And then Jean said, "Beth, you have become someone with whom I like to dance. You keep your own balance. You can turn. You can follow. You are gaining technique. Now I worry that the music holds you back. Let the music free you."
Why shouldn't the music free me, I wonder. It always has before.
I am afraid of...what?
It's been fifteen years since we drove down an unlanterned street, peered up toward the one lit window of a hunched house, and somehow decided that that house must be ours. Most everything about the house was broken, and there was hardly any garden, and once we got inside we understood that each of the six slanting rooms was a shattering in desperate need of imagining. Year after year, we have imagined.
Yesterday, between client calls and mad frustrations (did the refrigerator have to die so spectacularly?), I went outside in the rain, walked to the street, and looked back at this house, now so skirted in with red bud limbs, blooming viburnum, royal dogwood, mighty columbine, the daggers of rising irises, and a lacy miniature maple. I don't understand how things grow—not really. I don't know how we all became such rich inheritors of bloom. But I am grateful for the small beauties of a small life remade. For pink in rain. For purple on the fringe.
Once on an overnight train from Barcelona to Venice, this boy became my friend. Outside my compartment he sat, cat like, waiting for me to compliment him on the fearless red of his shoes. He liked to stand at the windows, looking out. I liked that, too. He performed acrobatics on the old blue rug. I was his audience.
He wanted his portrait taken. I took several.
I escape mirrors, as you know. I refute photographs of myself (just ask Tirsa). I am out with my camera, most every day, tunneling a distance. I wonder now, looking back on this boy, how it might feel to look a camera in the eye and to say, undaunted, See me.
I don't think I was ever the girl I might have been; I could have used a more sustained carefree.
Today I heard myself again: Serious, when others were laughing. Pushing for absolute when almost was all that moment needed.
In the beginning of a story, everything signifies, everything has consequences. That's why beginnings are so hard: You must stay in the moment, but also, you must see ahead. You cannot trap yourself inside the sound of a lovely line if the line is not a fathoming.
Early this morning, before the sun rose too high, I dug out the old cat mint and slipped armeria and black chervil into the ground, within the peninsula tip of my garden. Out by the street, I buried the perfect bulb of an elephant ear. By the front of the house a new vine still awaits digging in—red trumpet flowers, a hummingbird's seduction. I want hummingbirds to join my 24 carat finches. I'm glad the robin is back, in her old nest.
The new plants were all collected Sunday, from Handmade Gardens, Michael and Kathye Petrie's splendid Downington, PA, showcase. They were piled into my father's car, alongside all that he had bought to bring back to his own garden-rich home, and on my lap, as we drove away, was a black amarylis, a gift from Michael. This earthenness is something my father and I share—a love of growing things, a companionable existence with birds.
I've started on something new, very different, perhaps risky. I remember how whirligig beginnings are. You could be anywhere, but you are not there. You can almost see there, but you cannot write it. An idea is an idea: It's big. A story lies in the details; they are small, and they take time. Turn around it. Hammer it in. Hope that it coheres.
Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.
So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.
Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and I will say, for myself, this: Last week, and the week before, something happened at the studio, a letting go (again, more) that enabled me, for the briefest moment, to skim the floor the way Dove describes such skimming. To trust so completely the dancers who kindly danced with me that I could also trust myself. I'd ruin things, of course. I'd break the spell. But for an instant I grasped what it must be to have the knowing of dance in one's bones. I grasped it. I wanted more.
From Rita Dove:
Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless.
The fabulous Holly Cupala of Brimstone Soup tagged me on this meme, and since I was musing just yesterday about bookshelves and friendships, it seems an appropriate Sunday launch. The question is, What's on your bookshelf?, and the specifics are these:
Tell me about the book that has been on your shelf the longest...
A beaten, brown thesaurus (the pages unbound now and out of order) and the bible my mother gave me. In fact, however, most all of my books have been acquired during the last 20 years. I was not a bookish kid (I was a writerly one, not a bookish one, which is truly not the right order of things) and did not come from a bookish family, which is not to say that I did not come from an educated one. It's simply that the home that I grew up in was not furnitured with books.
Tell me about a book that reminds you of something specific in your life ...
Natalie Kusz's Road Song was the first memoir I ever bought—the first I ever read. I was pregnant with my son. I was in a Princeton bookstore. The book was revelatory (you can write about your life? like this?) and I wrote to Ms. Kusz, never expecting a response. A few weeks later, one came. "As I am sure you know (because, judging from the elegance and insightfulness of your letter, you must be a writer yourself), writers are in the business of attempting to expose the human condition in such a way that our description resonates in the souls of other humans ... " A writer myself? Not then. Just someone who loved the sound of words, their puzzling together. By announcing to me a new genre—memoir—and by suggesting to me a possibility—an actual writer—Ms. Kusz and Road Song changed my life.
Tell me about a book you acquired in some interesting way ...
This past Friday six books arrived in a brown box, chosen by an editor with whom I've lately had the privilege of corresponding. I had mentioned that I sought, in my life, books that "put faith in the reader." She responded with generosity and with a telling eye and ear. Every one of these six books appears to be my kind of book. You'll be hearing about them here, over time.
Tell me about the most recent addition to your shelves...
Since the books in that box aren't yet on my shelves (but on the coffee table, where I will leave them until they are read), the newest books were three: Book of Clouds, The Frozen Thames, and The Cradle. I've written of them all here. Book of Clouds also, in its way, changed my life, my way of seeing what is possible in story.
Tell me about a book that has been with you to the most places...
Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I've read it several times, in several places—in El Salvador while visiting my husband's family, in Orlando while helping to oversee a corporate launch conference, on the train to New York City.
Tell me about a bonus book that doesn't fit any of the above questions...
Two books that I felt strongly should win the Pulitzer Prize did, and they sit eloquently on my shelves: March by Geraldine Brooks and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. There were shouts of joy here when both were announced. Both winners aren't just enormously talented writers. They are gracious people, which counts just as much.
Yesterday Ruby came to play. She's almost three, and from her tiny perch upon the world she sees most everything. The bees building their hive in the high canopy above our heads. The black bird in the white scorch of plane plumes. The crack in the spinning wheel's last spoke. She thinks it's funny that I can't draw, so she makes me draw. She steals the soccer ball into the net, despite my best efforts to thwart. She waits until the music is loud, fast, and sure, then dances.
She forgives my hair, for never staying as prettily put as her own.
She has the sweetest goodbye hug in the world.
Ruby's got a dad who travels the world and writes it all down, unpreciously. A dad who surveyed my landscape of books—in three rooms, across many double-stacked shelves, and said, We have just about no books in common. Though the Roth he liked. The Roth relieved him. Something tethered down and true.
Funny, what friendship is made of.
Last night, in part two of my two-part class,"Very First Words," we spoke of the prologues that seem to launch so many memoirs—the pronouncements of theme and tone, the pencil strokes of frame, the percolated entanglements of story lines. We read out loud from books in the making and looked for wasteland stretches that might be eradicated, flat horizons in need of sky, opportunities to turn complication into complexity.
This morning, a day of corporate work begins (interviews! a succession of stories! schedule management!), and I'm about to put my many books back onto the shelves. Before I do, though, I share four teachable prologues, should you be weighing beginnings in your own mind.
We went there for everything we needed.... Most of all we went there when we needed to be found (The Tender Bar/J.R. Moehringer).
For a long time, my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldn't claim it for the sadness it was (A Strong West Wind/Gail Caldwell).
Everything about Great Salt Lake is exaggerated—the heat, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain.... Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life (Refuge/Terry Tempest Williams).
So, dear son, where to begin? It could be the August morning I stood on our front steps wondering whether to go in for a jacket, but first let me step back as far as I can and say that what I remember most about my beginnings, besides the voice of my mother striding down through layers of dark to where I lay under the wonder of the onrush of sleep, is how I felt set apart (A Step from Death, Larry Woiwode).
Are blogs dead? Are they being repurposed? Is the air going out of the balloon? Are we really on the edge of a no-book, no-newspaper, no-blog world, content to feed on the 140 characters of Twitter? Or have we already arrived?
I was talking with Anna Lefler about all this the other day—spinning out my theories and my unevidentiary evidence—and Anna being Anna (that is, infinitely more connected and tied in than I'll ever be) came back last night quoting an interview with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and, yes (shudder) a blogger. Keen recently predicted that static blogs (such as the one you are reading, if indeed you are still reading) are on the quick outs, while the sort of "real-time social media personal portal(s)" now being enabled by Wordpress are on the rise. Indeed, in an Editor Unleashed interview with Maria Schneider, Keen declared that "the shy and reticent author" will not survive the near-term future. "Ugly, mute writers," he likewise cautioned, "should probably switch careers."
I read Keen not long after I finished reading Margaret Talbot's fascinating piece in The New Yorker, called "Brain Gain: the underground world of "neuroenhancing" drugs" (I've always been a huge Margaret Talbot fan—perhaps because I, being a very old woman, prefer magazine-y thorough and thoughtful to 140-character nano?). It's the story of a Harvard student, a poker player, and a handful of others (representing the legions of the growing many) who have decided to approach their brains much in the same way that women of a certain age approach their faces: with an eye to cosmetic improvements. Why not off-label Ritalin, a treatment for ADHD, for example, or Provigil, a treatment for narcolepsy, to give oneself a little boost? Why not indulge in what Talbot calls "cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted"? Why not feed your child "smart pills" to help them get ahead? Why not smart-pill yourself, if it can level the playing field against less old, less ugly, less mute, less reticent colleagues?
Well, hmmm. There are reasons. These are drugs after all, and every drug has side effects, some known, some not yet proven, some physical, and some social. Here, for example, is the Harvard student of Talbot's story, describing papers he's written post-enhancement: "...they're verbose. They're belaboring a point, trying to create this airtight argument, when if you just got to your point in a more direct manner it would have been stronger."
Is this...enhanced? Is this...our future? Is this...what we want? Drugs (taken off label) that perhaps verbose-ify and dilute true content, social media that tolerate no more than 140 characters? My small and unenhanced brain tries to accommodate the two thoughts at once and conjures splatter, refractions, lots said, lost meaning. Clearly, I need someone much younger, much prettier, and infinitely less reticent to help me understand how all of this makes for a better world, the sort we're eager to hand down to our children.
I know that I've said it, but it bears multiple repeatings: An Aerial Armadillo is one of the most blessed blog spots on the virtual earth. Go there and be somewhere else—in Southern Africa, in Lantau, in a sacred before, above a plate of sushi. Go there and see beauty captured with utter verisimilitude, or with bold, painterly geometries. Go there. That's the thing. You won't want to come back.
Tessa, the force behind An Aerial Armadillo, has been reading a book I once wrote about marriage and El Salvador. I was honored this week when she mentioned Still Love in Strange Places alongside a mention of the reliably hysterical (humanly, craftily, and originally so) Anna Lefler.
Today is Earth Day, of course, a day that always has me remembering a long time ago, when the world was new to me. That's something I wrote about in Ghosts in the Garden, and so I excerpt that here.
We come to gardens bearing memories of gardens. I came to Chanticleer remembering a fringe of strawberries that pressed up against my childhood home. Whether we ever actually ate the strawberries that those tousled plants bore, I don’t remember. Whether my mother planted them there, or perhaps my father, I cannot say for sure. But I know I crouched the little girl’s crouch and peered, the way children peer, toward the fruit. I know I loved how the red would follow white, and how the white had come from green, and how the pendant of juice, with its thistle of seeds, would plump until it was too fat for its serrated cap. There is nothing exotic about a strawberry patch except that it delivers on its promise.
A strawberry fringe is a garden to a girl, just as the creek that runs between the old shade trees across the street is a child’s haven. I was the one who didn’t mind mud in her shoes, the child who named the tadpoles, then the frogs. I was an adventureress at the creek across the street, where it was cool and dark and also many shades of green (moss, algae, leaves). In a year I would move with my family to an isolated outpost in Alberta, Canada, where nothing anywhere was the lucky color of the Irish and I couldn’t find a seed, and I grew determined — always, forever — never to see that much comatose brown again. Three months later we would be home again, in the house with the strawberry fringe. My toes in the creek. My hands on the frogs. My dreams of fruit and flowers.
Today is April 21, which is another way of saying that today is the birthday of No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen anthology that bears the subtitle: Stories about growing up and getting a life. "What's the line that separates childhood from the 'real world'? the back jacket asks. "And what happens when it's nothing you imagined it would be?"
There are six of us telling stories here—An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, Jacqueline Woodson, and myself—and it is a very happy thing for me to be nested in with such a crowd. But wait, there's more: This anthology is designed to celebrate teen writers, too, by encouraging them (to quote the back jacket again) "to write their own stories about experiencing the real world for the first time. The winning story will be published in the paperback edition of the book." For details, go here.
I repeat: This book is an open invitation to you teens out there, you most exquisite writers. You know who you are, too, because I'm often on your blogs, awed and admiring.
Here are a few words from the middle of my story, which is titled "The Longest Distance."
Annie and Marne will never have what Joelle and I surely did. They may be laughing behind their hands, but their laughs are little kaput laughs, over before they get started. They’re practically flirty with each other, silly, the oh-my-God kind of girls, and they were always like that—on the bus, in the cafeteria, at football games—always making a show of themselves, like they were posing for reality TV. Except they weren’t like that the day I climbed back on the bus, a week after Joelle disappeared. They just stared at me then, with their hazel and brown eyes. “Hannah,” they said, both of them turned around, both of them staring open-mouthed at me. “Why did she do it?”
“Because she did,” is what I said. And closed my arms across my chest and stared out the window. All the regular things in the neighborhood went by. They looked blurry to me, underwater. I’ve worn sunglasses to school every day ever since. No one needs to know how I am feeling.
The slide down
You are not, he said,
Yesterday I read past the beginning of Patrick Somerville's novel, The Cradle, and straight through to the end. "You enjoying that book?" my husband would stop by and ask. "I am," I'd say. "Okay," he'd say. "That's good."
(that would be book talk, in our house)
But why? Why was I enjoying this book, which can be summarized in a snap: Man gets sent out to search for an heirloom cradle by a very pregnant wife who most often gets her way. Or can it? The man is Matthew Bishop, after all, the product of a destructive, still simmering foster care childhood. The wife is Marissa, whose mother walked out on her at 15. And to find the cradle Matthew must endure one of the oddest road trips ever, a direct stumble across a coterie of strangers who are cut from a cloth full of tatters, holes, raw seams. Moreover, this isn't just Matthew's story, for there's an in-cutting tale about a woman named Renee, who has a past that may or may not intersect with Matthew's present. Or Matthew's future?
Lots of layers, then. Lots of characters. Lots of time going by, backward and forward. All in a novel that comes in at a dead even 200 pages.
"You enjoying that book?"
Yes. I'm trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out how Somerville, an accomplished short story writer, achieved so much economy despite the spill of tangents here. How he found room in his spare story to pack out so much history and want. I'm coming around to the idea that it is, in the end, about how Somerville chose to play the odd—without apology, on the one hand, without a hint of cute, on the other. The Cradle is just as funny as it is sad. And it balances rightly by its end.
"Still Dancing in Her Dreams." That was the title, and so I read, unprepared, this story about Liu Yan, 26, who was paralyzed in an accident just prior to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. According to New York Times reporter David Barboza, Ms. Liu had been China's leading classical dancer, a woman of such extraordinary grace, extension, and soul that she had earned the only solo performance in the extravagant, theatrical Zhang Yimou show. It was to last six minutes. It was to have been called "Silk Road." She was rehearsing before 10,000 when, in Barboza's words, "she leapt toward a moving stage that malfunctioned, causing her to fall into a deep shaft and crash against a steel rod."
She woke in a hospital, with no use of her legs, her story unknown. She was asked not to speak of her fate; her family and witnesses were silenced, too. It would distract, officials felt, from the opening ceremonies, which she watched on a TV, in her hospital room.
Her arms still open to the wind. Her legs don't move.
I had been to Chanticleer, hours before, with a friend. We had seen a vase, its rooted limbs upreaching. We had spoken of its beauty, and I had thought of a dancer then—seen a dancer in the arcing, budded shafts. Now Liu Yan in my mind is that dancer—still a dancer, always a dancer, tragically caged now, as a dancer. These are the stories one cannot look past. The stories one can't fix, or mend.
House of Dance has a slightly modified cover in store for its release next March as a paperback; thank you, Carla Weise and Jill Santopolo.
In this trailer (the last of the three that I've been creating these past few weeks), we go through the streets of Ardmore and up into the Dancesport Academy studio, where it has taken an entire planet's worth of gifted dancers—Scott Lazarov, Jean Paulovich, John Villardo, John Larson, Jim Bunting, Cristina Rodrighes—and one very fine manager (the lovely Tirsa) to teach me a few things about the box step. This is the studio that inspired this novel, which was named one of the best of the year by Kirkus in 2008.
The Undercover paperback is due out in a few weeks, and it arrives with extras—Elisa's story moved forward in time and documented with her newest batch of poems.
I invite you to watch the trailer, here.
It often feels as if I live multiple days within the framework of one. I was writing about global health care for hours in the early part of yesterday, before I scrambled to my former middle school for the exhilarating Operation TBD, then went out with video camera and my Sony in hand to collect footage for book trailers now in progress. An hour of email, then to the high school down the road, where I was teaching a mini-course called "Very First Words." At nine-thirty I was sitting in our favorite neighborhood restaurant, chatting with one my favorite waitresses about a law school choice that she is making, her preparing to leave one life to create another.
Beginnings, then, were very much on my mind—each scene from the day let loose and catalyzed. In the class itself we asked ourselves what beginnings do and decided that, among other things, they extend an invitation, issue a caution, or lay down a bridge; they set the tone, establish a voice, and signal rhythms; they provide clues as to what is at stake; they either announce or suggest a world view. Beginnings can be bombastic or brave, ideological or explicit, dashed into place by an opening salvo of dialogue, or hushed unto themselves.
We read the prologue of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time—that streak through the dark world. We read the jiving Mum says of Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. We stole within the sensory till of Marie Arana's American Chica and the hushed deep night of Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, which is not the same, at all, as reading the clinical reportage of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking or the truly (and I do mean truly) non-cinematic opening lines of Steve Lopez's The Soloist.
Then we talked about how a writer gives a piece momentum, and while fiction wasn't on the agenda last night, I had Patrick Somerville's The Cradle with me, and so I read. For look at what Somerville does here—twining disclosure and unexpired exasperation, pairing a short sentence and a long one to rush the reader in, so that there is no choice but next:
Marissa could not be comforted, and wouldn't have it any other way. The cradle for the coming baby had to be the cradle she'd been rocked in as a child; not only the cradle she'd been rocked in but the cradle that was upstairs in her bedroom when she was fifteen and her mother came home one night from the grocery store, slammed her keys down on the countertop, slammed the brown crinkled bag onto the table, looked down at the floor, looked at Marissa, took the keys, and walked out the door, this time permanently.
I have returned this moment from Radnor Middle School, where I left three copies of House of Dance along the bus line. The former Dr. Dewsnap teaches there now, having moved there awhile ago from the high school where she inspired me and, ultimately, many pages in my first young adult novel, Undercover.
The books are there to be discovered. They are there as part of the terrific national program, Operation Teen Book Drop, which celebrates its second anniversary today and owes its birth to the extraordinary founders of readergirlz.
I borrow the following text from the readergirlz press release, so that you might know more and celebrate with all of us who are honored to reach out to younger readers.
In its second year, “Operation TBD” (short for Teen Book Drop), puts free books donated by 18 book publishers into the hands of many teens most in need of escape, inspiration and a sense of personal accomplishment. Books with exceptional characters and fabulous stories can provide just that for teens and their families dealing with difficult, long-term hospital stays.
At a time when philanthropic giving is down, readergirlz co-founders have been inspired by overwhelming industry support for Operation TBD. “readergirlz is always looking for innovative ways to connect teens with literature, “ said Dia Calhoun, co-founder of readergirlz and acclaimed young-adult author. “We’re honored that publishers have supported this goal by giving so liberally this year.”
Operation TBD also aims to encourage all teens to choose reading for pleasure as a leisure activity, over other entertainment options. Inciting the broader teen community to participate in Operation TBD in its drive to spur reading on a national scale, readergirlz has launched a trailer on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/readergirlz) inviting teens and YA authors to leave a book in a public place on April 16. When visiting www.readergirlz.com, participants can download bookplates to insert into the books they’ll leave behind, which explain the surprise to the recipient and tell them to read and enjoy.
I was not a good writer in my younger years. I was stymied, arrested, by the wrong idea of what beauty is. I thought the language had to course, unstopping as a song. I decided that if a thought, a moment, a scene could not be expressed with some degree of my idea of beauty that it should not be expressed at all. It was always all about words for me, their sound and flow. I could not see beyond that fence.
But there is room, in writing, for the forcible, physical, coarsened, unfinished. For the gap, the pause, the uncertainty. It is a good thing, I think, to see the author's mind at work, and even now as I write I work against the subjugating reign of a certain kind of refinement. I try to write more, write bigger, toward a different kind of beauty. And I'm still learning.
Early this morning, while reading "Enameled Lady," Hilton Als' portrait of Katherine Anne Porter in the New Yorker, I came upon these words. They were instructive all over again.
It’s true that it’s almost impossible to get a toehold on much of Porter’s later work, owing to its high varnish: her characters can barely breathe beneath the sheen. Porter perfected her stories until you begin to feel like a clumsy intruder for even reading them. Rarely do you get beneath the decorous surface and feel a character’s lifeblood. And it is this artificiality that kept Porter on the wrong side of the line that separates a minor writer from a great one. Ultimately, she controlled too much: she relied on tricks of style, on a language that was too cultivated for the rough potential of stories like “He” and “Noon Wine” to develop. Too often one senses Porter repressing the trashy twang of her childhood in favor of something more, as Capote put it, “enameled.”
Because I do not know where my head will be tomorrow (if, indeed, it will be found) and because I am taking a small break from the sort of work overwhelm that leaves me gasping (sometimes crying), I want to post this thought right now, before I lose it, or lose me—whichever happens first.
When my agent, Amy Rennert, today sent me an email with the subject line "this will bring a smile," I thought, Oh dear, what might this be? I opened the email to find a YouTube URL. Nothing more than that.
Well, of course you already know which YouTube clip I'm referring to. The one I and nearly a million of others have already watched as of this writing. Yes, Susan Boyle. Yes, the British singer, 47 years old, in silver shoes and lolling hair, who had the nerve to declare her dream on Britain's Got Talent and then to sing—magnificently—a song so bittersweet that even Simon Cowell was moved to sincerity. She had been jeered at. Disbelieved. The young among the many had rolled their eyes and sneered. A laughing stock, that's what she was, until she began to sing. And then those who had despised her envied her, perhaps a little, for the thing that she had kept within. For the honesty that she brought to a song about being young once, having a dream.
It was her moment. Her standing O. Her redemption. It was her voice, uncaged. What do we write toward, what do we live toward? The chance at that, just once.
Forty times over the course of recorded history, the Thames has frozen through, giving rise to frost fairs and temporary bridges, royal spectacles and common fare, ice skating and drownings. Winters cold enough to freeze a river freeze ale, wine, ink pots, too. They kill those who don't keep moving. They precipitate new forms of entertainment, and despair.
In forty brief chapters, in a book called simply, The Frozen Thames, Helen Humphreys conjures a scene from each of the forty freezings—an oxen driver persuading his charges to trust the ice, a queen out for sport, a purveyor at a frost fair, a frozen-in ship. Some of the pieces are no more than vignettes. Others go a bit deeper. All take the reader through time, through plagues, through inventions, through the evolution of weather itself.
Humphreys has always been an interesting writer—her language straightforward and often stubby, her ideas expansive. In a novel of a few years ago, The Lost Garden, Humphreys took readers back to the Devon countryside of 1941, where a handful of young girls from the Woman's Land Army and a regiment of Canadian soldiers had come together on a ruined estate. The setting is extraordinary and the book has resonance (I think of it fondly still today), despite the fact that many of its passages seem truncated, almost deliberately awkward: No one ever likes me. I’m not good with people. I’ve been too isolated most of my life. I don’t know how to get on with others.
As a river writer myself (though I chose, in my book Flow, to write from the inside of a river's mind, through autobiography), I couldn't help but be drawn to Humphreys' newest book. It's such a wonderful concept, it's so convincingly researched, it's so beautifully produced—squarish in format, colorfully illustrated. If my desire to lean into the text was often prohibited by a rush of declarative noun-verb constructs (e.g., The three boys have come down to skate on the river. The water above the bridge has set fast and smooth. There is no snow on the surface and the ice glistens black and there is no one else moving on the Thames.), I often found myself getting lost inside the circumstances Humphreys has collected.
Here, for example, is a scene one might spend an afternoon imagining:
The river has been frozen for almost two months and a town of tents has been erected upon it. There is a cook's tent where gentlemen come to dine every evening. There are tents that sell ale and tents that sell gingerbread. There are two printing presses and people can have their names printed on a card for posterity. An ox has been roasted near the Hungerford Stairs by a descendant of the man who roasted an ox on the ice at the last Frost Fair in 1684.
I write the elements, I said. Earth. Air. Fire. Water. I imagine myself gone, within them. The river as a woman. The fire as a man. The earth cracked open, so many mouths through which to speak.
And air?
And air is wind. And air is weather. A character—changeable, present.
It was all moving by too fast. The day with its demands. The things undone. The stack of those things that must yet be completed, before tomorrow, which will soon enough begin in earnest with its own misbehaved list of musts.
In the middle of this, a phone call. A conversation about a book I wrote, the delirious spark of questions no one else has ever asked. How did you decide...? Where did you discover...? What did you mean when you wrote...? How did you know...?
The gift was being taken back into this thing I'd loved. To be given room to walk around within its rooms.
It was late, Easter Sunday. She was putting on her show. No one but me, my son, my husband in her audience, and we were in shadows, in the brisk night, on the wrong side of the glass. We were, I am certain, unseen.
She stood and declared. She fluttered her hands, bent forward, seemed to walk away, but then came back so that she might peer out over the empty chairs and tables, and begin again. More feverish now, more determined to enrapt and engage, and I thought of me writing. Of me in my various rooms, alone, on my walks, alone, in my head, alone, exclaiming and gesticulating just the same—trying to hear myself first, trying to persuade me, so that later, when something I write is in another's hands, the words break free.
And the chimes broke free from the stone tower and fell. And the birds were high on the wind.
On this early Easter morning, I am thinking many things—gratitude for my son's few perfect days home, gratitude for family and friends, gratitude for the sun rising, gratitude for the pink blending yellow ripping through white.
I am thinking, too, about the two movies I watched this weekend—"The Visitor" and "The Station Agent." Both produced by Mary Jane Skalski, both written and directed by Tom McCarthy. Both entirely human and intensified by the space between words that are thought but never said.
"The Visitor" is the story of a professor living in the acute aftermath of his wife's passing—a man going through the motions until he discovers two illegal immigrants living in the Manhattan apartment he rarely frequents. He allows his life to be changed by them—allows his heart to be broken newly as he enters into their music, faith, and sudden terror. There are so many ways to snap a life in two. Here, in the detention center of illegal immigrants, in the world of deportation, in the dare of trying once again to live, we witness new fault lines; we, like the characters, are heartbroken.
"The Station Agent," a movie I'd seen before, at my mother's insistence, focuses on Fin, a four-foot-five man who takes up residence at an abandoned train depot and wants nothing more than his own company. Such quietude, though, is denied him—by the loquacious Cuban who parks his food truck by the empty depot; by the beautiful divorcee down the road, who grieves the loss of her son; by the librarian (early Michelle Williams) who slides into Fin's life, then out again; and by the young girl who insists that Fin come to her school for a talk about trains, something Fin knows down to the most excruciating detail. There is a lot of walking on tracks in "The Station Agent"—intoxicatingly filmed. A lot of outright beauty between people. It is one of the most distilled films you will ever see, and one you must see, if you haven't.
I have clipped the daffodils from the back yard (uncountable numbers now). I have placed them on the table. One more meal before we drive our son back to school. And then the aftermath of goodness.
Happy Easter.
Wearied by an overwhelm of work and the static panic of good-news hoping, I had again let reading go, until yesterday, when I brought home Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), The Frozen Thames (Helen Humphreys), and The Cradle (Patrick Somerville). This morning through just now I read the first, a book about which Wendy Lesser, in the New York Times Book Review, recently wrote: "First novels by young writers who see the world with a fresh, original vision and write about it with clarity and restraint are rare enough to begin with. When you add in the fact that Chloe Aridjis’ 'Book of Clouds' is also a stunningly accurate portrait of Berlin, as well as a thoughtful portrayal of a young Mexican Jew drifting through her life abroad, this novel becomes required reading of the most pleasurable sort."
I love fresh and original. I love a writer who will take risks. I adore publishers who will take those risks, right along with the writer—who will agree to put out a novella-length book as a classy paperback original in a format that fits so perfectly into one's hand that nothing—even that overwhelm of work—can budge the reader once she has turned the first page.
What a perfectly odd, summation-defying book this is. What a lonesome character is Tatiana, who believes she sees Hitler on the subway dressed as an old woman, who hears phantoms in the unrented room above her, who meets a meterologist and learns the language and salvation of clouds, and whose job involves transcribing the dictations of an historian who may or may not be a transvestite, and who may or may not be relevant. Do books about lonely people have sustainable plots? It's an old debate; let the debaters read this book. Let them fall into the quick thick of clouds and fog and watch this author lasso weather.
A thick smell hung in the air, a smell that spoke of dungeon, as if one thousand Victorian chimneys had been tipped over and the lethal combination of coal fires and urban vapor had been decanted into the vast cavities of Berlin, crawling up walls and skimming the surface of the Spree, coating the shell of the S-Bahn and halting trains midjourney.
If that isn't enough for some in a book, it is more than enough for me. We can't ever know, just as this character never knows, if all she sees and hears actually exists. But what does actually matter in a book of fiction? Only the imagination does.
In my post yesterday, "Boy among Girls," I riffed a bit on a conversation I'd recently had with my always dashing, never boring ballroom dance instructor, Jean Paulovich. He'd made a claim a week ago that turned on this fortissimo: men and women are two separate species; hence, the stories women tell about men have always and will forever devolve into a frustrated yelp of incomprehensibility.
I should say here about Jean that he is a purebred Belarussian and yet, since coming to this country less than ten years ago, he has become fluent in English, knowing more about root terms and grammar than most native speakers. He reads widely and deeply, is astonishingly quick witted, and he's an amateur psychologist to boot, a skill that, it seems, any ballroom dance instructor with aspirations for success must acquire and daily hone.
So that his comment caused me to step back and think, and now Kelly, aka September Mom, has thoughtified me (shall we say?) once more, with her comment/question: Beth, when you write, do you prefer writing to a primarily female audience? Does it change how you approach a story? I love the question so much that I yield this blog to it, and hope, of course, for your thoughts on the matter.
For me, the answer is this: I write the truest story I can find (be that memoir, poetry, fable, history, fiction) with the most-right language I can muster. I am by nature and by turns contemplative, ornery, outspoken, muted, at peace, distressed, entirely set on establishing a rhythm, then full of schemes to shatter the lyric's spell. I don't write for women, per se, nor for men, but for any who are willing to enter into the worlds I create. Much of the time, it is true, the willing are women, though I have heard from male readers of all my books, and I have treasured their responses to, say, Into the Tangle of Friendship, my memoir about friendship, and Still Love in Strange Places, my memoir about marriage, and Ghosts in the Garden, my memoir about growing up and older at Chanticleer, and House of Dance, a novel whose narrator is a 15-year-old girl. Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill river, was written in a woman's voice, and yet so many of its readers were men—men with whom I have had long conversations about time and love and hope and survival.
I have four brand new books on my desk to read. Two are by men, two are by women (more on these soon). I need, in my world, both men and women. I need their thoughts, I need their stories, I need their friendship.
Oh, to be this boy among girls. To have access to their riffling suspicions, their percussive dreams. To know when they mean what they say, and also what they would say, if only asked. At the dance studio last week, Jean claimed, "Every story a woman tells about a man is the same."
"Can't be," I said.
"Oh, yes. Believe me."
(And I pictured this ballroom dance instructor day after day, hour after hour, women in the hold of his cha-cha, his rumba, confessing and declaiming and wanting and hoping.)
"Every. Single. Story. The same?"
"One story," he said.
"So what is the story?"
"The story is simple. The story is this: Men and women are two separate species."
Imagine the moon like this—this bright in the sky. Imagine the blade of light that falls through the window now, slashes my glass desk, deflects at the touch of my hand, is not cool, is not warm, is not a weight, is yet alive.
There are reasonable people who claim the moon is nothing but dead, a stone in the sky.
There are those who like their words straight up, their stories quickened.
But I have the soul of an insomniac and the eyes of my mother, and I pour color down, where I can, where I am. Too old now to apologize for living my one life out loud.
I called Anna Lefler as the sun was setting, and we talked as the sun fell down—my eye on the purpled sky and the silhouetted tree (all its buds still in a clench). Purpled to dark, dark to the only lit thing being the moon, which is full and gorgeous this night. Have you gone outside? Have you seen it?
I'd been telling Anna about my day—an up and down day, intense from its four a.m. start. I'd been saying, Once upon a time I wrote a book that I believed in, a very different kind of book. I'd been saying, Today, Anna, on the very edge of this edgy day, I received an extraordinary letter about that book. A letter. A validation. A surge of hope. Hope, Anna, I said. A new moon rising.
I will not cook tonight, I said.
I will wear my new shoes, I said.
And you will write, Anna said, about the famines.
About the famines?
About how we have to fully own the famines, because after the famines come feasts.
While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal" clerk who never wants for a thing, suddenly (and with good reason) wants for a new coat, which, after six months of near-joyous privation, he can afford to buy. Which, but of course, Akaky will soon lose.
"The Overcoat," written in the early 19th century, feels entirely post-modern, unconcerned with the traditional rules of storytelling, made eager and purposefully wild by its own tangents. It was the perfect thing to read during a wait-ful, clerky afternoon (though I'm going to hope my complexion never rose to the level of hemorrhoidal; I avoid mirrors; I wouldn't know), and as I read, I thought about how this story came to be in my hands in the first place. How the book itself was a gift from Ivy Goodman, a writer of surprising talents, whom I'd never have met had I not been asked to review her collection of short stories, A Chapter from Her Upbringing, eight years ago. She wrote a letter of thanks; we became enduring friends.
It has happened like that for me, many times. Being sent a book in the mail by, for example, Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, or John Prendergast at The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Kate Moses, formerly of Salon.com, and discovering, all of a sudden, an author who speaks to me so clearly from the page and emerges, one way or the other, as a lasting companion in this book life. Sy Montgomery and her pink dolphins (and tigers and bears and birds). Robb Forman Dew and her gorgeous, period novels. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose essays I read long in advance of meeting her, and who is here, every day, in my life.
Books connect us, and not always in foreseeable fashion. So that now, whenever I think of Gogol, I will think of Ivy, and when I think of Ivy, I will think of her own power as a writer and a friend. And I will be grateful for the knots and strings that are yet becoming my life.
I spoke in a recent post of my privileged life—living literature, living community and ideas at the same time. I spoke of how sometimes luck walked me straight through the door of extraordinary people and let me stay awhile.
Dr. Constantine Papadakis, who served for 13 years as the president of Drexel University until his passing yesterday, was one of those big-thinking, renaissance-quality people. He was just 63, and today my city mourns his loss.
I spent time in the company of Dr. Papadakis during my work on a book commemorating the rise of Cira Centre, an historic glass building in West Philadelphia. Not a lot of time—just enough to understand and appreciate how deep a thinker he was. Our conversation was to focus on the emergence of West Philadelphia, on the shifting center of this Quaker City. It quickly spilled over into talk about Anthony Drexel and George Childs, two of my favorite historic Philadelphians. It moved from there into broader philosophical terrain, and when my team arrived a few weeks later to photograph the great doctor in that grand hall of Drexel, he was charismatic and charming all over again—more artifactual stories to tell, that bright smile on his handsome Greek face.
Drexel University is a vastly different place than it once was—anchored in with new architecture (for architecture was a Dr. Papadakis passion) by Michael Graves, I.M. Pei, and others; set off in many new directions. West Philadelphia has changed enormously, too—thanks to him, thanks to my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and thanks to Dr. Papadakis's dear friend, Jerry Sweeney, the visionary CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust, who made certain that Cira rose above an old train yard and who set us free to write a book that led us through the door of souls like Dr. Papadakis.
7:07 a.m. The view through my office window, right now. It is post storm, and pink, still a yellow moon in the sky.
Nothing but Ghosts is a work of fiction, but its landscape was inspired by the glorious pleasure gardens of Chanticleer—an international treasure that happens to breathe and bloom ten minutes from my home. I shot the trailer footage yesterday, in sixty-degree weather, under blue skies.
This morning, while finishing my work on the piece, I did something I tend to do most mornings, which is to check in on Chasing Ray, a most extraordinary book blog. There, in a piece about books Colleen Mondor has been reading while on vacation with her son, I found her early impressions of Nothing but Ghosts. I am deeply moved by her response and hopeful that the book carries her through to an ending she believes in.
Yesterday I hunkered down with client work until I could no longer and set off (this time in a car) for my favorite garden anywhere—Chanticleer. I'd received a season's pass as a birthday present from the gardeners themselves, and when I arrived I was floated at once up and out of myself. I had my Sony and two lenses and a borrowed video camera. I had my wild hair tangled up with the breeze. There were bursts of families and lovers on every hill, bright as balloons let free of their strings. There were those in tiger-colored chairs, reading alone and satisfied.
I am grateful for the many families I have accumulated in this life. The gardeners of Chanticleer have become one. Each gardener working the winter months to gift us in spring with new paths, new downhill leaks of yellow and blue, new fish in ponds. Each to be found in their own places over time, with the accretion of new stories now to tell.
I wanted to run, like the children were running, in a scream of joy down the plush, arced hill.
I have lived here a long time now, and I have taken near-daily walks—cleared my head, eased my limbs out of the posture of desk work and heavy lifting. You'd have thought I'd have traversed every road within an hour's walking, therefore, but yesterday I left the house in such a haranguing hurry that I wasn't much paying attention to the direction I was traveling, until all of a sudden I was somewhere new.
It was one of the prettiest bits of country I'd ever seen—a meandering margin of green, stone walls, wild daffodils, two ponds, a squat waterfall, and in between the new homes were old barn structures that seemed at least two centuries old. This kind of country telegraphs its own history and yesterday it dissipated my fisted-up mood. For there is hope, always, in the new discovery, and yesterday what I needed most was hope.
I'm not the prettiest sight when trying to learn new software (think of my hair springing madly about the sweaty planes of my head). When the prospect of new software is complicated by a downed Comcast email system (if you are trying to reach me, it's the worm that's got me thwarted) and a broken connection between my camera and the computer, well the only thing you have to add to the chase is housework and bills. Both happen to be on the day's agenda.
Nevertheless, I have made this first recording of a poem I wrote (and shared in part) a while ago, added in some titles, and braved the blog. I am going through all this—shall we call it a growth experience?— because I am determined to create a trailer for Nothing but Ghosts, with real video, soon to be shot at my favorite garden, Chanticleer.
Between now and then, I give you Juarez, and the true story of a little girl I met. She and I and Juarez are all recomposed in a novel called The Heart is Not a Size, due out next winter.
I started my own business at the age of twenty-five—hung out my shingle and began to consult with a dozen or so design and engineering firms. I worked on branding and positioning, wrote brochures and proposals, conducted research, trained internal staff. I continued along in my tried-and-true Undercover fashion, ghosting articles and writing talks for the city's architects.
Within a few years (following a brief full-time stint for a major consultancy), I had expanded my range—put my History and Sociology of Science degree to work for pharmaceutical companies like Merck, DuPont Merck, AstraMerck, and AstraZeneca (there's a pattern there, do you see it?). I was writing internal magazines by then, annual reviews and annual reports, corporate histories. I was working behind the scenes, again, to craft the talks that others gave. It all kept changing, shifting, growing. There'd be years when I'd leave the consulting behind to focus solely on books—a grant would come in, an advance, a spate of magazine assignments, competitions to judge. And then I'd be back at my work-a-day desk—interviewing executives or civic leaders, trying to see the world through their eyes, forging friendships that have lasted straight through to now.
Seven years ago my husband left architecture to enter the field of graphic design. We've since built a boutique communications firm that incorporates not just strategy, research, writing, and executive coaching, but also photography, video montage, and design. Whatever the work is, it always takes me somewhere new, and while it is true that at times I lose my literary self for weeks on end, that I fail to find the time to read a book, to dream something personal and bright, to comment as much as I wish I could on your blogs, this work that I do is also often a refuge—a peopled landscape with clearer border lines. It's a chance to make another kind of art, to stare down a challenge and emerge on the other side.
The literary life is rich and essential and often heartbreaking. The business is engaging and rapid-fire and deeply taxing. I once thought that I needed the one to survive the other. I've learned since that I need both to survive myself.
In a Woody Allen moment, I imagined walking out into the sea—down the spine of the pipe, over its buttresses, into the splash and foam. I'd mermaid for awhile, perhaps, and dream, and all that I'd been expected to do would be done (what would be the choice?) by someone conveniently not me (another one of the multitudes of Beth Kepharts?).
I'd reemerge eventually—salt in my skin, green in my hair, fewer responsibilities.
Well, because it's funny, and because it's my blog, and because if Paul Krugman can blog six times a day, maybe it's okay if I blog twice, but:
Some of you have asked about those shoes I bought in Atlantic City. The ones I danced around in after getting some nice publishing news.
It's this very pair, photographed against a black tango dress. Also bought yesterday. Also silky, and sleek.
Because, while it is true that I was the kickball queen when I was a kid, that my high school years were filled with guys who buddied up with me (and saved their flirting for others), that I wear lousy, ripped jeans when I'm out with my Sony digital, and that the running joke during a recent Friday night dance party was that the only way I'd get a man to dance with me is if somebody paid the poor fool for the favor (thanks to all who contributed to the dance-with-Beth fund), I do, every once and while, like to be a girl. A real one, with real shoes.
Like these.
This boardwalk cat wanted not a thing to do with me this early morning. The fog was still dense, and it was just me and a few hadn't-gone-to-bed-yet men out on the planks. Take my picture, the men teased. Not a chance, I said. For I was trying to have a conversation with this sand-colored cat who'd found a chick on a string and wasn't budging from its catch.
The cat wasn't buying. I moved on, a dance yet in my step, for nothing—not the men, not the cat, not the fog—would be piercing my happy state of mind. I'd had my own victory of sorts just the afternoon before when, while trying on a pair of most extraordinary shoes, my Blackberry buzzed. It was Jill Santopolo of HarperTeen, with a subject heading that read: Nothing but Ghosts--German language offer. I squinted (I have to squint now) to read the details (the offer coming from the publisher Carl Hanser Verlag!) and after I did, I stood up in those tall, glinting, spike-heeled shoes, and announced to the clerk: These are mine.
It was that kind of news, that kind of day.
Yesterday, while I was lounging about at the dance studio, the very gorgeous (you should see her) Tirsa said to me, "Do you know that there are, like, a ton of Beth Kepharts?"
She was on Facebook, trying to friend me. I was the forest, apparently, that could not be found for the trees.
A ton of me(s), I thought. How tres convenient! Could one possibly do my laundry and the other cook and the other get caught up with that pile of magazines? Oh. Please. I am aware of one poor alter ego, right in this neighborhood, who gets called upon, on occasion, to read from one of my books. I had the chance, once, to apologize in person, when she showed up at one of my readings to shed some light on her most unfortunate circumstance. I told her that I'd share the spoils of my fame someday, if ever spoils there are.
(From the looks of things, that won't be happening anytime soon.)
But I'm banking on the fact that none of these Beth Kepharts have had a day like the one I've had—an email from my brother-in-law of Seville, at four AM. A call from my Dallas-based brother-in-law nearer to ten (he wanted me to open a box he'd sent; he said, Beware, for the love stuffed inside might spatter out and stain you). A call after that from my Salvadoran mother-in-law, a woman I met just weeks before my wedding, a woman who taught me coffee farming, a woman I didn't think knew much of anything about English until she lay on my sofa for a week reading my book about her country, Still Love in Strange Places, laughing at the funny parts). A note later on from Adela, my aunt-in-law, if I might use such a term for one of the most glamorous women on earth.
And in between, my friends. And yesterday, my father. A moment ago, my son, that now-familiar happiness in his voice, a story he's been writing on his mind. And in a few hours, the sea.
That's this Beth Kephart. She has rain in her hair in the photo up above. She wears her lousy, ripped-up jeans.
PS Oh yes. I've been nominated me for a bloggers choice award. If you want to play along and vote, I'd welcome that.
With the exception of the hundreds of daffodils out back, the jailbreak of crocus, the small cherry trees with their blossoms (the big trees wait; they've seen spring before; they know there is no point in rushing), the season remains a suggestion here. Yesterday the sun was particles of yellow drift, and the sleeves of tree limbs glimmered, tinted and nubile. Driving, I was happy for red lights, for anything that allowed me another angle on the day.
Today promises storm. I will spend part of it by the sea.
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