and our friends came—wearing cowboy boots, bearing an ice cream cake, and balancing a bowl of potato salad on one hand, like some Grecian goddess. They are dancers, these friends, with dancer-brand intelligence, and so the night was a song, a salsa mix, the bolero of a story Tirsa told. I am, I remain, a person on the edge. Watching and loving with a full and complicated heart.
that can't be undone, day by day. So that a life travels with you, hovers, and when you look into the faces of children—when they turn and look up into yours—the thought is (my thought is), Be safe from yourself. Do right.
The question becomes: How does one write a scene that powers forward (can't be stopped) and yet (and for me there is always the and yet) makes room for the stop-to-watch-it-work invention of language?
Several years ago, Laura Geringer wrote a most extraordinary note, inviting me to consider writing for young adults. Despite years spent teaching children and a stint as the chair of the 2001 National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury, this was not something that I felt I knew how to do. Nonetheless, I loved Laura's mind from the first, I loved our conversations, and we kept talking. We talked for almost a year until we finally met in person—Laura asking me questions on a rainy Sunday morning to which some combination of my personal history and imagination responded. Undercover emerged under Laura's great care. House of Dance was next. Nothing but Ghosts and a short story for the just-released HarperTeen anthology No Such Thing as the Real World were subsequent. Finally, Laura bought the early pages of The Heart of Not a Size, the Juarez novel due out from HarperTeen next March (and carried so ably forward by the delightful Jill Santopolo).
Laura left HarperTeen in August of last year, but our friendship continued. Today I am so utterly happy to announce that I'll be working with Laura again on an historical novel that is currently titled Dangerous Neighbors. It's a book that I conceived of several years ago, when writing Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill River. It's a book that Amy Rennert, my agent, wholly believed in. It's a book that went through several iterations and will, no doubt, again, for Laura asks exquisite questions, she pushes authors far, she sees, and—more than anything—she believes in literature and complex stories, in fiction that pushes boundaries.
I have the chance to work with Laura again because she has formed an alliance with a genuinely interesting publishing house called Egmont USA, an outgrowth of a publishing house with a long European pedigree. In making her announcement about Laura today, Egmont USA publisher Elizabeth Law noted that "her excellent taste, creative ideas and deep relationships in the field will be a perfect complement to our fast growing children's list."
Yes. Yes. And Yes.
A brief description of Dangerous Neighbors:
It is the Centennial year in Philadelphia, and Katherine has lost her twin sister to an inconceivable accident. One wickedly hot September day at the height of exhibition madness, Katherine sets out to cut short the lonesome life she is no longer willing to live. This is the story of what happens.
This past Memorial Day Weekend, I took the short trip down the road to the local bookstore and spent some meandering time. At the high school reading list table (love those tables) I pondered classics I hadn't yet read and picked up Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. At the popular paperbacks I found and collected a book long on my list—Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. My agent, Amy Rennert, had suggested Marianne Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher (about the American West and photography, among other things; how could I resist?) so I went and hunted that down. Next I asked the sales clerk what literary book is currently selling well, and she suggested Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos. I like to be in the know, every now and then, and so I added that to my pile.
Finally, I went to the YA shelves and collected Melissa Walker's newest, Lovestruck Summer. I have a thing about owning all of Melissa's books—she's so cute, to begin with, but also, just as important, I learn a lot from her each time I curl up with one of her teen novels. This time was no exception, for Lovestruck Summer isn't just a compelling tale of summer romance and indie music. It's also a novel that showcases Melissa's tremendous ear and her ability, from the first sentence on, to juice a book with momentum and voice.
Listen, for example, to the book's first paragraph: "I live my life in headphones. That way I can control what I let in. If kids at school are being idiotic and perky, I put on a mellow track and tune out their spirit rally. If my parents are nagging me, I play a fast song and rock out in my mind while smiling and nodding at them."
That's good. That's very good, and here are some reasons why. First, rhythm. This book is about music and from the start, Melissa's language has jazz. From the start, too, the words surprise. Kids being idiotic and perky? Clever coupling. Tuning out a spirit rally? Wait. A spirit rally? Let me take another look, you think, at that. And do we not, in just a paragraph, get who this narrator is? Can we not already picture her, caught up in the medleys she's got tracking through her mind?
There is a reason that those who have big followings have garnered that affection. In Melissa's case, she knows her audience, she knows what they think (Sex and the City characters are old, for the record, and there are just some things that people shouldn't wear), and she knows how to write a credible romantic tale that will keep teens on the edge of their seat.
the most important thing is stop your work, get in your car, and drive to your father's house, when he's not expecting you. To find him out back, watching the birds in the trees and at their well-stocked feeder. To sit with him through mourning doves and orioles, woodpeckers and finches. To leave a book, a new one, behind.
Paul Steege is a friend. A Princeton graduate who reminds me, often, of my own brother, another Princeton alum. A broad-thinking, socially responsible, inventive soul with whom I loved serving on our church outreach committee. An associate professor of history at Villanova University, who was in attendance this past Friday evening at a dinner honoring the Distinguished Historians Lecture Series my father has bestowed there in memory of my mother. A man with whom I can talk at length about readerly/writerly things.
Paul Steege is all of that (oh, yes, and also: Paul played goalie for Princeton's soccer team), and he is as well the author of Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949, a book that I have just this morning finished reading. I knew Paul through some of the years that he spent working on this book—would see him at the local coffee shop pounding away on his laptop. We'd talk about its contents, but not until I read would I actually see just how smart Paul is on the page, how evocatively he brings to life the black market terrors, compromises, and small, lit-up salvations of a Berlin ransacked by divisions and impossible politics. This book is fresh; the past is parsed. What happened is here, but more to the point is how Paul discovers, for us, what the past means, how he challenges "all ordinary people," in his words, "to consider their complicty in the making of their worlds, but also their potential to transform them."
The years 1946-1949 were brutal and harrowing in Berlin: buildings were shorn, winters were fierce, women were so frequently raped that rape became the commonplace of conversation, and even for the most ethical-minded, the black market was the essential salve. Within this unambiguous context of suffering, there were, still, grace notes of humanity—gestures Paul sets aside with Terrence des Pres-like care. This one, from Paul's book, will touch any reader deeply:
Even in the midst of the extreme cold, Berliners sought out opportunities to reassert their humanity and do more than just survive. Ruth Andreas-Freidrich described sitting in an apartment with friends bundled up in hats and coats and listening to one of them recite poems by Goethe. 'And when you think about it, they seem even more beautiful at twenty degrees below zero, without electricity or coal.'
I was at the dance studio today when word came in that House of Dance was named a 2009 Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book.
I am, of course, entirely grateful. House joins books written by some of my literary heroes and heroines—Sharon Creech, Jane Yolen, Louise Erdrich, Avi, Neil Gaiman, and Mary Engelbreit, among others.
New: I close the day with these words from dear Priya, about Undercover.
Yesterday, while walking down the street, I heard the golden-voiced Devon Horse Show emcee introducing a Floridian horse named Undercover. I stood and waited as Undercover jumped a clean, high-gated round, a good-luck omen, I thought. Today Jill Santopolo writes to tell me that my own Undercover paperback has officially launched as of this hour. "I hope you celebrate," she said.
An hour later the mail brought a package from Jill containing the hardback of Nothing but Ghosts. It was the first I'd seen this book in its final form— a reminder of how much better the hardback is than the ARCs released months ago. Nuances matter in the books that I write, and they matter particularly in Ghosts.
How does one celebrate the release of two books? I can only think of one way. By plucking peonies from my garden and arranging a photo shoot, and by sharing the news with the intrepid souls who so graciously gather here.
So there I was, taking a break from not writing, reading the New York Times, about to rush right past the Real Estate section (I own my house, and I'm not moving) when a headline—The Poet of Property—caught my eye. Since I've written about real estate and architecture since I started my business at the age of 25, I thought I might stop to discover what I might learn from a NYT-worthy subject.
I learned, among other things, that Valerie Haboush, the story's star, pens "property descriptions" and "online biographies of brokers" for a nice little sum, collecting between $150 and $250 for bios featuring such lines as "She dabbled in merchandising before realizing her true calling, residential sales," and he "built his career from the ground-floor up, ultimately earning the kind of success that most agents only dream about," not to mention he "possesses an innate gift that allows him to connect with individuals, understand their needs, and deliver results that often exceed expectations." She is able, I also learned, to write 50 such bios each week.
I couldn't help myself; I just kept reading. And then I got to the end. Where I learned that Ms. Haboush doesn't just write for real estate brokers. She writes, for an unspecified sum, college application essays for the children of, well, anyone who might ask, I imagine (though the story lists brokers). Herein are the penultimate words of the story.
“Sometimes they’ll come to me with an outline, or else I’ll interview them first,” Ms. Haboush said. “My feeling is, it’s a very competitive world, and everything you’re writing about yourself, you have to sell yourself, you have to position yourself in the best possible light. If that child can’t write an essay — well, that’s not my business. Let’s at least get that kid into the school.”
Ms. Haboush has no idea what her track record is with school applications. “I always tell them to let me know if their kid gets in, and I never hear from them again,” she said.
What say we, I wonder?
It’s been a few years since they let the patients go—herded the inmates away in buses; slipped the loonies down the loop in cars; did not see the only escapee who shuffled straight to the river, crab walked the bogged banks, and paddled deep into the channel. So that she wasn’t found until three days later—a turtle egg in the nest of her hair, a chewed strip of rubber on her wrist. A child made the discovery. He’d been playing. He had thought at first that she was Galatea, the milk-white one in his book of myths. No one would believe him when he came shouting, spinning home—mud to his elbows, shoes undone.
“You leave your imagination out of this,” his mother said.
“I’m swearing,” he told his mother, crossing his heart.
it would be on her tongue—cherry cool and sweet.
That was my childhood, too. That was my once.
was to stand, creaseless and unspoiled, in the blazing sun. To make us guess her face. To suggest balance in asymmetry and poise regardless of heat. To hear the merry cranking go-round go-round go-round around repetitions of a near-identical song.
I could not be her.
I do not have poise.
I am impatient.
I want.
and it was her father who was down below, saying, "You have done this, you can do this, be brave." She watched the ring. She counted the jumps. She kept her one hand on her mount's neck.
Don't fail me.
she said, with her eyes, and I took the dare; why not? I took it for who I haven't been and for who I might still be, took it for all the times that somebody said, What you are isn't right enough. What you want won't be yours. What you write is too small.
But puny can be outsized, too.
And small has meaning.
Alone in the house, before Vin had moved in, Sophie had found the evidence of earlier owners in the attic, under the sink, on shelves—drawings left behind by children, marbles trapped beneath the radiator cover, a single sweater in the closet, a collection of dried lady bugs, laid out like counting beads, upon the guest-room sill. She had studied the scratches on the floor and imagined the traffic of past lives, had acclimated herself to the idea of spirits and specters, phantasmagoria. She understood, better than she’d ever let on, obsession.
Tonight, at the Devon Horse Show (or returning from the horse show) I see: Cammy, my high school friend, not to mention the mom of a young lady who has always been an authentic friend to my son. I see George and Shirley, beloved neighbors (even if George says the words in my books are too big). I see the kids from my church, the husband of an old friend, the former chairman of the board of a favorite company.
I go out with my camera, and I return with my world. A full heart. A deep gratitude that makes some think me sentimental.
I'm not sentimental. Don't call me that. I'm in love with the life I have been granted.
The Devon Horse Show is back in town, and last night, as the trainers and jockeys settled their mounts into the stables, I walked unnoticed with my camera. I visited the Horse Show most years as a child—driving an hour with my parents and siblings. When it came time for my own family to buy a new house of our own, we found one just two blocks from the fabled fairgrounds. On Sunday the old carriages will roll down my streets. All next week the Budweiser Clydesdales will be clopped by my garden.
It was inevitable that the horse show take a starring turn in one of my novels, and in The Heart is Not a Size, due out next March, it does. These words set the stage:
At the fairgrounds, the stalls were one after the other on either side of a dark corridor that was so long it seemed to bend and then disappear behind horse steam. The floor was hay and the trainers were busy and the long faces of the horses were practically floating over the wide doors of their slatted stalls. It was like being in church, like joining in the hymn—the sawdust and manure, the sound of horse teeth on carrots and sugar. No one minded Riley or me, and we minded no one either, just walked down the corridor between the horses like we belonged, stopping when we wanted to, to touch the snip or the star on a horse nose. Outside, there were black birds overhead on the electrical wires, and the dogs that come to the show every year had begun to chase each other, dig for old bones.
and signals the release of Nothing but Ghosts. It exists. It is. There's nothing that I can do to this book to make it any smarter, any righter, any more whole.
And the music is.
In a comment question yesterday, the wonderful Lilian Natel asked (among other things) whether I approach adult novels differently than, say, the novels I've written for young adults. The answer is no. I give as much, I ache as much, I confuse myself as much, I nearly walk away as much from any genre with which I choose to torment myself. I work the opening 50 pages countless times, for it is in those pages that many of the most important decisions are being made. Voice and mood, for example, which are established within the first lines. Conflict and backstory. Recurrencies and themes. Trajectory. The spaces I wish to leave blank, the spaces that will be flooded out with light.
The book I am writing at the moment is being carried by two very different characters, two moods, two tenses, and the suspense of inevitable intersection. The book entails enormous research, causing me to stop every line or two to find something else out. My frustration of late concerned a misfired motivation. To fix it, I had to fix just about everything else. One small novel particle, wavering at a novel's start, disallows progression, I find. Until I fix it, I won't move on.
Now for my question, to all of you. I blog every day, as you know, and sometimes twice a day. But would it be kinder to my readers (which are you), to pull back a bit from all of this? It's something I've been pondering. I know what BH thinks. I wonder about you.
Euphoria is short-lived in the life of a writer. You have an idea—oh, you have an idea—and you go all out in your attack of said idea—moving forward because you have to move forward because you don't have time (in the heat of the new) to slow things to a slog and hover over the fine points of perfection.
Then it has to happen: You slow down. You stop on a Saturday to read what you have written and you really wish you hadn't. You spend your next three days throwing out most of your work, swapping out paragraphs, cursing the day you opted out of law school (and why, in fact, did you opt out of law school when the law school library guys were so good looking?). Then you slow down, again, read what you've got, again, go off shopping for gifts for your many dear friends, again, and when you return to your desk and read once more, you hit a new low point of despair. You say to your son:
Can I, like, borrow you for an hour?
He says: Yeah, okay. Sure. What is it?
You say: Can you, like, sit on that Corbusier chaise over there while I read, um, nothing much just, well, you know, 38 pages of a stinking brand-new novel? Because we'll have steak tonight? Because it'll be just like you like it, which is to say, medium rare?
Um, he says. Sure, he says. Pulls half a can of Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and settles in for the haul.
And you read. And your son—he doesn't stop you. And you keep going, and what you've got, you realize, either isn't half bad or you're fooled by the sound of your own voice. And when you're done, and you look up, your son isn't even half asleep: He has a whole slew of questions that he's asking. Assumptions he tests. A few little pointers about that police work on page 10. He talks to you about motivation, does a few little turns around What if?
Oh my gosh, oh my goodness, now you answer me this: What would I do without this kid?
There are few things more gratifying than successful literary novelists. I myself can't get enough of their stories, their confessions.
It is a lovely thing, therefore, to watch Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times—to hear what this multi-platinum author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex has to say about the work that he has done over the years and the city, Detroit, that has fueled his imagination.
I was intrigued, especially, by the way Eugenides has determinedly evolved his own work—moving, as he says, from a "preoccupation with language" (The Virgin Suicides) toward a focus on plotting (Middlesex) toward what he describes as an emphasis on deeper characterization and psychological portraiture—the "deepening realism" that marks his current work. I loved his overt commitment not just to changing form, but to raising the stakes.
At the moment I am deeply engaged in the early research and writing of a novel for adults. It's not as if I have not tried to write novels for adults in the past; I have written many that have failed. I wasn't ready. I needed to take the cross-wise steps that years spent writing memoir, poetry, history, fable, criticism, and young adult novels ultimately yielded. To learn to trust language, in memoir. To learn to break it apart, in poetry. To pursue the almost impossible detail through historical research. To tell a story through YA novels. To bend a story, through fable. To sustain a certain vulnerability through the blog. Having never taken a writing course (as an adult, I attended three summer workshops), I have had to teach myself to write, and the road that I've traveled has often stumped out, looped back, and confused.
But it has also brought me here. It has given me both foundation and framework. Tools with which to work against an idea I can't quite yet contain.
This is just to say thank you (thank you!) to The Compulsive Reader, for her truly lovely review of Nothing but Ghosts, a post I didn't discover until just now, a full week past posting. Which says far too much about my own inadequacies out here in the blog world and not enough about TCR, who does terrific, trailblazing things on her site. My gratitude.
Working with a macro lens is like looking at life through a microscope—seeing what you would not see were you just passing through. So that yesterday, between rain bursts, I could be found crouching in my garden or braced above a vase of flowers, dialing in and out of temporal focus. I was catching the reflected crossbars on a puddled stamen and discovering the zebra stripes of iris. I was thinking how razor edged the lily is, how much like a skirt a blur of hydrangea seems, as photographed from above.
I brace myself for the macro lens. I balance against a wall, try not to breathe, snap. It's rare when a photograph works just right. No matter what gets MemorySticked in the end, I've had the privilege of seeing.
I often think that I must be a most-confounding blogger—too language steeped, too introspective to transcend the razzle of internet exchange. White is my canvas. The marriage of photography and idea, image and suggestion, color and word is the challenge I assert myself against.
Not, as my friend and dance teacher Jean says, an exercise designed to draw the masses.
Dear Kelsey Boeckermann has noticed, of late, how vanilla my blog seems, how still in a swirl-swell of fast-rising waves. She thought about that for awhile, she tells me, and designed a banner that captures, in her mind, my world. I was so struck by the generosity of the gesture, and touched, too, by the elements she chose—a dancer, alone; a sun-flooded window; a suggestion (but not the blare) of book titles; and a tag—books, photos, poems—that in three words captures the is and does of this blog.
I share her artwork with you here. While I remain committed to the white space that serves as a frame for the photos I work against and toward, I also remain indebted to Kelsey for the energy and talent she brought to this.
Okay, sure. I asked my husband to read one of my poems (a task I have learned, through the years, to but rarely impose on the visual artist to whom I'm married) and he said, in a quick green-tinted e-mail: "sounds nice and I have no idea what it means." I asked another friend; he said, "I tried to understand; I couldn't." I asked my son if he might read the poem I'd blogged for him today. He said, "Tomorrow, Mom, I will read it more closely. Today what I can tell is this: You are happy that I am happy, and you've always loved me a lot."
I write poetry in the heat of fever, in the panic of insomnia, in the utterly rare quiet that I sometimes claim between things. I write it to knock language about and to dirty it up, to go wild against convention. I write it to outsize thoughts and to slim them down, to win the undefended war. To find peace: I write poems to find peace, which is, in my world, so cruelly elusive.
But what is poetry? What should poetry be? I am still trying to figure that out. That's why I so enjoyed this week's New Yorker story, "Slang-Whanger," about the long-deceased but still considerable William Hazlitt (by Arthur Krystal). Take a listen to Hazlitt's words, here:
The language of poetry naturally falls within the language of power.... The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance.... Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right.
This happiness business of yours being
The strange knowing between us.
These instructive thoughts from Colm Toibin, in his New York Times Magazine (5/3/09) profile. The author of The Blackwater Lightship (one of my favorite books) and, newly, Brooklyn (on my list) avoids, he says, describing his protagonists, and this is why: "If you describe them physically, you actually remove them from the reader, you distance them. By not describing them, you begin to make their perception so intimately involved with the reader's perceptions that it allows the reader to enter into their spirit and become them. It's first-person intimate rather than first-person singular."
My deep thanks to the adorable Steph Bowe of heyteeanager.blogspot for her interview with me this morning.
Next March, my fourth YA novel will be released by HarperTeen. The Heart is not a Size was inspired by a trip that I took, along with my husband, son, and two dozen others, to a Juarez squatters' village called Anapra. It features a girl named Georgia (who just happens to be an anxiety-prone photographer) and her best friend, Riley. It asks the question, What difference can one person make?, while plumbing buried, dangerous secrets.
Today the cover for Heart was approved. I thank Jill Santopolo and Carla Weise for seeing it through, and I share it with you here. I share as well this small excerpt:
What I remember now is the bunch of them running: From the tins, which were their houses. Up the white streets, which were the color of bone. All the way to the top of Anapra, to where we were standing in our second-hand scrubs, and where Riley said, “They might as well be flowers, blown right off their stalks,” and Sophie said, “This is so completely wild,” and The Third said nothing at all. The Third: He wasn’t talking yet. He was all size and silence.
“I should tell Mack,” I said, but I didn’t budge, didn’t even turn and glance back toward where Mack and the others were digging in, hanging tarp, toting two-by-fours from one angle of sun fizzle to another. Because the kids of Anapara might have been chunks of blown-off petals, like Riley said, but they mostly looked like wings to me, flying and flying in their bright, defying best, their yellow cotton shirts, red fringy skirts, blue trousers. They looked like something no one should lose to a single instant of forgetting.
It was only our second day.
We’d pinned everything on nothing.
In Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, my memoir about the years I spent learning from a group of young writers, I made it clear that I do not believe in writing as a competitive sport.
I felt, therefore, as if I'd stepped onto hypocritical grounds these past two days as I tried to sort through the many glorious submissions to the Undercover poetry contest. The bloggers who visit here and the bloggers whom I visit are putting art out into the world. Thoughtful, provocative, introspective, original poems and prose that make me stop, over and again. How could I ever choose a slate of bests?
In the end, I narrowed the list of submissions into two semi-finalist slates—one for authors 21 and under, and one for all the others. Jill Santopolo, senior editor at HarperTeen, then spent part of her Monday morning narrowing the field even more. "This will be hard," she said, after seeing the work, but within a few hours she'd made her choices, saying: "What fun to spend the morning reading poetry! In all that I chose, I felt the universality of the experiences written about—I instantly connected with the poem and the narrator and the emotions evoked."
The winners of the 21 and under series are Cuileann, "My Letter to My Astronaut Sister" and The Curly Q, "Self-Contradiction." Runners up in this series are Erin ("Standing") and Maya ("Napwrimo-25"). Cuileann and Q will both receive signed Undercover paperbacks. Erin and Maya will receive (in two months, when they are available) galleys of my fourth YA novel, The Heart is Not a Size, due out next March. Please leave your email addresses in the comments box of this blog so that we can correspond and I can get your snail mail.
The winner of the second category is Susan for her poem that begins, "Searching for the boy." Susan, I'd love to have your email address as well.
Thanks to all of you who took the time to share with me your best work. There wasn't a poem in the bunch that did not move me. I have promised to write a poem with some of your best lines. Look for that in a coming post.
Finally, the writer Sherrie Petersen kindly interviewed me on her always interesting blog. She asked great questions, and I encourage you to take a look. Also today, on the HarperTeen site, I am guest blogging about beginnings. Finally, on David Tabler's lovely Appalachian History blog, I am writing about Horace Kephart's personal legacy, sharing photographs that I have not previously posted.
You will never be;
For those of you who took the time to enter your poetry into the Undercover paperback release contest, let me first say this: I am awed and grateful. Your poems have been carefully read and sorted, and this week, Jill Santopolo, senior editor at HarperTeen, will be reading the semi-finalist slate. As soon as I have news, I will announce it here.
Where you are is not
At the close of his review of Nothing but Ghosts, Ed Goldberg P.S.ed: And what/who is that finch that keeps pecking at Katie’s bedroom window? I have my ideas!
The finch of which Mr. Goldberg speaks is ever present, introduced in the book's second sentence:
There are the things that have been and the things that haven't happened yet. There is the squiggle of a line between, which is the color of caution, the color of the bird that comes to my window every morning, rattling me awake with the hammer of its beak. You would think that the glass would break, or else that dumb bird's beak. You would think that I could think myself right on back to sleep, because I am sixteen, a grown up, and I know things. But this is the start of every day: being rattled awake by the world’s most annoying bird.
In Ghosts, Katie is searching for answers in the wake of her mother's dying. Ultimately the world's most annoying bird shows her the way. In real life, the finch arrived shortly after my mother's death—pounded at my office window until I finally began to pay it some attention. There hadn't been finches in these parts before. Certainly I'd never had a bird drill at my window; have you? But my mother was gone, and there was this bird, and suddenly it occurred to me that spirits return in gilded feathers. I hung a feeder by the window, and more finches arrived. I wrote Nothing but Ghosts in a fevered spring and summer, accompanied by the birds.
Today, in the New York Times, Lori Gottlieb writes an important essay about the choices writers make when they are writing about their mothers. The reverberations, the ramifications, the rights, or not, of a writer. With Ghosts I chose to honor my mother by not writing about my mother. I wrote, instead, about the overwhelm of loss, about love in the aftermath of dying. I wrote toward the spirit of my mother without using a single scene from her real life. I wrote fiction, in other words, and left it there, for fiction, I've discovered, after many books and many genres, often takes us closest to the uncompromised, unreprimanded truth.
In Siena, in a garden, there were hummingbirds. At Chanticleer, they are suspendered from the air. Once, last year, at Adam's house, they helicoptered in while Adam and I spoke of Philadelphia history and writer dreams.
I've wanted hummingbirds. I've hung a glass feeder, filled it with sugar juice. I've planted a trumpet vine and arranged bright flowers beneath the nest that the robin has built in my rafters.
I've wanted hummingbirds, and yesterday, while slicing zucchini, thick, I looked up through the window, and one was there. Nobly beaked, curiously calm, undecided, I could tell, whether or not it would return.
I had no camera. I had no witness. It was just the red-tipped bird and me.
Today it stormed, then it stopped, then it rained while the sun streamed down, and during part of this fury I was dancing. I was freeing my mind of all the worries that crawl in and threaten to stay, save for when there is music.
And now I've come home to sun and to the loveliest note from Ed Goldberg of YAbookscentral, who has given Nothing but Ghosts a most exquisite, thoughtful, meaningful review. I excerpt from just the final paragraphs here, encouraging you to travel over to the site, where so much gets done on behalf of so many fine books.
... There is so much to like about this book. Kephart has penned an engrossing, engaging suspense story. Miss Martine is shrouded in mystery as much by the vision of her literally hiding in her upstairs bedroom peering out her window as by the indescribable way she disappeared 55 years ago. Old Olson’s actions add another layer of intrigue to the story.
But to stop at the storyline, in my opinion, is to miss the point. Kephart, better than anyone I’ve read recently, describes the loving relationship between a husband and wife and between parents and child. Jimmy clearly adored his wife as she did him. Katie has an easygoing relationship with her father. However, Katie idolized her mother and conjures up her image when in need of help or support. But most importantly, Kephart makes the point that living life in the fashion of those we loved is infinitely better than disappearing.
Nothing but Ghosts has great characters, action, romance and splendid writing. You can picture every character and every location. Any of you who has lost a close friend or relative will immediately identify with Katie. If you are lucky enough to not experience a loss, you will be treated to a wonderful story. You can’t lose by reading any Beth Kephart book. She’s a favorite author of mine.
P.S. And what/who is that finch that keeps pecking at Katie’s bedroom window? I have my ideas!
Read more...
May 1st was Horace Kephart day in Bryson City, NC, and my brother who, as the sole male of this generation, carries our last name forward, was there among cousins, librarians, enthusiasts, and scholars to commemorate this author-naturalist-woodsman who, among other things, penned Our Southern Highlanders and contributed to the preservation of the Great Smoky Mountains with the creation of the national park. I have written about my great-grandfather, not just on this blog, but in the pages of Tin House. I have thought about him often—of the family he left behind to live the life he chose, of the rising earth he fought to save, of the people who came to think of him as their own.
But my brother was the one who traveled south this past weekend to remember this enigmatic soul, and last night, on the phone, he told me of what he'd seen there, of what he'd heard. It's the story of my great grandfather's funeral that I wake up thinking of today—the story of how countless multitudes emerged from the hills to honor the man who had honored them, to roll a boulder into place so that no one would ever forget.
"I saw photographs," my brother said. "Everyone came." Even two of the sons who had not seen their father for years and who loved him despite the absence, despite all that he could not be for them.
On Melissa Walker's big week (Lovestruck Summer is now out in stores!), Melissa is being utterly Melissa, which is to say supremely generous. Today I'm over at her blog, telling the story of the Nothing but Ghosts cover, with additional photos of Chanticleer, the garden that inspired this novel. Thank you, so much, Melissa. I can't wait to drift away into your own Lovestruck space.
In the meantime, Jill Santopolo has informed me that the No Such Thing short story competition details have now been officially posted on the HarperTeen site. You can find them here.
Behind us the sun fell, and all that night, as we drove, I waited for the moon—scanned the skies as the music played, looking for a sliver. Rain fell. Rain stopped. We were the only car on the road. The lights of a city came into view, and then they vanished, and we were alone again, moonless.
My natural state, I have decided, is yearning. When all is quiet, when the child sleeps, my heart is scribbled with want.
Forgive me for being a tad emotional this morning. The last time I posted a world-goes-streaking-past photograph, it was the morning after the evening that we'd left our son at school—a freshman at a college hours away, a young man on the verge.
Yesterday, downpours and client pressures couldn't keep us away from that guy. His finals were done, and his room was in order; freshman year is done. Our son comes home with broader shoulders, boundless stories, and a multitude of friends—engaging, truly beautiful young people who were chanting his nickname as they made the trek to say goodbye while we boxed things up, Windexed the mirrors, and ran an old vacuum cleaner over nubby, well-worn rugs.
In my absence, goodness happened. The kindness of Little Willow, Holly Cupala, Readergirlz, Alea, Jen Robinson, and others, who made it a point to spread the word about the Undercover poetry contest. Meanwhile, the uber-kind Ed Goldberg, of the fabulous Young Adults (& Kids) Books Central, posted a glorious review; I thank him, deeply, for taking an interest in these books that I write.
For those of you interested in the Undercover contest, you'll see that I have now posted the official judge of the competition: Jill Santopolo. I have worked with Jill at HarperTeen since my earliest introduction there; together with Laura Geringer, Jill shepherded Undercover, House of Dance, and Nothing but Ghosts to their respective finish lines. Jill then took on The Heart is not a Size, due out next March, in Laura's absence, and as an author herself, Jill absolutely knows books and words. I can't wait to share your work with her.
Today my dear friend Melissa Walker celebrates the debut of Lovestruck Summer. She's a force and a presence in this blog world; I've learned a lot from her kick, her poise, her smarts. Congratulations, Melissa, on your fourth book. We (and the spring's entire bounty of daffodils) are cheering you on. (And I can't wait to read it.)
For those of you who have never gone to a Rahna Reiko Rizzuto reading or enrolled in one of her classes, she's a knock-out green-eyed Italian/Irish-Japanese astrophysics-trained novelist/memoirist who was born in Honolulu and has made the world her home (and left the world with, among other things, Why She Left Us, the novel that won an American Book Award). She's also one of my dearest friends, and every now and then a package will arrive with Reiko's writing scrawled across the front. Saturday that happened. Inside was a book by Christian Peet, a story told through postcards titled Big American Trip. Yes. A story told through postcards. Angry, odd, fantastic comminiques that all add up to a singular voice that may be male, may be female, may be fiction, may be not.
Addressed to the Sweet Grass County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center in Big Timber, MT, for example, these words: "I do not wish that the world would go by. I do not wish to watch the world leave."
Reading through Trip yesterday afternoon, I thought of all the other deliberately odd books that have won my heart—the out-of-the-boxers that made me want to write a book like Flow, a river's autobiography, and that inspire the work I'm doing now. Carole Maso's Ava, for example—the final words of a dying woman, the unpieced fragments of a life. Michael Ondaatje's pseudo-biography of Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter. John Berger's novel in unchronological letters, From A to X. Markus Zusak's Death-narrated The Book Thief. Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide. Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds. Alexansdar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Forest Gander's As a Friend.
These books don't hew to the sound bite. These books dare. I've got an entire shelf of them here. I like sitting among them, breaking rules.
This coming week, the paperback of UNDERCOVER, along with its back-0f-book extras, is being released. Some of you know already that the story continues in those extras, revealed by Elisa through a new collection of her poems. Elisa has given me permission to run one of those poems here.
In the meantime, I am (and I say this without excess) astonished, daily, by the poems that so many of you are writing and posting. I would like, then, to announce a contest, the winner of which will receive a signed copy of the UNDERCOVER paperback. I'd like those of you who might be interested to send to me, in the comments section of this post, a link to your best blogged poem. I'll be assembling fragments of those poems for a future post, and I'll be asking a special person to choose a favorite. This contest will close on May 10th. For more on the paperback, check out the UNDERCOVER trailer on the left margin of this blog.
Contest Updates: I had promised a very special guest judge of this contest. Let me now reveal that the final judge of this contest will be none other than Miss Jill Santopolo herself, my editor and friend at HarperTeen. All ages are welcome to submit. There will be three prizes.
And while this really happened, I am posting it just because it's, um, funny and so very my-husband like. The long and the short of it is: a) I am too dim-witted to complete questionnaires, and b) I do not know myself.
With the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, I rarely read outside the realm of biography and history until I was in my late twenties. I wanted to know as much as I could back then; I thought all education was based on the facts. And so I read about the history of science and the history of technology. I read the life of Tolstoy and not his stories.
When Elizabeth Taylor recently asked me to review Jane S. Smith's new Luther Burbank biography, The Garden of Invention, for the Chicago Tribune, I was taken back to a former self—taken back quite willingly. I loved this story about this seed and plant man, this grafter, hybridizer, cross-fertilizer. I turned off the phones and read it all on a single, stolen Monday.
A few paragraphs from the review are here:
He was a genius, by the estimation of many, "an evoluter of new plants," by his own. He changed the shape of potatoes and married an apricot and plum. He gave rise to the Shasta daisy and the Royal walnut, gave tours of his Santa Rosa, Calif., gardens to no less than Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller and Jack London, and because he was one of the very busiest men on Earth -- others said so, he concurred -- he began, in 1907, to charge a fee to those ordinary citizens who hoped to stand, for a moment, in his considerable shadow....
All in all, this Burbank makes for a tremendous character, and with "The Garden of Invention," Smith, who teaches at Northwestern University and previously authored "Patenting the Sun," has yielded a first-class portrait -- witty, seamless and unflaggingly informed. I couldn't find a single useless tangent to critique, didn't stumble across the arcane, didn't wish for light, for there was always light in this book that brings Burbank to pulsing life even as it teaches plant science, patent law, eugenics, evolution and the fate of the prickly pear.
It's all here in "The Garden of Invention" -- not too much and never slight -- and I was, from its first sentence to last, a most grateful reader. I was wishing, as I turned the book's final pages, that I could go enroll in a Jane S. Smith class, sit back and learn whatever she is now teaching.
The slow unfold of the black amaryllis cautions me to lean on time.
Don't write the first draft of any book on the bright, loud ding of the computer. Travel to the other room, where the light is new, and sit. Let no clock near you. Write with a pen that blurs. Don't be afraid of all that will be wrong. There will be a word you like. There will be a line.
© Blogger templates Newspaper II by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
