Beth Kephart Books

Alongside Sarah Dessen's Along for the Ride

2009-07-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

In the August issue of Family Circle magazine, Nothing but Ghosts joins Jude Watson's The 39 Clues: Beyond the Grave and Sarah Dessen's Along for the Ride as Kid Lit Cool Picks for Hot Days.

I am beyond grateful.

Remembering my Mother

2009-07-04T05:58:00.000-07:00

... In the weeks since my mother’s passing, I have been pondering the many measures of a life—that which dissipates, that which remains. I have been looking up, studying the skies. I have been watching the greening of the stalk of curly willow that sits in a vase in my most sun-filled room. I have considered spring’s rumbling things, impatient, even in winter, to rise. I have been blessed—immeasurably blessed—by the outreach and wisdom of souls like you, and I have made my decision: Beauty remains.

(I have been speaking of how Nothing but Ghosts was inspired, in part, by my mother. These words are from my memorial remarks two-and-a-half years ago.)

(Photos of my mother and father, 1955, and of my mother during her last birthday party at my house.)

Independence Day

2009-07-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

Sit by a breeze, if you can.

Live the day.

Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (2)

2009-07-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

The house is a storybook house. A huff and a puff and we’ll blow it down house. The roof is soft and tumbled. The bushes grow tall past the sills. Evergreens lean in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing pinecones to the ground. The floor slats are slants and the furniture slides, clawing away at the varnish. Big sheets of snaggled paint have split from Sophie’s bedroom wall and, like glaciers, crashed.

But there is a window—one—that is not tumbled, that is whole. Sophie waits until her mother leaves for work before pulling down the mid-air stairs and climbing into the pink scratch of the attic. Through the window at the far end of the room falls an oblique square of sun. Toward that oblique Sophie makes her way (careful on the cross beams, careful with the splinters, careful not to fall into the quilty insulation—that’s what the pink is, insulation), then sits watching the world beyond, the house across the street, the sloppy dog, the scramble of legs and tail that is the dog. The dog rumbles and slides, keeping guard over his house. He runs the grass alley between the fence and the porch and scurries a squirrel into a tree. He barks at the white car with the pistol muffler that goes roaring past—down the narrow asphalt, gone.

The dog is preamble; he waits.

He Said (the first fragment of a Gerald Stern poem)

2009-07-02T04:19:00.000-07:00

Thank God for summer, he said, and thank God the window
was to his right and there was a wavy motion
behind him and a moon in the upper right corner
only four days old and still not either blowsy
or soupy.

Gerald Stern, "He Said," This Time

(I love this: still not either blowsy or soupy. How, inside a conversational poem, the original erupts and never shatters the tone.)

Write What You Want, Open Your Own Doors

2009-07-01T05:26:00.000-07:00

Lovers of books, buy the July 13th issue of Newsweek (a magazine that has lately been looking so smart, so right in its new designer threads). The editors have called this issue "What to Read Now," and there's no mere lip service to books paid here. This is the real thing, with articles titled "What to Read Now. And Why." (which lists The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Brooklyn among the top 50!!!), "The Write Stuff," "Best Books Ever," "Now, Read it Again," The Reluctant Poet Laureate," "My Favorite Covers," and "Homer & Langley: An exclusive (E.L. Doctorow) excerpt."

Readers of this blog know that I'm a huge fan of Olive Kitteridge, and that I had the privilege of seeing Elizabeth Strout read from this Pulitzer winner not long ago, and of speaking with her for a spell. She's one of the interviewees in this Newsweek issue, and what she has to say—not just about how hard writing is, but how essential— is worth the price of the magazine.

But there are also these pristine words from Lawrence Block. What Block expresses here is a notion in which I, too, have put my faith. My first book was rejected by the house that had stated, unequivocably, that it had plans to buy it, because, the house marketing team reported, it would never sell (and then it did). FLOW, my autobiography of a river, was considered unsalable; a university press took it on, and that book changed my life in Philadelphia. I write literary novels for young adult readers that are devoid of vampires and salacious details; somehow or other (that somehow being the blog community), those books still find their readers.

It can, in other words, be done. Lawrence Block:

"...I think the less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. The enormous mistake a lot of young writers make is that they want to know what people want."

The Elegance of the Hedgehog/A Review

2009-06-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, on a rainy day, I walked through a bookstore and discovered Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I hadn't heard of it before—I should have, but I hadn't. I brought it home and made that book my own personal discovery. My touchstone. My measure. My source of redemption when the world seemed too scarred or dark.

The same thing happened yesterday, when I finally found time to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Sure, indeed, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) had discovered this second novel by Muriel Barbery before I did—but I hadn't spoken to a soul about it, I hadn't read reviews of it, I hadn't stumbled upon a blogger's commentary, and so it wasn't on any of my must-buy lists. It was simply there, face up, at a bookstore, and I had the urge to bring it home.

Yesterday I read this story of the autodidact concierge who lives the clandestine life of an undiscovered intellectual in Paris. She has a best friend who comes to visit. She befriends a brilliant, beauty-seeking twelve-year-old named Paloma. And then a distinguished Japanese man moves into her building and asserts the possibility of being truly known, truly seen.

I was sitting by a screened-in door as I read this book. The day was perfect. The phone rang and I did not answer. Emails pinged; I left them unattended. The book, which moves slowly, sumptuously, across the terrain of ideas and time, takes such an unexpected turn at the end that I found myself crying. Just sitting there in the breeze, sobbing. For the beauty of the story. For the courage of Barbery. For the very idea that so many people out there have already embraced this story of ideas and heart.

Read it, if you can.

Nothing but Ghosts Reading/Boston Globe Review/The Book Chat

2009-06-30T00:56:00.000-07:00

Tonight I have the great privilege of joining My Friend Amy, her friends, and perhaps you?, for a live book chat at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST.

In preparation for that chat, Amy asked if I might do a reading from the book. I chose to read from a section that takes place in Cascais, Portugal—a storybook world that I visited eight years ago. The music here is from the extraordinarily talented Jordan O'Connor. The photos were taken before I owned a digital camera. The piece is two minutes long.

I was further blessed yesterday by the news that Nothing but Ghosts had been embraced by the Boston Globe, in a Liz Rosenberg review titled "Where the coolest kids are, like, undead." This morning I was honored by this review by Charlotte, who always reads with care and purpose.

Please join us this evening.

The Bootleg Nothing but Ghosts Interview/Major Prizes/Stunned Author

2009-06-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

I am definitely living another's life right now.

I am not me. I am merry-go-round whirling. I am dizzy.

First My Friend Amy and Presenting Lenore cook up this not-to-be-believed virtual (surprise) launch party for Nothing but Ghosts—replete with prizes, with urgings, with viral enthusiasms. Their friends friend the initiative. Momentum builds. Conversations unfold: Can bloggers shape the book industry? Is there power in blogger suggestion? A party becomes a dialogue. A dialogue becomes a story. I watch, stunned—the woman who still thinks of herself as the loner in high school.

Then, today, I wake to discover that my friend, humorist and novelist (yes, she's a novelist; I'm reading her it-will-be-published-soon novel right now) Anna Lefler , has kicked off an extravaganza all her own. I mean: An. Ex.Tra.Va.Gan.Za. Featuring a Beth Kephart tour bus (how does she do those things?), an ocarina, and a bootleg interview conducted (in Anna's trademark so-smart-it-can't-be-slapstick style) with yours truly (when I received her questions I started to laugh; as I answered I kept laughing). Featuring prizes that you have to see to believe ($150 Amazon gift card anyone?).

I know that life isn't always like this. In fact, it rarely is. Nothing but Ghosts is my tenth book. What happens here, what happens now, is not, for an instant, taken for granted. It is a surprise. It is a miracle. It is this moment in time that I will return to, years from now. Remember when?, I'll say.

This is Me (and the books I should be reading)

2009-06-28T03:34:00.000-07:00

The books are stacking taller and taller about my tiny house—beckoning, desired, and unread. No One You Know (Michelle Richmond), which I won from Presenting Lenore, who lists it as a favorite book. Halfway House (Katharine Noel) and Home Schooling (Carol Windley)—gifts from a certain editor at Grove. John the Baptizer, by Brooks Hansen, a long-time friend and an Alane Mason author, Alane being my first editor. The Language of Things (Deyan Sudjic), also an Alane book, and The Little Strangers (Sarah Waters), because I adored Waters' The Night Watch and because I trust the independent film producer who suggested that I add Strangers to my list. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery), because everyone is talking about it. Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), because they are books by two of my favorite living writers.

I have been out, I have been dancing, I have been taking photographs, I have been Body Pumping and Zumba-ing and walking the streets of Philadelphia and running this business of mine. I have not been reading, and I have barely been writing, and I've gotten that ache in my bones.

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.

Viral Happiness (and a thank you)

2009-06-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

You think I love dance so much because, well, I love to dance. And that is true. But perhaps I love dance more for the friendships it has yielded, for the conversations, for the simple but abiding truths that emerge—during lessons, during practice.

There is, for example, the bit about radiant joy. About how, once it is found (once it emerges, is discovered) happiness is a contagion. Perhaps it begins (often it begins) with the song itself. The power roar of rhythm. The lyric lush or tease. But after that, there is the one who asks the other, Dance with me?, and where happiness has asked the question, happiness answers back. There's just no not smiling when you are dancing with one who is. There's no holding back.

This week, all throughout the blog-o-sphere, readers, writers, bloggers, and all-round good souls have engendered, in me, an uncontainable happiness. They have reached out, thrown me a party, given me cause and room to dance. I am not a celebrity writer, not a powerhousing commercial writer, not a writer headed out on tour. But this week I was an embraced writer. I could never ask for more.

This morning I wish to thank the always-dear Miss Em, for her gorgeous review of Nothing but Ghosts. I wish to thank My Friend Amy for her amazing words about this book she chose to believe in, to rally behind, before she even turned its pages. I wish to thank all of you—Lenore, Becca, Florinda, Ed, Anna, Sherry, Holly, Vivian, Bookworming, Erin, The Book Resort, Serendipity Teacher, BooksLoveJessicaMarie, Ellen, Colleen, so many more—who have done what you have done.

Happiness. Happiness going viral.

Nothing But Ghosts is written in Beth's trademark lyrical style. It's a rich look at the heart and at life and loss. It unravels slowly, like a lazy summer day giving us glimpses into what makes a person disappear, what grief looks like, how life can go on after we lose someone we love. I liked that there was a bit of mystery, a hint of romance, a lot of reflection. But what I loved most about this book is the simple truth that we are all a bunch of people who have loved and carry around aching loss in our hearts, and yet there is hope to be found somewhere, often in each other.

— My Friend Amy

It does what all books should do, provide hope for the character's future while not telling us every single thing that will happen in that future. Katie is a living character in my mind, someone that I might meet on the street or in a library one day. And there are so many other details, so many wonderful layers to this book—the glass bottles, the bird at the window, the paintings—I couldn't possibly write all of them down in this review. Just trust me and get your hands on a copy as soon as you can.

— Em's Bookshelf

Jean, Scott, Magda, Cristina: Photos from the Dance Studio

2009-06-26T03:07:00.000-07:00

They danced for us yesterday, for our cameras—Magda and Scott, Cristina and Jean, Tirsa. Against a canvas of white, beneath umbrellas of light, they became who they are when they are not teaching us: abetted by and glamorous with song.

To take a photograph is to be privileged by access.

The Presenting Lenore Interview and Ghosts review

2009-06-25T04:12:00.000-07:00

Is there something of your mother's that you hold onto that keeps her memory alive? Is cooking cathartic? Does that ancient underground city in Barcelona exist? How do you know when a book you are writing has potential, and how do you know when a project needs to be scrapped?

These were among the questions that were waiting for me over email early yesterday morning. They stopped me in my tracks.

I answered them, as best as I could, for Presenting Lenore, a Germany-based blogger with international reach, to whom I am indebted (for her review, for her co-sponsorship, with My Friend Amy, of the amazing Ghosts book launch party, for her companionship in the land of blogs).

Miss Lenore also reviewed Nothing but Ghosts. Her words touched me deeply, especially her reference to a certain Kate DiCamillo book called The Tiger Rising—a book I first read and fell in love with when chairing the Young People's Literature committee for the 2001 National Book Awards. As readers, as writers, our world is full of echoes and, when we are lucky, resonance. Thank you, Lenore.

Reflected Out

2009-06-24T13:58:00.000-07:00

Her kind of beauty I could live with. The wide open canvas of her eyes, the words she already holds to herself, the liberal adornments of pink: I am a girl, I am to be seen, I will not tell you everything. Earrings in a drawer somewhere, or hanging on a tree. The polishing of soul.

An hour ago, at the dance studio, I became too aware of mirrors, of me in mirrors, of life passing. I became too aware, and I stopped—unable, really, to keep on dancing, to make a pretense of it. I wanted more than I was just then. I wanted more time.

Home alone now, I remember this child. How she turned so freely, did not blink.

Girl Detectives

2009-06-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a high and low day—a business meeting that left me feeling hollow, a blog-world embrace that I will never forget. There is no sap in the kind of blog goodness that was sent my way yesterday. There is only strength.

There is also only strength in conversation, and there's a very intriguing conversation currently ongoing at Chasing Ray. The overarching theme, as you know, is What a Girl Wants. Today's conversation is called The Girl Detective Edition. Colleen Mondor, who hosts this dialogue among YA writers, is wondering about the apparent absence of Nancy Drew-style detectives in contemporary YA. Middle grade books feature them. Adult books do. What has happened to YA? What does it mean, and does it matter?

Headed for Perfection (or at least pointed that way)

2009-06-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Those of you who are in the middle of writing something are also, inevitably, in the middle of revising something.

Over at Brimstone Soup, Holly Cupala, a young adult author (and a Readergirlz marvel), has been shining light on the revisionary path with a program called Summer Revision Smackdown. I've learned a lot in previous posts, and today Holly is hosting me, as I think out loud about my own revisionary patterns, and instincts. Check it out, if you have a chance.

Also, Kathye Fetsko Petrie, a big-hearted local literary legend has a piece in the Examiner about authors' summer reading lists. What, she wanted to know, are some of us reading this summer?

Stunned: A Nothing but Ghosts Surprise Party

2009-06-23T03:50:00.000-07:00

I don't have words for today.

That's it, I don't.

My Friend Amy (her blog name, her world self) wrote to me a week or so ago and suggested that we have a Nothing but Ghosts party. I said, "Thank you. Of course. That would be lovely." I said, "Yes, of course, I'll be in a chat (thank you for the invitation)", and "Yes, of course, I'll do a reading (let me fix my hair)", but in truth, I had no idea—zero—what she was planning.

This is what she and Lenore have been planning. My Friend Amy plus Presenting Lenore.

The force is, most definitely, with me.

I also have (and I am grateful for this) Lisa Bishop of HarperTeen on my side. She's posted a piece I wrote on the origins of Nothing but Ghosts on the popular HarperTeen MySpace site today.

Nothing but Ghosts/Book Page Review and Contest Winner

2009-06-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

Beth Kephart’s dazzling new novel is wise and wonderful, certain to be a revelation for young adult readers. As Katie makes a few necessary discoveries, she begins to let love in once again. In doing so, she honors an important promise, “a daughter’s promise: to live my life with my eyes wide open. To honor exuberance, and color.”

Excerpted from Book Page review, Ellen Trachtenberg

A few days ago, I asked how you might paint regret, a question that arises in Nothing but Ghosts. I was stunned—truly—by the depth of your responses. Moved, in some cases, to tears. You are wise, and you are rich, my blogging friends. Today my son chose a name out of a hat to select the winner. Farida Dowler, of Saints and Sinners, that winner is you. Please do send me your address.

The Trick

2009-06-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

The trick, I think, is to remain calm in the face of the work that you have done, and to believe, always believe, that something greater yet lies within.

I don't want writing to be over.

I don't want to think that I am done.

Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt on Launch Week

2009-06-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

...I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, "Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?"

"In a heartbeat," he said, "and you know it."

"I wouldn't take any of it back," Mom said, and maybe I don't know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can't figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can't really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place.

"The Longest Distance": A Video Excerpt

2009-06-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

I have been hearing from some of you about a short story that I wrote for the HarperTeen anthology, No Such Thing as the Real World. Earlier today, I created and posted onto YouTube a three-minute vlog that tells some of the story behind this story and features a page or two from the book.

Eureka, Gamma Waves, and Colum McCann

2009-06-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

Joseph Dorazio, a poet and friend, alerted me to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight" (Robert Lee Holz, Science Journal, June 19, 2009). There's an emerging science of epiphany, apparently. There's proof that daydreaming matters.

"Sudden insights," Holz tells us, "are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically."

Eureka moments, Holz reports, are accompanied by "a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem." Moreover, in EEG-assisted research scientists have seen that "that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate."

Well, now, I like this, and Joseph knew that I would. I like it because in my memoir, Seeing Past Z, I made a long argument for the value of daydreaming—for giving kids room to imagine. I like it because I spent much of yesterday blanketed into a couch, trying to see the next scene in the novel I am writing. My thoughts were uncontainable. I could not keep them tethered. They wound in and out of the sound of rain, through conversations I'd been having, through images of my past, through the old newspaper stories I've lately been reading. Anyone trying to measure my thought's progress would have given up and left me for useless (I was about to do the same, just ask Reiko, who rescued me with a mid-daydreaming email) when, all of a sudden, I had a breakthrough on the novel I am writing. I felt the bright burst of gamma waves.

The novel inched forward.

This coming week, on Tuesday, one of my very favorite authors, Colum McCann, is releasing his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. Few authors trust their imagination, their process, as thoroughly as the entirely lovable, provocatively talented McCann, and I urge you to visit his website so that you might learn about this book that soon the literarily privileged will be reading. There's a video of McCann talking process on his site (and on Amazon.com). He's the real thing—aching and wanting like the rest of us, but somehow always pushing through. He's a writer worth listening to.

Loving Out Loud

2009-06-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

A review of Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love in this weekend's New York Times Book Review led me to an excerpt that I wish to share with you:

To be respected as a thinker in our world, a woman must cease to be a lover. To pass for an intellectual of any distinction, she must either renounce romantic love altogether or box it into a space so small in her life that it attracts no attention. If a man, as William Butler Yeats once claimed, "is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or of the work," a woman is too often forced to choose perfection of the heart or of the head. Should she choose to follow her heart, she needn't bother her head about philosophy or feminism because the world will mock her efforts. A strong mind, we've come to believe, precludes a strong heart. This, at least, is the mantra under which female artists have labored for centuries, and continue, to some extent, to labor still.

I have not read the entirety of Nehring's book. I can't make claims for the durability of her argument. But I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a widely respected male author (of, might I add, notoriously heartless stories) who essentially discounted my own work, not to mention my life, for being overly saturated with love. Sentimental was the word that he used. It was several years ago, just a few books into my career, and I can't begin to tell you just how long I felt the sting of his appraisal, how I began to cower behind, to feel ashamed of, the size and shape of my heart. You love too much and your writing shows it. That's the thought that kept tidal waving through my head.

Not any more. I am out in this world as who I am. I am living my love. I am dancing my love. I am cooking and gardening and walking my love. I am writing and I am blogging it—no apologies, and no one harmed. I put my heart and my head, such as they are, on these lines.

Portrait of Joy

2009-06-19T03:25:00.000-07:00

One week ago I wrote of a baptism, and joy. This is me, and the joy I felt, on the day I will remember. (Thank you, Mike Matthews, for the photograph, and Cristina and Jeremy for the party.)

Virtual Party

2009-06-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

As some of you might have read today in the New York Times, 85-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt has a new novel due out next week. It's called Obsession: An Erotic Tale, and it is, in the words of Charles McGrath, "the story of Priscilla Bingham, the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life."

I'm just wishing that I had an imagination big enough for magenta grosgrain. Or that someone would say about me, as McGrath says about Vanderbilt, that I could easily pass for someone 25 years younger than my actual age. I'm thinking, Gosh, how does it come to be that my own Nothing but Ghosts, also due out next week, will have to compete with a Gloria Vanderbilt novel? (The thought of such a competition staggers.)

But then I'm thinking, Now wait a minute, just hold on. Does G.V. have friends like I have? Does she, for example, know Tirsa, who offered, today, to make me my very own dulce de leche cake? Does she have a friend like Amy, who is all the way across this country, scheming? Is Anna in her life, listening? Is Sherry out there rooting for her? Does she know Tessa and her brilliant paintings, brilliant life? Has Lenore offered to interview her (we're talking Lenore)? Has she been honored by Colleen, HipWriterMama, Melissa, Lorie Ann, Little Willow, Priya, Maya, Solvang Sherrie, Alea? Does she have Miss Em in her corner, or In Bed With Books, or the curly Q, or Ed, or Woman in the Window, or Becca or LN, or Kelly, or Grete, or Lib, or PoetJaneS, or Sierra Rix, or TTTC, or...well, you all know who you are?

Does G.V. have, like I sometimes have, the stardust of your minds? Star glimmer?

I might not have magenta grosgrain. I might not have Minus 25 or the truly wonderful (I met him once, long ago) Charles McGrath of the New York Times. But I've got you.

And you is lovely.