colorado attorney general are aligned on the issues — but not on how to solve them
William MorrowThe Atomic City Girls by Janet Beard
It takes a lot to win a world war and defeat global Facism.
America certainly drew on its warriors on the battlefield to get the job done. But Janet Beard’s “The Atomic City Girls” — an illuminating work of historical fiction — also reminds us other people were thrown into the effort as well.
And some of the most pivotal were the scientists, soldiers and working class folks who came to live at the mysterious Oak Ridge, Tenn. facility during World War II.
Oak Ridge was the pivotal focus of the Manhattan Project and the residents there, some unwittingly, helped construct the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan.
Beard, whose grandmother worked on the Manhattan Project, focuses her attention on a few key characters, chiefly local teen June Walker. She’s overwhelmed at first by the sheer size and frantic pace of the Oak Ridge installation. It literally was built overnight by work crews that included Joe Brewer, a black sharecropper from Alabama who lived with other blacks in segregated housing.
Related Articles
Book review: “The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye” not as edgy and intense as predecessors, but still a good read
Book review: “I Was Told to Come Alone” shows one woman’s grit and determination while reporting on terrorism
Staff pick: If you read one book on immigration this year, choose “The Line Becomes a River”
Book review: Don’t believe the hype, graduates; instead “Assume The Worst”
But June quickly wised up to what’s going on, mostly thanks to Sam Cantor, lead scientist working at Oak Ridge and June’s love interest. Cantor and a few other scientists become downright fearful of the awful weapon they are helping develop.
Still, the story doesn’t get bogged down with June and Sam’s romantic entanglements nor the moral implications of what was being built at Oak Ridge. It does tease us with enough dumbed down science to keep the attention of a typical humanities major while also offering a glimpse of the seeds of the civil rights movement in the south.