The Good Writer

"When asked why she wrote, she replied, 'Because I'm good at it.'"

That's Flannery O'Connor as quoted by Joy Williams in her New York Times Book Review review of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.

Because I'm good at it. And why not? Why not abandon all the philosophizing for a moment—put the moral avatars in one corner and the world peace makers in another, give the riff raff their pot of coffee (very black) and their prime rib (bloody rare), and make a declaration?

Flannery O'Connor wrote lonely, she wrote dying, she wrote in pain, she wrote through. Flannery O'Connor wrote, and she was good. Didn't need the world to tell her (though it did). She had no time to lose.

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Unpleasant Characters

These words from Zoe Heller, as brought to us by Patricia Cohen, in yesterday's New York Times: "The point of fiction is not to offer up moral avatars, but to engage with people whose politics or points of view are unpleasant or contradictory."

I do a quick mental count against books I've written and books I've dreamed. Hmmm. The early polling suggests that I may have missed the point. I've been tripping behind Henry James instead, who instructed us that the "only obligation...of a novel...is that it be interesting." (Hey, I'm trying.) And I've stumbled after Denise Levertov, too: "One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language." I've cherished the Camusian notion (though of course I make zero claims), that "the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

But unpleasantness? Politics? Have I been going about this all wrong? Should I have been hanging out, in my head, with far more characters I don't like, characters I wouldn't expect my readers to like, so as to make my work more engaging? Every book needs a villain. Every story hinges on conflict. But just how unredemptively unpleasant do we wish our characters to be?

It's the question I pose to you, oh careful readers, on this day.

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Beseiged: A Poem

Such sweet succulence stolen
in the night when I did not lie sleeping,
when I assumed the sound of ruin
was in my head, something I had said,
regretted saying, and not the doe and her fawn
in the garden of fritillary. They had been so spooned
over with near fruit, my spotted lilies.
They had been so verging close to giving me
morning more still and lovely than any
night. How fleeting, how wretched,
the possibility of meaning.

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Love Equals Money ?

No doubt this will make me unpopular. Certainly I've been unpopular before.

But.

I'm hearing a lot these days about folks out of work and about the impact of such losses on family, on love. I'm feeling the quiet out there and also the quiet within, where work at my own marketing communications firm has slowed considerably and projects that were once sure things have been thrown off of their tracks. I get worry. I get wondering what tomorrow will bring. I get sitting down at 4 AM with the finances and the taxes and the bills and jiggering things around to make the many pieces fit. Simpler meals, more carefully made. Shoes worn until the soles are left behind on the pave. A house that feels emptier as less comes in—but also roomier, perhaps, also more accommodating.

But what I don't get (and here's where you start to hate me) is the level of animosity I'm finding, in some places, toward those who have lost their jobs. Spouses furious with spouses. Disappointments stomped out in public. Quotes like this one, found today in a Newsweek story titled, "Men Will Be Men:" When money goes, love flies out the window. Spoken by an interviewed man clearly living a whole lot of char and hurt.

Does it have to be this way? Must love be contingent on funds? Can't love also be the time that is spent just being together, finding a way? We're not going to get these days back. Not ever. Can we really put love on hold until the coins start clattering in?

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Undercover and the Paperback Extras

When Miss Jill Santopolo invited me to create an "Extras" supplement for Undercover, my novel about a rising young poet and her escapades, I thought a while before concluding that I wanted to tell Elisa's' going-forward story through a letter and a series of new poems. Elisa's story didn't end for me just because I happened to stop writing it. She had always kept growing up in my mind—I'd find her in my imagination, I'd see her out in the streets—and creating the Extras gave me a chance to put down some of where she's traveled.

Yesterday, when I returned home from teaching the next generation of young writers, the Extras were here in my electronic mailbox, waiting for a final review. The timing was Jill-like—creating an intersection between the poet I'd conjured (and partly been) and the poets and writers I'd just left in a light-filled room on the second floor of a coffee shop.

Here is Elisa, then, from the letter that introduces her new book of poems. Undercover, with its Extras, will be available as a paperback in May.

I've gotten interested, I'm saying, in all the ways that language bruises itself. In things that bump and collide. The past against the present. The want against the need. The truth against the lie. The weird against the regular. The smell of red against the color of a song. Poems do not explain, but they do suggest. They mean the most when they buck up and buckle.

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The Family of Things

I've never been very good at letting moments go. Not skyscapes. Not heartaches. Not eighth-grade talent shows or that moment at graduation when the caps are frisbeed to the sky and the dividing line has been drawn between the future and the past.

So that when I taught young writers for seven consecutive summers, I was, always, in my mind, with those young writers—traveling with them back and forth, trying to see past their page, thinking myself into their process and back out of it again—for their sake, in both directions. And when, today, I was joined on the second floor of a favorite local coffee shop by nine young women, I knew I'd go home with an ache in my heart—they'll all grow up; I'll never know where their lives now will take them.

Their talent runs deep, as does their capacity for thoughtful mutual critique. They listened—they heard—the fragments that I read out loud, some even asking later for titles so that they might read the wholes. There were among them the philosophical and poetical, the one who could write through time and the one who embraced the one moment, the one with a talent for original saturation, the one who knew how to suggest the possibilities of a character's life within the stretch of a single sentence. There was joy as we walked the streets with our cameras in hand. There was compassion for the child we found sitting near a grate, waiting for her mother to come to—well, what, we wondered: to rescue her?

Remain who you are, I urged them, at the session's end. Keep living: whole. And then I read them "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, a poem every true heart must know.

The closing lines:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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The Preemptive Howl

These claims, only, can be made for this day: I gave it over to dreaming. To preparing even more for the young writers' workshop I'll be teaching tomorrow, though my agenda is jammed already—more to do, more to see, more to talk about than the girls and I could possibly squeeze into one day.

And yet, how can we call tomorrow a success if we don't also speak of Rebecca Solnit's way of seeing, for example, the color blue? The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. How can we not retrieve Jean-Dominique Bauby from the brink? The last time I saw my father, I shaved him. It was the week of my stroke. How can we talk about beginnings and voice if we do not begin with Ondaatje? Drought since December. How can we claim to move toward the authentic and raw, if we do not tantrum with C.K. Williams, if we do not share his "preemptive howl"? And did you really think it would be possible for me to face a group of aspiring teen writers without reading aloud, with them, from The Book Thief? An original book and a popular book. You see, I'll tell them. It can be done.

And then I'll remind them of what Natalia Ginzburg had to say. I'll warn them, so I can warn myself: There is a danger of cheating with words that don't really come from within, that we have fished up from outside at random and skillfully pieced together, for we do become cunning. There is a danger in becoming cunning, in cheating. It is a very difficult craft, as you can see, but the most wonderful in the world.

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Learning as I Teach

It was a movie weekend—"Slumdog Millionaire" at ten on Friday night, "Frost/Nixon" at 4:15 Sunday, "Mongol," courtesy of Netflix, in between, late Saturday afternoon. And then the Oscars, a tradition strong as Christmas here—a semi-glamorous meal delivered picnic style while the "barely mint" dresses float by. The Oscars always make me cry. Call me a sentimental fool (you won't be the first), but I like seeing dreams fulfilled. I like the idea that it's possible.

In between, I was walking about my humble abode feeling knocked-down grateful for all the book recommendations that came my way via Looking for Book Love, for all the passion that is out there, still, for stories that cling to the page. While I considered the titles that came in, I read essays on writing and craft—re-read them, I should say, in preparation for Tuesday, when I'll spend a chunk of the day in a coffee shop with aspiring young writers. Sven Birkerts, Natalia Ginzburg, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz, Forrest Gander, and of course Pablo Neruda will keep me and the girls company throughout a day that will also be spent collecting and sorting the details we hunt down with our cameras.

We'll yield to six exercises, which I've named the following way. I plan to write right alongside the girls, for I am not the sort of writer who believes she definitively knows. I'm the sort who keeps trying to find out. Who learns as she teaches, and as she goes.

The class in brief (should you wish to write along...):

Leveraging Involuntary Memory
The Perceiving I
The Hunt for Character
The Fair Release of Story
The Act of Autobiography
Vulnerable Fictions

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Streetside Conversation

Yesterday I started walking toward the intersection of activity that is our town. (It being a gorgeous day, and not one ounce bitter.)

Through the doors of the movie theater busted out a young couple—I put them both at seventeen—and her look said it all. Her look said, I cannot believe you did that again and this time I just may not forgive you. He was turned toward her—crooked, pleading, what did I do? why are you mad? why won't you at least hold my hand?—and then, all of a sudden, his expression broke into something huge and grateful, something approximating understanding. "Is that why you are mad?" he started saying. "That's it? That's the reason?" He was practically dancing now, he was going on with all the antics of relief, and the more he crowed over his exquisite epiphany, the angrier she got. Now her expression was all, You idiot, why didn't you get that in the first place, and will you stop your jumping up and down?, and why would you think just understanding is enough?; understanding is nothing; you better fix it, while his kept being, I get it, I get it, I don't have to guess anymore, I'm done, I'm free.

Seventeen, I thought. Seventeen. And there it is. The future in script.

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Looking for Book Love

a note of quest,
and a request...

(for names of books you love)

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The Dreaded P Word

There it is, in this weekend's New York Times Book Review—back page, Geoff Nicholson, the P word. The first word most people think when it comes to, say, Joyce Carol Oates. A word that, when it lands, can prick you.

Prolific. Shudders. Prolific. It doesn't feel, as Nicholson writes so well, like "an unalloyed compliment." It can feel indeed like something one has to apologize for, as when the interviewer asks, a burble of impatience in her tone, "What exactly was your thought process, going into that year: A history book? A corporate fable? Two YA novels?"

I have hung my head. I have tried to explain how sometimes books that seem to emerge all at once—in a snap, and in a cluster—were conceived years before they were ever published. How I've spent years writing novels that will never be published (80 drafts of one book; 15 years lost on another). How sometimes the work labored over when young announces its maturity years on, at the most inconvenient time. How the only conceivable benefit of insomnia is that it doubles the work hours in a day. How often my sanity has been tied to the writing work (the panic attacks cured by the search for a word), and how hard it is to stop myself from chasing language, chasing story. And how, nonetheless, there was that one forsaken year when there were too many books, and I couldn't escape myself, and I buried myself in other work so that it would never, and not ever, happen again.

Nicholson's essay is essential for the issues it raises. It's essential for these true and telling—perhaps forgiving?—lines: But perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope, naïve perhaps, that we’ll make a better job of it next time. Unless you’re a genius or a fool, you realize that everything you write, however “successful,” is always a sort of failure. And so you try again.

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Anna Lefler/Humorist: The Interview

Ever since bursting onto the scene with her consistently brilliant humor blog, Life Just Keeps Getting Weirder, Anna Lefler has shaken the whole ‘net up like the one-woman show that she is. Awards have come her way, awards by the wagon load. Invitations to speak. Legions upon legions of commentators—dueling commentators, even, all seeking to do justice to Anna’s posts. And all the while, Anna hides behind her mustache (is that mustache a meme? is it a style?), never letting her humor run dry. On Mondays and Thursdays, reliably, she ushers her boredom-shucked fans straight out to the edge of hysteria. She leaves us gasping for air, and grateful.

Wondering how she does all that? Indeed. So was I.

Anna, your brand of humor transcends. It’s edgy but never unkind. It’s bold yet hardly brassy. It’s painfully honest and, nevertheless, it makes us deliriously happy. Comedy, you once reminded me, equals tragedy + time. But at what point in your life did you begin to understand that the very thing that hurts us most can also be thing that redeems us?

I think the first unarticulated inklings were in junior high, a very tough time for me during which I relied heavily on making people laugh in order to ease the pain of feeling like an outsider. I’ve gained a deeper understanding in the last few years by doing stand-up and by devoting myself to writing, both humorous and otherwise. I’m fascinated by that shore where comedy laps over mishap and pain. That contact point is very powerful.

What was your first true moment as a comedienne?

I would say my first stand-up show. I have a flashbulb memory of waiting in the wings as the MC introduced me and feeling that many roads had converged to carry me to that place. Then, a few moments later, the memory follows of looking out into the audience and seeing strangers laughing, pounding the tables. That was magical and true.

You’ve done stand-up. You’ve entertained crowds. You’re quick as a whip with this odd saying, that perfectly bizarre but fitting analogy. (Plus you have a dedicated kick boxer’s arms and still, we love you. Still.) How does the funny demanded by stand-up differ from the funny inherent in a successful humor blog?

I think stand-up invites a certain outrageousness and physicality that goes along with having a handful of minutes on a live stage. Every second counts and the material must be condensed to maximize the number of laughs generated in a small time slot. On the humor blog, the humor lives or dies on the silent page - you’re not there to deliver the material with your voice and body. This is demanding in a different way, but the nice thing is there’s no clock running, so you can take the time to build the more delicate connections and surprises that would not have enough impact in a live club performance.

Your blog requires you to be a techno-genius—a bad photographer on a good day, a stage designer, a montage queen, a caricature artiste. How, Anna? How have you acquired all those skills? How much time do you spend fashioning a blog post?

I love doing things with my hands. I feel my way along and experiment to realize something I’ve imagined. My tools are probably pretty crude (I don’t know PhotoShop, for instance). The posts that rely on visuals for laughs tend to come together pretty quickly, because once I know the concept, I just run around the house and set up the shots and, when necessary, enlist my children as grips.

You live in southern California, but you dream of Texas-sized storms and smoked-up cowboys. You’ve herded cattle and marched flashy suits (and killer shoes) down the halls of corporate America. You’ve got more degrees than I have eye shadow colors (okay, so I only have two). What about the life you are now living surprises you most of all?

What surprises me most is that I still feel in many ways like the goofball I was when I was young – wearing my gym shorts on my head for a laugh or smearing my face against a sliding glass door to entertain the people inside. I thought I’d grow out of all that, but apparently not – she’s alive and well inside me. I expect every day to be busted for impersonating an adult.

You call your husband Jon Bon Jovi, your daughter Morticia, and your son Gomez. You are a collector of nicknames, obviously. What is the most telling nickname that has been bestowed on you, and who bestowed it?

My husband will call me “Sally,” as in the Peanuts character. It started years ago when we were watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” and Sally was on this tirade against Linus because she’d missed tricks or treats to sit out all night with him waiting for the Great Pumpkin (who never arrived). She felt so wronged, so misled. “I demand restitution!” she yelled, pounding her fist into her hand. Jon Bon Jovi turned and pointed at me with this look of revelation on his face and said, “You’re Sally!” Apparently, certain parties think I can get worked up about things at times. They may be on to something with that.

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New Life

At the dance studio today, it was all of us. It was, at the heart and pulse, Cristina, who brought her baby—six weeks old and already dreaming music. The baby's long and perfect fingers sculpted the air. Her soul absorbed our love. Her grace was our grace as Scott took her on and cradled her within his rise and fall.

You don't dance at my age to become a ballroom star. You don't dance with illusions, when you dance with Jean. You dance because you trust the others who gather with you there, because they have, in so many ways, become a family. I danced a lousy jive today, and I also held a baby. I hugged a radiant, brave, and dear new mother, and I looked around—at the good in us, the awe, the tender.

New life is new hope. The music plays beyond us. The music is dreamed by the young.

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Taking Control

"Stress Could Save Your Life," this week's issue of Newsweek heralds on its cover, and I sit down to read just how. I read the theories about how stress spikes adrenaline and after that comes cortisol and how in the presence of both muscles are flooded with energy, and not only that, but the brain grows sharper—more sensed up, more survival primed. Turn on that "stress-hormone switch" at the right time, and you might just go super hero when you need a dose of super hero. (Leave that switch on, however, and damage gets done.) Pregnant women who are stressed may be giving birth to babies with better-stimulated brains. Stress may help us solve more problems, faster.

It all comes down to control, apparently. "...if we feel we're in control, we cope," Mary Carmichael, the story's author, says. "If we don't, we collapse." The key to now, Carmichael says, is determining "what parts of our future we can control" and "engag(ing) with them thoughtfully."

I'm all for that. I have, in fact, been discovering, in these tricky times, the outright power of dreaming small dreams bigly (and of making up words, because it's my blog, and I can). Of recomposing my idea of the perfect day. Of taking the time to do things that I had to hurry past before. I can control how I watch the sky, how I fashion meals, how I arrange the day. I can count as an achievement a cleaned-out closet or a page of prose that perhaps no one but myself will read. I can say to my friends, Join me in this, and be happy when they do, and I can hold these things as central even as all that I can't control spins on—the fate of books I write, the status quo with clients, the headlines that keep blaring.

I can't fix most of what is wrong out there (or any of it, frankly). But I can make it a point not to add to the problem—to be lighter on my feet, to ask for little, to give more. I can use the stresses of now to my advantage, and I will try. I don't see that we have another choice.

(Oh, and for the record, I wasn't driving when I took this photo. Imagine the stress I'd have added to the world if I'd been.)

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What is the Point?

These things happen in a day:

1) The sky breaks bright but the neighbor's chimney steams, predicting the weather to come. You sit with the writing that wasn't working yesterday, and then you add one word to a once-stuck sentence and the passage tilts and the world opens, but just for a moment.

2) A crane flies just west and lands on the roof of the house that stands on the diagonal across the street. The house they've been building for two years now. The house that has yet to suggest welcome. Then the crane takes off again and you're at the window of your office, chasing it with your eye, wondering what it knows that you don't, and where it's going.

3) A friend reveals the things the friend has grown to envy; the list is almost precisely your own. Not wealth. Not things. But talent, yes, and sentences that come when you beckon. And also (not on the friend's list, but yours): Beauty unimpeached by regret.

4) You face a long list of things that must be done, and precisely because of that you read the latest New Yorker instead. The Daniel Zalewski article about Ian McEwan. The thousands of words. The penultimate paragraph. You have to read that far to get the matter you need, which on this day echoes the thoughts in your head, only with greater and more resolute precision, for this is McEwan, after all:

"You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They've got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you're fiddling around with something that's already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be."

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Heart Sore: A Poem

The dog running, and then the girl.
The curled-up lip of the hill at their feet,
and the sky browed blue
above the steep of their shadows.

What it was was the way
the ridge bent back,
and how my arms wished them in,
from the heat.

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Nothing but Ghosts: The Real vs The Imagined

This past Friday I had the pleasure of speaking with someone who had just read Nothing but Ghosts. She was asking what was true and what was fiction, what had been seen and what only imagined. I thought about Barcelona, where some of the story takes place. I thought about the following passage. I walked these streets. I saw these things. I could not sleep. All of which I yielded to my characters, who are more essentially complex than I will ever be.

In Barcelona she couldn’t sleep. We would walk from the old city to the new city all the way to this place they call Sagrada Familia, which is a church that looks like a painted sandcastle that they’ve been building for years but cannot finish, don’t ask me why; even the tour guide couldn’t explain it. We would stand in lines and we would walk through the church, around the construction, up into the towers, over and down, and then we’d walk all the way back to our hotel to rest, stopping at theaters or shops as we walked. She wanted to be by the sea at dusk—by the boats that bobbed on the back of the Mediterranean, and at midnight she wanted tapas, she wanted dancing, she wanted, but I only get it now, life. In the morning she’d be out of the room before Dad and I had awakened, just taking a walk she would say, or buying oranges on the Rambla, or hunting down some pastries for our breakfast.

One afternoon I was up in the room when Mom pushed through the door. “You have to see this,” she said, and she led me by the hand down the hall to the elevator and out onto the streets, then up toward the square, where these musicians who had gathered before some government hall were banging and playing and calling. They had burnt-bottom pots in their hands, big wooden ladles, teakettles, and also real instruments like brass trombones, harmonicas, accordions, and flutes. It was all just noise, not song, and some people were shouting over it, and I asked my mother what was going on, and she said, “I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.” She had so much light in her eyes, and what I kept thinking was, So this is Barcelona. So this is my mother loving Europe.

The sun was hot, but she stayed pale.

The days were long, but she wanted them longer.

There were mimes in Barcelona, I remember. They’d paint their faces white and their mouths grossly huge, then stand in the sun and stare at the crowds and not ever break their silence. “Imagine not speaking like that, for hours and hours,” Mom would say. The thought of it making her shudder, but I didn’t understand why.

“Mom?” I call out now, because I hate the silence of this house. “Mom?” Her door is shut and I lean hard against it, and then I walk away, deliver myself to the shower.

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Writing my Life: Excerpted from Talk

I take my camera most everywhere; it is my habit. I take it because the weight of it around my neck reminds me to see—to decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or the newly announced. I look for the water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond at winter with deafening, delirious force. If I can’t see, then I don’t know, and if I don’t know, I’m not writing, and while some may question the value of the written word, I shall make this claim for stories: They spook and spur us. They recall for us. They suggest the tremble of the whole so that we may believe in the lives we’re living.

Live your life, some say. Don’t write it. But I don’t know how to do one without the other. I don’t know how to feel alive unless I’m writing.

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Three

For a little while (never long enough) it was the three of us in a corner coffee shop. We talked fiction (my son just read "Sonny's Blues," he's reading Faulkner, he read Tolstoy). We talked advertising and statistics, talked Jack London and his journey, talked basketball and fraternity row. I asked (for I'll be teaching at the University of Pennsylvania come fall, and there are things I need to know) just what makes a class engaging, what makes knowledge stick, and I got insider tips from a guy whose opinions I have always, without question, trusted.

If you have a child, if you love a child, you learn what matters most from them. You watch their eyes in the sun—the glinting of brown, the arrival of gold. You wait for the laugh that heals you.

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The Measure of our Days

I spent Valentine's Day in the simple state of being. No reading. No writing. No client projects. No head bowed down toward work. Taking a small holiday for the mind and not stopping to count (as is my habit) just what I was achieving, not regretting that which I was not striking from my have-to-do-that list. There are no measures for the well-lived day. There are, instead, encounters—with old high-school friends, with the chocolate man at the farmer's market, with a father over lunch, with the waitress who remembers that you like your tuna rare, with a friend's long laughter on the phone, with the son who texts you from the heat of a college basketball game: Hey. Mom. We're winning.

Late in the afternoon we watched a movie. Dusk was falling when the opening credits rolled in and it was dark as the film slipped away. In between something had happened to the world outside—it had gone white and showy with enormous floating flakes, and there was a glow on those flakes, as if they were lit from below, as if the earth in winter is still somehow radiant. There was so much snow, and it fell so fast, and the flakes were so fat, and it was all so thick with beauty. I stood and I watched it coming. I took no photographs. Joy was the measure of my day.

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What Was Enough

The Neighborhood Crazy (me) found herself in the mirror on a tree, and there, too, found her world—the comings and goings, the cross roads, the sky, the branches waiting for leaves. She wanted it all. She wanted it to make sense and to transcend, so that it wasn't just her story anymore, but a life decoded and returned.

She wrote down what she saw. She took pictures of it. She ran toward it, and she held back, and nothing was ever enough.

What was enough were the voices that answered back, that entered the world this Crazy sketched, conjured, contemplated, loved. What was enough was you.

A Happy Valentine's Day to all of you who make this life so much bigger.

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Choose Happiness

The winds that howled through yesterday's poem never did stop blowing. Even now, dawn, they're out there scuttling, overturning, knocking down the limbs of a favorite front-yard tree (I cradled its carnage yesterday, thought of the leaves that will now never green and singe, the birds that will not roost).

The weather made for mood. I couldn't put my head into the heat and dust of a cortijo outside Seville, because every time I began to dream sun, I'd hear a gutter banging. I sought to distract myself with client work, but the clients seemed to have been displaced by the wind. I moved onto another project, but was temporarily foiled by technical difficulties. I started to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz's latest, and got caught up studying the sentence structures of the first purposely dense page, and that page was a wall, and I couldn't get past it. (Today I will.) And then I went to the dance studio to dance, and everyone, it seemed, had been affected by the wind. Everyone, and also the dancing.

Later I remembered what a friend had said, a few days before: "It's easier to be in a good mood than a bad one." Easier, I thought, and I tried the theory out—spent what was left of the day and night inside a swell of happy. After five minutes of trying I tried no more. Happiness breeds happiness. It breeds calm, inside of storm.

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Neighbors: A Poem

It has been years since we went to war,
since you planted your pear trees
and I dug in my garden
and the birds nested—
indiscriminate and lovely—
along our borderlands. Years,
so that we lost the war,
both of us,
and beauty took revenge.

Tonight, beneath the supposition
of a pearled moon,
in the absence of warning,
in the alley between us,
the last of our divisions
are howled away by wind.
My lit lamp
waiting for yours.

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Living my World

The truth is that most of the time I wander toward my readings and talks in undercover fashion—slipping in and out, not mentioning a word to friends. But a few weeks ago, as I began to prepare for the Tredyffrin Library talk, I began as well to tell my friends—to celebrate the idea in my own head. I'd be sharing my photographs. I'd be talking about the things I love and how they've shaped me. I'd be living out loud, and I wanted their blessed companionship.

Last night they came. My neighborhood friends and their friends—the ones with whom I watch the horse show carriages roll by, the ones who come singing Christmas songs in winter. The St. Johners from down the street (I adore them). Claire, the first baby I ever held (she's 20 now), and Soup (she knows who she is), and the Chanticleer gardeners, and the dancers who inspire me (Mike and Mercy, too), and Ann, and Heidi, and Jamie, and JC, and Libby, and Joe, and Kathy, and Simona, and Adam, and my father and husband, and also B&BM (you've met her here, you've read her blog), and Helen, who came by way of that gorgeous Southern California comedienne, Anna Lefler, and endearingly introduced herself.

I looked out, and I thought, Beth, this is it. This is the life you've built and the luck you have, and when things get dark, because they do, this is what you hold to.

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My Seville

For five years I worked on a novel—a series of novels—that sprung from and kept returning to Seville—my brother-in-law's home, a favorite destination. I've never left that novel, not entirely. I've always looked for another way in.

Yesterday I printed hundreds and hundreds of pages of my Seville. I sat in a quiet room and began again. Writing olive trees and gypsy songs. Writing down flamenco.

Flamenco is the bend of the body. The play of the soul upon the face. The invention of the moment. She wore her dress like an animal she could not trust. She worked her castanets.

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Writing my Life: Excerpted from Upcoming Talk

I am held into place by the world in which I live. My continuity is my neighborhood, the streets I walk, the stretch of fabled road between my own house and my parents’. I am tethered here by the slow simmer of a passion that began in 1973, when I moved with my family to a house on a bend. When I began to walk and drive, with them, the roads that would always mark me as a writer. I’ve written memoir. I’ve written poetry. I’ve written fable. I’ve written short stories. I’ve written novels. I’ve written history. Everything I’ve languaged is touched by the trees that leafed and the trees that were felled, by the bales of hay and the frozen pond, by the flower that wouldn’t bloom and the garden that did, by the fox that arrives and the deer that departs, by the crow that threatens and the hawk that stays, by the ribbon of asphalt that carries me home.

— from "Writing my Life," Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening, Tuesday, February 10, 7:30 PM

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The Accuracy of the Imagination

The first essay my student, K., ever wrote for me was about this abandoned greenhouse, which K. had found, he said, in a park, and photographed at sunset, just before autumn became winter and K. himself was forced inside. It was this essay that announced K.'s huge, if voluble talent and made me want to discover if his words had been fanciful or accurate, fiction or truth.

Yesterday, all these months later, I set out with my camera, and there this broke-down creature was, shattered and exquisite as K. had promised, cordoned off but accessible to the eyes and, therefore, to the imagination, and suggesting torrents, seasons, sprung seeds, escape. Accuracy, in this case, could only be pinned to fancy. Both things necessary to broker the truth.

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Moon Rise at Sunset

So that the day brought warmth. And the warmth yielded a long talk with a dear friend. And a pot of daffodils from my father. And a call from my son. And my son told a story, and in that story, young men—my son's 18 and 19 year old friends—emerged as heroes, noble creatures, guys with heart. And all day long I walked around with my son's story in my head, and when I took a walk the sun was setting, and when I came home the moon was up. But the sky wasn't letting go of its pink just yet, just as I'll never let go of my son's story.

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Nothing but Ghosts: Making it Right

In this two-minute video log, I honor those who help me face the world as a novelist—my editor, Jill Santopolo, and the ever-strict, absolutely essential copy editor, Renee Cafiero, who refuses to let me fail language.

Renee would take that sentence above and blue-pencil it to perfection. She would also add an accent to her name, but I don't know how to do that either.

I apologize. A million times over. I'm grateful. Eternally.

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The Liquid Wash of Was

The birch in the back yard was a gift, ten years ago, from my parents. The brick walkway that leads to the front door was a gift, the last one from my mother. And this week, in between the rest of everything else, I was retracing the provenance of the hard metals and spark that I've carried forward, from girlhood until now.

I have been thinking, in other words, about the way things signify. About how often the objects in our lives are less about the things themselves—their utility, their value—and more about who we were at the time that they entered our lives, and who shapes our lives, and how memory waits for us in a quiet afternoon. Memory waits, and it lingers.

I'd bought myself a proper jewelry box, my first. I was putting my history in place. The ring I'd proudly acquired with the $35 dollars I'd earned one summer as a teen in South Carolina. The earrings my son brought home for Mother's Day. The ring I bought to remember my uncle by. The pearl that remembers Chicago. The tarnished silver from a friend who forgave me my decision. The ring I purchased one day, post-surgery, to prove to myself that I am a survivor, and the other ring, the one born of a poem. Reiko's Hawaii, in a pair of dangled fish. My brother's aquamarine. My own Seville, in tangled silver. My Barcelona, my San Miguel, my Nashville, my husband's exquisite taste in sapphire.

I have too much jewelry, I kept thinking, as I fit each piece into its velvet wedge. Too much, and I was almost in tears. But then the tears were for something else altogether—for lost time, for lost friends, for the liquid wash of was.

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Sun Wash

Everything an accident. Beauty spills. Today, speaking with my son by phone—feeling the physical distance, fighting the ache of a stammered heart—I stood, and there, flooding in through the kitchen window was sun. A warm spot in a frigid house, and the color of hope.

I took the photograph.

Two minutes later, and the room was dusk.

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This

There are days when I show up at the dance studio for a lesson certain that I'm headed for disaster. My brain is locked, my limbs are ice, I can't distinguish left from right, and honest to goodness, I think to myself, Jean (vested with the responsibility of teaching me, poor thing) is going to kill me. I apologize in advance for the coming catastrophics, and then I beg for mercy. I mean, the guy and his gorgeous wife, Iryna, are on the cusp of huge ballroom dance fame. Can you imagine how much it hurts his head to return, with me, to the basics?

Yesterday Jean took one look at me and said the following words: "Let's not worry about teaching today. Let's just listen to the music and dance." A waltz was on. Jean (the world's greatest mimic) pantomimed a bird. And then my head was arced back and we were dancing. Two false starts, but the third time there it was—the glide and air that I go to dance to find, the float that I'm perpetually seeking.

"What are your goals in dance?" Jean had asked me two weeks before, and I should have said, This. This ageless, timeless, everness. This gift of release from myself.

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The Neighborhood Crazy (2)

As The Neighborhood Crazy (that would be me, see yesterday's post) goes about her (isn't it purely harmless? can you tell me who I'm hurting?) business here, she takes note: Not just of sunsets and tree splits and the blueness of sky set on a sheened slope of ice, but of people deep in the adventure of sheer living.

She has lately seen: A mom and a son in a public park—the boy with the loose line of his fishing pole dipped between ice floes, the mother in a beach chair with a book on her lap, her eyes on her son and not the pages. She's seen a father teaching his four-year-old daughter to play ice hockey, her skates a decorative and dainty pink. She's seen a boy in a plastic dish on a sledding hill, screaming all glory as his father leads him in a skimming down-slope chase. She's seen this boy, above, helping his father up from the frozen face of a pond, both of them laughing too hard to go vertical.

Lived moments—that's what The Crazy's seen. Time spent in the brisk outdoors in another's company, just being.

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The Neighborhood Crazy

Frequently, and especially recently, perfect strangers stop me when I am out and about and ask, "Didn't I just see you, like, down that road over there, taking photographs?" Or, "Was that you risking life and limb, taking pictures of the sunset while the cars whizzed past?" I'm usually alone. I shrug. I smile. Say yes.

But today I happened to be with my husband when the question was asked—when I was recognized, again, as the woman behind the Sony.

"Um, Beth," my husband asked, when we were out of the inquirer's earshot. "Did you go and become The Neighborhood Crazy or something? Are people out there going home and telling their friends that there's this weird person out on the streets with a camera?"

"The Neighborhood Crazy," I said, getting a taste for the sound. "The Neighborhood Crazy. Yes, as a matter of fact. That's me and you're married to her. Good luck with that."

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Sleep

I slept past 3 AM for the first time this year, and I credit the snow, which fell like a hush through the night and changed the shape of the coming day. The snow, which insisted on dreams.

Every once in a while I see the world through clearer eyes. The first virtue is patience. Sleep grants it.

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Shadows

A client canceled a late afternoon phone call, and I might have been distressed (deadlines, I should have thought, promises), but the fact is that I was already comfortable in my overstuffed chair and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was balanced enticingly within reaching distance. I didn't even have to stand up. I turned. Stretched. Fit the book in my hands. Found page 177. Plunged back into the story where I'd left it, a few days before. Utterly irresponsible, but there it is. I sat here and read a book of my own choosing. I dove beneath the radar.

I like this book. I am, in fact, amazed by long stretches of it—by how O'Neill, in this novel about displacement (I'll call it that; others have called it elsewise) slides all around the map of time, defusing the Big Questions early on so that readers never wonder what has happened; they only wonder why. The book is pure erudition. It's New York City post 9/11. It's cricket. It's The Chelsea Hotel. It's phantasmagoria and a marriage on the rocks. It's deep dives into stuff I knew not a single thing about. It's not easy, but neither are we human beings easy. We want to hold to the illusion that every life suggests a story, when in fact life is a jumble that works quite like the tumble and tangle of Netherland.

By the time I put the book down, there were three inches at least of new snow on the ground, and it was dark. I had dinner to cook, in other words, but I wanted to stay with Netherland a bit longer, and so I ambled over to Amazon to see what other readers had to say. My thinking being: I'll hang out in this little club of Netherlanders for a while before returning to real life. Some 76 reviewers had weighed in, and the book had four stars, and that was fine, it didn't much matter.

What impressed me, though, was the utter self-confidence of the naysayers. The certainty they shared that this book—acclaimed by so many, likened to The Great Gatsby by more than one—was, in a word, "bad." Bad. Boring and bad. Or pretentious and bad. Interesting combinations of bad. And I thought of how almost impossible it is to write well and how ready one must always be for those who will inevitably dismiss you.

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Up to Us

So here's how I see it, in these brittle, aching times: We only have each other going forward. Nothing is matter of fact—not our jobs, not our clients, not our favorite shops (I go out, I seek, they are gone), not our favorite people in our favorite familiar places (suddenly they have been vanished, too), not our future. And those who once seemed straightforward, firm, reliably reliable are doubting, less certain, wracked by caution.

There is less of most things. There is more ache ahead. There are questions nobody can answer. And so it is up to us to fill the gaps and erase the voids, to shore these days up with our attentiveness, our kindness. To live these days, too, because we won't get them back—live them, walk them, photograph them, write them, love them, share them. We'll be older when this is over. We'll look back. We'll wonder who we were, and how we lived.

And on another note entirely (but not really; this is connected): Thank you, Jane Satterfield at Loyola University, for teaching Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River to your gifted students today. They are lucky to have you.

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The Who of Us

The tributes to John Updike keep pouring in, and I keep reading them. Carlin Romano, in this Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, declares Updike a Master, not just a Master Stylist (as some have accused), and notes that "Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, some valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work in words or rococo flourishes across pages."

Charles McGrath, in the Times' Week in Review (February 1), speaks to the man himself in a beautiful piece entitled "Acknowledgments." He notes Updike's "quiet, burgherly life," his penchant for a round of golf following a morning's work, his reliable presence at the post office (and not in Manhattan, where the deals went down), his rare acceptance of a literary advance, his legacy among writers who prized, in McGrath's words, "his prose—that amazing instrument, like a jeweler's loupe; so precise, so exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless.... He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record existence and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn't quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did."

The world notices a life lived rightly, and not just the art that life brings forth. These past several days, flooded by tributes to Updike, we are reminded that the who of us counts at least as much as the way we write things down.

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On Air

There was a moment, over the weekend, when my desk was clear, my mind was free, and the sun was shining. I started out with my camera, thinking I'd go around the block. Soon I was down by the bend in the road, the old church, the ancient cemetery, the wide open field and the cove where the bees do their work in summer. I kept going—now along the skinny, jagged road where no pedestrian has any rightful business being, now by the necklace of slushing-in-the-sun ponds, now alongside the flock of geese, which didn't mind me for a moment.

I could have walked all day and wanted to.

No wind whipped.

No questions were asked.

I searched for nothing and goodness was found.

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House of Dance, Undercover, Friendship, and Gratitude

I owe some very big thank you's to some very dear people, and I won't waste your time with preliminaries, except to say that this photo was taken last Thursday, at DanceSport Academy, the inspiration for many scenes in House of Dance. That's Aideen O'Malley (who inspired some aspects of the grandmother in the story). And if you look really hard, toward that slice of mirror, you'll see Scott Lazarov. Scott runs the studio (the very best anywhere). He was among my first teachers, and still teaches me tango, lindy hop, jive, bolero, and salsa when he can. It was Scott's wisdom and patience that inspired the character, Max, in the novel. Scott who made the dance scenes live.

All right, I've said more than I meant to for someone promising few preliminaries. What I came here to do was to say thank you to Laurie and Betty and Boo's Mommy, both, for their recent exquisite reviews of House. I meant to thank the always-wonderful Miss Em, for highlighting Undercover in her recent (gonzo) Winter Book Giveaway. And I meant to thank Anna Lefler, the comedienne extraordinaire (I was just watching one of her Hollywood gigs on YouTube; she's incredibly feminine and hysterical at the same time; get to know her) for well, hmm. Let's see. For the mug and for the postcards, both. For the mid-week pep talk when stuff was getting me down. For putting together an ad—an ad, I tell you—for my own little Beth Kephart blog.

Someday I'll throw a party for all the special people in the world. Hopefully all you will come. And when you come you'll get to meet all those other special people. (You know who you are.)

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Hope Montgomery Scott, Ardrossan, and The Philadelphia Story

I had every intention, yesterday, of staying home in a state of mini-collapse (hey, I thought, I'd earned it), and besides, it was still so cold outside, and besides, my car was iced in. But the sun was brittle bright and therefore the sky was interesting, and by 3 PM, having at last cleared my desk of work, I was out on my hunt for photographs.

By 4:15, I was here, at Ardrossan. Hope Montgomery Scott (recreated on the stage and on film as The Philadelphia Story's Tracy Lord) lived here. Cole Porter, Cecil Beaton, Katharine Hepburn came to visit. Black cows took their time on the hills. Horses were ridden, and loved. And while much of the original 750 acres of the estate has been parcelled out to modern wealth and tall deer fences, there is still this view, which had to have been Mrs. Scott's view, of the land beneath a setting sun—the ice turned blue and the trees black and missing an apparent dimension.

There is something to letting history stay where history was made. Something to the way land contains a person's essence. Something to turning a corner and being stopped by the kind of beauty that the land alone can yield.

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