Boy in Yellow Shirt, in Tree

Though there was a war on and I'd been cautioned, I was often alone in El Salvador. I never believe, as much as I should, in danger. On this day we'd left in a mad hurry from the white house in Santa Tecla and driven a highly militarized road (guns everywhere, soldiers at attention) to the raw edge of a cattle-and-pigs somewhere, where we loaded our hastily assembled things into a pontoon of sorts and floated to an estuary. No one told me, until much later, that we were escaping the threat of bombs, a report that the American Embassy had been targeted.

The others unpacked and spoke in their Spanish. I was confused and wandered away. Down a dirt road where women balanced jugs of water on their heads and the houses were brilliantly thatched.

Finally I stopped and waited for this boy to look up and see me. Beyond the thin barbed wire, he would not. I wonder to this day what he was thinking.

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Brief Lessons from Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout in person is just as interesting, complex, and ultimately original as her own Olive Kitteridge. I liked her at once, and very much.

She read from "Security." She spoke of the ways that writing involves one's whole heart, also one's liver. She said that every sentence counts, and also: There is no room for sogginess. You put down your coffee cup when you write, she said. You step past and through.

Oh, Libby, I said to my friend afterward. She makes me want to write an entirely different kind of book. Makes me want to write. Again.

I should have had my fill of books by now. I should have. I have not.

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Presenting Lenore Presents Undercover

You have not forgotten dear Presenting Lenore, who taught me the zombie chicken dance (a number I performed for that star of ballroom dancing stars, Jean Paulovich, last Thursday; he was impressed indeed). Who makes me smile at many an odd early-morning hour with her unstintingly opinionated posts. Who takes me back to high school days and academic bowl life, though let us be clear: Lenore made her high school smart team because she was actually smart; I made mine because I had the smartest brother in the entire school (the guy was a stand out everywhere he went—high school, Princeton, Stanford), and people assumed I'd have at least a fraction of his brain matter. (They were wrong, I tell you, wrong! They should have seen the difference in our eyes—his brighest blue, mine hazy green.) Who assures me that sushi can be found in Germany (a relief) and that I can (at my old age) still adopt a cat so as to be more like her.

In any case—that Presenting Lenore.

Lenore has a review of Undercover up on her site right now, and let me tell you all one thing: I'm exhaling mightily over here. Lenore has the toughest of tough standards, and she loves highly plotted tales. I'm just so relieved that she found, in Undercover, a character to remember her former self by. I'm grateful, hugely, that she had such nice things to say.

I bow my head.

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Readerly Pursuits, and on seeing Elizabeth Strout with Elizabeth Mosier

With Dangerous Neighbors, my novel about 1876 Philadelphia, now safely in my agent's hands and Small Damages, my novel set mostly on a cortijo in southern Spain, now fully formed, I can again turn my full writerly attention to the stories that others tell. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, had me laughing (and marveling) this past weekend. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol is (at long last) next on my list. After that I'll be reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, just because many have and I haven't; subsequently I'll re-read Paul West's Master Class.

But what is in store for tonight is something truly special—a trip to Swarthmore College to see Elizabeth Strout, in the company of my writer/teacher friend, Elizabeth Mosier. Those of you who read my blog post on Strout's Olive Kitteridge know how deep my respect for this writer runs, particularly for this collection of linked short stories. You know how much I think this collection teaches.

A thank you, then, to Libby Mosier, for alerting me to Strout's appearance. The last time Libby and I ventured out into the world of literature together, it was dark and cold and we were sharing a meal with the spectacular Patricia Hampl, a writing heroine who lived up to every one of my expectations. I expect tonight to be just as glittered.

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Weather Mood

The weather was the question yesterday—the cool, the sticky hot, the kicked-up breeze, the swamped, low air, rain that fell hard, then rain that came down against the curtain of near sunshine.

Who are you supposed to be, on a weather day like that, if you are a person like me, utterly suggestible, forever pacing, on the hunt?

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Writer: A Definition

These words read an hour ago in "Waiting," Anthony Lane's New Yorker piece on Samuel Beckett's life and letters.

... the only thing that separates the writer from ordinary folk—and, far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, it can redouble the force of solitude, “one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a Crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover—especially if, as in Beckett’s case, lovers were scarce.

Is this it, then—the line that gets drawn, cordoning writers off from the rest of the world? It's not a thought I'd had before. It's one that I weigh now.

And you? Your definition of a writer?

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On Guard

Hundreds of them now, along the back wall, where I tucked in the bulbs four years ago. It is the season of vigilance. Color won't wait.

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The Drexel InterView: On rivers and young adult books

Last fall, I received a note from Lynn Levin, the executive producer of The Drexel InterView, who was inviting me to spend some time in the company of Dr. Paula Marantz Cohen, the popular author and Drexel University Professor of Literature. Would I join poet Gerald Stern, Chuck Barris, Craiglist's Craig Newmark, astronomer Derrick Pitts, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney, social critic Steven Johnson, and others in the Season Six line-up of interviewees, she wondered. I said yes, but of course.

(Then worried for days about lack of appropriate wardrobe.)

In early October, on the second floor of a fabulously ornate 19th century building, Paula and I spoke of many things. Of the writing heart, of a career (my own) that has moved from poetry to short story to memoir to poetry to history to novel and back again to short story and poetry (and what, you ask, is this blog? A bit of everything, I guess, and too much of all, as someone just told me). The genesis of Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill River, was discussed, as were my three young adult novels to date, Undercover (soon to be released in paperback), House of Dance, and Nothing but Ghosts. If memory serves, we also discussed my short story, "The Longest Distance," soon appearing, along with work by An Na, M.T. Anderson, Chris Lynch, Jacqueline Woodson, and K.L. Going, in the HarperTeen anthology No Such Thing as the Real World. Young adult literature—where it came from, where it's going, what it might someday be—was very much on our agenda.

Lynn (a poet whose work you should seek out) has just written to let me know that that conversation will premiere this Tuesday, March 31, in the Philadelphia area at at 8 p.m. on DUTV (Comcast channel 54; in West Philly 62), then air four more times that week at 10 a.m. (Wed, Sat, Sun, and Mon). On April 5, it will air again on MiND (formerly called WYBE) at 10 a.m. In subsequent months, the interview will be available in other cable markets across the country.

I invite those of you who have the time and interest to listen in.

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A Pile Up of Lesses/All the Living Review

It seems like a long time ago now that I read C.E. Morgan's All the Living for Chicago Tribune review; I don't believe I've read anything so remarkably undiluted since. It's the story of two lovers, Aloma and Orren, on a Kentucky farm fighting silence and each other. Some aren't going to like Morgan's supremely ascetic vision. I applaud anyone who goes so zealously far with an idea, a sound, a purpose.

Two paragraphs from my review:

... here was a first novel so self-assured and unto itself, so unswerving in its purpose, so strummed through with a peculiar, particular, electrifying sound, that I found myself reading in a state of highest perplexity, and also gratitude and awe. Maybe the gratitude came first, for "All the Living" is a novel about the hardest things—about grief and lonesomeness, about desiring much and staying true, about loving through and forgiveness. It's a novel that makes you think on all of that anew, and that spares nothing and no one in the process.

And:

This is the story, and it's a very good story. But it's the language that gets you. Austere and full of losses. A pileup of lesses: Not just blinkless, but spinless, bookless, riseless, goalless, pitiless, steepleless, driftless, depthless, windowless, questionless, milkless, stormless; there's even a letheless. They might not all have been words before, but they are now, essential to the fabric of a chapterless book whose heroine had "been born into a doublewide of nothing and then spent the better part of her childhood in a school at the sink end of a holler."

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Just Do It

You know you have those days—the wrong weather, the wrong answers, the wrong smudges on the soul, not to mention that dastardly, lingering migraine.

I woke to that at three a.m. and couldn't shrug it, and as I looked ahead to the day and my afternoon ballroom dance lesson with Jean Paulovich, I had one prevailing thought: Well, that will surely be rich.

Funny thing: It actually was. Because by the time I walked up that tall flight of steps, put on my sand-colored shoes, and slipped out onto the floor, I'd battled all the battles I could battle in one day and my mind was spectacularly clear. The first dance was a waltz, and I yielded. The mambo was next, suspiciously swooshed, and then the cha-cha didn't defeat me, and the rumba was slow where slow was right and contagiously fast at the quicks. Even the jive didn't thwart me as the jive often does—it was (and this is strange) more right than wrong.

Why is so much of life that much easier when you stop fighting with yourself? When you cast off your own self doubt, your disappointments, your melodramatic exasperations? When you just shrug your shoulders and do? When you stop thinking, and dance?

Oh, dance.

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For the love of a cat

She lived in a cemetery up the street, our Boston year, and then one night, during a thunderstorm, she was at our back door. Our mother left bowls of milk on the stoop until the bowls were brought inside, and that is how this calico became our cat, the only pet I ever had. I was in third grade then, and she lived until I was 25. I don't ever remember her slipping away inside the fog of disappointment or the presumption of self importance.

"You should have a pet," a friend told me the other day, and I wondered why she said it, what about my life seemed hollow or absent. Then I remembered the days when Colors would claw into a tree and leap to a gutter and climb in my second-floor window, just to see me. I remembered holding her in my arms, and doing nothing but that, and feeling happy.

I'll be in the Big Apple tomorrow on client work. If I don't have time to post before I dash off for an early train, imagine me imagining you.

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Haloed

I'd come through the coffee jungle. I stood at their door, and one turned, and though I was intruding and do not mean, when I take my camera out, to steal the private (only to spare the moment from the regret of time), I could not move—for their beauty, for the light that haloed their hair. As if they were angels settled into a one-room cinderblock shack.

Does the one write at her desk?

Does she mean to?

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Raw, Guileless

Although I've had an obsession with photography since I built my first pinhole camera back in elementary school, it wasn't until I married a Salvadoran and began to travel to his country that portrait photography became my great passion—photographs of people living their real lives, children, in particular. In El Salvador, then in southern Spain, then in Juarez, San Miguel de Allende, and West and North Philadelphia, I have been confronted, again and again, with the raw, guileless beauty I ache to carry home.

The camera frees me from the need for conversation. It demands of me an observer's stance. It requires no vocabulary—not, at least, right then, when the child stands before me, in her bird-colored dress.

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Rescuing my Mother: Fourth Grade

The teacher's desk is crashing sun.

The teacher's desk is a continent,
floated blue.
I have been told to come.
I have been given the news:
An accident.

Against the rules, I run.
On the ribbon of macadam,
down.
Through the fence gate,
on the wrong side
of the creek,
where in summer we do not
come when called,
but this is spring
or this is autumn,
and I should not have run:
Mom!
Mom!

Alive, and I thought
I’d always save her.

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Newly Created Things

Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.


Federico Garcia Lorca

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Shouting Out to Some Special Bloggers

Presenting Lenore—oh, Presenting Lenore. She adorned me with a zombie chicken award (yeah, you read that right) and asked me to pass it on. I love Lenore—so smart, so unblinking, so quick on her feet, so adventurous (plus, she loves sushi).

But: To win an award means one should pass the award along, and I've always sidestepped this. I only have one son. I've only had one husband. I only ever had one cat. I can't do the favorites thing. I'm constitutionally incapable.

But I can tell you, as I do in this video, about some of the bloggers who mean a lot to me. I'd list them out here, all properly URLed and stuff, but then what would be your motivation to watch this little vlog? Truly.

Oh man, I hate already all the names I couldn't fit in, like Little Willow (oh my gosh, she's smart, LW, you are right here in my heart), and Ink Mage (so dear), and Jen Robinson and Finding Wonderland (both indispensible), but wanted to so badly. All right, and while I'm at it: The 3 Rs, Shelf Elf, Saints and Spinners, The Holly and the Ivy, Doret, Not The Rockefellers, Juliet Colours, SolvangSherrie, MariReads, SeptemberMom, Kristen, and yup, here you have it, from the horse's mouth itself: There are so many smart women out here that I (with my limited math ability) can't enumerate them all.

(Forgive me.)

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Almost Present Time

Because I do not write with outlines, I never know—I am eternally anxious—whether or not the book I am currently writing will come whole. I don't trust myself until I'm three or four scenes shy of first-draft done, and unless those scenes are fully (in my mind) throbbing. Not written yet, but seen and smelled.

I am this morning three or four scenes shy of finishing a book that has been with me for ten years, more. That was born in the wake of many travels to Seville and of one particular expedition to the cortijo of Count Leopoldo Sainz de la Maza, one of Spain's greatest bull breeders. He was one of the most courtly men I ever met—tall and blue-eyed and gracious—and I have imagined him and his 7,500-acre landscape into this story of mine. I have rearranged his house (which in real life was hung with the photographs of him together with all the most famous people of the day, and which was called Arenales). I have peopled it with a young woman, an old cook, the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War, and a band of gypsies.

Yesterday afternoon I tasted wedding cake with a dear soon-to-be-married friend, then came home and could not touch this book. I was afraid and stalled and doomed, I was sure. I could not imagine it forward. This morning I woke feeling heartbroken—not with fear, but with the knowing that I can indeed finish this book, and that I will. That soon this story won't be needing me anymore. It will come into its own.

I have real work to do (for my corporate clients). I have a garden to stir to life. I have a friend getting married and another healing from long sickness and many more who wish I'd quit closing myself in here, at my desk.

I have blogs to write that aren't about me.

I have a Sony digital aching for a walk.

I have been obsessed with this novel, as I am obsessed with all novels. Sometimes it's the only way to see a big dream through. After this, there will be the memory of writing. There will be me living forward, in present time.

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Details, Details

Do you remember this? The swing when you could swing alone? The feeling of power and soar? The bird that came to you because it understood your admiration, your way of trying to be just like it was? Do you remember?

I sang on the swing when I was a kid—Bob Dylan and My Fair Lady. I pumped higher than I'd been taught to, and one day, on the highest arc I'd ever achieved, the chains snapped and the plank that I was sitting on flew out over the yard. When it came down my arm was shattered and it would never be the same, and so that one moment changed everything for me—there wouldn't be gym class until 9th grade, there wouldn't be team sports, there'd always be this brace when I skated—my sequined dresses, my funky arm.

When I saw this boy at the beach last Saturday, I did this thing I do—project myself back then arc me forward, imagining one small detail changed, chains, in this case, that never snapped. But it is the single detail that often does define a life, and in my case who knows if I'd have been a loner writer if I'd been able to play team sports, or had I not been sent to the library all those years in lieu of gym.

The single detail. I try to pay attention to these in my fiction, because I have learned what the single detail does to real life.

On another note: I have been blessed this past week by the goodness of others who have taken the time to read my books and to put down some thoughts about them. I'm not entirely sure these good people can ever know just what this means to me. But today may I thank one of those incredible bloggers out there, aquafortis, at the collaborative YA bookspace, Finding Wonderland, for these words about House of Dance.

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Eruptive Scenes from a Novel in Progress, and a thank you to The Shelf Elf

We've been talking about outlining, not outlining. Below is a scene from a novel-in-progress that emerged from nowhere, then set a tone.

Before I get to that, though, may I extend enormous gratitude to The Shelf Elf, for her truly dear and generous words about House of Dance. I've been working through the deepest dark of this night (rain outside, a drumming in my head). I found her post by almost accident. I am so grateful.

The agent left us there, outside the locked-door of our graduation house. “To the sea,” Tim said, taking the lead for once, spinning an imaginary umbrella in the spitting-with-winter air. We drew our plastic hoods over our heads and when we got to the beach, we took off our shoes and ran. Ellie got to the water before the rest of us could. She stomped down a wave, and then I joined her, and Robb did, and the waves were freezing—oh God, the whole beach was. When I turned I saw Tim and Kevin in the distance, walking the rusted pipe that stretched parallel to the shore. “All the way to Cape May,” Tim directed, and now we were running toward Tim and Kevin, our shoes in our hands, clambering up the pipe, catching our balance, marching south.

The wind blew the salt into our skin. Robb’s hair rose and fell like it might fly. We walked single file, the rust beneath our feet, until the skies grew dusky and Kevin jumped from the pipe and reached his arms toward me. I leapt high and up and down, and I knew he’d catch me. I knew that he’d hold me, and he did, and then we both turned and saw Ellie still high on the rusted pipe, Ellie alone, and Kevin put me down and reached for her, and now Tim was taking Robb into his arms. Then we all stood just inches from the first froth of waves and tossed clamshells until real darkness fell.

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On Outlining, Young Readers, and Undercover: A Blogger's Cocktail

All right, so. I had a little blog something to say about outlining earlier today. I said—nay, I announced!—that I don't rely on this time-honored tool in my own writing process. Which is to say only that the outline does not work for me, but it works impeccably for others.

I don't use outlines because I'm weird. C'est tout. Because (for me) the great pleasure of writing is finding out, getting shanked by surprise, stretching toward unanticipated connections. I feel boxed in and unhappy in the presence of an outline. I need to be allowed off the path. I need to stray awhile, go hunt down some details, find out what that character really thinks, which is tied to who that character really is, which is not something I will find in an outline. Outlines presuppose. They rein things in. They don't yield to me, and I need so much room. (Gosh, I'm demanding. Gosh, who can live with me, really?)

I'm writing toward meaning. I'm inside a mood. I know what I want a book to achieve, how I want one of my books to make a reader feel, what my book is remembering or honoring or sacrificing. Sometimes plot (so well facilitated by an outline) is a means to that end, but not always, at least not for me.

So what do I have, if not an outline, when I write? I have the landscape defined—the room with its deflated balloon or the olive groves or the outside balcony of the Main Exhibition Hall. I have the biographies of my characters. I have the sound of the last sentence in my head. I have an overriding idea about narrative choreography—the pitch points, the quiet stretch, the crescendo, the rattled keys. Beyond that, I let the book become itself. I am eager, every day, to go down and meet it. To learn where it might take me.

Writers who have achieved the sorts of things I can only dream of achieving use outlines. I'm not suggesting that my process is better than theirs. It just is what it is, and I'm too old now to change it. Too weird, but I think I've noted that.

All right, enough on this. Last Sunday, as I've mentioned, I met with a number of 13-year-old readers and their moms and we talked for several hours about Undercover. It was an interesting exchange, and I learned a lot (is there room for subtlety in novels? must we like each character?). Throughout this week I've learned even more from young writer/readers. I've learned from Maya and Priya and also The Curly Q and AyeCaptain about what makes a book work, or not.

Curly Q and Aye Captain just reviewed Undercover and had some intriguing and helpful things to say. I am, as always, so very grateful for the conversation that percolates here. For the enthusiastic embrace of the idea that there's a book out there waiting for us all.

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Dream Life, Novel Pursuits

I woke from a dream so vivid, so intense, that for an hour or so after I'd awakened I couldn't decide if I was still alive. My dreams are like this. It is why, perhaps, I rarely sleep, for when I do I am crushed by color or chase, by diving bells, as was the case last night, and deeply distorted perceptions.

It was 1:30 in the morning. I had to decide whether to trust the night again with sleep or to work, in the dark, on a novel.

Novels are like dreams. They crush you differently. You're sure of where you are going—you left that tag for yourself just yesterday. But when you come downstairs to your glass office, something new stirs. A scene you didn't see coming. A sign that the book has turned. You don't have much to go, and still you don't know precisely where you're going.

Do you write against an outline? I've been asked.

No. Never.

Do you know how your books will end?

If I did I'd have no interest in surviving the crush that is the crush inside which all my books are written.

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Incomprehensible

I am unable to comprehend, this evening, the death of Natasha Richardson, the yelping loss within her family, the fracture of what had always seemed whole. A fall on a ski slope, a minor-seeming bump. And then the unreality of her dying.

I can't understand it.

Just as I cannot understand or find the language for the searing beauty of new life, the feeling I had, earlier this afternoon as I held a baby named Eva in my arms—cupped her head in my hands, stared deep into her permanently blue eyes, and sang to her while my husband and her mom talked in the other room. Eva wanted to see the world beyond my windows, and I took her there. I told her daffodil secrets, and about the boy across the way, who stands aboard his skateboard while his new dog runs ahead. His dog is like a horse, I said. His skateboard is like a carriage. Eva balled up her pretty, arabesque-ing hands and almost laughed.

Laugh, Eva, I thought. Laugh and live.

Loss and life. Loss and life. The fragile unknowns. The incomprehensible and the lovely and the deeply sad. A day past. A moon rising.

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Super Delicious

Some time soon my garden will look like this, but right now, it's wheezy and last year and blown into by my neighbor's loose-haired ornamental grass. It's stalks of fallen glory. It's crusty hydrangea heads. It's at least one perennial that's acting like an annual.

I've been up since 2:30, and I've written five pages of olive trees and confessions, grapes peeled by an old cook's thumb. I have a few hours before the day's guests arrive. I'm choosing mud and seeing and some super delicious (don't you love that commercial?) outside air.

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Priya Ganesan and the first official review of Nothing but Ghosts

On a day when many a soul is out there celebrating a certain Saint's day, I'm here, post-dinner, celebrating Priya, a marvelous thirteen-year-old (thirteen!) who, like her sister, Maya, offers something quite unusual out there in the world—clear eyes, a good heart, that nothing-can-stop-it mind.

Priya e-mailed earlier in the day and asked if she might post a review of Nothing but Ghosts, a book she'd borrowed from Maya. Yours would be the first official review of NBG, I told her. I was eager to learn what she thought.

Well. Look. Besides the fact that she has written some of the kindest words I've ever read about a book of mine, Priya has written an adult-caliber review. For the quality of her mind I encourage you to visit the blog that she calls Book Crumbs.

Thank you, Priya.

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All Hail the Europeans

I've always loved the Europeans. Oh, honestly, I have. I've sought them out throughout my life ever since third grade when my father went off to the Sloan School at MIT and we acquired a new best-friend family, all ten of whom hailed from this place called France.

Pierre was the boy's name, a messy-haired blond the right amount of older than me. And so much more interesting than any other guy whom I'd yet met.


Oh, Pierre.


In any case, my European clients are the ones I'm often talking with at five or six or seven a.m., and not much minding; I do adore a good accent, thank you Jessica, Angus, Sonia, Faye, Helena, and Souheil. And my European vacations are the ones I most miss; it's been too long now since I've crossed the wide salty blue.

And look today what we find in the venerable New York Times. Repeat after me, will you?, this headline: "Book Sales in Europe are Gaining in Tough Times." "People have been reading and they will keep reading, no matter what happens," one Andre Breedt of Nielsen BookScan is quoted as saying.

Something to raise a bit of bubbly to, no? Okay. All right. Perhaps not bubbly. It's St. Patrick's Day, after all, as a friend just reminded me. People are out on the streets of New York City, he says, awash on too-much green beer. So raise your beer to the news, then. Or your sparkling apple cider. Or your Malbec. Or your ginger ale.

Just give a moment to the Europeans, who are leading the charge for the rest of us who still believe in books.

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Asbury Park and Springsteen's Star

I mentioned our outing the other day—our accidental arrival in Asbury Park, NJ. The old, iron casino, the stretch of boardwalk, the entertainment pier on the far end, and so much left empty in between. Asbury Park is a place caught in the teeth of dreams, where much of the old has been torn down and much of the new has been sketched up and the economy has wrought the actuality of nothinged-out plots.

From the boardwalk, through a nearly finished water park, I could see The Stone Pony, Bruce Springsteen's stomping grounds. Could hear music throbbing at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Could imagine him striding through, as he still does—a hometown concert for a hometown crowd.

You know I love Springsteen music. You know that I dance to it many a day, alone here, on the thin pine boards of my house, and that at night, lately, I can't get the lyrics of his newest songs out of my head (I'm in love with the queen of the supermarket/As the evening sky turns blue/A dream awaits in aisle number two...). But I also love Springsteen the man for being true to where he came from, for lifting it up on his shoulders, for not forgetting. His breed of stardom is the only kind I'll swoon before.

And you? You swoon for...?

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On Answering Maya's Grand Questions

It took me awhile, but I found a garden image bright enough to suggest to you the star power of one Maya Ganesan, whose blog, Allegro, is home to a certain kind of serene intelligence. Never boastful, never anything less than thoughtful, always suggestive. Please check this young poet out.

Recently Maya was kind enough to ask a few questions about moi, and boy, did she do her homework. She inquired, for example, about my reaction to certain book-related news (my answer involves high heels, a London subway, a poundless-purse, and abject confusion). She asked about my reaction to reactions to Undercover (having visited a lively and engaging mother-daughter book group just last night, I might someday write a bit more about what I keep learning from younger readers). She asked about the genesis of Nothing but Ghosts. In any case, her blog is so worth visiting. I encourage you to make the journey.

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Alive: Excerpt from a novel in progress

This is Seville, I say to you now. A place that rains flowers in the sun. This is Seville, and suddenly I’m so homesick I can’t stand it. Suddenly I need your dad, and mine, too, and I’m remembering last summer, with Kevin, when I thought the world had lost its color and he kept trying to convince me that it hadn’t. He would drive me to sunsets and moonrises and gardens; he’d say, “Look.” He’d pick me up after my mother had driven, in her preposterous hurry, off, and take me down roads that he’d found when he was running and the rest of us were standing still. “Look,” he’d say, “Jessa. The color’s still here,” and I tried to believe him, but he knew. And then one day he said he had concocted a solution, and he picked me up and drove me to his house and walked with me to his backyard. He told me to sit in one of those Adirondack chairs. He said I should close my eyes.

“Come on, Kevin. Tell me.”

“Just wait.”

“Where are you going?”

“Sit. And close your eyes.”

I did, at last, and he was gone a long time. When I heard his voice again I was nearly sleeping. “All right,” he said, and I turned, and there he was, by the basement door, and there, by his head, were butterflies, an entire swarm. He had a pot of aster in one hand and joe-pye in another, and I thought that maybe I was sleeping, that this was my strange dream.

“I bought eggs,” he said. “They’ve been hatching in the basement.”

“Butterfly eggs?”

“Yeah. You can get them. Mail order.” He was walking toward me, with those pots in each hand. The butterflies swarmed, and they flew. Satyrs and swallowtails and sulphurs and skippers—the S butterflies, the ones we’d learned in science and had decided to remember.

“Kevin,” I said, but that’s all I could say.

“Color,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Color.”

“You’re still alive, Jessa. Your father, of all people, wants you living."

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Lemmings by the Sea

We set out early in the direction of Spring Lake, a vague idea of a getaway day in mind—Victorian and quaint, we thought. Boutiquey and proper. The roads were nearly empty, smooth as silk. The car was fleet. I tried to keep my acceleration action as close to legal as possible.

We came in on a road that wasn't precisely on the map. We saw nothing, then we saw hundreds. People dressed in Elk ears and red capes and Santa Claus bikinis. An ambulance crew holding towels. "What's going on?" I asked one guy. "Five minutes of crazy," he said, and by now the ambling hundreds were massing along the beach. They were walking straight to the water's edge and summoning their wits and courage.

"I'm checking this one off my bucket list," one woman in a gray tee-shirt told me.

"I guess so," I said.

"I don't even have a bucket list," she said.

"Well now you do," I said.

A pirate with a sword charged before the shivering crowds. A man hoisted his flag and pointed waterward. Someone with a trojan's hat screamed bloody trojan somethings. And then on the count of three, the massed hundreds lemminged themselves. Dove into the ocean froth and came up screaming harder. It was 39 degrees outside. The ocean temp? Well, you've got me.

This didn't seem like Spring Lake. Was this Spring Lake? I asked my husband. I asked my son. They shrugged. We didn't know, but it didn't matter, because suddenly, instead of going off in pursuit of our boutiques, we got back in the car and drove north. Drove straight through, to Asbury Park and Bruce Springsteen country, where we finished out the day in our own kind of crazy.

We take our son back to the bus that will take him back to his college tomorrow morning. It's been a whipping, wild week. I think I'm talked out. I know I'm thought out. This blog may be quiet, thus, tomorrow.

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In Bed With Books—A Nothing but Ghosts Conversation and Giveaway

You all know Liviania, yes? You do, right? I interviewed her here once before, and she's consistently impressed me in the intervening months. Her blog, In Bed with Books, is a growing triumph, and her reports out, from her life as a college student, are often story enough.

In any case, she's been having a birthday, and she asked me to be one of several authors to help her celebrate. Our recent conversation is posted here. A Nothing but Ghosts giveaway is part and parcel of our party.

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The Big Green Screen (and the PBS American Experience)

I had a week that plunged me into so many different places in my head that I wake this morning feeling fractured. There I was, walking around with Katherine, my fictional character of Philadelphia 1876. There I was back on the cortijo in southern Spain, recalling with my old cook, Stella, the reverberating horrors of the Spanish Civil War. I was editing a piece for a client on a dialysis center. I was looking forward at health care trends. I was talking with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett about the making of memoir and fiction.

And then, yesterday, there I was at the Constitution Center, waiting my turn for that seat before the big green screen and the phenomenally well-informed Mark Moskowitz, rehearsing in my head all that I think I know about George Childs, the great Philadelphia newspaper editor, philanthropist, and community builder. I'd been asked to share my thoughts on behalf of a PBS American Experience documentary-in-progress on the life of my city. I was wondering, as I waited, what I really had to contribute. I was feeling less than.

This, then, is what happened: I met Stephanie, in make-up, who redesigned my face and chatted all the while about dance choreographers (one of my favorite topics). I met Damon Sinclair, who promised to show me his box step. The lighting guys were kind, and Mark's questions were fantastic, and all of a sudden I forgot to feel the panic I'd arrived with. I walked into a community—I, the lonesome writer—and was given a place. George Childs came alive again, thanks to the caring of many.

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Beth Kephart Interview (with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett)

I've mentioned a podcast recording of a one-hour dialogue I had earlier this week with that gem interviewer, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Our topics ranged from the crafting of authenticity in prose to the genesis of my involvement with young adult novels to the making of Nothing but Ghosts and Undercover (I read excerpts of both). We talked about what makes for good books overall. We spoke of how past awards, past seeming successes are, in fact, always in the past, and that every single day of writing feels brand new, raw, and uncertain.

If you can forgive the popped Ps of a long-distance phone conversation (I hope you can and will), I invite you to listen in here.

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What Makes A Book Great?

Talking with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is one of a writer's guiltiest pleasures. She wants to know what you do and why. She lets you talk process. She actually reads the books you've arrived (via phone, in my case) to discuss and sends you back into the mindspace of creation. I like being there, in that mindspace.

Yesterday's one-hour conversation will soon be available through podcast, and when that's the case, I'll let you know. For today, however, I thought I'd share with you an answer to one of Barbara's questions about the criteria by which I evaluate books. I returned, with her, to the year I chaired the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury (2001) and to these words that I delivered when presenting the five nominees—An Na, Marilyn Nelson, Kate DiCamillo, Phillip Hoose, and Virginia Euwer Woolf (the winner):

We concerned ourselves with matters of framing, form, and voice; with credibility and characterization; with the execution of plot or storyline. We studied the language—was it rigorous? Tantalizing? Fresh? We explored dynamics pertaining to originality and mood, meaning and soul. We thought out loud about each book’s innate capacity to alert, embolden, and inspire. Enduring books are the ones that enter the blood streams of their readers—that stir and shape and finally transform. They are the ones that get passed on, parent to child, friend to friend, the ones that jolt us toward insight, compassion, idea, hope, politics, or love. Toward the answers to the questions we must keep asking.

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San Miguel de Allende, and the beginning of story

I found her in a marketplace at the edge of San Miguel and she has haunted me ever since—the way she dared me with her eyes (Go on, take my picture), the way the haphazard quality of those many cloths massed together as a somehow virgin art.

Yesterday, while trolling through one of my new favorite blogs, Aerial Armadillo, I found what I imagine is this character's younger self in a painting that is so classically Tessa's—bold, brilliantly hued, shapely, seductive.

So that now the younger and the older versions of this singular woman have begun caroming about in my head. A dialogue that could only lead to story.

NOTE FOR TODAY: For any of you who might live in sunny Orange County, I'll be on the beloved Barbara DeMarco-Barrett show, Writers on Writing (88.9, KUCI-FM,) at 9 AM California time today. I'll be talking about books read, books written, books loved. I'll share podcast information once I have it.

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The Recession Generation

Reading the Sunday Times on Monday, a story called "The Making of Generation OMG," I come upon these words: Regardless of their age, members of the recession generation will most likely be shaped by a return to Things That Matter, a redefinition of values.

Less eventual emphasis on consuming, the article makes clear. A greater value placed on family life and secure jobs, a quest for "personal meaning."

Besides reminding me of the subtitle of a book I once wrote (Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things that Matter), the story made me think of all the young people I've lately had the privilege of knowing, if only for a day. The children of North Philadelphia, with whom I went out taking photos one afternoon. The young writers of a few weeks ago. The young poet, K., whom I mentor. Moira, my University of Pennsylvania intern (and ultimate inspiration for Zenobia, that curious book of business). The kids at church. My own son. The bloggers—Erin, Liviania, Maya, Priya, Emily Ruth, Cuileann, Tasha, Lauren, Joyce, That One Girl Emily, the list goes on and on—who have their whole lives ahead of them and are choosing to use their right now to read good books and to engage in intelligent, thoughtful conversations about matters I couldn't grasp until I was twice their age.

Even before the breadth and depth of this recession had been augured, these young people were engaged in a quest for meaning. They were, at the same time, expecting to be engaged. By books, by art, by possibilities, by adults who might listen and might suggest a way. This recession will reshape all of us, no doubt. It will also pave the way for those who already have so much to give, who are thinking way beyond the few words afforded by Twitter, who have already committed their lives, as Erin wrote a few days ago, to making people feel stuff.

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All Emotional

Someone very special asked last week if I might convey to her how I press emotion to the page. Me? I said. Emotional?

In any case, you have to watch this microvlog to find out who (well, you don't actually have to watch it to find out, but maybe you'll watch it anyway)....

And now an update: Hipwritermama (bless her good heart) is conducting an UNDERCOVER giveaway on her blog today. The deadline is March 12.

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Undercover, through the eyes of My Friend Amy

Confession: I have a really hard time reading reviews of my own books. Indeed, I have a hard time reading the books themselves once they're locked for good between hard covers. Like Michael Ondaatje and Tennessee Williams, I have the urge to nip and tuck right up to the very end. At readings I'll often find myself stopping mid-sentence, and reconsidering: What if I moved this semi-colon here? And: Do I need that adjective?

So I go along in this world, trying to write the best books that I can and hoping that those books will find their right readers. Good reviews are far from guaranteed. I write a certain kind of book. There are risks, always.

Tonight, I was moving through the blogs I love to read when I saw an image of the UNDERCOVER cover on My Friend Amy's blog. My heart skipped a beat, like my heart does. My Friend Amy, I thought. And then I held my breath, and read.

Amy does so much more—so beautifully—than talk about UNDERCOVER in this post. She talks about YA novels in general, and about her own high school career, and about a teacher she remembers. It's a charming, touching, and, to me, deeply moving, post, and I thank her so much for it.

(I'm breathing again.)

A footnote: UNDERCOVER is due out in May as a paperback "with extras." I describe just what those are in this earlier post.

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Alive

The weather changed our minds. It had locked us in, in the early week, with snow and ice and howl. Then, Thursday afternoon, Friday, Saturday, warmth arrived, true sun. It was as if someone had unclenched her fist (was it my own?) and said, "Go. Live. Be."

At home, my son made me laugh. Many times. "You have this twinkle in your eye," I said.

At the farmer's market, the man selling me nuts began to whistle a song, told me he was rehearsing. "What for?" I asked him. "We're forming a group," he said, "of old singers." "Like that movie?" I said, "Young at Heart?" "Yes," he said. "Precisely. That's me."

At the library they had the book I needed—The Man Who Made Wall Street. I took it home.

At Anthropologie they were selling red shoes. I own them now.

In the blogosphere the lovely reader and craftswoman Bella Fox included me in the embrace of the Proximidade award (for bloggers "who aim to find and be friends").

At night there were stars.

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Philadelphia 1876

This coming Thursday, I'll be down at the Constitution Center being interviewed for the still-to-be-titled Sam Katz documentary on Philadelphia. I'll be talking about one of my favorite Philadelphians of all time, the philanthropist and Public Ledger editor, George Childs, and about a period of time (the late 19th century) that has forever captured my own imagination.

Yesterday, while speaking with one of the film's producers—while trying again to conjure Philadelphia at what I feel was its most glorious—my thoughts sifted back toward this passage from my novel-in-progress:

Katherine climbs and tells no one where she is. She climbs looking for her end, her final day. She’s climbed through February and March, through April and May, through seasons that cannot decide on the weather, confusing the tulips and squirrels and Katherine as well, who nevertheless finds her way. Sometimes Katherine leaves the house in a light wool dress with a scarf looped loose around her neck and then, of a sudden, the weather will change. In will blow an infiltrating wind and there Katherine will be on Belmont Hill, all the way up, on the highest tier of the Sawyer Observatory. She’ll secure the scarf around her chin and stay. She’ll stand until the city can be seized—the coves and hollows of the Centennial park; the spire of Saint Peter and Paul; the houses, theaters, marketplaces, banks set tight upon the city’s checkerboard squares; the bulbous steam above Baldwin Locomotives. She’ll stare out onto the Renaissance pile of City Hall—like a cake, she thinks, with excess butter cream. She’ll look for a clap of bakery flour. And it won’t matter how fiercely the weather blows: Katherine stands. She stands and dares herself to the very edge, almost but not quite losing her balance. Getting ready.

“Anna,” Katherine says aloud, “how could you?”

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Homecoming (2)

Late tonight my son comes home from college for his spring break week. In my world the sands are already shifting. We'll sit. We'll talk. I will not take my walks alone. We'll head to the city, for how that kid loves all cities, and we'll stay out late, for since he was born he has always loved the late night best. I'll learn from him, because I always do, and because lately he has more and more to teach, and also, within all of this, I'll have to wait my turn, for whenever he's home, my kid loves to work with the employer who always makes room on the schedule.

So he'll come home, and I'll hardly sleep, fitting my client work in around his waking hours. Some of my friends are having their babies for the first time. Many of my high school friends are brand-new mothers. My baby is nineteen and still every note from him, every day with him feels new, feels sweet and exhilarating.

I wonder whose homecoming—whose hour visit, even—you yearn for.

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Make People Feel Stuff

This week the impeccable D.T. Max yields to us the life and thoughts of author David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker story "The Unfinished." My friend Ivy Goodman made certain that I saw and read the piece; as soon as her note came in, I stopped all else and did.

The story of Wallace, who took his own life at the age of 46 last year, is the desperately sad story of a man so committed to his craft that his own impassioned brilliance was, in the end, defeating. He could think through and past himself, but that wasn't enough. Indeed, as Max reveals, nothing but an utter reinvention of storytelling would suffice for Wallace, and since he'd done that at least once with his massive novel "Infinite Jest," attempts to write his third novel required an act of even greater transcendence.

"I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff," Max quotes him as saying. And: "It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies...in be(ing) willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet."

Make living people feel stuff. Yes. Isn't that it? Isn't that, in the end, what books are supposed to do? And why is that so hard (because, oh, goodness, that is hard)? And has it become increasingly irrelevant in a world that honors and rewards It books and Twitter books, quick tricks, sleights of hand, ideas that can be captured in a sentence?

We write our books, and then we rewrite them. We make them new every day to ourselves, and the moment they become flat in our eyes, overly familiar, known, processed—well, that's the moment they have died. That's the moment when we must put them away until something stirs in us again. Because if we cannot make ourselves feel stuff, we sure as heck aren't going to move others. The story of David Foster Wallace is a tremendously tragic one. It has the wrong ending. But his life, as told by D.T. Max this week, serves as a reminder about this writerly enterprise of ours. It puts us back in our seats with a whole and right directive:

Make living people feel stuff.

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Homecoming

The emotions of the last few days have made me think quite a bit about the past and about an essay I once wrote about the day that I decided to return to my childhood home. Here is how that piece begins. As with all my memoir work I write not to dwell on myself (never an entirely interesting topic) but, hopefully, to transport the reader, by way of suggestion, to her own childhood.

Today, then, I wonder: What is the one prevailing image that emerges when you recall your childhood home?

When I was 13 my family moved from one idea of suburbia to another, roomier version. It was what families did, what families still do, and besides, my father had been transferred. I was in eighth grade, then in high school. I moved out, went to college, got a job. I married a man from El Salvador, and next I had a son. Somewhere in the midst of this I lost my childhood. I listened for the pulse in my husband’s surreal stories and could not find seduction in my own. I raised my son the way all mothers raise their sons, with an emphasis on now and, then, tomorrow.

But even when you’re not looking for it, the past will up and find you. Someone from before will hunt you down with a treasure of a tale, or with a challenge. Someone will salvage an old photograph and slip it through the mail. Someone will say, I remember you singing, and someone will say, Whatever happened to that shoebox?, and one afternoon in winter your brother will get a look on his face that suggests honeysuckle and lightning bugs and stars watched from the roof. My brother climbed trees when he was young. My sister made mud patties near the swing. I played kickball on a street that ran a circle around our home.

Memory is episodic, aggrandizing, mischievous, iconic, and also mostly all we have of who we were back then. The anecdotes are easy; it’s the continuum that eludes us—all that falls between the heroic and the mournful, all the taken-for-granted everydayness that you can never see from a distance. Measured in terms of time and contradictions, my childhood can’t be reached from here. Measured by asphalt and traffic lights, it’s a 50-minute drive.

Somehow or other, though, I never drove in that direction. Not in all these years. Somehow I hadn’t journeyed back, and then, of course, I did. Down one country road and to a highway. Across another country road until it intersects another highway. At one point you turn left and, heart in your throat, you hunt for signs. For a neighborhood pool. A neighborhood field. A hiccough of a circle, and a house...

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And Then I Cried

There was hardly a soul in the restaurant last night by the time my husband and I made our way to it. The streets were thick with ice and the snow that had been falling all day long kept rising back up with the wind and snapping. I had my blackberry with me because I always do, because it is my one connection across hundreds of miles to my son; I want to be near if he wants to talk. And so there we were, and there was the blackberry, and there was cold outside and a certain emptiness in my heart—a sadness stemming from news encountered earlier in the day.

Toward the end of the meal (appetizers, only), that little red blackberry light went off, and I checked to see to whom it might belong. It was Little Willow, of all people, a forerunner blogger of forerunner bloggers, who was out there doing smart book talk in advance of most of the world.

Guess who has a book recommended in this month's issue of readergirlz? she wrote. You do! You do! The postergirlz picked UNDERCOVER as a recommended read, along with our main March pick, THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX by Mary E. Pearson.

I try hard not to cry at things that are not life and death related, but no amount of resolve stopped my tears with this. Because who are those readergirlz? They are Lorie Ann Grover, dancer, writer, illustrator, thinker. They are Justina Chen Headley, former executive and now author of such supremely successful and lovely, intelligent books as NORTH OF BEAUTIFUL, her latest, which earned three starred reviews and is getting incredible responses across the blogosophere. They are Melissa Walker, and we all know Melissa—beloved author of the VIOLET series and fashionista, who reports on her Manhattan travels so that the rest of us can be voyeurs. They are Dia Calhoun, the acclaimed authoress, and Holly Cupala, whose first novel is due out in 2010. And in essential supporting roles there are those like Miss Little Willow herself, HipWriterMama (a blogger I admired for so long from afar, a writer, and interviewer extraordinaire), and the delightfully popular Miss Erin, rising actress and poet and friend (and daughter of sometimes actress, rising photographer, and always friend Sherry!).

They are, in other words, women I have long respected. Women who are out there making a difference with their voices and their opinions.

UNDERCOVER stands as a March pick among books that I'd be proud to be associated with on any day of any week: MEMOIRS OF A TEENAGE AMNESIAC, FRANKENSTEIN, GRACELING, NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING: SIX-WORD MEMOIRS BY WRITERS FAMOUS AND OBSCURE, and WALDEN.

I don't know about you, but sometimes electronic hugs, as first delivered upon my heart by Anna Lefler, are not enough.

Still:

(((thank you)))

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The Recipe for Disappointing News

This is what you do when you get terribly disappointing news, as I just have.

You fill the house with music (fast and loud). You locate, between the clouds, the sun. You open the door to your father who has slid down streets and trudged through snow with a bag filled to bursting with tulips (yellow).

A friend sends you a photo to make you laugh, and you do.

Another friend listens.

Your son sends news: A 100 on his Interpretation of Fiction mid-term.

That's my recipe. I offer it to you.

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Time Equals Time

Last week, in a post titled "Love Equals Money ?," I pondered a theme I'd seen percolating in some blogs and newspaper stories—the assertion by some that those who had lost their jobs were less lovable or inherently valuable than they'd been when they'd brought home a paycheck.

Your response to that post—your collective assertion that true love is never money bound—was deeply moving (and reassuring since, hey, that's been my thinking all along).

Today, as the snow keeps falling, I'm remembering a conversation I had yesterday with a friend. We were talking about how we've been in this economic slowdown and I confessed that I was feeling blessed by all that I'd been learning about time. I'm learning to read the paper more slowly, I said. Learning to wait without trembling. Learning to make something old feel brand new just by changing its position in the house (and by dusting it, too; dusting helps). Sometimes I sit down, I said, and write five pages of a novel and I look up six hours later and realize that I've cheated nothing or no one, put no client project at risk, compromised no deadline—that that time was actually mine to spend, and I spent it in Seville.

I know, my friend said. You worry at one level, and then you stop. You realize that it's rather peaceful not running from one thing to another. That all you can do is hope for the best and live your life in the meantime.

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A House Built of Flowers

Ours is a small house built mostly of glass and light, of bright tones and books, and, when it is possible, with flowers. Flowers dragged in from the garden outside—blue heads of hydrangea, blooming stalks of peach iris, dozens of glads in two dozen colors, a stem from the red bud, a bright plume of lilac. Flowers bought and arranged in the Ikebana patterns I have learned—in half-moons, in swish plates, in rising wooden circles. Flowers tucked in with the groceries.

But this past winter of cold and dark I somehow neglected the flowers. I was being...economical, perhaps. Rational and wise thinking. I was testing out the small unsentimental fraction of me and seeing if I liked her.

I didn't. I missed those blooms and their unpredictability. I missed the way they turned toward the sun to remind me it was there.

Friday it was warm enough to walk to the Farmer's Market, and I had friends due in the next day. I shucked the unsentimental me and went off buying and didn't stop until I'd reached the flower stand, where anemones of historic proportions held their heads high on straw-like stems.

"I can't help it," I told the lady. "I'm taking some of them home."

"Of course you are," she said.

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High School Musicals

I'd moved around a lot by the time I reached eighth grade and that year, once again a new person in a school about to graduate clans of kids who'd known each other forever, I tried out for the school play, The Sound of Music. I won the role of Elsa based on my alto rendition of "No Way to Stop It" and the fact that my brother, sister, and I had grown up singing that soundtrack along with countless others (Windjammer, The Music Man, Peter Pan). I thus stood in line to kiss the guy who many (it seemed) considered highly kissable.

There was one small problem: I was ice skating at the time, competitively. There weren't enough hours in the day. "You'll have to choose," my mother told me, and I went with skating, but sometimes now I wonder what sort of first YA novel I'd have written if I had gone with the school musical instead.

I've loved school productions ever since—the stunning enthusiasm of the performers, the risks they take, the unfolding and uprising set designs, the costumes, that final moment when the entire cast swaggers out onto the stage for a last, congregating bow. One of my favorite final memories of my mother is of the night I took her and my father to the high school's rendition of The Music Man—of watching the look on her face as those 76 trombones swept down the aisle. The songs brought it all back—the house in Delaware, the room with the wall-length mural, the couch upon which my brother stood to conduct my sister and me. That night my mother, so often in pain, was happy.

This past week I took my father to the middle school production of Peter Pan (the same school where I might have been Elsa, only the building is new), where my friend's daughter was starring as the boy who won't grow up (and oh, can Alison Mosier-Mills sing), while Captain Hook was a perfectly roused-up menace, and Wendy was soulful and sweet, and Tinker Bell was a dazzling zipper of green light. Then yesterday we took our friends to the high school's Kiss Me, Kate, where Michael Browne, a snappily fantastic kid with whom my husband and I had traveled to Juarez, took on the starring role of Fred Graham. Michael might have been a gymnast but he fell in love with theater. He wanted to act, so he learned to sing. And does he ever entertain us.

I am left today in awe of young people who can imbibe those roles and stand up there fearless and give us everything they've got.

Don't stop.

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