Rain-soaked Autumn
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The rain has was melting the leaves from the trees; at the height of storm, I went out foraging for color.
Mirror Image
Friday, October 30, 2009
BTW, my friend Anna wrote, my daughter and I want to see your fanciful jacket.
And since today is a day in which no one is pressing, nothing is pushing, my mind is unspooling, and my thoughts are easy, I grabbed my camera, went upstairs, and stood before the only mirror in this house that is bigger than 12 inches by 12 inches. I actually never see myself from head to toe, which is probably a good thing. But at least the jacket is short, and I could snap this picture.
William Robert
at the Richard Avedon show, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,August 2009.
readergirlz writing contest (2): the story song winner (2)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The second winner of the readergirlz story song contest is Rachel L., who brought us a lyric called "Strength."
Read more...Strength
To stand as stone; to sing as wind.
To call your name; to let me in.
With flame and ice and skin aglow,
Those eyes that crackle; those tears like snow.
The heart that’s stronger
Than the oak’s wide frame;
The lips that call
And those that came.
Choreography Explanation: When I get an idea for a piece of writing, usually it comes in the form of a single image. Then I take the image and do what I can to sketch it out and transfer it to the reader’s mind. Once I found my image, my strategy for this poem was vagueness. I wanted the words I wrote to conjure up an image in the reader’s head and perhaps a feeling that went with it, but I didn’t want it to be the same thing that came into my head. I endeavored to take my image and just lightly brush around it with my finger, enough that the reader has an outline of my thought, but there are thousand possibilities of what I could have meant. My meaning is mine alone, and your interpretation makes the poem yours too.
Shelf Elf reviews Nothing but Ghosts
As those who read this blog know well, Nothing but Ghosts was written in the wake of my own mother's passing—inspired by the finch, the fox, and the songs that edged near to assure me that her spirit was yet within reach. Much of the book takes place in a fictionalized version of Chanticleer, the pleasure garden. In this photograph, the great katsura tree rises over a bench a gardener made, and those who sit there can look out over Doug's cutting garden and the wild profusion of asparagus. Beneath the shade of that katsura is a stone I asked an artist to create for me, a stone that Doug placed, just right, between the shade of limbs. The stone reads "the wedge of sun between us." It's a line from my memoir, Ghosts in the Garden, a line that memorializes my mother.
This morning, Shelf Elf let me know that she had posted a review of Ghosts. Her extraordinary words touched me deeply, for she had seen what it is that I try to do with books, writing in part, "Beth writes about the quiet miracles of real life. She helps readers to see that ordinary experience, all of it – the trouble and sadness and simple day-to-day joy of it – is worth noticing." I know this isn't always an approach that resonates with readers; it is, however, what I have chosen to do in this book life of mine, and I am so grateful, always, when touched by the grace of readers who wait, who read, who imagine themselves inside these worlds.
This Happened
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The rain came and came. I might have gone out, but I stayed in. I sat on the couch and not at my desk, and I closed my eyes, and I thought. The issue was, How will I finish this novel I'm writing? What is the final scene, and how do I get there?
I hadn't asked before because I needed not to know. I needed the making of this novel to be urgent, powered by wanting, by uneasiness, angst. I needed to wake to not knowing, to that desire to find out, and I did, I woke to that, but most days I could not work, and the novel was a dreamscape, the novel was a stagger.
Today: rain and silence. Today: courage. Today, all by myself, I knew. I saw the final scene. I saw one way to get there. I opened my eyes and I wrote not a line. I will carry the scene with me now, until I find the truest words.
readergirlz writing contest (2): the story song winner
The second readergirlz contest asked writers to think out loud about the way their own work is choreographed—how it moves across the page, and from sound toward meaning. Our winner is Q. Here is her poem, and her reasoning. Q receives a signed copy of House of Dance.
Tinged with regret
The girl in the bus
window
sees me on a park bench,
me with all my waiting and
watching her,
too.
I might have known her
once,
and I wonder if she saw me
for who I was,
for who I am,
or for who I'd like to be.
And how do I see
her?
She is a sheet of
paper,
breezing by on the wind
of the bus she sits in.
(Maybe I should have
sung
when I had the chance.)
When I write a poem, each sentence is its own stanza. I break lines where the next word should be emphasized more, leave a word on its own when it should be said slower and more alone, and leave lines together where they ought to be said faster. That, however, is just the basic structure.
I imagine this speaker thinking about the direction her life is taking and, perhaps, not really knowing where it leads. The girl on the bus could be anyone--like the sheet of paper, she is generic and fleeting. Yet, the poem starts with her perspective because it ends with the speaker's. She allows the speaker to build to a climax at the end of the second stanza, and then draws the speaker to her regretful conclusion, all without saying a word.
Read more...
readergirlz writing contest (3): then and now
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Two winners have been selected for the October readergirlz writing challenge, and their work will be posted shortly. In the meantime, I'm happy to unveil the third challenge of four, a contest I've called "Then and Now." Here we go:
In this readergirlz challenge, the premise is simple (and does not involve a video). Find a photograph of yourself as a young child on the verge of some new knowledge or turning point. Write a paragraph about that photograph/that moment in present tense, as if you are experiencing that moment for the first time. Then write about that photograph/that moment in past tense, with the gift of retrospection. Ask yourself what you gain from working in the present tense, and what is gained by reflection; include your thoughts on this with your submission. Send your entry to me at kephartblogATcomcastDOTnet by November 25, 2009. The author of the winning entry will receive a signed copy of NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, a novel about a young girl who, in learning to live past her mother’s unexpected passing, involves herself in decoding the mystery that envelops the recluse down the road. The past and the present collide in GHOSTS.
English 145 (5):
I arrived at the Penn campus early yesterday, first to have tea with Gregory Djanikian, a poet, a mentor, and the director of the creative writing staff. We talked of students and what might be yielded to them, talked of what remains, or should. We walked, then, to the eastern wedge of the campus, where Greg has a standing Monday squash game, and where I, by virtue of proximity to a once-familiar structure, remembered my own days on the varsity team.
I said goodbye to Greg, then met Jay Kirk on the library steps. I had an elephant's eye for him—glass, a taxidermist's tool, an object found at Paxton Gate during a San Francisco trip. Up Locust Walk, then, Jay and I went, talking of books, rehearsing history, recalling the days, mine, when again and again my work was rejected for its lack of commercial viability. We talked about English 145, and about Jay's narrative nonfiction, and about what I hoped he might relate to the students of my class.
After lunch, Jay was there, in Room 209, engaging these young writers, as I knew he would, with stories about funeral home directors and brothels, a lesbian retirement community, Rwanda's post-genocide tourism business. In structure lies meaning, Jay told the class. Scene making is story making. Write your authentic self—your fears, your not knowing, your questions—directly onto the page.
They do. They have. For we critiqued the students' memoirs then—powerful, personal stories that demanded respect and received it. Talent matters in writing workshops, of course it does, but so do intellectual integrity and kindness. My students bring all three to class. They move me to tears. I can't help it.
In the end, what does it mean?
Monday, October 26, 2009
The thing about making yourself vulnerable in a discipline you'll never own is that you don't go out and do it alone. When you dance, for example, before a few hundred people on a Sunday afternoon on a stage, it's not the steps that matter in the end, not really. It's Annika and Monika, who arrive early, with all their enthusiasms, and love. It's those who stand on the margins of the stage, calling your name as you whisk by. It's your Broadway partner, Jean, who looks you in the eyes as you dance and laughs off a mistake and texts you later, "I enjoyed our show a lot. It was very alive." It's your husband, Bill, who worked so hard to make the tango right and who, at the end of the journey, said, "You did great." It's your father, who comes in his best suit; it's your friends, John and Andra, with whom you later share dinner; it's Mike, Aideen's Mike, who says, "I had no idea you had that jive thing in you;" it's Magda and her sweet Polish-flavored encouragements; it's Tim, who says, "Yes, you danced it well, and you danced it together;" it's Jim, the quiet choreographer of the very few words, who says, "Your dances were good."
I have no illusions. I don't pretend. I am not headed toward world championship titles, I am not the show-closing star, I am still (and will always be) fussing with the way I stand and move, I will never be "the one." I dance because I love to and I dance in shows like these because my friends are there. Because in the end what does it mean, save that we cheer each other on.
Some of Each, in a Rain Storm
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Throughout the long pour-down of yesterday's rain, I travel. First, in the dark of pre-dawn, I travel a dreamscape, write to page 246 of this new novel. It's a number bearing no actual significance, save that there, within page 245, are the seeds of the novel's ending, a turning toward, a knowing that, someday, I'll finish this—a fact I would not have bet on until yesterday's strum-beat of rain. Mid-morning Body Pump at the gym with friends is a journey away from me, my mind. Later, back at home, the windows streaking, the laundry room leaking, I slip inside the work of my Penn students, who have responded, with heartbreaking skill, to this call:
Choose an event from your own life about which you now have some distance, some accumulated wisdom. Tell the story of what happened. Enrich it with your understanding of what it meant then, of what it means now, of how time has shifted both the event and its meaning. Consider Ginzburg's dictate about poetic beauty, Dillard's consuming wish to notice everything, Hampl's suggestion that true memoir is written in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.
In the early afternoon, my husband and I eat under a canopy at a local dive, watch the canvas pucker beneath the force of rain. At the gym, beneath the pounding down of storm on rooftops, we practice our tango. Inside the ceaseless wash, we drive home, and again I read the work of my students, then read (for the fourth time) "Hotels Rwanda," authored by my friend Jay Kirk, a best travel essay originally appearing in GQ. Jay will join our class on Monday, talk about how narrative nonfiction gets done, about how one hunts for story, then finds its heart, then gives it shape and purpose. Jay will come, and because he knows and charms and bushwhacks and waits, we'll all be smarter for it.
Late afternoon, our son calls and we talk for a long time about the things he has learned, the conversations he has started, the words his teachers write across his papers. Night, the rain still falling, we watch the movie, "Seven Pounds." I cannot sleep afterward.
Today, this much-discussed ballroom dance showcase will take place. A tango. A Broadway quickstep jive. No matter what, then, that chapter will be written, complete. That is life, the sum total: the anticipation, the afterward.
I just wish I slept more.
Writing by the Numbers/Twin Stories
Saturday, October 24, 2009
On October 19th, The New Yorker published a piece by Rebecca Mead called "The Gossip Mill." Subtitled, "Alloy, the teen-entertainment factory," the piece revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations of the company that packages approximately 30 teen-oriented books each year, while also scouring the what if? horizon for new TV and feature film projects. Alloy is indeed a factory. Its products are designed to sell, built to please, crafted with an insider's understanding of what teens really want, and want right now. The Gossip Girl series is the brainchild of Alloy. So is The Luxe and The Clique. With concepts brewed in team meetings, plots crafted by committee, and authors hired to see the big concepts through, teens, apparently, are getting their own very special brand of berries.
As one who struggles along here on her own, writing from her heart, I read the story with more than a modicum of interest, wondering how I would fare in a write-by-numbers scenario. Not well, most likely, since I've yet to use (as I've already stated here) so much as an outline, and since one sentence inevitably (if painfully) leads me to the next sentence, as opposed to, say, a hyper-imposed yellow sticky or rules sheet.
Mid-way through the article, however, I was stopped in my tracks by these words. "Shandler says, 'More serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit.' Alloy's next offering in this genre is a book called 'Wish,' which is to be published by Scholastic in January. The heroine of 'Wish,' Olivia Larsen, is a withdrawn 17-year-old in San Francisco whose outgoing twin sister, Violet, has recently died...."
Um, I thought. Hmm. Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel, is about twin sisters, one of whom has died. It's serious, too, it's literature, and there's a fair amount of angst, but I would like not to think of it as morbid. Still, could I, in my five years of non-committee isolation with this book, my fifteen drafts, my word-by-word finding my way, my nose-too-buried-to-parse-out-the-leading-indicators, have inadvertently hit on some pop trend? Was that trend already augured by Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry another book about twin sisters, one of whom also dies?
Could I, in other words, be onto something?
An entire year will pass before my book is out on shelves. I'll just have to wait to see what is what by then. I'll spend the time curled up with this adult novel I'm writing, immune to the trends in that genre, too, never knowing, day by day, just where I'm going.
The Drexel InterView: Beth Kephart and Paula Marantz Cohen
Friday, October 23, 2009
A few weeks ago, I prematurely loaded this brief excerpt from a much-longer interview conducted by the extraordinarily gracious Paula Marantz Cohen on behalf of The Drexel InterView, a nationally distributed cable show. My thanks to Lynn Levin for clearing the way for this permanent posting.
The conversation was held last autumn. During this segment I speak of the blog, the dance world, and next projects. I had not yet started on the book that preoccupies me now when this taping took place. I did not yet know that Dangerous Neighbors, my fifth novel for young adults, would find its way to Egmont USA.
Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (4)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Stories had saved Sophie, stories with their small acts of victorious aggression, their black words on white pages, their strikes against, their love affairs with deviations. There was snatch and thrum in stories. There was sway and influence, shatter and audacity, the glory yield of the road not taken; Sophie had gone her own way. She had set off with no sure understanding of where she had been or why she had been there ....
Pretty Kitty
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
This pretty kitty belongs to Kate Moses, whom I first met when writing for Salon.com. Kate (along with Camille Peri) went on to edit two anthologies on motherhood (I was lucky to have an essay in both volumes); to write Wintering, the Sylvia Plath novel; and, most recently, to complete a memoir called Cake Walk, which will be out next year. She is a dear and good friend, an impassioned hostess, an enthusiast, a seasoned romantic, and one of the only people in the world who has ever called me Bethie.
A few days ago, I sent Kate the smallest snatch of this novel I am writing. I am ready to read more, she wrote back.
Sometimes it's just words like these that keep us writers going. You who comment on this blog: You keep me going, too.
Tango: A Rehearsal Photograph
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
(courtesy of the brilliant photographer and wonderful friend, Mike Matthews)
Dangerous Neighbors/Parallel Reads
Yesterday I received an email from Laura Geringer regarding Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel set in 1876 Philadelphia and due to be released from Egmont USA next fall. She had read the book through one final time. She was writing with her thoughts about the cover. Neighbors is in many ways a cinematic book, and as a visual artist, Laura has always brought this keen extra sensibility to the way books look—not only that, she opens the conversation to the author. Reading Laura's descriptions of potential covers was like being given my own book back newly. I felt, I feel, anticipation.
At the close of our email conversation, Laura asked me whether I had any comparators in mind for Neighbors—any books that strike me as relevant parallels for readers. These were my thoughts:
When I describe the book — a story that unfolds around the
Centennial, a story in which large-scale tragedy strikes—people immediately make the Devil in the White City comparison, and I think there is some merit in that. In terms of an historical novel that is unafraid of language and idea, there is The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. In terms of a story about Philadelphians affected by something larger than themselves, there is the middle grade reader, Fever. Finally, in terms of an historical novel written to feel entirely present and contemporary, not lost in a sepia spill, there is Amy Bloom's Away.
Miss Em Reviews The Heart is Not a Size
and the Phillies win in the bottom of the ninth. I think I'll always conflate these precious things in memory now. A gorgeous review, a favorite reviewer, a favorite team, one night.
Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (3)
Monday, October 19, 2009
She’d spent all those years behaving as if there were a line between the unhinged and the sane, the barmy and the everyday, the irrational and the compos mentis. There wasn’t. There wasn’t anyone who could rightly say if the life that Sophie had fashioned for herself was raving or judicious, if it wouldn’t soon crumble. There wasn’t any actual distance from the past, no shelter from secrets.
Read more...
All right, so: here's the hair cut
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The funny thing is, of course, that it only looks that different if you are looking at me from behind. Clearly, I take my risks in stages.
The Person I am Becoming
Maybe change is harder for me than it is for others, and maybe I've not taken risks—have not traveled on my own throughout, say, Morocco; have not sung for my living in subway stations; have not acted on behalf of tomorrow without first shoring up today. I run, I push, I fight, I dream, but there's framework about me, and ground.
Yesterday I decided to have my hair cut in a new way—to give up twenty-five years of looking essentially the same for a shot at looking like the person I suspect I have become. I decided to change something that doesn't much matter but also matters hugely, just to prove to myself that I can. I sat in the chair of a girl named MacKenzie (an artist, I'd been told; a girl with ideas). I said, "Tell me what you would do."
She studied me. She spoke some truths. She began to tell me her story.
I was there for two hours, maybe more. I sat in her chair on a rainy day while she worked out the texture of my hair, named the shape of my face, described my head as flat, then laughed. "Don't worry," she said. "That's nothing. I've got a hole in mine." Then she cut and blew the hair dry. "Looks good," I said. She said, "I'm not even half done." She cut some more, she stood back, she cut, she blew it dry. The others in the salon stopped by.
Finally MacKenzie held up a mirror and I stood and I looked, and I might have cried, for what she had done was so good and so right. Cried for the good of this small act of letting go, of trusting someone else with me, of trusting myself to be less afraid to emerge as the person I am yet and yet becoming.
I have less hair. My head is lighter. I will wear Magda's coat and walk with my shoulders back, my green eyes high.
readergirlz writing contest (2): the story song
Friday, October 16, 2009
Only cold. Only wet. A lonesome feeling.
For a reminder about the second readergirlz writing contest—soliciting short poems or prose pieces that have been thoughtfully choreographed—please see my post on today's HarperTeen blog.
Taking Refuge with Librarians
Yesterday I went out in the cold, hard rain and drove to the Barnes and Noble down the road, where the perpetually bright-eyed Maureen had asked me to spend a few minutes speaking with local school librarians and teachers about young adult books. I had pictured the weather keeping most of these good people home (I'd have understood, honest), but when I got to the store I discovered not only my dear friend Joel (the elementary school librarian who had given my son such a wonderful start and has a starring role in my fourth book), but deeply-invested-in-young-people sorts from my own former middle and high school, my son's former high school, local Catholic schools, schools where I've conducted writing workshops, and elsewhere.
It was, in a word, heartening—spending this time in the company of those who care so much about the kids who wander into classrooms and libraries looking for light. Our few minutes stretched into nearly two hours. We spoke of boys and girls, and how their reading patterns differ. We talked about the role of research in personal work. We told stories about how blogs connect young readers with authors, and why that makes a difference. We considered the influential role of readergirlz. In Nothing but Ghosts, my third YA novel, I chose to celebrate, among other things, the power of librarians in the lives of the young and searching. Yesterday reminded me how precisely right that decision was.
I came home to two notes from my friend, Denise, who faces her second chemo treatment today. She'd read Brooklyn, and loved it, as I had hoped she would; she had the most interesting things to say. In addition, the pair of earrings that I'd bought for her had just arrived. Her email contained a photo of her wearing the promised colorful head scarf and the gold pyramidal flare. "Thanks to you," the note read, "I am officially a Way Cool Woman, and I have the photo to prove it."
Yesterday, on this blog, I was writing of beauty. Denise is shoulders back and spine tall and unimpeachable radiance. She has always been, and is even more so now, a most immaculate beauty.
Posturing for Beauty
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Magda, the champion dancer, talks about posture. She says, "Imagine that you have a coat, a heavy coat, and that you have filled its every pocket with stones. Now imagine that you are wearing that coat, that your shoulders bear its weight. There is no tension in your neck, no hunch around your ears, because the coat that you are wearing keeps your shoulders in their place and your arms proper in their sockets. You reach high, but always from an anchored place. Your neck is strong. Your head sits right."
She talks and I watch her move, I watch her glide across the room—this gorgeous creature. I think how easy it seems—standing straight, shoulders back, life in repose. I think of how, from the earliest days on frozen ponds and ice skating rinks, I had all the inner joy and all the speed and all the height, but I lacked posture. I lacked the courage to present myself to the world, to come out from behind myself and say, Here, at last, am I. That has carried forward. Writing, for example, is myself once removed. It is me, behind words, inside them.
Is it too late, at my age, to finally stand tall?
No. Because I want this. I want beauty.
The Reading Junky Reviews The Heart is Not a Size
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Reading Junky received an early copy of my fourth novel for young adults, The Heart is Not a Size, and begins her review with these words:
Beth Kephart fans are not going to be happy with this review. Don't get me wrong...
To be honest, that left me hanging, too. And then I read on.... I hope you will, too.
The Huffington Post
Thanks to the quick thinking of my Tiburon-based agent, Amy Rennert, I have a piece on the Huffington Post Book Page today, a short song sung in praise of book bloggers as well as a question raised, What can we do to help bloggers continue to do their work in light of the coming revised FTC guidelines?
I hope you'll take a look.
The last time I saw Amy we were sitting in a fabulous diner right down the street from this trolley. Hence the image of the day (or, more rightly speaking, the second image of the day).
Be Honest
The gold heart on her ear is tilted sideways. The gold hair around her face has fallen loose. She is at the age when what she is thinking is transparent on her face, when there is no reason, in her mind, to disguise her yearning.
Last night, doing that squirrely quickstep with Jean, my back was being wrenched and my shirt was quickly drenched and my lungs were raw and scraped and bleeding, and still he wanted more. Still he was standing there with his hands on his hips, telling me to give more, hop higher, land harder, thrust wider. "Can't you leave me alone?" I asked him, only half joking. "I mean, Come on. Look at this. I'm crazy even to try it."
And he said, "I am telling you what I see, and I am telling you what I want, and I am only ever honest."
"It's brutal," I said (I gasped), my body slammed against the bar for it could no longer stand up on its own. "Your honesty."
"Why would I waste my time," he said, "being anything but? Dishonesty is inefficient."
English 145 (4): Most Unlonely Teacher
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
I walk the campus every Monday before class—always a new direction, always some memory that I am stalking. Yesterday I went the length of Locust Walk and out toward West Philadelphia, where a mod-looking bowling alley has been slipped inside a residential street and the Dental School where I once worked has the face of new authority. At the corner of 42nd and Spruce I was besieged by memories of a friend with whom I shared a passion for Russian history. The room where he kept his books. The pea soup that he made from his mother's recipe. His fascination with Tolstoy.
By the time I reached the Writers House, I was feeling melancholy. J met me downstairs. S met me upstairs. K arrived with a tiny, days-old kitten tucked into the collar beneath her chin. "They call him Wild Bill," she told me, "and I think he likes my bling," for this found refugee from the streets of West Philly had dug his claw in deep to her necklace chain and was, it seemed, intent on staying.
The past is gone, except that it leans upon our present day, except that we write it into our stories, except that it tangles into our imaginations and hovers near. The past is a yearning, and now is the bowling alley, the cleaned-up Spruce, the Writers House, the stairs, the room, Wild Bill in K's collar, and the email that arrives from J, in the evening after class. It includes a bit of found memoir that, he says, he thinks I might like. It includes the line, "most unlonely teacher."
Yes. Certainly.
Growing up with Baseball
I grew up a Philadelphian, which means I grew up with baseball—the sounds of it on my grandfather's radio in southwest Philly, the gleam of it on the family TV, family expeditions to the ball park, including a clincher game at a long-ago world series.
Last night the Phillies earned their spot in the National League play-offs by finishing off the Colorado Rockies, but it was no simple victory. It was a game, in the end, that required the Phillies (who had heretofore left the bases loaded twice) to score big in the top of the ninth and to finish things off with a strike. They did both things against the odds, and I lost my voice yelling them on. Now to more pacing, yelling, nail biting as the Phillies take on the Dodgers for the division championships. Sorry, all my LA friends, but you know where my sentiments lie.
This photo, in case you are wondering, is not of a Phillie, but of the star pitcher from the local high school baseball team. My son was one of the two team managers for several years—a job that gave me one of the greatest excuses in the world to quit all else at the end of certain school days and to sit in the weather with the fans.
I miss those days. I miss that team. I miss yelling where the players can hear me.
Imagine the Past
Monday, October 12, 2009
Though the novel for adults that I am currently writing is inspired by a real (no longer extant) Philadelphia institution, I have been frustrated by the lack of verifiable documentation. Innuendo swirls. Rumor. Whispered references to a dark past. But aside from a spate of newspaper stories from a single brief era, some remarkable photography, a few ambitious blogs, a township planning report, a slim chapter in a slim book, a few generic paragraphs, and an elderly gentleman who agreed to speak with me by phone, I had been coming up short.
It doesn't matter, my friends kept saying. This is a novel. You are free to imagine.
Yes, of course. I am writing a novel. But there are some things that one really must know, and besides, my degree is in the history and sociology of science. I crave the past like runners crave water.
A few weeks ago, though, I noticed a 1959 report listed at the University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt library, set aside in storage. It took a while for the book to make its way to me, and yesterday afternoon I sat with it for the first time. I hadn't much hope. It was, after all, a typewritten, yellow-paged report—full of Roman numerals and bullet points with chapter titles that stated, without romance or flutter, their purpose: "Ergotherapy Department (Hospital Industry) Activities in the Rehabilitation Service," for example, or "The Function of Occupational Therapy in the Rehabilitation Service." Marked as a "First Interim Report," the book had been donated to the library by its author—"with compliments—" and in a neat blue script throughout (the author's own) corrected or amplified with notations.
Who would then have thought that this book would turn out to be the gem that it is? Here, at long last, are many of the elusive facts—matter-of-factly called out, unmanipulated, and unpretty. It's all here, scientifically stated and bullet-ized, and I suspect that I am the first who has ever gone off in search of it; the book shows no signs of having been read. I can't help now but imagine this author, precisely 50 years ago, carrying his volume to the Van Pelt front desk and saying, "It is yours." Did he imagine that a novelist would someday wander in and find his recorded past for the taking?
Text Message
Sunday, October 11, 2009
It has become our habit—my son texting me at the end of his weekend nights to let me know how the evening's gone for him. It was his decision to begin this tradition, his way of giving me a certain measure of peace. Here I come, to this desk at 4 AM. There is the red message light, flashing.
He's got a gang of friends, this son of mine, and the news is always varied. When I read his missives off the tiny screen, I conflate his words with my own imagination.
Hey, Mom, reads the latest. Tonight was great. We pretty much stayed in but then we went to IHop at 2 in the morning. It was really fun.
So that I see him laughing. I see him with his backwards cap and his plate piled high with French toast and extra syrup. I see these friends around him—the guys and the girls—who call him by his nickname, Smooth, and who have become his second family. We live our lives toward so many goals. I live my greatest joys through him.
Three-dollar Diamonds
Saturday, October 10, 2009
I have so very little time to do my own work (I steal the hours; I beg for them) and so today, when it seemed I would have the afternoon to write, I decided to be a girl instead. To not try to pound something provable out of every single minute—a book read, a line written, a house cleaned, a meal cooked, a paper graded, a dance step learned—and to go, with the rest of the world, apparently, to the mall.
I found the big earrings for my way cool artsy friend, Denise. I found a three-dollar diamond ring (the size of an elephant's eye) and a pair of black above-the-elbow gloves (Halloween stores are the best when you are shopping for your ballroom dance showcase). I found a pair of jeans (I was down to just one) and some new socks, because I've decided that, come Autumn, you really do need more than four pairs of socks.
It was, all in all, an exhilarating afternoon of doing nothing that will add up to much of anything in the end. And sometimes that matters most of all.
Stand Tall
Friday, October 9, 2009
In about two weeks I'll be standing on a stage, hopefully blinded by the lights, dancing a tango in Act One and that much-feared Broadway number in Act Two—all as part of the DanceSport showcase. It's always about now in these scenarios that I ask myself, And what, Beth, were you thinking? When I wake from a dream (I mean to say nightmare) purely certain that there's an elephant turning a pirouette on my chest.
Graceful beasts, those elephants. And so heavy.
Every time I think about getting out there with those jumps and lifts, that impossible Quickstep, that prickly tele-spin, those many cortes, I remember my final ice skating competition, when all I wanted was to be perfect. By the time I took the ice however, I was so clutched and crunched with fear that when the music started my legs were ungreased tins. The rink seemed huge and the audience vast, but most of all I was aware of my parents in the stands—deeply cognizant of their generous investment (time and money) in my ice skating career. I needed, I thought, to skate for their sakes. I needed to be lovely.
I fell on the first jump. I skated tall after that. I brought speed and height into my jumps, kick into the footwork, patience and lean to the spread eagle. I lost, in the end, to my rival, Holly Archinal. But I had skated, I had, and that's what I hope for in two weeks—to find a way past the inevitable errors and to finish tall.
Autumn in Pennsylvania
Thursday, October 8, 2009
She was the poet about whose work I had been raving—stopping friends and making them listen, stealing her book into conversation, (blogging). She wrote to me, then, asked about autumn in Pennsylvania. Said she missed it like she missed the spring's pear trees.
I said, Here is the view of just now, the slam-in upon my glass-topped desk. Here is morning, in autumn, in Pennsylvania.
Let the Writing Take You Where
The only way to free yourself from the fear of writing is to do the writing. The only way to advance the work is to sit with it. Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the book's final quarter. And if you write like I write, which is to say scene by scene and absent an outline, you are writing with no safety net. You have jumped and you are hanging from a bungee cord. You do not know if you have a book until you write its final line.
There's panic bound up in that. There is (but of course) anxiety.
But there is also the essential-to-me element of surprise, the waking up to the I don't know what, to the question, Where is this story taking me?
Yesterday, after a morning of mulling and worry, sketching and retreating, I turned to the computer to type up the page I thought I had in my head. The first sentence was how I'd constructed it, rehearsed it. Into the second I inserted an uncalculated detail. That detail took me off the expected trail, so that by the fourth sentence, my well-rehearsed scene was being substituted by the unforeseen and strange. I went with it—what was my choice?—and just as I came to a stopping place, a tree limb fell on a wire nearby. Our house went off the grid; my page went off the screen. When power returned just a few minutes later, I had nothing but a vague sense of what I'd written moments before.
I couldn't, I discovered, recreate the scene. I tried. I got that first sentence in, the second one, too, but now somewhere inside sentence number five, a new detail fought its way in. Trust it, trust yourself, I told me.
Never the light at the end of the tunnel until there is the light.
Work in Progress
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
It has been those long seven weeks since I could work at all on my novel in progress, this one for adults. I had left the book at a crucial place. I was afraid, frankly, that it would deny me access. Sometimes all you can write in a day is a scene. This one takes place in 1955, in a hospital for the mentally unwell. The photo above is the Alcatraz kitchen. It was the closest I could come to an institutional shot.
Down the long vat of the hall, the day is a scowl. The white sun through the streaked glass is a kind of unhappy. Beyond the windows the trees poke their naked branches into the underbelly of the sky. “Fresh air to do us good,” I tell Autumn, because she already knows, because I told her so through the hard itch of the dark night, that our goodness has earned us the outsides. “We’re privileged people now,” I said. I walk smooth and straight. I parade, no shenanigans, as if there is not, all around me, the bent smash of the Staters in their untied dress wraps and naked feet, their nowhere to go, their back and forthing. They walk and they sit, or they lump along the hall edge like rolled-up carpets, or they have been tied into the places they will remain all day, like dogs at the end of no leash. I walk like I walk, through the smoke and the stares, pushing my parcel, which is Autumn. “Wind is blowing,” I tell her. “Bushes are in rumble.”
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Shuffling Bricks
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
For seven weeks I'd been telling myself, If you can just get to that night. If you can just get.... Last night was that night.
Why does everything ache when you thought that only your head would be tired?
I look for words. It's like shuffling bricks. Like fighting the barricade of traffic on a smeary night.
English 145 (3)
At the end of class, the question: But how do we imbue our memoirs with meaning? The answer, which came later:
First and foremost, memoir writing is not autobiography. It is not the straight line of the what happened. It is the what happened and why, and what did it mean then and what does it mean now. Mostly it is about asking the right questions about the past and about the human condition. What are the conditions that lead to violence? What is the aftermath of abrasion? How does one survive loss? How do we tell ourselves stories to protect ourselves from the chaos of experience? How are big things small and small things big? How do the refrains from the past shape the condition of our present?
And on and on. Sometimes you can get at those questions obliquely, through structure and elision, as we saw with Running in the Family. Sometimes, as with the Diving Bell, you very directly play the now against the then; it’s in the shock of the discrepancy that we most intimately experience the author’s horror. This is the beauty of memoir. There are a million methods, but in the end, the best memoir is the memoir we read again and again for greater meaning. If all we get is a story, unlayered, we have no reason to return.
Anxious?
Monday, October 5, 2009
Whether I'm writing about a river or a young woman confounded by corporate America, about a marginal high school poet or a girl trying to survive the loss of her mother, I am, with my books, writing what I know, what I have felt. The Heart is Not a Size is no exception. Georgia, the narrator that Ed Goldberg describes so well in his review, is very much like I was and am—plain and responsible, known for taking care, and, at times, debilitated by anxiety and panic attacks. Georgia worries about most everything. She lives her life on high alert.
It was with tremendous interest, then, that I read "Understanding the Anxious Mind," this week's New York Times Magazine cover story by Robin Marantz Henig. It's a story that looks at the hard-wiring of prone-to-anxiety folks like me and at the longitudinal studies now under way to detangle questions about the actual physiological brain state, the words subjects use to describe their anxiety, and the behavioral aftermath.
There's much to recommend the story. There is also, on its final page, some hope, or, perhaps, a reason for those afflicted with this condition to come down a little less hard on themselves. I quote from the piece:
"People with a high-reactive temperament—as long as it doesn't show itself as a clinical disorder—are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes."
That's not all bad, from where I sit. Or at least, I'm going to try not to worry that it is.
The Heart is Not a Size Unveiled by Way of an Ed Goldberg Review
Sunday, October 4, 2009
How do we meet people? How do we continue to know them? Years ago, it seems, Ed Goldberg, a Syosset, NY-based librarian and an avid reader/reviewer, asked if he might have a copy of one of my books. It was sent. He wrote a gorgeous review; it was posted. There was, after that, another book. Ed asked. It was sent. He read carefully and dearly once again, sharing his thoughts with me, then with the world, and in the meantime advocating my work to others. He became—over Facebook, on the blog—a constant presence and friend.
A few weeks ago, Ed asked if he might read Heart. It's a different book for me, purposefully so. I held my breath. I knew Ed was going to speak his mind, say whatever it was that he truly felt; he's that kind of ethical reader. Here, now, just as my dinner guests arrive, is Ed's review of Heart.
Kephart, Beth. The Heart is Not a Size. HarperTeen. 978-0-06-147048-6. 2010. $16.99. 256
Georgia, a high school junior, needs a life altering event, something that might end her frequent panic attacks. Described as plain and responsible, she is an avid reader of fliers tacked to shop bulletin boards. The flier from Goodworks about spending two unforgettable weeks in Mexico, “planting a seed” so that some small, impoverished community can begin to improve, intrigues her. She convinces her artsy best friend Riley, who overheard her own fashion-plate mother once describe her as average, to join her.
Anapra, Mexico, is an arid colonia on the outskirts of Juarez containing one-room huts pieced together from scraps of tin and cardboard. It is a land of dust storms and las muertas de Juarez, girls who mysteriously disappear, never to return. Georgia and Riley join nine other teens, whose goal is to construct a community bathroom for the Anapra people. A small seed, indeed.
In The Heart is Not a Size, Beth Kephart has written an engrossing novel contrasting the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, both groups surprisingly in need. The Anapra people need life’s most basic elements. A people with nothing, their hopefulness is evidenced in the way they dress their children in bright colors and the care they take in digging out after dust storms. Georgia and Riley, two girls with bright futures, are equally in need. Georgia’s panic attacks are debilitating. Riley’s reaction to her mother’s indifference is to stop eating. As Georgia watches Riley waste away, as Riley’s health is seriously endangered, Georgia can no longer remain the silent friend.
Kephart has veered slightly away from her usual poetic prose, although the care she takes with her wording is still quite evident. Heart is a faster paced novel of self exploration. Hearts know no size limit. They can encompass five year old Socorro searching for her missing sister’s spirit or the entire Anapra community. They can enfold Riley, an extraordinary person whose mother is blind to her wonders, or Georgia who must realize how smart and capable she really is.
The writing in Heart is so descriptive that after reading about a dust storm, I felt the need to wash the dust off my hands. The characters are wonderful, from the teens performing the community service to the Mexican men who sit on a roof watching them. The poet that Kephart quotes has prompted me to read Jack Gilbert’s poetry. Reading some books can be considered an enjoyable pastime. Reading others is more of a “reading experience”. The Heart is Not a Size falls into the latter category. Beth Kephart has not disappointed her current or future fans.
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Does the dream define you?
And he says, "It never matters what you can do or what you have done or what you think or how you dream. It only matters who you are."
And I say, "But isn't the dream the who?"
Myself, Today
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Today: Awakened at 1:35 AM, I come downstairs and do not sleep. A few lines make their way to a blank page; I do not know if the lines are good.
Morning, then, and at the gym, I find Ann, an old friend, long lost; I'd once thought forever. In the large group room Teresa, leading the Body Pump class, has chosen the music of men. She turns her barbell into a guitar and sings her Aerosmith loud; the rest of us abide her antics, need her antics, love them. We don't scream the pain we feel. Many times a week Teresa leads this class and yet on Saturday it is as if we are her only students, her passion just for us.
Mid-morning and in my in-box I find the first official review of The Heart is Not a Size. I am overcome. The reader has found within my work just precisely what I hoped a reader would. A faster plot. The smell of dust. The have-everythings who learn from those who possess little.
Noon, and while shopping for the small dinner party that I'm throwing Sunday, I find my father at the Farmer's Market, sit with him while he eats his lunch. Then there is the frenzy of deciding and shopping. Yes, the serrano ham and the lavash, the strange apples from the Lancaster trees, the fatter berries and the insanely rotund scallions, and why not those tomatoes, which cannot decide what size they wish to be.
Mid afternoon, and I sit with the work of my fantastic Penn students, who move me to tears with the way that they think; I sit with Patricia Hampl. And then time alone with the Horace Kephart segments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea" (go to episode four, plays segments five and eleven). I don't care what you want to say about my great-grandfather. He did this country good. He saved what remained of the Great Smoky Mountains from the avaricious loggers, all the while knowing that once the park was made, it would not be his homeland anymore.
Later, a conversation with Andra. An email exchange with my friend Buzz. A note from Alyson Hagy, perhaps the grandest writing teacher of all.
Later, dinner.
Later, now.
Myself.
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