Beth Kephart Books

Looking Toward San Antonio

2008-10-08T01:52:00.000-07:00

A box of books arrived yesterday: Christmas in October. There are two Justina Chen Headleys—Girl Overboard and North of Beautiful (an ARC). There are three Catherine Gilbert Murdocks: Dairy Queen, The Off Season, Princess Ben. There is a note from my friends at HarperCollins: For ALAN, which is shorthand for, Hey, aren't you lucky, this is the work of your co-panelists for the upcoming ALAN conference in San Antonio. (Matt de la Pena will be joining us for this Sports Stories = Life Stories panel as well; I'll be getting his books soon.)

The answer is, Yes, I am so lucky. I rarely travel in my book life—rarely pretend that I do much more than run my business, clean my house, write this blog, chill with friends, text with my boy, stand helpless in the produce aisles attempting to dream up (yet another) dinner, watch Project Runway and DWTS with my happily agreeable husband, dance a sambarumbafoxtrotchachaandsomehorrifyingmixCDofeach, and (on good days) surreptitiously scribble in the dark. The Traveling Writer's Life has eluded me, or perhaps I have eluded it, but this November I am off to San Antonio to sit on a panel with writers with whom I am so genuinely looking forward to thinking out loud, if only for a short while. It's one of those bright collisional possibilities that could shape a point of view or thread a question through, and frankly, I'm in need of a little shattering of self, a little new.

No Such Thing as the Real World

2008-10-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

Before Jill Santopolo was officially my editor, she was my editor—calling one day to ask if I might write a story for a planned new HarperTeen anthology. The story, as I understood it, was to focus on a chosen turning point—on a moment of emergence, clarity, vision.

I'd written short stories for years before I'd ever written books; I've always celebrated the form's power. I'm a fan of the deeply distilled, the evocative, the provoked. I favor poetry over plot, emotion over explanation, wisdom over information; the short story seems to favor such things too, or can. Read the exquisite Steven Millhauser piece in this Sunday's NYTBR. Consider his words here:

The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Millhauser-t.html?ref=books

The point is, I said yes. I said yes and loved every moment of immersion in a piece I finally called, "The Longest Distance Between Two Places." Written early last year, it confronts teen suicide and its aftermath—and a decision to live on.

I saw the cover of the anthology today, and I'm really proud to be part of this project. I'm especially touched to see An Na's name here, for seven years ago, while chairing the National Book Awards jury for Young People's Literature, I read her gorgeous "A Step from Heaven;" as a team we nominated it as a top five title. I remember many things from that evening of award giving (Jonathan Franzen's talk, sitting beside Terry Tempest Williams on that stage, my son out in the audience, holding court, and, later, Steve Martin entertaining my child). But I especially remember An Na's graciousness in the moments after the winners had been announced. It made me even prouder that I'd pushed for her inclusion in the top five.

I can't wait to read this book.

Baited into Books

2008-10-06T02:11:00.000-07:00

How are we to feel, then, today, about the ways in which video games are now being used to 'bait' young readers? Is gaming our new reading? Is it our new gate to reading? Is it the essential path in a digital world? Some words from today's NYT story:

... doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up a book, many more will skip the text and go straight to the game. Others suggest that video games detract from the experience of being wholly immersed in a book.

Some researchers, though, say that even when children don’t read much text, they are picking up skills that can help them thrive in a visually oriented digital world. And some educational experts suggest that video games still stimulate reading in blogs and strategy guides for players.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books

Certainly gamers are required to attend to plot and to latch onto words, to follow the thread, to notion in. But is it also possible that knowing and feeling are two different things—and that books prepare us like nothing else can for the heartbreak, confusion, mystery, joy—the outright complexity—that constitutes living day to day? Books without gadgets, books without gimmicks, books in which characters can't be surmised at a glance and stories take time to unfold? We aren't in control when we read another's book; the author is. We are forced to go under, deep, to submit, and when we emerge we aren't precisely who we were; something ineluctable has changed. We have in our head new ideas not just about the ways in which stories get made, but about how lives—for better, for worse—get lived.

Good books square us up against complexities and consequences; they force the issues. And I suspect that in the days to come, we'll need leaders who can manage both, leaders who read. Games have their place; of course they do. But in our zeal to please, let us not sweep aside our book-bound stories.

Open for Business

2008-10-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

So that I was sitting here yesterday at dawn, working as I do (client work, complexities of heart and head), when my cell phone rings. It's my kid, and of course I panic. Because what college kid isn't sleeping in at dawn on a Saturday morning? And isn't worry always my first response?

"Hey," my son says.

"Hey," I say. "What's up?"

"Just calling to say that I'm having the best time." That's it. No crisis. Just joy. There are details: The gift of friendships, of spontaneous decisions, of dances danced, of jokes shared, of a lounge movie watched at 3 AM, of a realization, six weeks into campus life, that the campus is starting to feel like home. "I walk into this party and I realize that I know most of the people there," he says. "Everything fits. It feels right."

I listen. I smile. I lean back in my chair. I don't ask questions; I just listen. "So you're having a good time," I finally say.

"Oh yeah. I really am. Just wanted to call and tell you that, because I knew you'd be up."

It occurred to me then, after he hung up the phone, that maybe I've worked this early-morning seven day a week shift all these years for but one good reason: So that my kid would know it was okay to call at dawn just to say that he is happy.

The Bruises Art Delivers

2008-10-04T03:58:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Kate Moses rendered Sylvia Plath so three-dimensionally in her novel, Wintering, that I now feel compelled to read any Plath-infused story I find. Yesterday it was the New York Times piece on the Ted Hughes letters, a piece that concluded with the following lines:

Earlier, while Plath was still alive and they were together, there is his unstinting reassurance, rejoicing in her successes and praising her work. Above all, after her death there is his searing defense of her shattering “Ariel” poems. To Donald Hall, an admirer who nevertheless found “Ariel” too sensational to be first-rate poems, he wrote:

“Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do,” Hughes wrote. “When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”

A mantra then, a new one: Let us not argue ourselves out of the bruises art delivers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/books/03book.html?ref=books

The Aura of Loneliness: Horace Kephart Revisited

2008-10-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

Horace Kephart, my great-grandfather, was one of the country's greatest librarians in his time—an iconoclast who ultimately helped pave the way for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But what I could never forget, as I grew up with his name, is that he'd abandoned his wife and six children at the age of 42 to live the outpost life—among bears, among the Appalachians, among the tall trees against which he sometimes rested his narrow, beautiful head.

Horace Kephart has inspired song cycles (the glorious Ways That are Dark by Daniel Gore) and theater and library collections; he proved so irresistible and ineluctable to me that I once spent some six months researching and writing my own version of his tale (with my brother's help, with the help of my father's cousin, with the help of librarians, too). Because his story can't be known wholly, it can get told again and again, which is something my talented cousin Libby Kephart Hargrave is poised to do later this month at the Calhoun Inn, in Bryson City, NC, where the Horace Kephart library is located. I know she'll do a bang-up job at an event that will be filmed by West Carolina University and will unite those whom Kephart continues to intrigue.

I post a few words from my 6000-word essay here, the skimmed-down beginning, an introduction to a man.

In July 1959, Clarence E. Miller, by then retired from his post at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, sat down to remember Horace Kephart, the most brilliant man, Miller claimed, that he had ever known and “almost, as a matter of course, the least assuming.” Miller was a young job applicant when he first encountered Kephart. Kephart was a man of some repute—born in 1862, a college graduate by 1879, an ambitious bilingual librarian whose career had taken him from Cornell to Florence to Yale and, in 1890, to the top spot in St. Louis, where he had notoriously begun to build the largest standing collection of “Western Americana.” Following “perhaps the briefest interview on record,” eighteen-year-old Miller was given employment at the Mercantile.

Hoping for mentoring and encouragement from this married father of six, Miller realized soon enough that he wouldn’t be getting much of either. Concise and efficient, his memory perfectly photographic, his demeanor cordial enough despite a predilection for solitude, Kephart, recalled Miller, "lived almost exclusively in a world of his own, guarded most securely by his constant activity. He had no secretary and spent most of his day beating a two-fingered tattoo on a Smith-Premier typewriter."

As the years went by, Miller noted, Kephart, a “crack shot with a rifle” who once tried but failed to raise a small corps of volunteer sharpshooters on behalf of the Spanish American War, spent more and more time in the woods. He would camp alone in the Ozarks on the weekends, Miller said, and then return to the library early each Monday, renewed, invigorated. Once back in the civilized world, he’d burrow deep in the card catalogue, pound his Smith-Premier, buy up a few more books for his beloved special collection. He’d consult with a growing band of western writers who hungered after the knowledge Kephart singularly possessed.

Nearly thirty years after Miller began making his sly observations of Kephart, F.A. Behymer, a star reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, journeyed to a tiny town in western North Carolina to spend an afternoon with the former librarian. The year was 1926. Kephart was sixty-four years old. He had lived alone in the Appalachians since scandalously abandoning all that had ever seemed to matter—his library, his reputation, his Ozarks, his wife, his six young children—at the age of forty-two. At the Cooper House in Bryson City, Behymer sat with Kephart in his modest writers’ workshop and noted how the window opened out on the Tuckaseegee and “the Big Smokies beyond.” It was a glorious view. It gave the illusion of freedom. It enabled Kephart—still sprightly, still fine-featured—to:

… raise his eyes and look through his window and see the swiftly-flowing water and the mountains that rise, ridge on ridge. And, if the day’s toll irks and the outdoors calls, there’s a packed knapsack hanging on the wall and within two hours he can be out in the wide spaces and the high places where he likes best to be.

My great-grandfather’s knapsack weighed just twenty-seven pounds. In the long, strange last chapter of his life, it was all he ever needed to feel the most alive. He had an “aura of loneliness,” Miller would later recall. It was the legacy he would leave with us, the mystery of a man.

Second Chances

2008-10-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

I posted earlier this week about the gifts of friendship yielded by the mostly private writing life; I wrote, particularly, about Jayne Anne Phillips.

My story was about the time I'd spent with Jayne Anne in Prague; Jay Kirk, that enormously gifted writer whom I've praised in other blog entries (most recently that gorgeous Rwanda piece in GQ) and whom I've benefited so hugely from knowing since 2005, wrote to tell me about the quality of a critique Jayne Anne had given him at Bread Loaf. The email dialogue went (paraphrasically) thusly:

Me: Wait. What year were you at Bread Loaf?

Jay: I was there in '96.

Me: As was I. Grace Paley. Anne Lamott. The gorgeous Olena Kaltyiak Davis. Jane Satterfield. Brooks Hansen.

Jay: Wait. You were in our class? Or were you teaching...

Well, indeed. You get that point. Apparently, I've known Jay since 1996. Apparently, we sat in the same small classroom. Surely, I read pages from his then novel-in-progress; I remember the beating pulse of the guy's talent. And beyond this being one of those ain't-life-strange conjunctions, it raises for me this question:

How do I keep managing to trip up against blazing talents who are also (don't ever take this for granted) hugely good souls? The sort of people I need to know, because without them I wouldn't think nearly as hard. I had the chance to know Jay a long time ago, it seems. I was given (fluke that it was) a second chance. Thank goodness I was finally paying attention in '05. It would have been lousy if I hadn't.

Laura Miller and The Magician's Book

2008-10-02T04:49:00.000-07:00

Laura Miller is a vigorous reader; the reviews and essays she writes—for Salon.com, for New York Times, for New Yorker, those stature zones—speed forward with a sort of exhilarating fury, a faith in books and their significance, and a determination to say precisely what she means. If I haven't always agreed with her (do two people ever see eye to eye on every book?), I've always greatly admired her, and when David Foster Wallace died so tragically a few weeks ago, it was Laura's words to which I turned first; she wouldn't appease, she wouldn't heal, but she might help me understand.

Laura has a new book due out soon, The Magician's Book, and its premise intrigues. It's the story of a woman—Laura herself—who fell deeply in love with the Narnia tales as a child and grew disenchanted as a teen. Finally, she allowed her adult self a rebounded intrigue, allowed herself to return to the land of Narnia. What had C.S. Lewis done with his tales to bring this child in? How had it shaped what and how she would read later? Who else had fallen under Narnia's spell? What in the end makes for a literary reader?

http://www.magiciansbook.com/

All this past week, perhaps even more, I've been talking about The Book Thief with my friend Andra. She read it after I did, we wrote nearly each day of its power. Two nights ago, she turned its final page, and when her husband arrived home, he found her devastated, not wishing to leave the company of the characters she'd met. As I'd lived this, too, as I still have not escaped The Book Thief's spell, I understood. I recognized, in Andra, a kindred heart, a reader who, in Miller's words, pays exuberant attention.

Laura Miller has spent an entire life paying attention to books. I'm betting that we should pay attention to this one.

I'm also wondering what books have seized your heart and have changed who you've become.

Cut to the Bone

2008-10-01T03:47:00.001-07:00

In the Sunday NYTBR essay, Dorothy Gallagher looks back on the lessons passed on by one Helene Pleasants, a copy editor the author met while a junior editor at Redbook:

Helene had no literary theories — she had literary values. She valued clarity and transparency. She had nothing against style, if it didn’t distract from the material. Her blue pencil struck at redundancy, at confusion, at authorial vanity, at the wrong and the false word, at the unearned conclusion. She loved good writing, therefore she loved the reader: good writing did not cause the reader to stumble over meaning. By the time Helene was finished with me seven years later, I knew how to read a sentence and how to fix one. I knew what a sentence was supposed to do. I began to write my own sentences; needless to say, the responsibility for them is my own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/books/review/Gallagher2-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

I wondered about the essay's frigorific opening lines, "My copy editor died. No need to be upset on my account. I hadn't seen Helene Pleasants for at least 10 years before her death; and even those closest to her would agree that her death was timely." I wondered, too, about its gelid last: "And I've changed my mind: it is a pity that Helene died. As long as she lived, I could still think of myself as a young writer."

But the in-between of Gallagher's essay brought poignantly to mind the copy editors who have done their level best to keep me in grammatical line. I moved quite a bit as a child—Wilmington to Alberta to Wilmington to Boston to Wilmington and finally to a suburb of Philadelphia—and in that zagging journey I lost two academic things: continuity with a foreign language (don't test my French) and an ability to stay on course with any grammar lessons. I was perpetually relearning what I already knew, or I was skipping entire chapters of Strunk & White.

Given the Swiss Cheese quality of my brain, this was not good.

So that I have had to rely on copy editors since (and pray for my poor blog readers, who daily encounter the unfiltered, uncorrected Beth), and though I've run the gamut of experiences, I've grown rather fond of one who shall remain unnamed, one I've never met. She stalks my every comma, circles my overblown "just," writes thin-penciled comments in the margins that remind me that it'll always be love of language first for her, struggling writer distant second. What were you thinking? her comments fairly shout. What business have you writing in the first place? Have you taken a good look at yourself?

I read her notes in the privacy of my own house. I turn magnificent shades of red. I tremble. And then I'm severely grateful for her, grateful that she cares so much.

I pay attention. I apply my learnings. I do try to get it right. I fantasize, even, about receiving a Fed Ex with a single note inside: Your manuscript required no changes, it might say. It's gone directly to print.

Another Day

2008-09-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

So Wall Street didn't blinker shut, and the ATMs didn't go on strike (I greenbacked one, so as to be sure), and the book that I'd been reading just kept getting better, and two new client projects reared, and three more marched bravely forward, and I'm not saying that we're out of the woods, that there's not real trouble, that we can put off doing what must be done, that there are not sacrifices to be made, and compromises, too.

I'm just saying: Another day.

What Happens Next?

2008-09-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

Stammered, stoppered, stunned by the news. By headlines four inches high. By images of strangers—panicked. By the realities of a country that has lived far too long on borrowed time, in the haze of inflated ambitions, under the scourge of obfuscating mechanisms and tools.

What happens next isn't up to most of us, but I think this much is true: Responsibility, in the midst of this crisis, means living on. It means going about our days as we would have elsewise gone about our days—a little kinder, maybe, a little more clear with ourselves that every moment of abundance is a gift, every gesture of goodness is a salve. Anxiety can't help us now. Obsessively watching the news won't change the news.

Outside our windows, the world goes on. The rain comes, the flocks descend, the sun rises, a neighbor brings a puppy home, inexplicably, the sweet William once more blooms. Life's incidentals, but right now, this is what we have.

You’re Still Here, With Us: A Jayne Anne Phillips Story

2008-09-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

Jayne Anne Phillips has a brilliant new book due out this coming January. A brilliant book: Faulkneresque. Unblinking. Committed. Not a shred of fear. It's called Lark & Termite, and in a future post I'll be getting to that, but for now, as I sit curled over the galleys, as I sit here celebrating Jayne Anne's unsinkable talent, I remember my first days with this writer, I remember an essay I once wrote. Because she is a rare, living legend, a rare female living legend, I post parts of that earlier piece here today, to provide context for what I'll post next week.

I met Jayne Anne Phillips in a city of puppets, on a night of daggering rain. It was Prague, the summer of 1995. She was across a gilded reception room, near a table piled high with apples and cheese, and I remember watching how she moved through the writers who had assembled there—moved through them, touched a hand to them, but escaped them just in time. Her long crimped hair sat on her shoulders like a cape. She seemed unspoiled by the rain.

Standing there, observing Jayne Anne, I was struck by contradictions, as readers of her work have always been. Here was the woman who had yielded characters who marched straight out of the dark side and spoke: Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks …. Here was the author of tender reminisce: My mother’s ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Here was the teacher with the reputation for being obsessed with the miniscule, the line edit, the word and its hyphen, the punctuation mark. Here was the mother both saddled with beauty—charcoal blue eyes, sun-darkened skin, a photogenic nose and chin—and famously uncomfortable with beauty’s dark allure.

It occurred to her, I never did ask why, to speak to me that night. When had I gotten to Prague? Where was I from? Had I gone to the castle across the bridge? Had I seen the big cathedral? This morning, I said. Pennsylvania, I said. And no, I’d seen neither castle nor cathedral, though I’d hoped to at one point, when there was time. She asked me to call her the following morning at ten. She said we’d go see things together.

We spent the next day jostled by the summer crowds of Prague, Jayne Anne and me, our families. We spent it beneath pinched-high roofs, beside confessionals, in the trapped light behind stained glass. Cathedral and castle. Gardens and walls. Heat, and the sound of singers singing. It was mid-afternoon before we made our way back, over the bridge. We bought postcards and jewelry and architectural miniatures, then parted ways in Mala Strana.

Over the next ten days I got to know Jayne Anne, quietly and slowly. If she was cautious in among the crowds, she was generous in private. If she was guarded about the price of fame, she spoke without pretension. She talked about stories, about words, about the book that she’d been writing. She talked about the carnival that is the writer’s life. She asked questions, too—what it was that made me write, where I thought I might be going, what I hoped to get from books, and over coffee and hot chocolate and one kind of cookie then the next I said that I was writing because I always had, because I couldn’t break the habit. I said I was writing because I believed that words could be morally persuasive.

In Prague I wasn’t a writer yet; I was just a woman, writing. I was just a woman with a writing dream, and Jayne Anne listened to it. After ten days went by, I left for home; after more time passed, I got a postcard. A portrait of a Ferris wheel on the banged-up front, and on the back, a single gesture: Dear Beth, it said, are you really gone? No. No. You’re still here with us.

Being out in the world now with books of my own, I am overwhelmed when I think back on Prague, Jayne Anne, and castles. I know the price of advice, I know the weight of strangers’ manuscripts, I know the urgency behind the questions: Read me? Know me? Teach me? Promote me? Love my book? Make me a writer? When you lean in the direction of another’s work, you lean precariously out of your own. When you attend to the dreams and works of others, you are thrown from the path you had been on. In Prague I was a stranger—unknown, prone, as I continue to be prone, to wrecking sentences with elaborate extensions. I was living on the other side of books—unpublished, unread, linguistically ungainly—and still, on a night of rain, in a city of puppets, Jayne Anne asked if I had seen a castle. She opened a door, and I walked through. I invaded her world with my own.

Like the architect, the writer is a romanticized profession. It is the lavish drunkness of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the outrageous cruelty of Sinclair Lewis, the staggering machismo of Ernest Hemingway, the infidelities, always that. We love the brokenhearted writer. We love the beg for forgiveness, the confession of betrayal, the fragile ego smashed wide apart in the finest final pages. Writing, the myth goes, is tenderness reserved for the book, intelligence transferred to fiction, generosity given over to scene, and the writing life is the life that’s lived subservient to stories. Thieves, writers are, and shadows drag behind them. And wherever writers claim to broker the truth, they cast, instead, a net of lies.

It is the irreproachable loneliness of the writer we’ve come to expect, the miserly way they parcel out their flecks of available love. Those who love too much get nowhere. Those who teach will never sell. Those who give back cannot be classified as genius. Those who cede the stage are thrust aside. Don’t expect a thing from a writer but their books. Don’t look for their decency anywhere but before you, on the page.

Except I cannot prove the myth. Except I have lived within the graces of its polar opposite. I have opened my mailbox to a postcard from Michael Ondaatje, a careful, intricate, telling response to a letter I had written. I have found a pen in my mailbox, too—a gift from a novelist I met only once, after standing in line for hours at a bookstore. A writer friend brought my son paper stars, and another writer sent me seeds, and a writer’s blueberries have arrived as well—overnighted to preserve their wild freshness. And one day an orchid appeared with two dozen purple blooms and, another day, a pillbox from Dubai and always books and, astonishingly, more seeds and three packages of saffron, and a jar of jam and a bundle of photographs, a pen, a chocolate bar, a ceramic dragonfly, a subscription to a magazine. Dear Beth, are you really gone? No. No. You’re still here with us.

It is from the gifts and notes of writers that I have learned what writing is. It is how writers have reached far beyond their books that has rescued me from absurd and brazen dreams and taught me what really matters. What I thought writing was writing isn’t. How I thought writers were at least some writers aren’t. Where I thought I’d take my rewards, I have found nothing worth my keeping. Where I expected little, I’ve been overcome with flavor. If I thought I could write myself into kindness with words, I have learned, from my writer friends to know the extent of the possible. If I thought I’d write my way to truth, I have been helped to redefine my purpose. Memory is not memoir. Truth supercedes the tale. Arfulness induces artifice. And writing a book is not publishing a book. And being a writer sometimes means that one does anything but writing. And.

Lost, often lost in the dispiriting mechanics of publishing, or the disappointments of the trade, or the injustice that can be done to an ambition or a story, I have found my anchor in other writers, in the gifts and cards and emails that have floated in, across the nether. Beth, we are writers by virtue of our stance to the world. Plus the act makes us feel good. Writing makes me like myself. One email, out of many. It is such a scary time, when your novel is tender and green and you feel if it is not tended it must just dry up and blow away. Another. Don’t want to be that famous anymore, so we’ve cured each other, you and me, maybe.

When I was a child aspiring to be a writer, I never dreamed about growing up and knowing other writers; I wasn’t that audacious. I thought about how putting words together made me feel. I thought about riding a train and seeing my book on a stranger’s lap. I thought about the view I’d have from my writing window, and the places I’d go to find story, and the books I’d have stacked around me like old friends. What I knew about writers I’d know from their books; that was the assumption I’d made. Writers wouldn’t have the time, just as I wouldn’t have the time, to talk about books and their making.

But now I am on the other side of books, and what has begun to matter most to me is those who make the writing right. I celebrate the wisdom of writers and what they know. I celebrate the life I live, in writerly company. I celebrate the notes that I wake up to, the attention, the succor, the decency, the humor, the honorable and companionable quality of the endless conversation. It isn’t finally about writing. It is finally about living. It is about reaching out and listening, imagining another.

A Freshman Comes Home (for the day)

2008-09-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

The federal bail out deal appears to be crafted, the candidates brought themselves to the debate, it rained where I live and the rivers flow more freely, and my boy was home for a blessed Saturday. The house was suddenly messy again, there was a sprawl of books (on logic, on media culture, on social justice) on the downstairs desk, and there were stories—everywhere I turned, there were.

I did nothing but sit here and take it in.

A child grows up and goes to college, and he crafts his own life. He returns and there is the rush of the familiar, but not just that: There is the interweave of what he's lived that you never will, the what he's learning that is his alone, the hours he keeps because he can.

The sun rising and falling. The promise steeped within the blaze.

Samba-ing

2008-09-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

This isn't really me, but it is a photograph of happy dancing feet, which I found myself in possession of last evening. I'd been practicing the samba with the champion Belarusian, Jean Paulovich, and last night, among friends, we performed it. Though perhaps "perform" is too strong a word, perhaps "perform" suggests glitter and glued-on lashes and fish-netted thighs, and that will never (to Jean's professional despair) be me.

What is me is only this: The music goes on, and my bones take it in. My heart beats higher in its cage. Someone waits for me to get it right, and occasionally (but never wholly) I do. Frankly, I missed a few steps last night. But I never lost the music.

It's a privilege, dancing with Mr. Paulovich. It's a happy thing, to be forgiven for less than perfect bota fogas, voltas, whisks. It's good, after a stretch of worry, to come back home, to dance.

Nothing but Ghosts: The Cover Reveal

2008-09-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

There we were, visiting our son at college (he looks so good, he is so wise, my heart just flips when he's near). And there were Jill Santopolo and Carla Weise at HarperCollins, working toward a difficult cover deadline for Nothing but Ghosts. I was walking through a hotel lobby. I got a message from Jill. A few bumbling technical difficulties (on my end) and, suddenly, there sat the cover, on my husband's phone.

I fell in love.

You want to embrace those who have read your story and who have translated it into art. This blog is my embrace of Jill and Carla, for seeing this jacket through.

Nothing but Ghosts began life as a relentless finch and in the aftermath of my mother's passing. It went through countless iterations. It has emerged, it is emerging, as a book of which (forgive me) I am proud. A book that I hope says something.

Pushing to Publish

2008-09-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

A posting here to share with you this URL, which will connect any of you who are Philly centric to the Push to Publish program, sponsored by Philadelphia Stories. Some of you might already know about this dedicated and graceful organization—writers and editors who care about opening the world of writing to others, and who publish a gorgeous magazine. Last year's event was, I've heard, a terrific success.

I'll be keynoting that day, but the whole day looks rich and worthwhile.

http://www.philadelphiastories.org/marketing/pushtopublish.php

No Road Alone

2008-09-25T04:05:00.000-07:00

I mean for there to be no melodrama, and so I begin this post like this: I am practically fine. But for the past two weeks, I've been taking the sorts of tests one takes to prove or disprove fine.

I'm not dwelling on that. I'm dwelling on this: The world is gooded through. Yes, I'm watching the news. I'm worrying out loud. I grow impatient for solutions, too. I bump up across all varieties of raw, of wrong, of unjust, of incalcuable; I feel myself sink into trenches of despair. But I am rocked and rescued by the good that nonetheless prevails. By people who do their jobs well, and do them humanely (barium, they say, is like an extended pina colada; try to remember your first kiss, they say, when your anxiety seems to stop your blood from flowing). By friends who send funny and loving emails. By bloggers who couldn't even begin to know how valued they are. By a son sending all hieroglyphic form of the famed 160-character text message.

Not to mention a husband who stopped one day beneath the dogwood tree outside my office and noticed that the finch had supped on every last skinny black seed. He reached up and took the feeder down. He filled it with new seed. He stretched and slid the feeder back into place, like he was ornamenting a Christmas tree. He went on his way, then, my husband did. And the birds returned in force.

Finch on the First Day of Fall

2008-09-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

The birds have returned, and yesterday they came in force, keeping me company while I waited for news. I have recorded their story here, their golded breasts and evaporative wings.

Books as Vessels, Memoir and Non

2008-09-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

It seems like decades since I wrote memoir, though one might argue (and indeed some have) that blogging is memoiring, too. I tussled with the genre, ultimately let it go, moved onto poetry, history, fable, and also the YA novels that I have been writing for HarperCollins.

What I have never relinquished, however, is my belief that memoir's highest purpose is to put into place, for all of time, the people, geographies, and ideas that have earned a permanent vessel. In Still Love in Strange Places, my third book, I wrote about my husband's birthplace, El Salvador—the wars, the coffee farm, the people of Santa Tecla, my marriage. I wrote and researched and photographed for more than ten years, and in the final weeks of my work on that manuscript, a terrible earthquake shook Santa Tecla to the ground. Still Love had become the vessel for that which was no more.

In my novels, I look for ways to keep the true alive as well. To celebrate an English teacher who mattered (Undercover). To honor a young man named Nick, whom I have watched grow up over these past 13 years (House of Dance). In a book coming out next June (Nothing but Ghosts), each important person bears the name of someone important to me—my nieces and nephews, for example, my editor, Jill Santopolo (whose doppelganger is actually a young, smart, patient, curly-headed blond named Danny Santopolo). In The Heart is Not a Size (which I've been editing of late), there is a young man named Drake, who is fashioned after K., the rising poet with the enormous heart whom I sometimes write of in this blog.

Our first responsibility is to readers, of course. But I have discovered that I write truest when I am writing from the truest corner of my heart.

Above the Stump

2008-09-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

I was so touched by the comments I received about the tree bear (below) that I went back and retrieved this great, wild bird, which was sitting above a stump nearby, in that same park in Vancouver, beneath that same lovely sky.

Miss Em said the stump might be a character in a woodlands fairytale. I wonder if this bird (so black it reads as blue) might be a character, too? I wonder if the bird might teach the stump to fly, or if the stump might persuade the bird of rootedness?

Poetry Transcends Description

2008-09-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

This is just a tree stump sheened with moss, but when I saw it (in a Vancouver park) I thought bear. The deep, but narrow eyes. The truncated nose. The mountainly stretches of cheek.

Still and only a tree bear unless I can animate him in a poem.

Hope's Bookshelf

2008-09-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

And finally:

I am lucky again at the close of this weekend. Very.

A talented young reader and reviewer (and youtuber) has posted a generous review of House of Dance. She goes by many names. I include the link to Hope's fine bookshelf, hoping you'll take the journey to her site, and see what else she does.

http://princess2293.blogspot.com/2008/09/house-of-dance-beth-kephart.html

Gracias.

Remaking History

2008-09-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

In a posting earlier this week I spoke of the gifts that the books we write can yield—gifts that fall far outside wealth or fame, and reverberate far more sweetly. I was making reference to Flow, among other things, a book which tells a river's story through her own words and which managed to fall both to the left and right of any mainstream publication category. And where were you thinking bookstores would actually shelf this book? other publishers asked. Temple University Press opted to give the book a life, regardless.

Writing Flow, and giving countless talks based on it, led me to places I'd have never traveled otherwise. Last week, it led me to the Cassatt House in Philadelphia, where I was privileged to sit with historians, authors, and the inimitable Sam Katz, a former mayoral candidate and impassioned Philadelphia citizen, who has dared to suggest and inspire a film about the making and remaking of my city for a planned 25-part series. I was (as I usually am) the least qualified person in the room, but I was there nonetheless, thinking out loud, voicing opinions about framing questions and narrative flow, the threads that might bind such a film together. It was an interesting process. It is leading to interesting places. And I wouldn't have been there without a book that the mainstream publishing world thought little of.

Here's to Temple University Press, then. Here's to Mr. Katz. And thanks to Philip Katz, who happened to snap this picture.

Not Being Done For

2008-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

I scared up my courage this morning and went at my novel-in-progress again, dared myself to read the sentences out loud, which is not the same as reading them through in one's head.

A small discovery, which I seem to make (somehow anew?) at this stage with every project: Sentences are units of speed. They race, they drip, they dawdle, they stall, and if you take your eye off the inherent momentum of any sentence that you write, you mess with the story you are telling. You throw the passage off, you throw the chapter off, you throw the book off. You're done for. You know it.

I don't want to be done for. I'm still working.

Something Almost Unlooked For, Something Given

2008-09-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

I spent the day being frustrated with myself—despite the gorgeous weather, despite the gift of time, I wasn't hitting the right rhythms with my new book. I was stumbling over sentences, fixing them, destroying pages. Taking out chapters, starting again. I kept watching the birds and the skies, taking deep breaths. Finally I came back inside.

And then I did something I vowed never again to do. I typed my own name into Google.

Was it procrastination or some heavenly hinting? I'll never know. But what I found when I did that was this most incredible gift—a Boston Globe story about House of Dance and Undercover. Written by the impeccable writer Liz Rosenberg, for whom I have such respect. I learned something from this review—was reminded of what I must do going forward, of what I must try to avoid, if I can. I'm grateful beyond measure for the time Ms. Rosenberg took to think out loud about the stories that I write. For rescuing me from this day of thwarted story.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2008/09/07/lessons_for_teens_and_an_anxious_cat/