Never Enough Time

I went looking for W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz yesterday, and of course it was buried. There are thirteen bookshelves in my diminutive house and all of them are double stacked—triple, if physics allows—and this despite the fact that I take an alarming number of books to the local library for broader circulation. Even more alarming, I don't consider myself to be sufficiently well read. Or perhaps I read too many genres to have ever specialized in one. I love experts. I wish I were one. I'm not.

In any case, in the course of hunting for Austerlitz, I fell upon The History of Love, the Colum McCanns, the Rebecca Solnits, the complete Cathers, The Book of Salt and The Night Watch, The Optimist's Daughter, The Awakening, and I was Amelia Earhart, and when my husband found me fortressed in by a tower of books and asked (inevitably), "What are you doing?" I looked up and said, "Oh, Bill, I love these books, I love these books." With tears in my eyes that I had not known were there.

Tears because some of my dearest titles have grown slightly vague in my mind. Tears because I can no longer recite some of my favorite lines. Tears because I've just bought three new books for me along with so many books for others—books I have not, in some cases, yet read. Tears because I'm reading Brideshead Revisited for the very first time—the first time!—and when will I have time to read again my favorite books?

Why isn't there ever enough time?

We will take our son to the university bus today, and he will be driven, along with some of his classmates, north, returning for his first set of college finals. He will come home again two weeks from now. We'll miss him in the meantime.

Separately, unexpectedly, yesterday I discovered that a blog reviewer whom I've always admired had this to say about HOUSE OF DANCE. Thank you, Becky of Becky's Book Reviews. Thank you so much.

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Tango

... Then she stood there, hands on hips, waiting. A tango, with its blood-beat fatality. She began to dance. She didn't look at me, but her choices of where to advance and step, acknowledged my presence.

Tangos are made up of scraps of life, which have happened to survive. Scraps, rags, gathered together into the zigzag of the legs, continually obedient to flowing blood, spilt or unspilt.

John Berger, From A to X

One dance book later, several blogged confessions about dance lessons gone awry, and I have not yet said with clarity how elusive dancing is, how bound up with magic. Or how much I love dance but can't withstand dance, want to keep going, want to quit, am desperate to get it right, never do get it right, want to explain it, can't find the words—always competing thoughts in my head that make dance what? A pain? A pleasure? The beauty that is dance is nearly unattainable in all ways, except: Look at Iryna, here. And look what Berger has done with words to capture the raw "blood beat" of tango.

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Children's Classics

Claire, my third-grader niece, is in love with books. "Classics!" she says, when you ask her what she likes. "The Cricket in Times Square!" she declares, a recent favorite. Books that have survived, that have been loved, that are time tested and therefore true. She reads them to herself; she invites others to read to her; she recounts the tales in loving detail (then breaks into an all-out rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas").

Talking with Claire takes me back. To Heidi and Pippi Longstockings. To Harriet the Spy, The Secret Garden, Doctor Doolittle, and Black Beauty. It floods me with the desire to fill her library with more books to love—with classic classics or with books, newly written, that feel timeless. So far I've bought her the following for Christmas: River of Words, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Penderwicks, and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. (Along with necklace, for she's as pretty as can be.)

I wonder what you might suggest.

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Timeless. Placeless. True.

Woe lives in the hallways of mainstream publishing (or much of mainstream publishing). That much is clear. It's being reported on, debated, blog flogged. It lurks in the corners at night, while writers write and dream.

And then what happens? One picks up an unusual-looking book with an unusual-seeming premise by a writer, John Berger, who is a giant. A book (in this one instance, this single exemplar of many exemplars) called From A to X: A Story in Letters, which defies summary, but is (in most basic terms) a collection of letters found in a fictional prison. Letters penned by a woman who may or may not be named A'ida and addressed to a man whom we think is named Xavier. They are lovers, tender terrorists, revolutionaries. They speak in code. Or rather, she speaks, in letters that are no longer contained by chronology, about their life before and her life now without him. He writes marginalia in her letter's empty spaces— the drop notes of his mind from the spare space of his prison cell.

We readers are made responsible for piecing together a life, a world, an invention of places and events. Which sounds so much harder than it actually is, for what we are in fact given is a record of intimacy and understanding between two people in love.

We are given lines like these:

I am looking into your eyes, and I am not your friend, I'm your woman. And I want to tell you something.

The ephemeral is not the opposite of the eternal. The opposite of the eternal is the forgotten. Some pretend that the forgotten and the eternal are, when it comes down to it, the same thing. And they're wrong.

Others say the eternal needs us, and they are right. The eternal needs you in your cell and me writing to you and sending you pistachio nuts and chocolate.

Tell me about your foot. I need to know.

Imagine this book coming across the desk of an editor at a publishing house where the powers at be are operating under the premise that the only new books will be market-safe books, beach-readable and movie bound. Then look at its spine and see that From A to X was published by a house called Verso, whose stated mission is this: "Verso stands today as a publisher combining editorial intelligence, elegant production and marketing flair."

Ah yes, you think. We're going to be okay.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all—near, far. No. Always near.

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Blessings

Dark outside. Chill in the air. My son home. My husband near. My father, brother, and sister just down tomorrow's road. The refrigerator bursting with unusual ingredients, and four new recipes to hope through.

And then this blessing:

Thank you, Mr. Goldberg, for your review at YAbookscentral.com

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Sports Stories=Life Stories (or what I would have said at the ALAN conference)

Moira Silva, the ALAN workshop moderator whose company I would have had the pleasure of keeping this past Monday at the workshop I never (thank you, Delta Airlines) got to, just sent along the most gracious note of understanding, and I am grateful. Had I had
the chance to be among her and my co-panelists, I'd have answered Moira's questions this way.

Clearly you have chosen sports as a point of engagement with young people. How did you decide to use this lever? (Was it a conscious decision or did it evolve as you wrote?)
I built the character of Elisa first; I lived in her head for a while. Since she is patterned after who I was years ago, I knew her heart, I knew what would heal her from all the hurt and isolation she was feeling. Skating—its lift, its flow, its speed, its way of making a skater feel graceful, empowered, beautiful...I wanted Elisa to have all of this. I want all young people to have all of this.

What point of engagement worked for you as an adolescent reader/writer? Who/what provided that for you?
Language mattered most to me—the song of it, the way it played on the page. I skated myself, choreographed some of my routines, and I always fell for stories that felt choreographed to me—bigger than plot, bigger than dialogue, bigger than technique. I fell for the emotive entangling work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

As you write your sports stories, do you consider your audience to be both boys and girls?
I recognize that girls have been my primary readers up until now. I don’t write for them necessarily, but my books find them.

Can you describe a time when sports played an integral role in your life?
Sports are essential in my life. There’s a great deal of connection, for me, between the way a body can move or can be taught to move, and the way that words move across the page. I ice skated for many years, then joined the high school cross country, winter, and spring track teams, where I was a sprinter, high jumper, and long jumper and also a part of a relay team that went to states and to Jamaica. I played high school tennis as well, and when I went to Penn, I learned squash and played on the Varsity team. I was a tom boy through it all, always kicking and throwing the ball with guys. Now I am learning (always learning) ballroom dance, which is much more of a sport than one might at first think. And which requires better clothes than I own now or ever will own.

Readers have categorized your writing as sports stories; how else would you classify it?
I write about young people at turning points in a language-intensive way.

What have you hesitated writing about, or even eliminated? In other words, what negotiations have you made in writing for young adults?
I am always working against my tendency to play out a feeling or a thought too long, at the expense of plot. I try to speed things up more than I might otherwise, for other genres. By writing skating into UNDERCOVER and dance into HOUSE OF DANCE I was able to vary the rhythm and sound of the books.

Since our workshop theme is negotiations and lovesongs, can you describe a situation that a character of yours is trying to negotiate?
Elisa, my heroine, is writing love notes on behalf of love-struck boys when she realizes that she’s falling in love with one of her clients. It’s a conflict of interest, shall we say.

By using sports in your writing, what kinds of themes can you develop?
Pushing against the odds.

Can you tell us a bit of information about what you are writing on now?
NOTHING BUT GHOSTS is due out in June, and though galleys are already out, I’m still tweaking it in true Tennessee Williams style. I have a fourth YA book due out next February about a mission trip to a squatter’s village in Anapra, Mexico. I have a short story in a forthcoming HarperTeen anthology called NO SUCH THING AS THE REAL WORLD. I’m working on a novel that takes place in 1876 (in which there is rowing and some more ice skating).

Who has been the easiest character for you to write about? Hardest?
Ease comes with familiarity. All my characters are implanted with parts of me. I can move through them and walk with them once I know who they are.

How has the Internet affected your writing process and overall career as a writer?
My blog has brought me close to younger readers, helped me understand what is important to them and how they dream. It has also yielded friendships with adult readers and writers that I cherish.

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Prove the Publishing Houses Wrong. Please?

In today's New York Times, Motoko Rich continues the less-than-pretty news stream regarding the future of publishing. Less-than-pretty? No. Let's just call it what it is: Wholly distressing. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that, "with rare exceptions," editors won't be acquiring anything new. Indefinitely, that is. Indefinitely. All those stories authors have been working and reworking for years, all that hope, all that passion, all that possibility will have to find another home, a door that will open when it is knocked upon. And good luck, too, if that book is quiet, or literary, a work of art as opposed to a commercial venture, for, as Rich reports:

Once upon a time, some publishers suggested, they could cultivate under-the-radar authors and slowly build an audience for them over several books. Now, with few exceptions, books tend to come out of the gate at the top of the best-seller list or be deemed failures.

“It is seriously going to be a time for known commodities,” said Esther Newberg, a literary agent who represents blockbuster authors like the thriller writers Patricia Cornwell and Linda Fairstein and Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The Times. “I would hate to be starting out in the business.”

There is, of course, only one fix to this, and that's us consumers proving the publishing houses wrong. Proving that we are a civilization that needs more than vampire stories and thrillers and beach books to survive. That expects more from books than made-for-movie plots. We have just elected a tremendously literary president—a man who both reads and writes. He's calling for programs designed not just to fix a broken economy but to redress a spoiled, mucked-over planet. We have before us a new generation of young people who care so much about their country that they campaigned for change in force.

There's got to be more for them to read than books a publishing house declares a blockbuster.

There has to be more for all of us.

Keep books alive by buying them. Keep culture breathing in, breathing out.

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The Air We Breathe

I've just now set down The Air We Breathe, Andrea Barrett's science-infused novel about a community of tubercular patients trying to survive their own disease, the paranoia of World War I, and their inevitable disappointments. Barrett is a MacArthur Fellowship winner, a National Book Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist—accolades that she has absolutely earned for her ability to web together science, plot, and sentences as tranquil as a finger lake in September.

She does it all.

In The Air We Breathe, Barrett does something else as well—tells her story with a chorus of voices, a gentle, overriding we. Back then we lay on our porches in orderly rows.... Fields surrounded us—they still do—and also a river, three ponds, and the road curving down toward the village.

From this vantage point, this cliff above and beyond and after all action, Barrett's story swoops in, hawk like, and settles on the shoulders of protagonists, then swoops off again up back toward that we: When she stepped inside the doorway, we learned from the way she smiled and the swiftness with which Naomi leapt from the ledge and moved to greet her that she was also Naomi's friend.

We saw. We learned. We regret. We should have known. We, unwittingly, contributed to a catastrophe.

It's a rather miraculous performance, far more effective than the second-person strategy of another National Book Award finalist (in a different year), Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, which, for all its cleverness, even whimsy got stuck, I thought, in its narrative device, could not move beyond the claustrophobia.

Most writers, I suspect, read as much for the suspense of the how a book gets made as for the story itself. As I read The We Are We Breathe, I often felt my heart hammering, wondering, How will she pull her narrative off? Can she take the we all the way to the end and make it work? Andrea Barrett does. It's worth discovering for yourself.

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Gifts

I am the recipient of gifts: too many, none of them earned.

Yesterday, for example, in the airport: a young girl from Penn State who, like me, waited for that ersatz plane to San Antonio. She was beautiful—dark haired, a diamond chip on the left flare of her nose, a tender kind of edgy. Studying Spanish, dreams of becoming a translator, a good sort. I liked talking with her. We made a pact. We said, If we hear again that the plane that is about to take us high in the blue cold sky (the plane that was so tiny that it had no overhead luggage compartments) needs "more" maintenance (after already waiting a long time for maintenance) then we will be officially spooked. We got word. We were, together, spooked. She went her way and I went mine, but I felt as if, during all that waiting, I had made a friend.

Another gift: Dina Sherman of HarperCollins was kind beyond description about my airport dilemma. She understood. I am an uber responsible, don't let people down if I can possibly help it sort, and I never not show up for things; it's against my annoyingly obsessive nature. Dina made it okay for me to go home during the swamp of airline confusion.

Another gift: A few days ago, Vivian of Hip Writer Mama took the time to lay out, step by step, just how one embeds links in a blog. I had no idea previously how this got done. I don't know how anyone learns this stuff in the first place. But I know that it took Vivian a long time to teach me, and this was after she had already gone the distance, interviewing me and three others for last week's Winter Blog Tour. She's something else.

Another gift: Jane Satterfield, whose beautiful, searing memoir, Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond, is due out next year, sent, arriving just today, a book of poems by Elizabeth Spires. It's called The Wave-Maker and Jane's generosity is inexplicable (except that Jane, whom I profiled not long ago on this blog, has always been enormously generous). Jane's taste is immaculate. I've been sitting with this book for the past half hour and I think I'm in love with every page. I wonder if Ms. Spires would mind me quoting a stretch from a single poem called "Translation of My Life":

Imagine: a town
in the same universe as this one,
with the same physical laws,
but no poets, no poetry.
No scribbling hands up late
at night writing words
they believed would save them.
No noisy fluttering pages
to disturb the peace
of a dreaming populace.

I hope not.

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Goodness

This morning I am grateful to the finches that still come, despite the snow, and to Lorie Ann Grover—a mother, a writer, an illustrator, a former dancer, a co-founder of ReaderGirlz, that YA site that transcends all others—who read HOUSE OF DANCE and had kind words to say.

Goodness abounds.

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Not San Antonio

This is what I had: New shoes and a turquoise dress. My head filled with the fine craftsmanship of my fellow would-be ALAN panelists. My camera, for I've always wanted to see San Antonio. Two books for the plane. A bag of M&Ms.

This is what happened: The computers aren't working well at the A 12 terminal of the Philadelphia airport—Boston flight posted on the San Antonio screen, those in charge scratching their heads and asking each other the sort of questions we passengers had hoped to ask them. An inconvenience, only.

Up next, though, the plane I am to take is three-quarters boarded when somebody mentions a Whoops. Whoops as in, Um. We're sorry. This plane isn't actually headed southwest. It's headed for New York.

(The woman in charge running across the tarmac, gathering the passengers who must now gather their bags, saying, I'm sorry. We got that wrong.)

Afterward, another whoops. Whoops as in, Your plane—the one that is actually headed southwest—is in maintenance. We don't know what's wrong. We don't know when it will be fixed. Give us an hour. Whoops as in another hour goes by, and now the terminal printers don't work and the sign still reads: Boston 9:50, even though by now it's 11 o'clock and all we want to do is head southwest. And now the word goes out that Maintenance is still having trouble with the would-be (ersatz?) plane and they don't know when they'll get it fixed.

There were five us headed for San Antonio. One by one we began to peel off. Too much of this didn't feel right for any of it to be right. That was the decision we singularly made.

This is how it went. This is why I am home and not in San Antonio, at the ALAN conference, where I had looked so forward to being.

This is what I thought as I drove home from the airport, where I'd spent the past five hours: I love my husband. I love my son. I love my father and family. I love my tiny house. I love my friends and the books on my shelf.

I love this life.

I'm very disappointed that I'm not in San Antonio. But I'm still here, alive to the cold brisk air. With a pair of new shoes I may someday have a place to wear.

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Thanksgiving

I've been aware, these past several weeks, of hush, of stillness. In the city I've walked on streets where I've only ever known bustle and had the sidewalk width to myself. In parking lots I have my choice of spaces. In client offices I've waited all alone in lobbies. Quiet and hush. This sense that the world is turned around on itself, knotted with questions, and of course it is. These are the times in which we live.

But yesterday, at the farmer's market: A prevailing neighborliness. Stories shared over counters of cheese and chocolate about children coming home, tables being extended, rooms being rearranged for guests. A rediscovery (perhaps, again) that in the hardest times as in the best of times we are glad for one another.

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The Writing Minor

I could begin in so many places with this. I'll just begin here: A little past midnight two nights ago, my college freshman sent a long, jostling email full of joyous news and fine explorations (midnight volleyball games, a shot at field reporting for campus TV, an evening out that was just "so much fun"). He wrote the note and sent it; a half hour later, he wrote a second. Just after I sent you the last email, it began, I figured out that I want to minor in writing.

Yes. My heart stopped.

When it started beating again, I had to dance.

Today's email, then, is an open love letter to a guy who has taken this writing journey with me and who will now formally embark upon it on his own. I retrieve a bit of history, a passage from my memoir, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World. In celebration of what was and what becomes.

Can you read the world like you read a book? Can you see in stalks and cows and sheep and rock a telling narrative? Can you teach a child? Can a child teach you? In southern France, we have been thinking of Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” We have been hunting for details, patterns, and surprises, making lists and trading them, working on our capacity to bear witness: Not just to the moon but to the haunting power of the moon. Not just to the dying of the sunflowers but to the fact of so many embedded seeds. Not just to the thick, stone, age-old houses but to the way those houses come alive.

I want my son to grow up poking his fingers through the web of mysteries, hoping for the unexpected, taking pleasure or conviction or understanding from what he finds. I want him to build the bridges we all must learn to build between the world we are taught and the world we read about and the world we will only ever guess at. Curiosity bolsters knowledge, and knowledge feeds intelligence, and intelligence helps us navigate our lives—that is the way it works—and so we are here looking for the cloud of flour above the baker’s shop. For the miniature dogs in the baskets of bikes. For the color of river water to change depending on the light. For the cows to crowd into shady wedges, for boys to head off with fishing poles, for the rain to come at night. We have gone from town to town in southern France, teaching ourselves to pay attention, to see—the domestic and the sacred, the glorified and the wasted, the crumble of a castle and the wedding in the street. Reading the world like a book so that tomorrow or the next day the stories we imagine, tell, act out, or write will pay homage right back to the world.

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The Poetry of Sound (Or: My Morning at the Sound Studio)

Sometimes (increasingly often) my client work collides with my writing/photography life, and yesterday this very thing happened in the form of a trip taken to that fantastic Philadelphia sound studio, Audio Post. I was there to record a fresh voice over for a photo essay I posted not long ago on this blog—to make the sound right in an echo-free room with an expert's help. Behind a pair of double doors, I stood—my script on a music stand before me, headphones snug on my head, my leather jacket thrown across a nearby chair for leather, I learned, is disrespectful of sound. Scott Waz, the studio president, was unaccountably near and out of sight.

I write, as I have often said, to a certain music in my head. I seek to generate, on the page or screen, a pattern of aural meaning, a choreography of sound—which words should fall, which should rise, which should patter together, which should be held as a long, clear note. Hush or snap. Sigh or declare. But standing before a microphone that has entertained the likes of Jennifer Lopez could have been a tad intimidating, especially as I had only heretofore recorded my vlogs into the Mac microphone that sits on my glass desk, in a window-wrapped room, at the front of a house where the door slams freely all day long. (Oh, and the phone rings and the emails go ding.)

Except for this: Scott Waz is extraordinarily good at what he does. Not just a sound engineer, but a poet of sound, a guy who knows how to generate power, how to keep something still, how to tell a story with sound alone. "Try not to oversell that word," he'd tell me through those ear phones, just his voice, no threat in it. "See if you can give that phrase more time." "When you get to that P, turn your head to the right and that way you won't pop it." And on and on, the quietest possible instruction. Two hours for five minutes of sound.

I read everything I write out loud—many times. I'll read going forward with a new gauge in my head. An even deeper appreciation for the poetry of sound. And soon I'll repost that vlog of mine and you'll see just what a difference Scott makes.

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On Air (and an UNDERCOVER giveaway)

Yesterday I wrote about the float of a book—how the books I fall into and wish to write generate energy in the seams, in their criss cross and overlays.

Today I am myself floating on air, for Hip Writer Mama, of whom I wrote just a few days ago, has posted her interview with me on her popular blog site, which has been running terrific author interviews all week long as part of the 2008 Winter Blog Blast Tour.

http://hipwritermama.blogspot.com/2008/11/wbbt-through-eyes-of-beth-kephart-and.html

I'm not going to say more here, for I'd love for you to visit her today—Hip Writer Mama, who puts such time into her interviews and such care in the posting (obviously, I don't even know how she does what she does with all those fancy color-coded embeds, or I'd do a little of that myself). Later today (perhaps by 11 AM Philly time?) you will also be able to find me on the MySpaceHarper Teen site, where I'm writing about something that is important to all of us who care about our future: books, and how we vote for them by buying them.

http://www.myspace.com/harperteen

Enough having just been said, I think I'll go hop my train for the city and float some more.

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Unexpected Float

It takes time to write a book; it just does. I learn that newly each time out—have learned it again over these past few years as the novel I've been writing takes its shape. Three voices. One day. A tapestry of flashbacks and collisions. The deeper in I get with this book, the more I disassemble and reassemble, the better I come to understand that scenes don't make a book. Seams do. The unexpected float from one thing to another. The power of a recurring detail, an operative refrain. The care one must take to avoid needless repetitions, blatant explanations, false exultancies.

(and sometimes you make up a word because it fits)

Something is coming together at last, something that feels as if someone else, not me, has been at work, by which I mean, that this book that I am working on has the power to surprise me.

A good, essential thing.

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Whisked Away by Books

I wrote recently of my hope to re-visit favorite books, and (though the weather changed, and a friend stopped by, and one new client project started while another ended) I've stayed the course. Rediscovering the crystalline pleasures of When the Emperor was Divine, for example, Julie Otsuka's slender novel about the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. Five voices tell this tale in five exquisite chapters—the mother who discovers the evacuation orders, the daughter observing her disappearing world, the son who wanders about the internment camp, the son and daughter (a magnificent 'we') upon returning to a battered home in a prejudiced world, and the father who had been taken from them all much earlier. Five chapters. The cresendo of simple sentences. The power of quotidian detail. A book that every person should read—young adults especially. I was not disappointed in my return to this book. I wondered where Julie Otsuka, trained as a painter, might be now, what she is writing.

Yesterday I re-read Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, another narrow, artful volume, this one by Harriet Scott Chessman. The story of the painter, Mary Cassatt, and her sister, Lydia, dying of Bright's disease and serving as Mary's muse and model. A simple story, simply told—where plot is what a dying woman chooses to love, and how she helps her sister let her go. Excerpts from historic correspondence webbed right into the dialogue, the narrative. These final words: I yearn to be simply present in this day, filled for the moment with color and shape, my own hand urging the needle through the silk.

Today I'll take a new book on the train with me—Andrea Barrett's multi-voiced historical novel The Air We Breathe. Later in the week I'll be reading one classic I've never read (forgive me), Brideshead Revisited, and this weekend, while en route to San Antonio for the ALAN panel, I'll be reading John Berger's From A t0 X: A Story in Letters. All three books picked up at the local bookstore on Sunday, as part of my pledge to buy books and more books through this economic downturn.

Rare to find myself with this tunnel of reading time. Grateful for the whisking away, always.

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Transcendence

Two nights ago Bill and I watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," the extraordinary Julian Schnabel film based on the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the bon vivant editor of French Elle who suffered a massive stroke in his early 40s. Condemned to live with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, Bauby nonetheless authored a memoir that tantalizes, that lives. Schnabel's film is painterly, as one would expect—deeply layered, surprising, reeling off into high color and fantasy. It is a wonder, a feat of the heart.

Films are free to do so many things that books cannot, and yet, "Diving Bell," the film, is a writerly provocation, reaffirming the power of tangents and the fantastical, of flashbacks and dream forwards, within the shell of a story that is ultimately chronological. I am interested in the seams between things, in understanding just how memory and imagination sit inside the frame of narrative. In how memory and imagination become, to some degree, narrative.

I am interested in how one thing sits beside another in a story. In placements. In transcendence. And I am awed, in the end, by this man named Bauby, who found hope and love and power and a way to speak the mind that was still his.

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The 2008 Winter Blog Blast Tour (and a tribute to hipwritermama)

Fourteen months ago, when I first went blogging, I knew nothing, I knew no one, I scratched about and made my way. I'd fall through the rabbit hole of GoodReads, for example, and trip up against some smart reviewers. I'd find a comment on one of my postings from, say, Miss Erin, and travel over toward her blog, only to encounter others about whom I would sigh to myself, Oh, wouldn't it be nice to know a little about them.

Hipwritermama was one such force. She seemed so smart. So, well, hip. She thought a lot about books—the ones she was writing, the ones she was reading. She took her time to say precisely what she thought and how she felt. When she disappeared at summer's end for a brief vacation she returned—refreshed, rejuvenated, ever thoughtful. I noticed this.

I dared, at last, to reach out to her. She took the time to come my own blog's way. She was generous, encouraging me on with a passage I was writing, or commenting on something I'd openly been struggling with.

http://hipwritermama.blogspot.com/

I learned, about her, that she lives where I once did. She helped me locate (for my memory was fuzzy) the pond where I taught myself to skate (a memory I borrowed for UNDERCOVER). We talked about cooking, about expectations, about raising children, and recently, hipwritermama, who is also known as Vivian, took the time—she really takes the time—to read my books and to ask me questions for the Winter Blog Blast Tour.

I'm not the only one on whom she has showered such attention. I stand in the privileged company of Melissa Walker, Mark Peter Hughes, and Wendy Mass. All of us together being featured among many other wonderful writers over the course of this coming week.

I'm looking forward to reading these interviews. I invite you to take a look at the full line up, which is posted on the fabulous Chasing Ray.

http://www.chasingray.com/archives/2008/11/2008_winter_blog_blast_tour_sc.html

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Historical Novel, Excerpt

The rain still sliding down and down here, the house quiet. I work on the historical novel in this stillness, an excerpt from which I post here today. It is 1876, August, Philadelphia. William, Ma, and Francis are just barely getting by, but Francis, who will be murdered by a policeman later, has a gift for the remarkable. In this scene he has caught a bobolink by the Schuylkill River and brought it back home in a magenta hatbox, an act of theater and, also, generosity.

The sun still at his back, the blue-steamed sky as his frame, Francis stood in the doorway and slid the lid of the box back just wide enough for the three to see, until Ma, catching her breath, said, “And such a derring-do he is.” There was a penny toss game getting under way across the street—the toughs, already distracted. There was a milk cart trotting by, a tabby in the gutter swatting fleas, and the sun had been high all day, heat was the mood, heat was August in Philadelphia, and the kitchen stunk of bleach. William had been upstairs reading Moby Dick. He still felt out to sea.

“He’s a good bird,” Francis said, and now, like an illusionist with a practiced trick, he closed the door behind him and freed the box of its lid—such a strange box, William thought, so like Francis to be out there toting a livid, bigheaded color. Into his free hand, Francis scooped the bobolink and let the bird stretch its one wing and settle, let the bird flaunt the bright coal-blackness of its feathers, the drifts of snow white across his small, proud back, the straw-colored cap on his head. The bird cranked its head right, and blinked.

“Come on, bird,” Francis encouraged. “You show Ma what you’re made of now.” William could see the pulsing heart in the bird’s elastic chest, the cinders of fear in his glassine eyes, and Francis—understanding, sympathetic, a genius with living things, living being Francis’s genius—began to whistle until the bird gave up its song, which wasn’t shrill and wasn’t haunting, just a daylight summer song.

“He’s a soprano,” Ma said, after awhile.

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Incredibly So

Have I mentioned that it's been raining here, and that I got called for jury duty, and that I'm really aching to see my kid again? These things are true. But also true, incredibly so, is that last night, returning in the dark to our abode here in the Philadelphia suburbs, I discovered (nearly tripped across) a bag full of incredibly beautiful blossoms. At no time in recent history have I seen such a gorgeous arrangement. But more than that, I've never been quite so surprised, except for that one time, when I turned sixteen, and my mother somehow managed to persuade high school super star Jim Clancey to come to our house for a party.

(He came to MY house for a party!!!!!!!!!)

(I always wished that I knew how my mother managed that.)

But that isn't all. Because just now, having been out and watching the stock market bounce all around down on someone's TV and thinking oh, what a mire we're in, when again might we feel somewhat deliciously carefree, a box arrived bearing a matching, gorgeous, cashmere-soft scarf and long gloves—gloves and scarf the HOUSE OF DANCE shoe color, if you know what I mean.

Both of these gifts being from the same one person, for some small thing that I had done. I don't ever remember being thanked so elaborately, so exuberantly, so lavishly, not for anything. I am rather in a stammer, and, basically, I'll be inarticulate and inadequate with glee the remainder of this afternoon.

So may I, Anna Lefler, send you the biggest (((((((())))))))) hug. For being who I guessed you would be, and even so much more sweller than that.

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A Return to (some) Favorite Books

There hadn't been time in a long time to return to my shelf of books, but this morning I did. I felt like I do on those Saturday mornings when I leave in the near-dark for the Farmer's Market and stand (in advance of jostling crowds) before cases of fresh cheese, fat shrimp, silk chocolate, blueberry muffins. Rich. That's how I felt.

I pulled Elizabeth Graver's Awake to my lap and read again the last 50 or so pages—one of the finest renderings of maternal guilt and regret that I have ever read. I pulled down Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine and decided to read it all the way through again tomorrow, so that I could remember fully why I loved it so much a few years ago. I took Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses into my hands, and resolved to read it again on Sunday. I returned to The Cellist of Sarajevo and remembered: Another book of multiple voices, masterfully done.

And then I started reading Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, and oh my, truly. Have you ever seen so much poetry in a novel's opening lines? Almost like reading Carole Maso's Ava—every detail an awakening, a surprise.

For you today, then, from Hansen:

Crickets.

Mooncreep and spire.

Ears are flattened to the head of a stone panther water spout....

Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar.

White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.

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The Perfect Day

This would be enough for me: A place to sit. Proximity to birds. Unsullied water. Reading weather. I'd carry a picnic of winesap apples, cheddar cheese, artisan bread, an almond chocolate bar (which I would eat in the smallest possible increments over the course of an entire day). People would stop by, every now and then, and tell me their stories. I'd be thinking my own thoughts the rest of the day. The sun would crawl across the sky; the sun would change the day's colors.

At night I'd travel back inside, into a necessarily cozy house. A fire crackling in the fireplace. A blanket tossed across the couch.

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When we Cannot be There to Cure

While warming last night's dinner for this afternoon's lunch, I began paging through the current New Yorker, stopping at a Joan Acocella story called "The Child Trap: The rise of overparenting." Among the books cited in the story is A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, by Hara Estroff Marano, an editor at large at Psychology Today, who once asked me to write a magazine story by the same title. I ultimately declined, for while I have often worried about children being asked to do too much too soon under too much pressure, I couldn't abide by the theory that we are out here raising wimps. I know too many young people who are anything but, and I believe in the future of this country.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/17/081117crbo_books_acocella

I've frequently been asked about the overparenting phenomenon because I once wrote a book about the importance of giving children room to dream and to breathe. I wrote of raising my own son in this idiosyncratic household of artists. Of forging a community of young readers and writers with whom he might dream out loud. I wrote, in SEEING PAST Z: NURTURING THE IMAGINATION IN A FAST-FORWARD WORLD, of the sometimes loneliness of choosing the road mostly untaken. I worried about whether I was making the right choices, whether our son's college application—his very future—would suffer because he did not have a comparably long resume of private lessons, quantified triumphs, proof of far-above-par life ambition. Because his mother had not pushed to give him one.

Reading Acocella's review essay just now made me think again on these issues, to reassess just what might have been gained or loss. It brought to mind a conversation we'd had with our son a few days ago, when he called at night to, as he says, give us an update. "This story has a good ending," he began, as he often does, a habit he got into years ago when he realized he had a slightly anxious woman for a mother.

"Well, the thing is, I woke up at 3 AM with a really bad earache. I mean, it just was really bad," he said.

"Okay."

"So I tried to go back to sleep and I couldn't, and finally it was 6 AM, and I took a shower. But I still felt really bad, I mean, there was just so much pain, so I went off to Health Services and when I got there, I realized they were closed."

Oh Lord, I thought. Oh no. Because this is a kid who can have a fever of 104 and say simply that he's going upstairs to take a rest. A kid who refused to admit that it hurt even the tiniest bit after he got all four wisdom teeth pulled.

"So, you know, I didn't really have any options except to check myself into the emergency room," he continued.

"The emergency room? Of the hospital?" My husband and I said, choral like. Because we're talking dawn here, and an off-the-campus institution.

"Yeah. But it was okay. It's not that far from campus; I remembered seeing it one day. You know, it's a process getting checked into an emergency room. But they took care of everything, so now I'm pretty much fine, or will be."

This is a simple story, no heroics; I'm not deluded. No one has saved the world or out-thought Paulson on the economy. But when our son told us his tale, hours later, when his pain had passed, an entire wash of emotions ran over me. Relief, most of all, that he'd done the right thing and was well. Realization, absolutely, that he's on his own now, he's a man. There comes a time, and that time has come for me, when we cannot be there to cure. We can only be there to listen afterward, and to be grateful for the children with whom we've been entrusted.

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Insomnia: A Poem

At night I keep
watch over my own
heart grinding, hands
winged out like a sylph
to muffle the sound. You
wouldn’t die either,
unaware. You would
stand by affirming blue,
you would remember
the plummeting pink
of the sun that was
caught in the blur
of yesterday’s train,
the shroud of your face, too,
in the scratched glass,
and in the rocking.
Hands over heart,
heart crossing.

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The Children of North Philadelphia in Words and Pictures

As those of you who have visited this blog know, I recently had the great privilege of spending a day in North Philadelphia among those who are working to make lives better for children, and among the children themselves.

This vlog tells that story in words and pictures. It, like St. Christopher's Foundation for Children that sponsors the programs I visited, holds hope high and (I'll use that word again) aloft.

The music is from Les Choristes.

Thank you, Scott Waz of Audio Post, for helping me re-engineer the sound.

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Jean and Iryna Paulovich

Last night we drove to New Jersey to see our favorite professional ballroom dance couple, Jean and Iryna Paulovich. I've written of them here before. Of Jean, who has taught me to take it slow in salsa, to be late in rumba, to soften the knees in the paso, who says—not often, but enough to keep my hopes alive—"Yes, Beth, this is it." Of Iryna, who sometimes teaches with Jean, who can walk you all around a song and explain, "Now you are on a corner waiting. Now you notice the guy. Now you walk toward him, lazy, not that interested. Now you agree to dance with him. You sigh."

They held a party last night—for their students, for themselves. They extended roses; they danced. But more than anything they exemplified what a marriage can be—so full of passion for an art; so full of respect, one for the other; so happy for the chance to create, to yield a good something together.

We watch ballroom all the time on TV—those forced seductions, those assembled two-minute passion tales. What a grand thing it is, then, to see two people who deeply love each other, dancing through and for that love. To see dance the way dance is meant to be.

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Tears Fall Down

Yesterday the leaves here gave up for good, streaming down, hailing down; at times I thought that I was seeing snow. It was the end of the autumnal show. I felt deep melancholy.

Late in the day, Bill and I watched "Lars and the Real Girl," a story about a lonesome man who is pained by touch and who nonetheless longs for a woman. And so he brings a beautiful, contemplative-seeming sex doll into his life and (consequently) into his community—all of them treating this silent creature with such care and making room, always, for the man (Ryan Gosling) to step forward, out of delusion and sadness and into life.

I was so deeply moved by this movie—by its oddness, its kindness, its determined, quiet vision. Moved by the artists who would make such a film and the producers who would let them. It brought the film "Waitress" to mind, and also "Once," a movie about a busker and an immigrant who make music during one Dublin week. I can hardly think of "Once" without welling up with tears. Without knowing, for sure, that this is the sort of legacy I'd like to leave—one story, one single story that gets every note right.

Why is it so hard to capture human kindness—on the page, on the screen? To do it as well as Lars and Once and Waitress? These movies stand out because they are the rare exception, because they dare to be compassionate and odd at the same time, compassionate, perhaps, because they are odd.

As an artist, I know what I would like to achieve. As a person, I know how far I must travel still to get there.

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Collisions

I have been at work on a book off and on for two years, as I have previously posted. It's an historical novel, deeply researched, and three voices carry the plot.

Here is the lesson of a multiply voiced novel: Collisions are essential, and they should not look like coincidence. The collisions (between characters, within moments, across voices) must carry meaning. They must signify.

I work on the signifiers now. It is slow but fascinating going. I look to the masters to see how it is done—Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, and now Jayne Anne Phillips in her new novel, Lark & Termite, which got her a starred PW review, for starters, but more than that, it has Tim O'Brien saying:

What a beautiful, beautiful novel this is—so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving. I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark and Termite is by far the best new novel I've read in the last five years or so.

I'd love to know of other masters of collision, of when you think multiply voiced novels work.

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Here, Now (and the sun breaks through)

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Quiet

Perhaps because it has been raining. Perhaps because the trees keep losing their leaves at a rapid, unstoppable clip. Perhaps because I have allowed myself back inside a novel I have trembled about for months.

Perhaps I don't know why, but the house is a different sort of quiet.

Yesterday, running outside with my camera between rain showers, I stopped and glanced toward the kitchen, so unpeopled just then, so still. No stacks of my son's homework on the table, my mother not there with her cup of tea.

This quiet is a new quiet. I'm learning to bend it toward me, finally.

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Autumn Toward Winter

The wind whips, the rain slaps, the trees shake off their leaves (too soon, don't be in such a hurry). It is autumn turning to winter here. It is winter coming.

I am summoning the courage today to return to a book that I've been writing, off and on, for two years. An historical novel that, I fear, I've written too precisely. So that there isn't enough air between the words. So that a reader has to hear a very particular background song to hold the rhythm, therefore the characters, therefore the mood, in place.

I am up early, searching for air.

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Nothing but Ghosts ARCS

Little by little, it happens. An image floats in, a voice makes itself heard, a story evolves and devolves and is thwarted and is found, and an agent says, Keep writing, then an editor steps in, and then questions are raised, and some brilliant someone designs a cover, and, finally (it seems impossible at times, it seems like it won't happen) a book gets made.

But none of it seems real to me until the galleys are in hand—advance readers copies. Today ARCS for Nothing but Ghosts were dropped (I heard the sound, I went running) onto my front porch. Ten of them. Two of which I mailed at once, one of which I drove to the local library, seven of which now sit nearby. Vivian (hipwritermama) said, "Take a photograph, Beth." She said, in other words, Take a moment. Celebrate.

Why am I always afraid to celebrate?

This time I won't be.

A glass of chianti at the ready.

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The Morning After

What it will take now is us being true to the call for civic responsibility, decency, humility. To living within our own means so that there is room, clean air, fresh water, hope for every other. Mutual regard trumping self regard. The end of arrogance.

It will take all of us, because no one man can transform a country.

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Aloft

I found her in a shop called Imagine in that place known as Skaneateles, and I brought her home because she gave me hope. I've hung her in my office window so that I might watch her float on air.

Do you remember that thirty-four minute French film called "The Red Balloon?" Do you remember how the balloon was the boy's best friend and did not have to speak to take him places? The balloon would show up and the boy would look up and that was the adventure.

We hunt for stories as writers—for complexity, entanglements, surprises. But sometimes it is the simplest story that surprises us the most, that we remember, all these years later.

We catch our breath.

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Happy News

"UNDERCOVER," Jill Santopolo, my editor, writes, "just got chosen for the 2009 Texas Lone Star Reading List AND the 2008-09 Tayshas Reading List."

And because that makes me happy, I post the news here. I have heard from other schools (my alma mater, even) that UNDERCOVER is sneaking onto recommended reading lists, and not long ago, while giving a talk, the dear librarian from Upper Darby High School (proud secondary ed proving ground of Tina Fey) made mention of this delightful fact: UNDERCOVER is sometimes being coupled in classrooms there with the original "Cyrano de Bergerac," which inspired some of the story.

I send, then, a virtual hug to these librarians who have so generously made room for UNDERCOVER. In NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, due out in June, I play out my admiration for librarians in full.

For now, right now, I can only say thank you.

Oh, and maybe this would be a good time to mention that an UNDERCOVER paperback is due out in May with a supplement I've loved writing. In that supplement, we meet Elisa a few years on. We read some of her new poetry. We learn the fate of her burgeoning romance with Theo. And Dr. Charmin remains within view.

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Pulse Red

In the neo-natal intensive care unit of St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, there are the babies born too soon, the families who love them, and the doctors and the nurses who fight the daily battle, not just for survival but for quality of life.

Last week while there taking photographs on behalf of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, I met a young man and his girlfriend, high school age. Their baby had been born at just 27 weeks six days before, and now inside the warming bed he lay, scarred by surgery, linked into life by machines.

"Look at this," the young father gestured, and he began to introduce me to his child. "He got his ears from my girlfriend, see?" he said. "He got his chin from me. I cut off my dreadlocks when he was born. I want to be a respectable dad." Then this young man—charismatic, beautiful, his smile like a tilted crescent moon—slipped his hand inside the circle opening of the covered warming bed and fit it upon his baby's tiny head—big as an oversized cap, and gentle. "Take our picture," he said, and through the thick plastic, past all those tubes, I did.

It will be late January, at the earliest, before this baby goes home. Between now and then, his parents will be driven to the hospital every day after school by his great-grandfather on his mother's side.

The future must be imagined every day. It must be hoped for.

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Creation

In Skaneateles you can walk straight out to the end of the pier and stand above the world's cleanest body of water—stand there and look out and look through the pristine and the unsullied, the hints of emerald within the blue.

Yesterday there was still the bloom of lemon and cranberry leaves along the shore and a sedate crowd of white gulls on a single sun-warmed roof. There was the coming crisp of winter, the gaping grins of autumn's pumpkins. One season invested in the next.

There are days too beautiful to record. There is glint that can't be captured. Beauty like this leaves me gasping for words, struggling to stitch a single line of meaning.

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