The Elegance of the Hedgehog/A Review

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

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

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

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

Read it, if you can.

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

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

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



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

Please join us this evening.

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

I am definitely living another's life right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.

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Viral Happiness (and a thank you)

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

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

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

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

Happiness. Happiness going viral.

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

— My Friend Amy

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

— Em's Bookshelf

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

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

To take a photograph is to be privileged by access.

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The Presenting Lenore Interview and Ghosts review

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

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

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

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

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Reflected Out

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

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

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

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Girl Detectives

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

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

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Headed for Perfection (or at least pointed that way)

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

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

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

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Stunned: A Nothing but Ghosts Surprise Party

I don't have words for today.

That's it, I don't.

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

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

The force is, most definitely, with me.

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

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Nothing but Ghosts/Book Page Review and Contest Winner

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

Excerpted from Book Page review, Ellen Trachtenberg

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

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The Trick

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

I don't want writing to be over.

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

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Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt on Launch Week

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

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

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

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"The Longest Distance": A Video Excerpt

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

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Eureka, Gamma Waves, and Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

The novel inched forward.

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

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Loving Out Loud

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

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

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

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

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Portrait of Joy

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

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Virtual Party

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

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

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

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

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

And you is lovely.

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Gymtastics

So it happened: I joined the gym. I had gone all these years being the rebel non-joiner (I was clique-less as a teen, mommy-and-me free as a young mom, a failure in a book club, and I was kicked off a committee at church once for having too strong of an opinion about, well, most things). But I was getting bored with my little self-imposed, in-the-house exercise routines and my neighborhood jaunts have been lately messed with by these biblically saturated days.

So two weeks or so ago, I sashayed down to the gym and walked into a class called Zumba. Do you know about this? An hour of cardio set to Latin rhythms. I thought I could handle this because, well, you know: I dance. Let's just say I made it through. Barely. Nearly defeated, I rose the next day to conquer Abs and Arms, which is to say fire and indescribable pain. The next day I chose to think that I could Body Step my way to glamour (excuse me, but what's an A step? What's an L?). One day later, I could be found at Body Pump, thinking (the thought was all over my face): Barbells? Are you kidding me? For an hour?

Every day I'd come home and say, That's it. I cannot. The next morning I'd rise with the desperate hope of proving to me that I can.

And guess what? I am finding that I love the challenge. That I love the way the other women work, how they don't give up, how they make room for the one or two men, how today one brought me a mat and one brought me a chair, and how somehow community coexists with anonymity. I like thinking that maybe someday I can and that, already, so many others do.

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Weather Mood (2)

I don't remember two consecutive days of sun. Silver is the color now. Rain is the sound. The sun is a caution sign and the moon has gone fishing. Every now and then, cloud pink, but mostly sky silver, which often fades to gray, and an understanding that I am settling into a new and fundamental slow—a different slow from the past many months, a more self-reflective one.

An even more self-reflective one.

(You were thinking it; I'll say it.)

What do the weather, the politics, the economy make of you?

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The Importance of Music to Girls, and other notes on redemption

How would you paint regret? I asked, most recently, and I have been moved beyond words by the responses, not just on this blog proper, but also on Facebook, and also late two nights ago, while talking with my son, who said: "Regret is a path directed by a one-way sign; just beyond the sign is a storm."

This morning I embrace the collective wisdom and generosity of all of you. Why blog? This is why blog. Because you get so much more than you give.

Speaking of giving: Several weeks ago, I sold an historical novel, Dangerous Neighbors, to Laura Geringer, now collaborating with the extraordinarily exciting new USA presence, Egmont. Those who have known me for a long time know just what that sale meant to me: that I would live to see a very different kind of Kephart novel in the world, that I had been buoyed by the faith of an editor whose mind I wholly value, that perhaps I, more literary, always, than commercial, would still have a future with books in a world in which commercial is the gauge by which authors are most measured.

It meant, in other words, everything, and Jane Satterfield, whose brilliant memoir, Daughters of Empire, launched a few weeks ago, celebrated the news with me by sending along a book of which she had lately been speaking: The Importance of Music to Girls, by Lavinia Greenlaw.

A few days ago, in the midst of frustration over the novel for adults that I'm now writing, I took Jane's gift outside and started to read. Utter endorphin release. Near immediate calm. The sensation that passes through me when I am confident that I am reading a good book. Over the course of fifty-six taut, quirky, magical-because-they-are-quirky essays The Importance of Music traces Greenlaw's awareness of/fascination with/life-bending relationship to music. From dancing, Roethke like, on her father's shoes, to learning to dance, to studying Bowie's attitude on the Ziggy Stardust LAp cover, to playing the piano too fast or too slow, these exquisite star bursts tremble with the true stuff of life.

Or, at least, with a life I understand. For, like Greenlaw, music has always been the charge within. I, too, was a girl dancing in the basement to music turned up loud. I was the girl singing, untamed, in the car. I was the girl dancing on ice and on a stage. I was a girl because of music. Here is Greenlaw:

If we sung out of trepidation or the need for release, the experience was nonetheless one of joy, as was dancing. I danced in line with my friends and alone in front of the mirror, as a rehearsal of love. It was preparation for saying "Look at me" and "Yes, I will" and "I know how."

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How would you paint regret? The Nothing but Ghosts Giveaway

With Nothing but Ghosts, my third YA novel, set to launch in eight days (I think that's right), I thought I'd offer a signed copy to one of you who answers the following question: How would you paint regret?

It's a question that Katie's father asks her, as he restores an odd and ultimately revealing painting. A question that becomes integral to the mystery in which Katie is embroiled.

Here's the relevant scene from the novel. I'll have my son assist me in choosing one of your names (from a hat or the nearest equivalent) on June 23rd.

An added note. I was deeply touched this morning to read this review of Nothing but Ghosts by Ink Mage. She is a sweetness in the world.

... everything is strangely quiet. I check the studio, but Dad’s not there. I head for the kitchen and there’s the in-the-oven-smell of pot roast, but not my father, who I finally find on the living room couch, no TV on. He seems asleep, but his eyes are open—staring straight up at the ceiling, no glasses. I used to find him like this every day for weeks after my mother died, until finally he began to work again, began to cook, like someone far away and maybe high above us, was forcing him back to life.

“You okay?” I ask him.

He says quietly, “Hey, Katie.”

I tromp over to the couch, sit at one end near his toes, untie my heavy, old, grunge-ugly work boots, which I will, I promise myself, dump in the trash once this garden gig is over. “What’s happening, Dad?”

“It’s that painting,” he says, after a while.

I wait for him to tell me more, to roll his eyeballs back down from the ceiling. “If you wanted to paint regret,” Dad asks at last, “what symbol would you use?”

“Regret?” I’m too confused, tired, hot to fake an answer.

“Things that you wished you could do over. How would you paint that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t do much painting.”

“It’s a theoretical question, Katie,” he says. “Not like I’m going to hold you to the answer.”

“Regret could be a bird flying away,” I say, thinking out loud, playing this game for his sake, because for all I know he’s been lying here for hours, waiting to ask me this question. “Regret could be the shell you leave on the beach, or maybe the last leaf on a tree.”

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Waiting for the Words

Sometimes you just have to decide: A book, this current book I'm writing, is going to take a long time. Days to conjure a single scene. More days to find the words. Many more to find the right ones. I'd been upset with myself for thinking (it seemed) inefficiently and without directed purpose, but then this morning I decided: Let the process be. Let the book find itself. Wait for the fog to burn off. Know that what I have is good, and trust more good to follow.

Live in the meantime.

How freeing it was, to decide. To say: On this one matter, at least, I will not berate myrself. I will, when I am stuck, read. I will sit outside. I will take a long walk with my son, and tonight I will join old friends at dinner and laugh until I cannot even breathe.

Now, alone in the house, I watch the clouds unstack themselves. I sit near the breeze.

Tomorrow a page may come, or it may not. That, too, is writing.

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Street Festival, Storm Coming

My hometown, yesterday.

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Life Saver

A long time ago, in a hospital room, a woman saved my life. I'd had extensive surgery on a jaw that had gone bad; I woke (as I knew I would) to a mouth wired shut. When, in the evening, all who knew me had gone home, when the nurses were on their quiet rounds, when there was no one looking, the machine that had been pumping my stomach failed. I could not scream. I could not speak. I was drowning in my own blood.

It is true what they say about the mind spinning back. Over time, over roads, over regrets.

It was my roommate who saved me. A woman I'd met just hours before. She heard me struggle and rose in the dark—sat at the edge of my bed and cleared the pump. And there she sat, through the rest of that night, warding off trouble, keeping me safe, urging me to look beyond the window toward snow.

The other day, while taking a train to the city, I saw a woman who might have been the woman who one day saved my life. She sat on this bench. She was reading this paper. We waited, both in peace, both of us breathing.

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Getting the Day Right

I have been the kind of person, throughout too much of my life, who measures the day by the progress that's been made—against deadlines, against expectations, against you name it.

I've tried to make the days count.

But today, after going urban pecs power and all, I decided to give myself the day off. Went shopping for an outfit. Went shopping for shoes. Took my beautiful boy out to lunch. Got my hair done. At four o'clock I was in the car, driving to the baptism of a baby girl who has a world of dancers head over heels for her, at least partly because her mom, Cristina, pictured here, had long ago danced her way into their hearts.

I did nothing all day but look forward to this—this gathering of friends in celebration of a baby and a marriage. And then it happened, then I came home, and all I wanted was more song, so I turned the music on. I stood at the screened-in door and watched the night begin. There were clouds. There were stars. There was a carousel of lightning bugs. I sang to the songs. I danced alone.

One more thing: The beautiful service that honored Cristina, her husband, Jeremy, and their baby was conducted—impeccably—by a man who later introduced himself as the husband of fellow blogger, Sierra Rix. Sometimes we bloggers slip out from our shadows. Sometimes we're just standing there as no one but ourselves.

I get so much wrong in this life, but today I got right. Today there was one measure: joy.

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Power Surge

At 3:30 AM this morning, after my husband drove off in the rainy dark to catch a plane to El Salvador, his home, I posted here a stillness-seeped excerpt from Nothing but Ghosts. That's the mood I was in—stillness seeped.

An hour or so later, though, I was at the gym, working abs and arms, pecs and tri's, bi's and all manner of psycho stay-with-it tricks. I was rocking and urban, determined and persevering, and when I left the gym, the sun was out. This changed my mood, so it changed my post, and it will no doubt affect whatever I write today, or how I receive whatever I read.

I am more people than I care to count. I swim a thousand channels.

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On Writing the Last Sentence First/John Irving

I love the New York Times Book Review conversations with authors—Sam Tanenhaus meets a writer meets a camera.

The current subject is John Irving, now nearing the completion of his twelfth book, Last Night in Twisted River.

What I find extraordinary about this conversation is what Irving reveals about his process. He writes, he says, his novel's last sentence first, and that sentence never changes, not even the slightest grammatical bit. Seven months to a year after finding the book's last sentence, Irving writes the novel's first words, and over a long stretch, then—years—the story develops. The beginning of an Irving novel will go through many iterations. The ending will not.

When I think back on the poems, short stories, memoirs, fables, and novels I've cranked my mind around—the things that I have tried, through the years, to write—I cannot think of a single instance in which I had glimpsed the last sentence before arriving right on the doorstep of that very last sentence. Vastly limited in my ability to look ahead in that way, I begin at the beginning, and I feel my way (often blindly) through. Never do I write so much as a pairing of words that goes unchallenged or unchanged (my books endure upwards of two or three dozen edits, and no sentence is spared). Never do I know, as intensely as Irving knows, enough to declare, This is done, solid, fixed in time and typeset.

(If I were to tell you how many iterations each of my blog posts go through, how they endure changes sometimes days after posting, you would ask yourself if my company is worth keeping.)

It works for Irving—this knowing where he's going. It no doubt works for others. But I never know, and I suppose I need this long bath of uncertainty to keep me rising at 4 AM, to keep me sitting here at my glass desk, to keep me hoping. I want to know, in my books and poems (in these blog posts, even), what is going to happen next, and in tiny fractions every day, my brain cedes bits and pieces.

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Quaver/Beth Kephart Poem

Now you understand
everything. How it was never
what he said or how he listened,
never the violent grind
of his coffee at dawn,
or the caution: Leave me
to what I am, to my idea
of the intransitive.

It wasn’t the way he kept
the birds in seed
or how time idled
in the architecture
of his afternoons,
or how, at night,
he resolved,
or I should say countered,
distance.

It was color.
It was the way
intimation came to him,
and shade,
the way the paint
roamed a glissade
but would not settle.
His assertion of quaver.

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What a Girl Wants

From a Sunday New York Times (Douglas Quenqua) story entitled "Blogs Falling In an Empty Forest," this:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream—or at least an ambition—unfulfilled.

And later:

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the internet, but "it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views." He added, "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one."

Statistics are statistics, and I'm not here to counter those. But I do wish to suggest this morning how downright thrilling it is when blogging communities emerge and thrive. Readergirlz, the online book club for teens, is a prime example. The virtual worlds that bloggers such as My Friend Amy, Presenting Lenore, HipWriterMama, Ravenous Reader, The Holly and The Ivy, The Curly Q, An Aerial Armadillo, Life Just Keeps Getting Weirder, and Pop Culture Junkie (among many others) generate are real and human (if you doubt the human part, follow the adventures of Cuileann, Faith, and Miss Erin—long-time blogging friends—who met in person for the first time this week). And last evening, Chasing Ray—always inventive, always forthright, impeccably well read—launched a project in which I am honored to participate—a summer-long tour of the minds of a rich slate of YA authors, all of whom are answering questions spawned by the general theme, What a Girl Wants.

Today, Lorie Ann Grover, Sara Ryan, Melissa Wyatt, Laurel Snyder, Margo Raab, Jenny Davidson, and others (including me) are reflecting on the question, "What book affected you most as a tween/teen?"

Check it out, if you have some time.

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This Photograph was also taken by Jill's Blackberry

I have drawn the brilliant conclusion that all important messages are sent to me while I am at the dance studio being tossed about, from partner hip to hip (do they really call that move the back breaker?), or when being encouraged to go high on the tango kicks (really? you want me to kick that high?).

For today while being asked to scorpion my legs while being spun but a quick half turn (okay, you try it), the red phone light was blinking with this news: The Heart is Not a Size is now available in galley form.

There is so much, for me, that is bittersweet about this book, and so much that, quietly (can I say this?) I am proud of. Not proud in a hang-the-ribbons-on-the-wall fashion, but proud because this book required me to push through issues with which I have struggled for nearly a lifetime, and because it takes place mostly in Juarez, a border town where I discovered community of a most essential sort.

In any case. And so it is. And someday, maybe, I'll execute that scorpion kick in a manner that does not cause Scott Lazarov to gently roll his eyes.

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Storm Mourning

You recognize the pale gray pink before a storm; you know the storm's coming. Even so, when the storm came in this morning, I was unprepared for its volume—thunder like a jet just off the tarmac, hail the size of rock salt, rain in straight white nails driving down.

It is a storm in the wake of a week of losses. The grandson of my mother's best friend, just 24. An ebullient former colleague of my husband's, only 49. A friend's beloved father. The first two taken as suddenly as the storm that just knocked in. They were there, and then they were vanished. They were whole, and then they were gone. The third a man who, his daughter writes, "was my hero and my best friend."

We are silenced by storm. We are made to listen.

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The Photographer at Work

Because turnaround really is sometimes fair play, I post a photo that Leslie Kase has now sent my way—me behind the camera Saturday, freezing young dancers for eternity's sake.

We have a good time, those of us who join in for the Dancing Classrooms Philly extravaganza—getting lost on flights of stadium stairs, corralling children, begging for just half of that salty soft pretzel, and urging the make-up lady to shower us with a smidgen of her glitter. Finally we step back and then: the show belongs to children.

You can't hear it, but imagine this: An entire basketball stadium's worth of screamers, urging the gallant on. Calling out school names. Calling out dancers. Waving signs the size of four people.

Better than basketball on a good day.

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The Shadow Catcher and the Word "Beautiful"

I am there, in the round chair in the thin room, the day coming in through the slender screen, and I am reading—finishing the final pages of Marianne Wiggins' odd and remarkable The Shadow Catcher (a WG Sebald-like melage, a tour of the early lives of the photographer Edward Curtis and the woman he married, an inverted commentary on the making of a novel, a discourse on sound). Outside it is still, save for the bounce-echo of the ball that my son sends up and down the driveway.

I don't know how much time has passed. I think, perhaps, too much. That I went away inside a book and that I need, somehow to return to the day. To my responsibilities.

So I call to my son, through the screen, "Hey there."

Which must, to him (the distortion of distance, the ruffle of tree limbs between where I sit and where he stands), sound like a question, for he calls back, "Yes, Beautiful?"

And I sink. And I have nothing to say. He has disarmed me, the way that he does. Using a word so rare and heartbreaking.

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To Be Young Again, To Dream

Scenes from Dancing Classrooms Philly, Finals, June 6, 2009.
Sponsored by Harvey and Virginia Kimmel and The Connelly Foundation, among other fine and loving Philadelphians and institutions.

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The Teacherly Personality

In "Show and Tell," the Louis Menand/New Yorker essay on creative writing programs (June 8/15, 2009), these words arise:

Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn't matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.

John Gardner, Menand says, "was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Donald Barthelme, for his part, "assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashberry's 'Three Poems'." And then there was Gordon Lish, who "had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence."

I'll be teaching the advanced nonfiction workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and so Menand's essay gave me pause. I hadn't, for example, planned on having my students empty out the nearest liquor store. I also thought that I might give my students more leash than the first few words. But more than that, I plan to teach, along with the writing, so much essential reading, for it is only by reading that writers—aspiring or not—gain footholds against language and idea. I'll be encouraging students to read not me, but the books that I believe will matter most in their long-long evolution.

My course description for the few who bravely enter in:

“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected…” the poet-novelist Forrest Gander has written. “To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.” In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will seek, and leverage, exposure. We’ll be reading writers contemplating writing—Natalia Ginzburg, Larry Woiwode, Vivian Gornick, Terrence des Pres, Annie Dillard. We’ll be reading writers writing their own lives—Gretel Ehrlich, Anthony Doerr, Stanley Kunitz, Brooks Hansen, Jean-Dominique Bauby—as well as writers writing the lives of others—Frederick Busch on Terrence des Pres, for example, Patricia Hampl on her parents, Michael Ondaatje on the utterly cinematic characters of his childhood. The point will be to get close to the bone of things. Students should each be prepared to craft and to workshop six new short pieces of analysis, memoir, and literary reportage.

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What Blogging Is

Early in the writing of a book, the mind is a jostle. It's bump and grind. It's lonely. It's spending six hours writing a sentence or two, and wondering the next day, What was I thinking? If I can't get a scene right, I can't move on. In the beginning, I hardly move on.

Yesterday, though, I had this mini-breakthrough. I had something that might be something; I wanted someone to tell. But how do you justify crashing in on another's day—smashing up whatever thoughts they're having with your own odd nascencies? I've learned through the years how to snare my own impulse—how to hold back, keep calm, contain the urge.

And then blogging happened. Blogging became my thinking out loud—for better or for worse, that's what this is. It asserts itself against no one who cannot make the time. It lets me say, Hey. This happened. To whomever might wish to hear.

I am grateful (beyond words) for those of you who wish to hear.

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Life Lessons

I am thinking this morning of the smash and fractions we leave behind, of the contradictions we provoke, of the black clouds we send up over our own heads. I think of the comments we make in a moment of hurry or exhaustion, the tossed-off observations, the words we use to delineate one thing from the other, to set one thing to the side of another, at the awful expense of that other. These things echo; they reverberate. We don't see the ramifications coming, but they will come: you wait, they'll be there. There is nothing we can do to scrub the thing we might not have said, the hurt we should have never inflicted, from our record. We can apologize, and we do. But we can't retreat to the before.

Lately I have been taking dance lessons from a choreographer who, in so many ways, silences the negative. You doubt yourself, and he asks you not to. You hear yourself making some ironic observation, and it goes strictly unacknowledged. You ask him a question and you discover, in his answer, no manipulation, no deceit, no cunning. You make a mistake, and he does not shame you. The lesson isn't soft, the learning is relentless, the stakes keep getting higher—and yet: the negative doesn't enter in. Nothing is gained at the expense of something else. There is, quite simply, gain.

The best teachers teach us more about life than they do about anything else. They give us the chance to be slightly better people. Taking ballroom dance lessons is a self-indulgence of the highest order. But oh, I still have so much to learn. And oh, I am so desperate to get some part of this living right.

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An Insomniac's Writing Moment (or, excerpt from novel in progress)

In July the orange-pink of the gladiola crack from their husks; they split the dark. The birds fidget in the trees. The crows are disgusted. The noise of quiet places is impossible. It kept Sophie awake all that night.

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Heart Healing

In a story posted yesterday on MSNBC.com, Bill Briggs writes of the doctors who are "increasingly studying—and employing—the physiological dance music does with the body's neurons and blood-carrying cells." Of patients whose rooms are filled with the sounds of harp or Brazilian guitar, post surgery. Of melody's vital role in slowing heart beats, spiking pituitary growth hormone, or dilating the tissue in blood vessels. Of the relationship between song and healing. The harp, as it turns out, has extraordinary healing powers as an instrument whose vibrations are capable of going "to the deepest places of the body," according to Tami Briggs, a harp therapist. But listening to "joyful" music is essential, too, a newly prescribed regimen for those concerned about heart health, and Mozart, too, is a recommended cure.

I write often, on this blog, of dance. My house, when I'm not working, is jammed with song. At night, in the dark, music is there, in my thoughts, and everything I write is pinned to rhythm.
I have never been able to tame my own urgent need for lyric, melody, lift, and sometimes I have been ashamed by that—ashamed by my need to dance, my desire to move, my insatiable want of more song.

Perhaps, I think now, the music is keeping me alive—saving me (mostly) from the extremes of myself and, at least for now, for a while longer, protecting my big, fractured heart.

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