Christmas in Stereo: House of Dance and the Taysha List

Nothing would interfere with our collecting our son—we drove miles, we drove them quickly, and then we parked. He was waiting for us in the bitter cold, and when we saw him, we began to run. He's that kind of soul, that kind of beautiful, and he was joyful; five finals were done. Over dinner we talked and after dinner we drove, and it was very late and dark. Beyond us, the snowy valleys were filled with candy cane lights and rooftop reindeer, with pinpoints of white and blue, of blinking green. It's Christmas, I thought, a complete thought now that our son was near, with us.

Seven corporate projects have come in over the past few days—months of work to be completed in a few weeks' time. I was on my computer late, to take care of a few things, when I noticed a comment on my blog. I will repeat it here for history's sake—an extraordinary gift to me at Christmas:

Dear Ms. Kephart-
It is my pleasure to inform you that your book, House of Dance, was selected to be on the 2010 Tayshas High School Reading List. The Tayshas reading list highlights the best fiction and non-fiction books for Texas teens. It is one of the most respected state reading lists in the country and generates millions of dollars of sales throughout the United States for the books selected to be on the list.
If you would like to see which other books were selected for the 2010 Tayshas High School Reading List please follow the link below.
http://www.txla.org/groups/yart/tayshaslists.html

Congratulations and thank you so much for writing such a quality young adult book.

I'm not sure who to thank for this. Renee, if you are reading: thank you.

A Few Smile-able Things

1. I've been working this morning on the copy edits to Dangerous Neighbors. I have a feeling that I'm going to be saying this a whole lot come 2010. But Egmont USA—the entire team—rocks.

2. The Christmas tree is up. I swear. It actually happened.

3. Part two of my interview with Serena Agusto-Cox has gone live. Boy, does that Serena ask good questions.

4. I am heading out the door right this very instant (truly) to collect my son from college, even though my hair is wet and there are at least 30 emails that I've yet to answer (I'm sorry!). Yes. The word is ecstatic.

The Beth Kephart Reading Challenge (I Know, I Can't Believe It)

When My Friend Amy named her blog My Friend Amy, was she anticipating that she was going to meet me? That she was going to change my life with such force that whenever I talk about the trajectory of my writing career, I talk about her? She's the one who threw the Nothing but Ghosts virtual launch party. She's the one who got me involved with her tremendous Book Bloggers Appreciation Week. She's the one who, every day and often several times a day, helps direct us, her fans, to new books, new shows, new concepts, new issues, other bloggers and writers.

My Friend Amy. Indeed.

Today Amy has posted a Beth Kephart Reading Challenge. But beyond that, she has given me the opportunity to put my eleven years as a book-published author into perspective. I began this journey by publishing memoir. I moved into history and poetry, corporate fable, young adult novels, and I'm currently finishing my first novel for adults. I have learned a lot along the way—about how memoirs, for example, inadvertently freeze people in time when in fact (and for example), children grow up, they evolve, they overcome, they teach us more and more each day. They deserve to be recognized and seen for who they are right now.

Amy has given me the chance to say this, the platform, and she has done this within the context of a contest that has, as its prize, an ARC of Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel that, as of this moment, only Laura Geringer (my editor), Amy Rennert (my agent), Robyn Russell (Amy Rennert's assistant), and the extraordinarily good people of Egmont USA have seen.

I encourage you to head over to Amy's.

The D.C. Literature Examiner Interview with Serena Agusto-Cox

This is how I felt when the entirely thoughtful Serena Agusto-Cox invited me to join her on the virtual pages of the D.C. Literature Examiner—emulsified by blooms. It's a two-part interview, the first of which posts today. Take a look to find out, for example, who some of my own literary heroes/heroines are.

Philadelphia at Dusk

Philadelphia, through the bridge window at Cira Centre.
The lights go on.
The taxis urge toward home.

Light Speed

"Wait," I said. "How much longer do you think we'll have this light?"

"Not long," he said. "Light moves quickly."

So I grabbed my camera because I thought I'd have something to say—about shadow selves, about near identicals, about black and white.

In the end, all I had was the light.

Books Beneath Trees

I buy books en masse each year for Christmas, and this year was no different. And because no one for whom I buy my books actually reads this blog, I feel safe in divulging some of my now-wrapped presents.

Here we go:

For a certain dancer with a talent in the kitchen: Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source. For a southern California writer: Lit: A Memoir. For a nephew who isn't just an extraordinary swimmer, but also one heck of a fisherman, the gorgeously illustrated FISH: 77 Great Fish of North America. For a niece who is off to college in a year or so, pursuing her passion in science (and likely physics): The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. For my dad, a former chief executive and still active consultant who yesterday brought me the loveliest planted gift (but more on that later): Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. For my artist husband now working in new media: ZBrush Character Creation, Mastering Maya, and Ghostly Ruins. For my son, firmly ensconced in the advertising world: Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements and Creative Advertising.

Finally, should my schedule afford me reading time, I've got Nothing to be Frightened of (Julian Barnes), Half Broke Horses (Jeannette Walls), The Piano Teacher (Janice Y.K. Lee), Something Must Happen (Ned Balbo), Eiffel's Tower (Jill Jonnes), The Perfect Square (Nancy M. Heinzen), and my own great-grandfather's Smoky Mountain Magic (Horace Kephart) stacked up near.

Speed

There was her cane, flying fast ahead of her, and there was her left foot, flying, too. Nothing would keep her back, nothing would assert itself against her, nothing would dare. I understand living at that speed. I understand eternally running. But right now, right this very instant, the novel is written and the presents are wrapped and the clients are happy and the bills are paid and there's even a tree on the back deck and there's no dust in my office, only the new, gorgeous, nearly blooming succulents that my dad brought over this afternoon. My boy will be here come Thursday evening. I've been flying fast ahead of myself so that I won't need to rush when he is home.

To those of you whom I've not visited lately, I extend my apologies. I will be back. I nearly almost am.

Dream Tangle

In my dreams, the scenes are gravity defiant and emotionally untrue, and yet I cannot take my eyes off them, talk myself out of them, disbelieve them.

I awake on the couch in the dark stunned, a victim of the movie in my head.

Bright Lights

In Wayne, PA, you either look for stories or trust that stories will find you.

Yesterday, while yielding my often ill-behaving hair to the tres-talented MacKenzie of the always -superior Cole Wellness Spa (which sits directly in the square heart of Wayne), a certain Sean Guiney walked in. "He looks like Sting, don't you think?" MacKenzie said, and when I cocked my head slightly to the left, the guy kind of did.

Soon we were joined by Liz, the receptionist, and soon stories were flying, and soon Sean was talking about this organization that he founded in April 2009, Kids and Hope Foundation, Inc. He was talking, in particular, about the families who—no longer willing to live in their cars—have taken up residency among the tall trees and wild wolves and myriad deer of New Jersey's Pine Barrens. Without running water or electricity they live. Within the plastic walls of tents. Sending their children to school, or waiting for children to be born, and hoping, most of all, for a way out.

The rain comes down, the snow falls, there are floods, there is a freeze, there is the thick dark of long nights, there is a fiesty dog keeping the wolves at bay—and this, to many families, is home. Sean Guiney, a former auto mechanic, is doing all he can to raise $30,000 a year to help those in that needy place with everything from food and school supplies to the possibility of affordable housing.

That was some story—a story that left me thinking about gifts and Christmastime.

Just a week or so earlier, I'd encountered another story in Wayne. This time I was in a boutique buying a bracelet for a friend when Sharon McGinley looked at me and said, "Beth Kephart, right? Radnor High School?" Yes, I agreed, and she reintroduced herself—a former classmate who had, as it turned out, spent some time getting to know those now too old for foster care, but unprepared for life. "I heard the stories," she told me, "about those who needed bridging between childhood and adulthood, and about all of those who fell through the cracks. It seemed like something had to be done, and so I decided to try to do it." Eddie's House: Doorway to Adulthood is the pretty amazing result.

It's a bleak day here. I've been up since shortly after midnight, working. The rain is gray and the earth is brown, and no one I know wants to be outside. But there are many out in this weather today who don't have choices like I do. There are also, thankfully, those who have decided to assert themselves against the status quo.

This blog post is for them.

Hiroshima in the Morning

Yesterday Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, a good and wise friend, wrote to say that Hiroshima in the Morning: A Memory, will be published by the Feminist Press in September 2010 in the big book fall of their 40th anniversary year.

Hiroshima is Reiko's book, a book about being a daughter, a mother, and a wife during nearly a year of travel. In 2001, Reiko, a New Yorker who had grown up in Hawaii, spent eight months in Japan interviewing the survivors of atomic bombings. She was away from her husband and children during the 911 attacks. That year away, she has written, on her web site, "fueled a new way of thinking about memory and truth and narrative," and Hiroshima is the book that has emerged from all that thinking. I've had the pleasure of reading this book throughout its incantation and making, and I am overjoyed for her that the Feminist Press will release it into the world.

Congratulations, dear Reiko.

Holding Up

As I walked the Penn campus on Monday I was struck by images of endings. This is a close-up of a campus information kiosk—all the advertisements, slogans, promises, queries snatched out from the rust-grip of staples. Come January, it will all be new again.

Here, in between corporate projects and Christmas shopping, between the tree I haven't gotten yet and the countless gifts I have, I am at work on a final round of edits for my adult novel. Come Monday, the book will be ready for prime time, which is to say, for its submission to editors. There's no telling what will happen after that. All I can say for certain is this: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto read it closely, and so did my agent, Amy Rennert. This book is already far better for the time they took with it—for the questions they asked, for the themes they parsed, for the way they told the story back to me.

Blog Famous

He wanted to sell me a hat.
I countered with a deal.
"How about if I promise," I proffered,"to make you blog famous?"

Garden Lights

If I happen to live on the storied Main Line, I happen to love the things that fall outside the history books, the guide books, the local gossip. This, for example, is the garden shop just down the street, which lights my way during evening strolls and heralds, always, Christmas.

Returning to Work

From the train platform at 30th Street Station, I always had this view of Cira Centre—of the offices, in particular, of Brandywine Realty Trust, a once and sometimes client. Waiting for the train on Monday evenings, I'd watch my friends across the way, huddled in meetings or hurrying back and forth, sitting alone with a pen in hand. I'd wonder what they were up to now, how their next buildings would shape the cityscape, what they would think of me if they turned and saw me—a teacher for a spell, not a consultant.

Yesterday I left academia and returned to the world of corporate work. I sat with my good friend (and co-author) Matt Emmens in the offices of Shire. Turned my thoughts toward an annual report and a news magazine. Buckled myself in for the ride. The thing about the life I live is that there are friends at every turn—people I am genuinely eager to see, stories I can thread my way into. Everywhere in this world, people are dreaming. They are putting up buildings and launching new drugs. Sometimes I stand by their side.

English 145 (11): Tea

Today, taking the train to Penn, I watched my world going by. Twice herds of deer—if you can call four, then five deer a herd—were scattered by the oncoming locomotion and made a heady dash for the margins. Near Rosemont a fox was nearly caught by the tail. Near Overbrook a hawk got mired in some kind of mid-air scuffle with a bird half its size and twice as fast.

Once in the city, I walked, as I always do—through 30th Street, toward Drexel, then west and south, toward Penn. I was followed, it would seem, by that hawk (or that hawk's cousin), which finally rested in a thorny tree and did not protest against its portrait.

Later, I would sit with my class at the Bubble House, where we poured variously tinted pots of tea (and one coffee) and shared a long, long lovely lunch. How do you say goodbye? Maybe you don't. That's how I'm figuring on it.

Holding On

Sometimes when I come to this computer and choose a photograph and settle it into its place on this blog, I only know what mood I am in, not what "what" I have to say. That is the case this evening. It has been a slow Sunday, one that has left me feeling awkward in relationship to myself.

For example: At church this morning, a perfect stranger approached me suggesting that I must not get much sleep; it was the darkness beneath my eyes, she said, that gave my insomnia away. But. I wanted to say. But: I actually slept last night. Five hours, I wanted to say. Five. Whole. Hours. Logged. Last. Night. It occurred to me then how truly frightening I must be on most days, how I am the only one who does not see me.

In the absolute still of the afternoon, I pondered a revision to a novel. I asked myself, What do you have left? I did not yield (unto myself) a sufficient answer. Sometimes, it seems, I don't have all that much left.

Then, tonight, my student, K., sent in her final words about the class I've taught at Penn. Her words were so smart, they were so honest, they were so earned that I just read them through, and cried. K.'s words should make me happy, and in many ways they do. But they signal the end of something I have loved—those particular students, this particular year, our together journey of discovery—and there is no cure for that.

She Man

"Now, would that be a snow man or a snow woman you've got there?" I asked, as I strolled by.

"It's a girl!" she said (emphatic). "She's just missing her hat."

The View from Here

The view through my north-facing office window this morning.
White, but for the pink replacing gray.

Purple Slash

Because it's gray outside, and the day wants color.

Lit: A Review

I've titled this post "Lit: A Review," but on this blog, I don't write reviews; I save that voice for the Chicago Tribune. Here I write about a book's impact, about where I was and how I felt when I read it.

I read Lit while lying on the slender black couch where I spend most sleepless nights. I read it pulled up under the blue blanket that snuffs the perpetual winter chill. I read it in three sittings and would have been happy with just one, but life (my life) got in the way. I heard voices in my head: This is an artist working. This is a woman resurrected. This is a mother who genuinely loves. This is a poet-teacher who, within the pages of Lit, is teaching us how a book like this gets made. There are so many extraordinarily fine sentences in Lit. There are fragments torn from Heather McHugh, Terrence Hayes, and Don DiLillo; words of advice from Tobias Wolf; stories about good-hearted addicts; revelations of a gorgeous sisterhood. There is a lot of soul searching, a lot of desperate need, no small share of triumph, and—this is, perhaps, the biggest thing—no accusatory fingers pointed. Mary Karr has lived one hell of a life. There would be blame enough to go around, but no one gets blamed in Lit, which is to say that no one emerges as caricature.

Last Monday, in Room 209 of the Kelly Writers House, J.—in endless pursuit of a deeper knowing—asked if I'd heard the Mary Karr interview, if I'd read any of the book's excerpts on-line. I said that when I got home that day, Lit would be waiting for me on the doorstep. J.—no romantic—actually sighed. "You're so lucky," he said, and J., I am. But we're all lucky, as a matter of fact, that books like these get written.

A readergirlz Winner

I felt a bit like an elf today, slipping through the halls of a local high school and delivering a copy of Nothing but Ghosts to Kiera Ingalls, the talented young writer who won the third readergirlz writing contest. I meant to stay for a short while, but my hosts—Katherine Barham and her class of aspiring writers—were dear and gracious, giving me room to talk about the extraordinary enterprise that is readergirlz and asking intelligent questions about the writer's life. Where do stories begin? How do titles erupt? Can books really build an audience through word of mouth? Why do so many embrace and celebrate books that don't appear to be immensely well written? These students had just, at Ms. Barham's prompting, written their own books and designed their own covers; they'd rounded up blurbs and crafted their bios. What, they seemed to be asking, is the future of books?

The future is you, I thought. And you. And you. It's Kiera, pictured here with the fabulous Ms. Barham, and with me, who felt so proud to meet her.

Lit

I said I wanted to read a good book, a very good book. I picked up Lit, by Mary Karr. I picked up Lit, and suddenly I wanted my son to have a copy, my students, my friends. In the middle of all my reading and wanting, my friend Kate Moses called, and I said, Lit. Lit. Lit., and she said, Did you get to the part about the wedding yet? and I said, I don't want this book to end. Sometimes I think I've fallen out of love with books. And then comes Lit, and I'm impassioned once again.

Home Coming

I stood outside my own kitchen, looking in, for I'd just been on that journey with the moon. I'd promised myself a few things, come December. More time to cook (by which I mean, time with new recipes). More flowers bought on a whim (and not just because the guests are coming). More time spent with books I actually want to read. Fewer yeses to requests that I can increasingly not live up to.

It was cold outside and warm within. My house always welcomes me home.