Juxtapositions

It's the juxtapositions that tell the story, the relationships between things
(between us)
that matter.

Read more...

Always The Days Keep Passing

We spent five minutes sitting together in morning silence before we threw my son's things into the back of the jeep and set off for the city, where the bus that would return him to his school hover-hummed. There is never enough time when my son is home. There is always, when he is near, tremendous calm. He hasn't an ounce of the self-trumpeting about him. No need to command the stage. I can't decide what I love most about him, but this is high on the list.

I spent the day, then, thinking out loud with a friend about her dreams and, on either side of that, in the company of my students' last big papers. They have traveled so far, these writers. They have made room, in their minds and hearts, for a larger conversation about life and language, about this one word, vulnerability.

I may be very tired tonight. I may indeed be getting older. But look at the size and shape of my life. This is the feeling of fullness.

Read more...

Main Line Today: In which my friend Libby Mosier and I get to share a page

(scanned from Main Line Today, December 2009, "young at heart: the western suburbs seem to nurture authors with a knack for connecting to kids and young adults." by J.F. Pirro)

Read more...

readergirlz writing contest (4): writing from life

Today I post the final readergirlz writing contest—a challenge that asks you to look at something familiar and transform it into the unexpected. Check out the video posted here. Send your best work to kephartblogATcomcastDOTnet. The winner will receive an advanced reading copy of The Heart is Not a Size (which is due out in March from HarperTeen). The winning work will be posted on this site. Our deadline is December 30, 2009.

I would say, Give it your all, but I know I don't have to.

Read more...

readergirlz writing contest (3): then and now: The Winner

For the third Readergirlz contest, writers were asked to choose a photograph of themselves at a turning point in time. They were then to write of that moment in present tense. They were next to take that moment and recast it in past tense. Finally, they were to reflect on what each tense made room for in terms of storytelling.

Our winner is Kiera Ingalls, 17, of Wayne, PA, who did a masterful job of twice telling a wild turkey story and reflecting on what the exercise yielded. We had two runners up: Carly Husick and Lucia Anderson. Kiera wins a signed copy of Nothing but Ghosts, and I replay her entry in full here. Look for the fourth and final readergirlz writing contest tomorrow; the winner of that contest will receive an advanced reading copy of The Heart is Not a Size.

Present Tense:

I follow my brother’s quick steps in the dewy grass to the roaring creek. The slime of salamanders lingers on my small fingers as I rub the bumpy skin of a toad. My brother Roscoe starts to meander towards the woods. Quickly following him I make sure not to drop the fidgety toad that I cusp in my hands. Under the tree cover there is a myriad of vibrant green “monkey brains”. I pick one up and the citrus scent wafts right up to my nose. From the corner of my eye sudden movement catches my attention. I drop the monkey brain as Roscoe dashes after a wild turkey. He lunges at it once only brushing the tail fathers. He sprints up again making another attempt this time acquiring a feather. With another grab the agitated turkey turns around and bites Roscoe. My brother stops, allowing the wild turkey to fade into the distance. I approach my brother and after seeing that he still has all of his fingers we take our time back home. Looking down my brother faintly knocks on the heavy mahogany door. My mother slowly opens the door appearing disgruntled. I gaze up extending my arms in front of me to expose my bumpy finding to mommy. In return she extends her accepting arms to Roscoe and I for a hug, and in relief we leap into them.

Past Tense:

We jumped in the creek looking for slimy squishy creatures and we walked through underpasses beneath major roads. Wandering through the woods my brother, Roscoe, and I discover fox skulls and fragrant Osage Oranges. As we started back to the house Roscoe spotted a wild turkey and decided he would try to catch it. I’m not sure if he intended to have it for dinner, considering he was a very picky eater and would only eat turkey and lettuce sandwiches for some time, or if he wanted to domesticate it as a pet. Nevertheless, he was chasing the poor animal and grabbing at its feathers. I t must have been Roscoe’s second or third attempt to grab at the turkey, so it turned around and bit him. At that moment Roscoe decided it was time to head home. We hesitantly knocked on the front door and our disappointed mother answered. Although she was greeted by two once clean children that were now soaked, covered in mud, infested with ticks and most likely infected with giardia-- presenting fox skulls, toads and Osage Oranges-- she still accepted us with open arms and a smile.

Reflection:

Writing this event in present tense following with past tense revealed to me the humor of the event that was unfathomable at the time it happened. In general this process allows for interpretation of a past situation with the end result presenting intriguing differences. In my story for example the present tense introduces apprehensive characters and the past tense illustrated a couple of fearless pioneers.

Read more...

Reading The Help

For one hour this afternoon, the house will be quiet, and I won't be cooking and I won't be cleaning and my gorgeous son will be off at his job.

The plan, then, is this: I'm going to sneak away and read a little deeper into Kathryn Stockett's The Help, a book, Motoko Rich reported in the New York Times, that was "at first rejected by nearly 50 agents" before it was "scooped up by an imprint of Penguin and pushed aggressively to booksellers, who fell in love with it.... Amid blockbusters from the likes of Dan Brown, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and Nicholas Sparks, Ms. Stockett has stayed within the Top 5 on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list since August."

Who doesn't like that kind of publishing story? Who doesn't want to love this book? I've only read the opening chapters. I'm using this hour to read more.

Read more...

Zumba Joy on Thanksgiving Morning

For many of us (and I am most assuredly part of that us), these past many months have changed the way we go about our business. With less to spend, we think harder when we spend. With fewer options, we "shop" in our own closets. We light candles at our meals, as if ambiance were itself a savory something. We find great joy in the simple things—in dreams shared over tea, in walks among the falling leaves, in books long in our possession.

This morning, at Club La Maison, I found that joy, again, in Brenda's Zumba class—in how the so many of us made room for the so many more, for those sisters and friends who had come from out of town and took the dancing risk. Sometimes we are gypsies in Zumba. Sometimes we are Mexican cowgirls. Sometimes we are dancing Bollywood, and sometimes African rhythms, and sometimes, yes, we wear boas around our necks, and heaven help anyone who has not joined in, but is only standing there watching. The thing about Brenda and Zumba is that it locks nobody out. The door is always open to this essential, simple joy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Read more...

Where My Imagination Goes

My imagination has lived, these past many months, within the agitation of conflicting eras and places.

There were the three rounds of copy edits for The Heart is Not a Size, returning me again and again (in my mind's eye) to a squatters village in Juarez. There was all the final shaping of Dangerous Neighbors, so that there I was, walking (feeling as if I were walking) the crowded streets of 1876 Philadelphia. There were the first and second drafts of my novel for adults, which dreamed me toward the wreckage of an abandoned insane asylum. And there was Penn, the advanced nonfiction class, where I gave myself over to the landscape of memoir and narrative nonfiction.

On the afternoons when I danced there was nothing in my head but song.

Projects come to an end. The imagination grows lonely. There is no time at the moment to be anything, do anything but work and home.

But I feel that inevitable emptiness ticking, a desire to go somewhere far and unknown, a desire to make something new knowable.

Read more...

Thanksgiving

He is home. My boy is home. Taller than he was just three weeks ago. Broader. A whole new raft of stories to tell. I'd had his room painted versions of chocolate and vanilla. I'd left a chocolate turkey on his pillow. I'd said, "So, hey. What do you think?" when he came downstairs.

"Looking good," he'd said. "So glad to be here."

Myself? My gladness is boundless.

What do I want for each of you? This kind of joy. This kind of wholeness.

Read more...

Christmas in November: Two Nothing but Ghosts Reviews, an Interview, and a Contest

So here I am, scrubbing bathrooms, dusting shelves, sweeping floors, arranging flowers, buying the ingredients for butternut squash soup, citrus salad, cranberry sauce, my mother's brownies, and thinking: Oh, Thanksgiving. Soon my son will be home.

But friends out there have conspired to make this an even greater holiday (Christmas in November) by yielding space and time to Nothing but Ghosts. Sara of the very sophisticated YA book site, The Hiding Spot, has adorned Ghosts with beautiful commentary, asked me some great questions, and posted a Ghosts giveaway contest. I hope you will spend some time on her site (and I hope Sara will always know how grateful I am, especially since she had to persevere through some rather nasty e-mail problems on my end).

Meanwhile, over at Savvy Verse & Wit, Serena has given Ghosts the deeply thoughtful eye of someone whose book review and interview list reveals a reader who is committed to doing justice by fine books.

I am thankful.

Read more...

English 145 (9): Stationing the Mind, Readying the Heart

We saved Terrence Des Pres for last in English 145—"Writing into the World" and "Accident and its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner." He had so much to teach us, Des Pres. So much integrity as a scholar and witness. So much urgency toward imagining the truth:

"Transcendence, art for art's sake, writing for the ages—these take care of themselves. Good writing will always survive. Meanwhile, the prose of witness responds to the world, finds its work in the occasions that call it forth. Its method is exact attention to the actual. It depends on respectful reading of detail; on imagination making connections and seeing what's there. It also depends upon art—right words to station the mind and hold the heart ready."

One reads Des Pres's reflections on John Gardner's ultimately inexplicable early death with a heart made heavy with the knowledge of Des Pres's own far-too-soon, and essentially unreadable, passing. One leans toward the faith Des Pres held in this strange and beautiful thing we writers do: "Few of us believe anymore that through art our sins shall be forgiven us, but perhaps it's not too much to think that through art a state of provisional grace can be gained, a kind of redemption renewed daily in the practice of one's craft." One reads "Ourselves or Nothing," the poem Carolyn Forche wrote to honor Des Pres, and wishes, fervently, that Des Pres were still among us.

All of this we do—we did yesterday—in English 145, on a rainy day, in a quiet room, against the backdrop of the very real and pressing news of the too-soon passing of a student on campus just the day before. How did the end come early to this student? Why? How is one to speak of it? To whom does such sadness belong?

Knowing, in the end, isn't everything. Wanting to know matters more. I love my students for wanting to know. For being who they are. Right now.

Read more...

Well Groomed

I have been out of my home more than I should be of late—at meetings, at conferences, at gatherings. I have not found the time simply to be. Last night, as I walked through the dusk of my city, Philadelphia, toward the ALAN cocktail hour at the NCTE event, I felt a floating disassociation from myself. I counted the things that I should be doing, the things that would never get done.

That welling was countered almost at once by the embrace of HarperTeen's own Laura Lutz (who is a dark-haired version of the young Amy Irving, I finally decided); by a conversation with the delightful Matt Phelan; by the long rat-a-tat with HarperTeen's Emilie Ziemer, not just a dancer herself, but an exemplary reader (and good soul). It was further improved by time spent with Jill Santopolo, and by listening, then, to writers talk about their process and their teaching.

Are you a lawyer? someone asked me. No, why? I wondered. Because you ask so many questions, came the answer. A familiar accusation.

There was a dinner after that—eating on stools, family style, in the Osteria kitchen; it was like a scene straight out of Top Chef. Chris Crutcher talked about freedoms of speech. Patricia McCormick was her extraordinarily lovely self (we share friends, as it turns out, and experiences in special places). Alessandra Balzer and Patty Rosati were gracious hostesses. I wasn't entirely sure, to be honest, just why I was there, how I fit—if I would ever fit—within that lit world glamor. But I was very glad to have been invited. To have touched down, for a brief spell, within that world of books.

Read more...

Alphabetical Exotica

The question is, Which of these have you tried? Which would you, if indeed you would?

Read more...

The Philadelphia Inquirer Review of Nothing but Ghosts

I have to admit that I did not see this coming. There I was at the gym, at Teresa's Body Pump, aching (and I mean aching) between the shoulder rotation and abs, wondering how in the world that Teresa can sing—sing!—while we're all lifting that bar again and again, while we are all shaking and trembling, when I saw my phone blinking. It was a note from my friend Lynn Levin, congratulating me for a review of Nothing but Ghosts, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

I pretty much figured that the work-out had gotten to me, that I was seeing things.

But no. In fact, Katie Haegele, who writes such tremendous reviews of young adult books, had included Ghosts in her fall YA round up, along with titles like I Can't Keep My Own Secrets, Murder at Midnight, and Pop.

This is what she says. This is why I am so happy right now, while I type up this post. I can't help it. Ghosts, which like all my books celebrates this community in which I live, has been noticed in my own hometown. It has been seen.

Nothing But Ghosts
By Beth Kephart

Harper Teen. 288 pp. $17.99

Well, this is a treat. Beth Kephart, whose memoir A Slant of Sun was a National Book Award finalist, has written another one of her beautiful YA novels - this one set locally, with references to the Devon Horse Show and little kids in Phillies T-shirts. And ghosts. Katie lives with her father, an eccentric art restorer, in a big and otherwise empty house; her mother has just died, and Katie, only 16, throws herself into busyness to cope. She takes a summer job working with the grounds crew on an unusual building project at the estate of a reclusive heiress whom no one in town has laid eyes on for years, and soon finds herself preoccupied with the woman's secrets. The lovely things in these characters' lives - pebble gardens and groves of apple trees, an old painting of "a metropolis" that her father restores (or, as he says, "resolves") late at night in his studio-shed, an honest-to-goodness riddle-filled mystery - are like something from a dream, but Kephart's writing isn't what you'd call dreamy, poetic as it is. It's solid and serviceable, beautiful in its well-madeness like an antique chair.

Read more...

Tangled up with Memoir

Judith Shulevitz reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History in this week's New York Times Book Review, and I read, with fascination, lines such as these:

Yagoda uses the words 'memoir' and 'autobiography' interchangeably. But they are not the same thing; practitioners know this.

If the flux of life conforms so readily to the constraints of convention, and conventions come and go, then how do you draw a line between truth and art? The last time I checked, truth wasn't boxed in by convention.

... maybe what makes a memoir edifying is not truthfulness but the memoirist's ability to justify a life appealingly. In the five memoirs I have written I don't ever recall working toward or away from a justifying impulse. I recall wanting to understand, wanting to reach out, wanting to write my life in a manner that opened doors for readers, set them thinking about their own journeys, their own choices. The memoirs that I love to read do the same thing. Is, to use our Penn class examples, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family a justification? Is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? If so, what are they justifying?

Truth is the least of memoir, he suggests, though truth can't be dispensed with. (There's that little matter of having to speak in good faith.) The power to persuade is all. Is it all about persuasion, then? I'm wagering that the best of memoir aspires to something greater, something more.

I respond here to a review, of course. Ben Yagoda is a terrific writer; I need to read this book for myself.

Read more...

The Heart is Not a Size: A Priya Review

Magnificent Priya honored me with one of the very earliest reviews of Nothing but Ghosts, and she has honored me again this evening with this most exceptional review of The Heart is Not a Size, in which she found what I dared to hope (in my quiet, hopeful hours) a reader or two would find.

I shall say it again today; I shall say it, I am sure, tomorrow: It's a life of blessings.

Thank you, Priya.

Read more...

HEART and GHOSTS: Two downloadable flyers

I have been busy this morning making (and updating) two one-page flyers that describe Nothing but Ghosts, which was released in June, and The Heart is Not a Size, to be released next March.

And then I thought to myself, I thought: Why not post them on the blog?

Hence.

Read more...

Revisionary

When a really fine reader takes a really close look at the work you have been doing—when she takes the time to say, Have you considered this? Could you clarify that?—your only response can and must be to pay attention. To get out of whatever mind space you've been in and to see the book as your reader has seen it.

That's what I've been doing these past many days—reviewing my novel for adults through the lens of my dear friend, who took the time to read it so closely. Her deep enthusiasm for this book has been a powerful tonic following a long, cloistered, knotty, lonesome spell of working within a framework that I could barely explain, or defend. (Indeed, I hardly tried.) Her eye for the small stray detail or the rattling inconsistency, the possible time shift or the unintended red herring has been spot on. Lately, working through my friend's edits in the very early hours, I've had the strange sensation of someone working near. I have been steeped in unloneliness.

Read more...

WBBT: The Shelf Elf Interview

I mentioned earlier this week that I had been granted a privileged place in the Winter Blog Blast Tour—an interview with Shelf Elf. I invite you to join us for a conversation that ranges from the perils and pleasures of not writing by-the-numbers books to the "truths" I seek to convey in my work to advice I would give to the characters I write to my trip to Anapra to Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel due out next fall.

Here's a brief excerpt:

When I’m finished reading your books, I keep thinking about the main characters. They stay with me. I feel like your characters are going places in their lives, going to be change-makers and risk-takers and people who live life with everything they’ve got. Do you imagine your characters’ futures? If yes, where do you see Katie and Georgia and Riley down the road?

My main characters are always in large part rustled up from parts of me, so that I know them well. I knew Elisa, that young, struggling poet of Undercover. I knew Rosie, desperate to do right by her dying grandfather in House of Dance. I knew Katie of Ghosts and I am so very like Georgia of Heart. They live with me, these characters. I know who they were, and I know who they’ve become. They’ve become a woman who feels blessed, every day, to be alive. A woman who struggles, every day, to be a better person. A woman who wishes, every day, that she could seize the world with words and photographs—hold it, own it, yield it back to others.

Read more...

English 145 (8): What is teaching worth?

And so in class, yesterday, we began to ask ourselves what teaching can deliver, what it is worth. What are the residuals of an advanced nonfiction workshop, for example? What will be carried forward, one short month from now, when we have had our last class and said our goodbyes (but not permanent goodbyes; that just won't do)? What will remain a decade hence, or two?

I want my students leaving English 145 knowing more about how they think and why they think what they do. I want them hungry, always, to know more, precise in articulating their beliefs, willing to take incalculable risks and to start all over again. I want them daring and I want them alert and I want them, most of all, to know their own value, to never doubt it.

Can we teach that? Perhaps not. We can only give it room to grow.

Read more...

The Shelf Elf Reviews The Heart is Not a Size

I am deeply honored this morning by the Shelf Elf's review of The Heart is Not a Size, a story inspired by a trip that I took to Anapra, a squatter's village, in 2005. I want this book to matter because the people of Anapra do. Because theirs is a story that doesn't get told; it is suppressed, instead, by the drug-war headlines.

The Shelf Elf has given me many gifts these past few weeks—that stunning review of Nothing but Ghosts, this remarkable review of Heart. And as if that were all not quite enough, the Shelf Elf generously invited me to participate in the Winter Blog Blast Tour 2009; I'll be her featured interviewee this coming Wednesday. Please take the time to read all the interviews during this remarkable week-long feature. I've been online this morning doing just that. This is blogging at its best.

Read more...

Portraiture

In the early morning, walking Lititz, he was there. "Don't be afraid," his owner called out to me, but I wasn't. I was only afraid that I wouldn't move fast enough, that I would fail to capture his portrait.

Read more...

The Lititz Kid/Lit Festival (a brief reprise)

We drove toward Lancaster on a sour-skied day—past sheep, goats, horses, cows, corn-stuffed silos, chicken cathedrals. The sun kept trying to come out, and sometimes, in a skittish mood, it did, but once we reached the town of Lititz, I wasn't thinking about weather. I was thinking about the town itself—cohesive, grounded, charming. I was thinking about that marvelous independent, Aaron's Books, which had engineered its first Kid's Lit festival and invited me to take part.

The first order of business was a panel seamlessly (and, because she's beautiful) beautifully moderated by Julie Peterson. Together with A.S. King, Lisa Greenwald, Lee Harper, Matt Phelan, Eric Wright, and Mara Rockliff I reflected on questions big and small; more importantly, I got to listen to what the others had to say about ambitions and priorities, about stories not yet told. It was be far one of the best panels I've ever sat on. It elevated book making, stayed focused on the true why for.

Later, there was pizza with local teens. After that, a long evening of clamoring and dishing with Caroline Hickey, Jenny Han, Siobhan Vivian, and Lisa Greenwald—long-time best friends who travel the children's/YA circuit together and (when you're lucky, as last night I was profoundly lucky) let you in for some of their outrageous (and so smart and it all comes from loving, seriously, I know it comes from loving) drubbing. An evening at the truly gracious Lititz House was next, a B&B you can't help but love, a B&B, let it be known, in which I actually slept five purified consecutive hours. That's no small thing. That's Lititz speaking.

This morning I rose early, walked the town, took photographs. Had a delicious Heidi breakfast at the B&B we were already calling home. Went off, then, to hear the writers read, to read a bit from Undercover.

We drove home on the same country roads, this time glossed by sunny skies.

Read more...

Waltz

Yesterday I danced the waltz with John Larson.

He countered the rain.

Read more...

Hold me Tight by Lorie Ann Grover/Beth Kephart Review

There is never enough time for me to be the person I want to be. I am shamed, often, by all I cannot find the hours to do. But this week, at last, I turned to books written by friends—to packages sent, to packages ordered. I turned to the poems of the extraordinarily talented Kate Northrop (Things Are Disappearing Here). To the short stories of Alyson Hagy (Ghosts of Wyoming). To Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's novel-in-progress. And, last night and this morning, to Lorie Ann Grover's young adult novel-in-poems, Hold me Tight.

Lorie Ann is a readergirlz founder, a homeschooling mother, a former dancer. She is also, let me be clear, a bonafide poet who, with Hold me Tight, captures the bewildering eight weeks in the life of a young girl whose father has left, whose mother is pregnant, and whose classmate has been snatched by a vengeful kidnapper. It doesn't make sense, and yet this is life as Estele Leann knows it, life as she must learn to live it.

A novel-in-poems might sound like a daunting proposition; Hold me Tight is anything but. I can't, in fact, imagine telling this story in any other fashion, with any other tools. More words would have been excess and somehow less true. Fewer would have denied us the long dwell in the cracked-open heart of a child. In line after line, Lorie Ann masterfully reveals a child grappling to understand, and to forgive.

I'm going to shatter
into a million slivers,
and none of my pieces
will end up
touching each other.

She reveals as well a child who is already finding her way:

I gather a few bits
and tape myself
back into Dad's arms.
This is what I have
to show he loved me once.
This was me
before I hated him.
This was then.

Sometimes the people who put others on the stage (as Lorie Ann has put so many on the stage) aren't given enough room beneath the spotlight. Today, on my blog, it's Lorie Ann Grover's turn to leap and to touch down, graced.

Read more...

Howl

The winds howl here, fierce and fearsome. The mind hunts for words that do not wish to be found. There is Zumba in the morning, Brenda dancing the ache out of our souls. There is my son sending a text: He has gotten a haircut; just the same, but shorter. There is Reiko in Brooklyn and me here, and our long, we-take-it-everywhere conversation by phone; when I punch the end key, I think (like I always think) about how much I love Reiko, how much her friendship means to me. She'll read a book you wrote, to choose a single example, and take the time to find the extra that's and the's.

I said that I wanted to write a poem.

I lived one instead.

Read more...

What I Want

I feel the need, the absolute need, to write a poem.

To curl up twist up nod back dream.

Read more...

I Emerge

I emerged from the long dream that is the writing of a novel with a desire for freshly cut flowers. I brought them home. I cleaned the house and threw a tea party for friends. I sat with the accumulated papers, the magazines, and read. I ordered books, embraced their arrival. I said yes to a new opportunity and plunged in, heart first. I said yes to another opportunity, despite the fact (because of the fact?) that it will take me, on many days, to a city that is not my own.

And I said, No, I will not be used anymore as I have too often allowed myself to be used. I will say what I am thinking, without apology. I will not pretend, because pretending isn't honest. I will gather close to those whose motivations I understand, whose hearts I trust, whose interests stretch beyond their own selves, whose capacities are bridged and bolstered by acts of tenderness.

I wrote a novel, and then I emerged. I am older than I was. It is easier to do right in the world when you know what you want from yourself.

Read more...

English 145 (7): In the Eyes of Beholders

Yesterday in English 145 we reviewed (among many other things) the mini-profiles the students had written about each other—small snatches cooked up from last week's interviews. It proved to be a session that went far beyond talk of technique and deep into the heart of many matters—compassion, accuracy, and the power of careful listening not least among them. Writing about another is no mere exercise, not just an opportunity to strut one's literary stuff. It is as well the commitment we must make to doing right by those of whom we ask our questions, those to whom we turn our thoughts.

Perhaps no one will ever see in us precisely what we believe is us. We require evidence, however, that the effort has been made.

Read more...

On the Clarity of Shadow Blur

I was cleaning the glass in my office, for friends were coming. I turned, and there on the yellow-orange wall behind my desk was the shadow blur of the glasses I need to keep my life in focus.

Today I print my novel. Tomorrow I read it. Later in the week I send it to Reiko.

Read more...

Ghosts of Wyoming by Alyson Hagy/Beth Kephart Review

I don't have a photograph of Wyoming, for I've never been there. I don't have a picture of my friend Alyson Hagy, either, though she was here one evening for a Christmas-time meal, and I have in my head the rigor and intelligence of her stories; I have in my mind's eye an image of her studying the books on my shelves; I remember that I had a terrible migraine before she arrived and her presence cured me of it like a pill.

I write of Alyson Hagy on this blog—of her talents as a teacher and leader within the University of Wyoming, of her talent for friendship, too. But today I am writing to herald Alyson's sixth book, a collection of eight wildly specific and original short stories called Ghosts of Wyoming. I'm heralding her relentless drive to present the Wyoming she knows—its tricksters, equivocaters, promoters, miscreants, and scamps; its legends and tall tales; its bird-afflicted weather; its eye-grazing, heart-bruising beauty.

The stories here take many forms and live inside several eras. Bad is not always bad and good is not what it seems. A boy steals a pup. A man goes missing. A girl does wicked thievery with bones. A reverend out in the wilderness can't decide what should be trusted. A woman on the edge of hysteria decries the loss of a moth. Men talk—trainmen and oilmen, a near-scholar. Women love hard and return as ghosts. The sky is made of howl and chirp and "the lusty flute song of larks," and "ravens...gliding with the confidence of the undiminished and unfed."

"You know why people come here, Livvy," one character observes. "They like how the mountains look. They like the wild creatures they see, the fantasy that we can change our lives." I don't know for sure how long Alyson, raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, has been making Laramie, Wyoming, her home. But anyone reading Ghosts, due out from Graywolf Press in February, will recognize, on every page, a woman and a writer who knows where stories lie and how to tell them. They'll find a woman gifted with a preponderance of odd and unfamiliar phrases, with metaphors that wild your mind and make a foreign place familiar.

I am blessed by many things in this life. One of those things is Alyson Hagy.

Read more...

Riviera Pears

The pears came treasured in the web of their box, in the crush of their green paper, in the nearness of their time. Wait until they are ready. Wait.

All day long, they sat in the box and ripened, their juices rising.

Read more...

Children's Book World Author/Illustrator Night/Lititz Kid-Lit Festival

Those of you in the Main Line Philadelphia area looking for an opportunity to mingle with young adult authors and illustrators are invited to join myself, Jen Bryant, Elizabeth Mosier, Catherine Murdock, Donna Jo Napoli, Kathye Petrie, Jerry Spinelli, David Wiesner and many others for the 18th Annual Author/Illustrator Night, tonight, November 6th at 8 PM at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA.

Those of you who live within driving distance of Lancaster, PA, meanwhile, have the chance to take part in the Lititz Kid-Lit Fest, running November 13 - 15 and hosted by Aaron's Books, an independent bookstore. I'll be joining Sandy Asher, Lisa Greenwald, Jenny Han, Lee Harper, Caroline Hickey, A.S. King, Marie Lamba, Faith Reese Martin, Ken Munro, Matt Phelan, Mara Rockliff, Siobhan Vivian, and Eric Wight for a variety of events. Super book blogger Julie Peterson will be hosting a Saturday afternoon panel. I know that I'm looking forward to it, and I hope to see you there.

Read more...

Rain Smear, First Drafts, and the National Council of Teachers of English

You should see the view through my office window, I wrote to John V., one of my earliest dance teachers, and still a dear, even if he's moved to Germany. Take a picture, he wrote back, and I did—the panes smeary with rain, the sky beyond somehow broken. It was the end of a day in which a long-loved novel found its final line, in which I stopped holding my breath, and exhaled. Anna sent a box of royal riviera pears from California—five of them, green golden. They arrived on my stoop the very instant I typed the book's final words. I don't know how she does this, how she is always here when the big things happen, but, in fact, she does and is.

In any case, in any case: A first draft. I will wait, let time do its thing. I will then work it through all over again. And then again. And more.

In the meantime, I'll be attending the National Council of Teachers of English conference at the Philadelphia Convention Center on November 22nd. I'll be traveling this way and that, among the booths, then attending, thanks to Laura Lutz, the HarperCollins-sponsored ALAN cocktail event before heading off for what should be a pretty spectacular dinner. I wonder if any of you plan to be there. If you do, I hope you'll let me know. I would love to meet you.

Read more...

Dreamscape

From high up, what does he see? What, after all these years, is he still hoping for?

He dreams with his hands.

He folds fabric over wire, and the breeze blows through.

Read more...

What a Girl Wants: The Mean Girls Question

In her ever-popular What a Girl Wants series, Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray is asking about that notorious literary mean girls fad, specifically wondering, "Does teen literature exaggerate the mean girl phenomenon too much?" Laurel Snyder, Zetta Elliott, Lorie Ann Grover, Melissa Wyatt, Sara Ryan, Kekla Magoon, yours truly, and others have opined. As always, the conversation is rich.

On other fronts, I am about a chapter and a half away from finishing the first draft of the adult novel I've been writing this past year. If silence begins to emanate from this blog, it's only because I've lost myself, temporarily, in another place and time.

Read more...

Devotions/Beth Kephart Poem

K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.

Devotions

The hawk came three months after the fox

had taken that one last lubricious

step onto my porch, a day of deer

unclasping the bracelet of themselves

across my lawn. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been

sleeping well, had not been on the lookout

for the hawk or for the toad, the crow, the snake

the single cricket that pulls a hawk down from the sky.

Nor for an egg; I wasn’t looking for an egg —

the mind fighting the night and at war

with the age I have become, wishing I had learned color

instead of words, but then: This hawk, with that telling

streak of rust for a tail and those four pounds

at least of bird encasing bone and soul, in the morning

in my garden, where it was late in the season and things

had turned to seed and no one, nothing but a bird and I

could guess the garden’s lore. I liked the hawk,

therefore, from the start, and I asked its name,

and it looked straight through me, for my bones

were hollow and my soul was the suggestion of insomnia,

and we were alone, besides, each on the verge of excavating

secrets but choosing to amble instead, from the garden,

across the mud pocks, toward the Japanese maple,

side by side and counting benefactions, the hawk walking

the way hawks walk, and I in devout deliverance of dawn.

Read more...

English 145 (6): The Art of the Interview

In English 145, we talked about the art of the interview. About framing the conversation without boxing it in. About listening for the tangent and knowing which tangents count. About never pretending to understand more than one actually does. About follow-up and follow-through. We had the fabulous Paris Review interview of Truman Capote as a model Q and A, and then we turned to one another, or the students did, for trial interviews.

I took a walk while the students dialogued. Found my way to a garden that I'd never seen before —a place tucked behind the Penn medical buildings and dedicated to a son. It was damp and chilly out, and there was just one young man sitting on one bench, looking out over the garden-wrapped pond. I missed, I realized, my students, asking and listening a mere ten-minute walk away, and soon I was hurrying back toward them, to that warm hearth that is the Kelly Writers House. Their interviews were done. There'd been some homework; we discussed it. The conversation then could have gone a thousand ways, but it went toward the personal—toward their lives, their decisions, their ideas about ethical living. For thirty minutes, perhaps more, they were the teachers. I listened.

Read more...

Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (5)

She runs the tip of her tongue over the ridge of her mouth. She blinks, and a tear falls down through the pebble land of her freckles. From far away I hear the high gauze of a church song—bells. Sunday, I think, and somewhere there are everyday people in everyday cars going somewhere. There are the mothers, and there are the babies, and they are together.

Read more...

His World

I'd stayed up late being silly the night before (some people dress up for Halloween and look gorgeous; I dress up and I am still, unfortunately, me, although, quite fortunately, I have my Halloween-glam friends who stand by and beguile, who also (miraculously) dance with me, even that friend who spends part of the night telling me how gorgeous all the other women are, detail by detail, he explains, they are so gorgeous, they have, he says, an aura, and that's right, these friends, they have an aura), and then I never did fall asleep. So that by the time we started driving through the endless rain to see that son I sorely miss, I was in a strange gray place, one easily pierced by the sight of cliff rock and red ivy on the dark bark of trees.

Some of the valleys were fog. Some of the valleys caught lost bits of sun, then shucked them off, before they warmed me.

When it wasn't outright pouring, we walked the campus with our son. "Hope he's able to show you a few surprises/discoveries," my friend Jay had written, and our son did more than that. He stole, with us, inside academic buildings and showed us where he sat in class. He took us upstairs to the quiet retreat where he gets his reading done. He walked us behind the campus, then out of it, and told us landmark stories. He said over and over how much he loved his school, then said, as many times, how glad he was that we had come.

What is it, I thought, what is it about him?

His happiness. His calm. His aura.

Read more...