forthcoming, June 2018. Click on the cover to learn more.
This is me.
I am the award-winning author of 22 books, editorial director of the PBS arts and culture show "Articulate with Jim Cotter," an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, an essayist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune. I take photographs. I hope for peace. All blog text and photographs copyrighted.
Tell the Truth. Make It. Matter.
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HANDLING THE TRUTH: on the making of memoir
Winner, Books for a Better Life/Motivational Award. Named Top Writing Book by Poets and Writers. Featured in O Magazine. Starred Reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus, a Top Ten September Book at BookPage. For more on this book please tap the image.
This Is the Story of You
"This beautifully written book works on many levels and is rich in its characterization, emotion, language, and hint of mystery." SLJ Starred Review. “A masterful exploration of nature's power to shake human foundations, literal and figurative.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review. "Kephart (One Stolen Thing) establishes relatable characters and a poetic style that artfully blend the island days before and after the storm.” — Publishers Weekly. A Junior Library Guild and Scholstic Book Club selection. Chronicle Books. Click on the image to learn more.
LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair
"... another excellent nonfiction book for the general reader." Library Journal. LOVE is the Upper Dublin/Wissahickon Valley Libraries Let's DIscuss It Pick. More more on the book and events, click on the image.
One Thing Stolen
2016 TAYSHAS Reading List, Parents' Choice Gold Medal Selection. Shelf Awareness Starred Review. Booklist Starred Review: "An enigmatic, atmospheric, and beautifully written tale." "Kephart at her poetic and powerful best. ONE THING STOLEN is a masterwork—a nest of beauty and loss, a flood of passion so sweet one can taste it. This is no ordinary book. It fits into no box. It is its own box—its own language." — A.S. King. Amazon Editor's April Pick. Top 14 Teen April Novel, by Bustle. Find out more about this Florence novel, due out from Chronicle Books in April 2015, by clicking on the image.
Going Over
GOING OVER is a 2014 Booklist Editors' Choice, the Gold Medal Winner/Historical Fiction/Parents' Choice Awards, an ABA Best Books for Children & Teens, 2015 TAYSHAS Reading List, YALSA BFYA selection, a Junior Library Guild selection,voted as a 100 Children's Books to Read in a Lifetime, a Booklist Top Ten Historical Novel for Youth, a School Library Journal Pick of the Day, an Amazon Big Spring Book, an iBooks Spring's Biggest Book, and has received starred reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Shelf Awareness.. Click on the image for more information.
FLOW: Now available as a paperback!
"There is no more profound or moving exploration of Philadelphia’s history."—Nathaniel Popkin Originally released in 2007, Flow is now available as an affordable paperback. More on this book—the autobiography of a Philadelphia river—can be found by clicking on the image.
Nest. Flight. Sky.
NOW AVAILABLE through Audibles."... strives to give all those who grieve the hope that there is peace, a peace that we can live with and thrive with, as long as we remember to breathe and be alive." — Savvy Verse and Wit. Click the link to get your copy for just $2.99
Small Damages
2013 Carolyn W. Field Honor Book/Pennsylvania Library Association. Bank Street Best Children's Books of the Year List. New York Times Book Review feature, BookPage feature, LA Times Summer Reading Guide Selection, Starred Review, Publishers Weekly. Starred Review, Kirkus. Starred Review, Shelf Awareness. "Stunning."— Ruta Sepetys Click the image for more information and reviews.
Tell me you don't need a suit like this one—all quilted up and caped. Don't need this mask, the set of this jaw, these fleet and fine rubber-toed shoes.
I know that I do. I seek strength beyond myself, strength being a word that I, just now, associate with calm.
The good things of this day: I survived the 5:45 AM Body Pump. I saw my friends at Shire. Someone told me a story. I talked to my dear niece, Miranda, on her very special birthday. And a nice guy at the front desk of a seaside hotel told me the answer to a question I had about Cape May just ahead of the 1878 fire.
The weather was perfect, but there was no time to play.
The hardest thing, I think, is to identify excess in your own work.
The best sort of editor helps you see it.
I move through the revisions of this Centennial novel, trusting the instincts of my editor, Laura Geringer, learning from them. I move through it considering this third season of Mad Men, which seems in some ways thwarted by too many competing story lines. Something about the rhythm feels slightly off to me. Something about the places and things on which the directors choose to dwell. Mad Men remains my favorite show on TV. But I am watching it as a writer, measuring its rhythms, standing back, even as I try to think and work harder against my own story-telling obsessions.
Yesterday, returning at last to the Centennial novel, I struggled to reclaim my footing—to go back in time to 1876. Nothing rushes writing. No short cuts can be taken. I had to sit again, settle in again, to the clatter on Broad Street, to the buildings, no longer there, to the strange interiors of spectacle buildings that turned Philadelphia into a near-circus for a year.
The vendors are out, roasting their chestnuts. There is a hawk with blood-colored feathers on the parapet of a slanted roof.
We drove through storm and upticking fog and lights that could barely find their way, and sometimes it was only the rain we could hear, and sometimes only the songs. We make songs to mean what we need them to mean. Last night, every song was for me.
Think what you must, but the book that has been with me of late—the one I just finally finished reading an hour or so ago while I waited for the boys to rise—has been the Ken Kesey classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was on the high school summer reading table at the local book store, and of course I'd seen the movie, but I should have long ago read the book.
I had anticipated the intensity of the story itself—the horrible inevitability that awaits Randle Patrick McMurphy, the red-headed asylum inmate with the white-whale shorts who does battle of every kind with Nurse Ratched. I fell in quickly with Chief, the faux-mute/deaf Indian who narrates the tale. What I didn't see coming was the sentence-by-sentence power of the writing itself, the ridiculously unriddled but original details that made this book not a fast read for me, but a slow one.
Here's what Kesey does with a man's hand, which is to say, with a man's character:
I remember real clear the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he'd worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge.... I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone from hefting the wooden handles of axes and hoes, not the hand you'd think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West.
There's a whole life story in these hands—no need to back story McMurphy in any of the staid, familiar ways. He's all right there, in a peeling Band-Aid. So much to learn from that.
We gave the largest room in this tiny house to our son, but it was never big enough. He was a keeper of all things, always. Favorite hats and books and every paper from every grade that reminded him of something happy. He'd stack his pennies high on top of books, and beneath the books he'd keep the magazines from years ago, and inside the magazines were notes he'd taken while watching world cup soccer.
I am a devoted minimalist, seeker of clean and open space, and I gave birth to a guy like this. In this way, he is his father's son.
But today, we attacked this room together, my son and I, and suddenly it was easy to throw things away, to move them to other places. To decide that memories don't need artifacts to contain them, or not all the time, at least. Sometimes memories just are, and the old tee-shirt can go, and so can the box of tired magazines, and all the while the room grows around you, and the sun comes in, unobstructed.
We are packed now, ready to go. Tomorrow he begins his second year at college, and I begin my second fall without him. He is a man of many friends and talents, and he has found the perfect college home. I will see him go in that full knowledge and also with the knowledge that he is that rare breed of guy who wants to know what it is that I've been writing or, even, thinking, who notices how it is when I finally tame my hair, who stops, apropos of nothing, to say, Mom, I really love you, or Mom, thank you.
Thank you. Two words.
Autumn was always my favorite season, but now, to me, it means something else.
Every time I'm in San Francisco I go several blocks down the street from the Hotel Rex, where I stay, and see what might be showing at SFMOMA.
This time, I got very lucky, for entire wings had been given over to both Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, photographers whose work has so very much to teach. The Frank exhibition presented, among other things, 83 photographs taken in America during 1955 and 1956—a time of diners, jukeboxes, intense racism, Hollywood, iconic barber shops, and road trips. It's not just the photographs that make this show. It's their heartrending juxtapositions. I'm writing a novel that takes place during this time—or I will be, months from now, when other work settles—and every pulse beat of every photograph mattered hugely to me.
The Avedon retrospective is one of a kind—SFMOMA will be its only host—and features more than 200 seminal portraits of faces wholly alive. A dancer, blurred. Dylan in the street. Janis Joplin inside a fury of hair. Marilyn Monroe with all her beauty still intact. I'd long been an Avedon fan. I'd never stood before his photos, hung, the faces so much larger than they'd ever be in life.
I had my camera with me; I expected someone at the door to take it. But no one did, and when I asked whether photos could be taken at the show, I was given an easy nod. At first it seemed wrong to photograph the photographs. Then I realized that that wasn't the subject at all. The subject was appreciation.
I asked Holly, who is an extraordinarily gifted photographer, to tell me what she sees when she sees a picture—what she looks for through the camera's eye.
The boy leaned forward to prepare himself for the quick dash across the plaza. Leaned forward, spread his wings. He was surprised by his own speed. He laughed. He never thought he'd get so far.
Yesterday I was in my post-vacation panic—piled high with work, looking ahead with consternation—when an e-mail slipped in from Ruta Rimas, my new editor at HarperTeen. There had been a starred review of Nothing but Ghosts from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, she wrote, an especially beautiful one. She wanted to share it with me.
I leaned forward. I was surprised. I never thought ....
From the review:
... Kephart employs this basic framework to spin a story of human connection and human loss, of looking forward and remaining frozen in time, as flashbacks to Katie's mother's life and last days interleave with Katie's unearthing of secrets about Miss Martine's past. The style is elegantly polished yet tender, with the book deftly illuminating complicated emotions and relationships in quick flashes of interaction; Katie's budding romance with her co-worker, Danny, her friendship with the soignee librarian who aids her research, and her father's growing comradeship with the needy preschooler across the street all evolve quietly yet affectingly...
We'd walked all morning, up and down hills, until at last we returned to Union Square, just to sit. But there is always something alive and happening in that seat-terraced place, and that day it was Jewels on the Square, a performance of Latin Jazz by high school kids who had salsa in their blood. So the sun streamed down and the artists cycled through their songs, their instruments, and mostly I sat facing the crowd, watching the faces of the mothers, friends, neighbors, strangers who had gathered.
It was as if the children belonged to all of us. As if they glorified us with their talent.
Here's a lesson that I've learned this summer: When you are on vacation, be on vacation. Leave the work (truly, absolutely) behind. This is the first year that I've ever done this. Real life, as I was saying to Holly yesterday, trumps all.
You didn't think you would leave San Francisco without seeing me, she said, and afterward I thought how impossible that would have been. Not seeing this brilliant writer and photographer and fearless adventurer, not braving the wind with her. We could have had tea, or hot chocolate, or something sweet. She chose, instead, to invite me into the Grace Cathedral, high on the hill, where the voices of four cantors filled the stone hollow, and where there were candles to be lit, for those we loved. The candles were our prayer, she said. They were our bridge, our friendship.
Later, we posed like the Beatles in the street. We posed like kick-line dancers on the wide walk of a hill, just ahead of its steep.
"The hillside provided a refuge from disturbances of the prison, the work a release, and it became an obsession. This one thing I would do well.... If we are all our own jailers, and prisoners of our traits, then I am grateful for my introduction to the spade and trowel, the seed and the spray can. They have given me a lasting interest in creativity."
Elliott Michener, Alcatraz prisoner and gardener, quoted in Gardens of Alcatraz.
San Francisco, ultimately, is weather and terrain. It's fog curl and cliff erosion, the stooped back of ascent and that moment (exhilarating, triumphant) when the hills turn in your favor and you are tall in a tall place; you have achieved your point of view. You have to think before you go here. You have to decide how strong you feel, how badly you want, how much you are willing...then you set off, you acquiesce to the whip and the rise and the fall.
It is cold for August. The fog has a mind of its own.
It was sometime between our driving to Crissy Field and up to the underskirt of the bridge, sometime in the midst of climbing up to Gary crow's nest to watch the fog escalate on the horizon, sometime while cooking and then, again, while eating, that I remembered how it has been for Kate Moses and me—how our friendship began with a question: Will you write an essay for our anthology? It was a decade ago, I think, the glory days of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor with her husband, and ever since our lives have tangled—her friends becoming mine, her stories familiar and extending, her beautiful face a signpost, her presence one of the reasons San Francisco feels, to me, like a second home, a place that is mine, too, for she has given it to me, in increments, over time.
See this, she says. Let me take you here, she insists. Climb into Gary's '66 convertible Mustang and go for a ride into the sun and out of the sun and all the way down Lombard. Then it is some crazy hour, late at night, and she is drawing you a map of the Mission, listing out the best restaurants, reminding you of the fossil shop where, once again, you'll go, this time with family.
I am blessed by friendships long and continuing. I am blessed by hearts that remember.
We saw the sea lions in the glaze of sunset. We saw the Richard Avedon exhibit and the Japanese tea garden. I bought something for myself and something for my father and something for a friend and now we are off to see one of the most generous literary couples I know, Kate Moses (Wintering) and Gary Kamiya (one of the smartest journalist in the states). I have missed Kate dearly. She is now just 20 minutes away. I bought her a bouquet of red sunflowers. Red! And the man who sold them to me told such a story.
I love San Francisco. I can't help what it does to my heart.
Every once in a while, you just want the truth. You need it. So that today, which began with a pre-dawn, sleep-deprived Zumba at the gym, advanced into corporate work, fell toward housework, slipped into a panic, and somehow spun toward a dance lesson, honesty was required.
"I feel as if I'm doing something wrong, and that no one will tell me what that is," I told Jean, during a quickstep lesson. "It's like everybody knows, except for me."
"Well," he answered, looking me straight in the eyes, not pausing, not beating around the bush, not acting as if I hadn't stepped forward with the question. "It's about posture. It's about confidence. It's about the way you plant your feet on the floor. When you think about it, you get it right. But when you don't, you fall back into your old way of dancing. You look as if you are looking for something. You don't stand perfectly straight."
And of course I wish that I did it all better. Of course I wish that I had dancerly wings. But today, this day, I was glad most of all that someone had not pushed me off, had simply said: I will tell you the truth.
I photographed this child just as the sun was breaking over the beach in Hilton Head. She was running away; I knew I'd not see her again.
Sometimes it happens like that—a person enters your mind space, and then they drift away. Sometimes we are lucky, and they stay. I met Melissa of The Betty and Boo's Chronicles electronically, as I have met many of you. We became virtual friends. Months ago, I gave a talk at a local library; she went out of her way to come, to be there in person. She stood there waiting (and I still cringe when I think of how long she waited) for me to sign her books, and even after that, she stayed in touch.
Today she brings me the gift of a Nothing but Ghosts review that made me cry when I read it. That's all I'm saying.
Once there were two sisters—elegant and kind, smart but also (we suspect, we have been told) prone to giggles. One was two years younger than the other. She wrote a poem a day, sometimes two. The older one wrote beautiful poetry, too, and read deeply and wisely, and journeyed far to American Idol concerts and reported back with photos. She made so many friends in the blog universe that only she knew how to keep count.
The older sister, Priya, cherishes her younger sister, cherishes the poems she writes, makes it possible for her write them. She (we read in the preface to Maya Ganesan's Apologies to an Apple) "guards Maya's bike, she runs manuscript pages up the stairs from the printer and sometimes supplies piano accompaniment to our (poetry) lessons."
Not to be outdone, the younger sister, Maya, loves her sister, too—so much so that she has thrown her a surprise blog birthday party, inviting those of us who have grown to love these girls to welcome Priya into her fourteenth year.
I put the finishing touches on the Penn syllabus yesterday, then took my readings to that leafy campus to have them readied for Blackboard. I am teaching, as I have noted here, about vulnerability—about the ways in which we open ourselves and our words to the world. I am teaching heart and I am teaching craft, and Edith Wharton's words, here, inspire: As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.
I came home to a gorgeous review of Undercover by the phenomenal reviewer/reader known to so many as Booking Mama. She made me think, with her words, about the journey that I have taken since I began to write young adult novels a few years ago—about where I have gone with my characters, and what I, in writing The Heart is Not a Size (due out next March), decided to return to. Thank you, Booking Mama, for that.
The white cat has not been seen since its one long hour near my side. Was she a ghost, I wonder? A spirit? I looked for her earlier on this wickedly hot day while I snapped the weeds from the garden, tamed the trumpet vine. She was nowhere. Not even the float of fur, or the one blue eye.
When I returned to my desk, there was a sweet note from Lauren of Lauren's Crammed Bookshelf, who has lately spent some time with my ghosts. Her gracious review of Nothing but Ghosts is here. Lauren, it's been a heck of a few days over here. I thank you so much for your kindness.
In preparing to teach the advanced nonfiction course at Penn, I read and re-read and remember. I re-enter the mind-space that took me here, to the first page of my Salvador memoir, Still Love in Strange Places.
The tear runs like a river through a map, hurtling down toward his right shoulder, veering threateningly at his neck, then diverting south only to again pivot east at the fifth brass button of his captain's uniform.Below the tear, two more brass buttons and the clasp of his hands, and below all that, the military saber; the loosening creases on his pants; the shoes with their reflections of the snap of camera light.He is one of three in a sepia-colored portrait, and someone had to think to save his face.Someone had to put the photo back together—re-adhere the northeast quadrant of this map with three trapezoids of tape so that his left hand would fall again from his left elbow and he would still belong to us.We suppose he is the best man at a wedding.We suppose that it was eighty years ago, before the matanza, before he was jailed and then set free, before he saved the money to buy the land that became St. Anthony's Farm.
“Did I ever tell you what my grandfather did the year the farm first turned a profit?”
“No.”
“He threw the money into the air, the bills, and they got caught up with a wind.”
“And so?”
“And so he ran after those colones through the park.Chased his own money through the leafy streets of Santa Tecla.Imagine that.”
I do.I am often imagining that.Imagining that I know him—this man whose likeness is my husband's face, whose features are now borne out by my son.His are the sepia eyes that passed through me.His is the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the determined mouth, the face not like an oval or a heart, but like a square.He died long before I'd ever meet him, but I carried him in my blood.Just as the land carries him still, remembers.Just as St. Anthony's Farm will someday, in part, belong to my son, requiring him to remember what he never really knew, to put a story with the past.Words are the weights that hold our histories in place.They are the stones that a family passes on, hand to hand, if the hands are open, if the hearts are.
“You look like your great-grandfather.”
“I do?”
“Yes.Come here.See?That’s him, in the photograph.”
“Him?My great-grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“But he looks so young.”
“Well, he was young once.But that was a long time ago, in El Salvador.”
We remember.We imagine.We pass it down.We step across and through a marriage, retrieve the legacies for a son.
I've been trawling through a part of my own history this weekend—through file folders stuffed with xeroxed passages, quotes, and lecture notes, with old book reviews and essays, with pitched-forward questions. I wanted to see, as I prepare to teach at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, just what I'd once been thinking. I wanted to measure my progress since then.
The exercise is bittersweet. It involves recalling books that I could not live without—but have, for a decade or more. It evokes wonder at my own wonder. It settles me into a slower unit of time. It reminds me of the power that books still have over me.
I was a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun, years ago, when Michael Pakenham was at the helm. In the big pile of things that I've been sorting through this weekend, I found a Sun piece I'd written on memoir. Tucked within were thoughts on memoirs. I share a few of passages from that essay with you, my book-loving blogger friends. I cherished these books then; I cherish them now:
I might not have learned to love the memoir form—or begin to write it—had I not happened upon Natalie Kusz’s miraculous Road Song in 1990. The story of the author’s long recovery from a ferocious attack of a pack of Alaskan dogs, Road Song was, for me, the revelation of a form. Here was the past delivered with equanimity and respect. Here was a terrible tragedy gentled by words, a book in which the good is everpresent with the bad. Kusz writes to comprehend, and not to condemn. She writes her way back to herself, and as she does, she broadens the reader’s perspective, disassembles bitterness, heals. Road Song begins in the spirit of adventure, not with despair. Road Song begins with an “our” and not an “I” and reverberates out, like a hymn. There is no selling out here. Just a hand reaching out across the page.
It is the same with The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, a book by first-time author Kathleen Finneran. With The Tender Land, Finneran is asking vast, impossible questions about love and loss. She is restoring a long-lost brother to the page, a boy named Sean, who kills himself at the age of fifteen for reasons no one can fathom. Why did Sean swallow his father’s heart medicine? Who was responsible for his sadness? What should Finneran herself have known to protect this brother from his fate? These are personal questions, certainly, very particular details, one family, one love, one loss. But as Finneran tells her story, she urges her readers deep into themselves, asks them to consider those whom they too love, and whether or not they have loved fully enough. Finneran’s fine prose operates as a prayer—not just for both her brother, but for her readership.
Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert is another exquisite example of the memoir form—a book of escape and discovery, exhaustion and surrender and relief. Morrow’s book takes readers out far beyond where most have ever been—to the sands of Egypt, to the company of exotic beasts and plants—and somehow yields up passages that speak directly to the experience of humankind.
“I thought of memory as a blanket,” Morrow writes of her traveling days. “I could take a thing out of my mind and handle it as though it were part of some beautiful fabric I carried with me, things that had happened long ago, the faces of people I loved, the words of a poem I had long since forgotten I knew. This was something any nomad or illiterate peasant knew: the intangible treasure of memory, or memorized words.” Morrow’s readers don’t have to go to Egypt to make this discovery. Morrow has made it for them, and has loved it with words, for their sake.
I've been somewhat crazy busy with work since returning from those few days by the sea, but I love what I do (most of the time), and more than that, I love the people I get to do my work with.
This week brought me back into touch with old friends at a client that has long felt, to me, like family. It found me laughing so hard in one interviewee's office that I almost fell off the chair; philosophizing over the phone with another about what makes for an engaged employee; and getting some idea of what research (deep research) really looks like in the eyes of a high-level strategist. I talked information technology with a new CIO (boy, is she smart) and got tripped up by a certain guy whom I'll call MY, who tends to read my stories much too closely and look much too hard (and sometimes not so hard) for the hilarious (to him) double entendre.
Thanks a whole lot, MY.
Yesterday, while chatting with my client's General Counsel by phone, we talked business, but we also talked books. She had, she mentioned, seen a man reading a book on a Kindle-type machine, and it had occurred to her how much she'd miss the feel and look of a paper book, if ever such a thing were to vanish.
This led her into a story about a British outfit called Persephone Books, which has dedicated itself to (and now I quote from the Persephone web site) reprinting "neglected classics by C20th (mostly women) writers. Each one in our collection of 83 books is intelligent, thought-provoking, and beautifully written, and most are ideal presents and a good choice for reading groups." There are novels, diaries, and cook books in the collection, and "all are carefully designed with a clear typeface, a dove-grey jacket, a 'fabric' endpaper and bookmark, and a preface by writers such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Nina Bawden, and Polly Toynbee." All, in other words, are beautiful books, sold mostly by catalog but also in two gorgeous-looking shops. Beautiful books, bucking a trend, and thriving.
I kept thinking all day about this gift of a conversation—about how a business client had opened a door, to me, about a book-making phenomenon I'd not have known of otherwise. How a lawyer had taught an author something new about her own profession. I kept thinking how lucky I have been, in this life, to weave in and out, across so many borders.
The best thing that we can do for our books-in-progress is to let them be for a long while—to return to them in a new season, with a fresh eye. This is what I will now be doing with Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial novel due out from Egmont next fall. The book has been in the hands of my trusted editor, Laura Geringer, for a spell. It's been safe with her. Percolating. Late last night she sent along her thoroughly well-considered notes. Think about this, she says. Consider that.
It is time now to collect my courage and to look back on that story—time to wrestle with myself. It's the final leg of story making, my last chance, the time to put it all on the line. To make the hard decisions. To throw away the pretty sentence, the hard-won research, the tangent that takes the reader nowhere. To throw away, and then go deeper.
A passage from the many that I'll be mulling:
Katherine turns her head east and looks out upon the spires, rooftops, bridges, and factories of Philadelphia, her city. The red brick and white lintel and brownstones and green swaths and temples of home, work, religion, pause. It is flat-roofed and hunkered. It is peaked and pompous. It is congested and incomplete, and Katherine’s eyes cannot possibly hold it all, until finally they settle on the dark bracelet of the Schuylkill River, which arrives from the north, pools and calms, before hurrying away with itself. Cure yourself, she thinks. Look away. But she cannot. Winter returns. February 6th. The day that she lost Anna.
The day began with a 6:30 AM conference call, ended with five additional interviews, filled two new pads of paper with notes, and featured a stunning, it-had-me downpour.
Now dinner is in the oven, and the sun is out and sinking, and I am thinking how grateful I am for that slipping-away moment, earlier today, when I went to the gym to dance Zumba. Sure, I didn't have time for it, but I went out and off anyway, for sometimes the only way that I can succeed in a jam-packed-think-day is to dance my head free of all the thoughts my head has (without my permission) previously accumulated.
I interview others for a living. Later, I write what they have said. I stand on the outside of others' expertise and story-it-up, thread it with language. The older I get the greater the need to make my brain bigger (wider, deeper) for others.
There's a spark in the children's lit air and her name is Elizabeth Law (her title, by the way, is VP and Publisher, Egmont USA). She's being talked about and interviewed in many places and, from what I'm hearing from friends like Sherrie, Elizabeth's keynote address at SCBWI-LA was exquisite—empowering and enlightening. This is the same Elizabeth Law who stopped by, unexpectedly, to a book chat sponsored by My Friend Amy, on behalf of Nothing but Ghosts. Amy is a book blogger Elizabeth follows on Twitter. Nothing but Ghosts is a Harper title. I was typing away, trying to keep up with the chatter, when it occured to me that the Elizabeth Law whose name kept burbling up among the chat-room many was THE Elizabeth Law, of Egmont.
Imagine that.
Every single time I hear an Elizabeth Law story, I stop and remind myself how entirely lucky I am that my historical novel, Dangerous Neighbors, will be released by Egmont next fall. I don't just get to work with a phenomonal, brilliant editor—Laura Geringer—on this book. I get to work with a publisher who is out there on Twitter and Facebook and Blogs and Chatrooms, talking about books she loves, trends she sees, things she hopes for. Elizabeth Law is a galvanizer. It is peace-yielding to look ahead to this collaboration. I wish that I could have been in LA, at her keynote talk. More than that, though, I hope and believe that the daring and caring that Elizabeth brings to books will become a surge wave that works its way across an industry that desperately needs her kind of energy and faith.
At Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor is doing what she does so very well—forcing us to think hard about the big things. Her post is titled "How to recommend a book written by and/or about a person of color (POC)" and, with her typical intelligence, she parses the issues, concluding, "If we want to fully integrate publishing—if we want to make bookstores places that only have an African American section in the context of history...then we need to depart from the impression that minority books can ever be lumped together. They are as diverse and unusual and unique as the genres they are written for."
I could not agree more, and I could not be prouder to call Colleen a friend. I've not posted about the Liar book cover controversy because everyone else has done that so well and because I've had my own cover challenges—once in my memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man, Still Love in Strange Places, and once during the design work for The Heart is Not a Size, my forthcoming Juarez novel.
But all of the talk has caused me to think back on 2001, when I chaired the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury. We were five people asked to read upwards of 160 books. We set down criteria for excellence at the outset, established guidelines that would allow us to put YA novels on equal footing with picture books, history books, poetry books, biographies. Then we focused on the task at hand. We'd never met one another, our team of five. We had no politics to argue against or for, no statement we were trying to make. We were simply looking for the five best books of the year—the five books we wished to recommend to young readers, teachers, librarians, parents. The books we wanted carried forward.
Excellence prevailed. Excellence resulted in our selection of the following five exquisite, timeless, please-recommend-them books. How can we influence what others read? We can, when we are given a voice about books, make sure we use that well.
With the fierce originality that inheres in the very best of books, Virginia Euwer Wolff takes on life's hardest questions in TRUE BELIEVER and then dares to answer them. Love and religion, hope and sacrifice, community and class are spoken to and through Euwer's audacious narrator, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn. In a voice that manages both authenticity and lyricism, and with a fractured prose-poem style that perfectly captures the particulars of LaVaughn's sometimes bewildering circumstance, Wolff has written a masterful, fearless, and most essential novel.
In CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, Marilyn Nelson takes the familiar sketched outline of the life of former slave and renowned scientist George Washington Carver and fashions a revealing, richly textured portrait of an extraordinary and unforgettable man. Like Carver himself, the poems included here are elegant, careful, and rich with detail; they hold a quiet but unyielding power.
In Kate DiCamillo’s novel, THE TIGER RISING, two bereft children, walloped by death and abandonment, find a caged tiger in the woods. They learn from their fascination with the creature that they and the life burning in them, the power of their emotions, and the solace in their relationship match the tiger in brightness, despite the darkness of their loss. The story is small but deep, populated with characters of mythic presence and written in a lyrical style that transforms the Florida backwoods into poetic territory.
History books are so often filled with the contributions of adults. However, in WE WERE THERE, TOO, Phillip Hoose has chosen to highlight the fascinating role that young people have played in the making of America. Using diaries, journals, and interviews, Hoose brings us unforgettable new insights into the courageous young people who dared to make a difference. These compelling pages yield a new, refreshing look at another kind of national hero.
In A STEP FROM HEAVEN, first-time novelist An Na creates an authentic portrait of an immigrant child and her family. A little girl when the story opens, bound for college by the time it ends, Young Ju tells of her journey in a brilliantly maturing voice as confusion gives way to articulate comprehension. The cumulative power of the book’s precisely imagined moments and its unwavering point of view carry the reader with Young Ju toward understanding—not just of where she is going, but where she has come from. To read A STEP FROM HEAVEN is to experience, or re-experience, what it is to grow up.
I'm not what you'd call an easy airline passenger; I really have to want to go somewhere to get on a plane and go. Yesterday's flight home should have been smooth as a whistle, but the pilot did battle with cloud stuff on the forever landing, and it took me hours afterward to be able to look up and not see a listing horizon, a crooked screen. I answered all my work email, made some calls, did a few things that were necessary, then collapsed, with my husband, to watch more old Mad Men.
My eyes drifted, at one point, to the deck, where I thought I saw this pure white cat, its one eye green, its other blue. Thought I saw. Looked again. Did see. Patient, it waited. Matter of fact, it stared. As if it were early for a scheduled one-on-one. "Are you really there?" I asked it—the same question I'd posed to that shoreline shark just a few days before. How long will she stay? I asked myself. I opened the door and brushed her head with my hand, touched her nose, told her a story. She stayed. She waited. Said not a word.
She settled in. She put one paw beneath the other and took up her Cleopatra pose. She wore no collar and I was sure that I'd never seen her before, but it seemed that she'd seen me. That she knew me. That I was someone who needed a bit of watching over, guardianship, wings. So she stayed, she waited. She asked for nothing, said not a word.
"In Ciudad Juarez, young women are vanishing." It's a front-page headline, LA Times, a story reported by Ken Ellingwood. "The streets of Juarez are swallowing the young and pretty," the story begins, and then, young woman by young woman, we are told the details. Of a studious, reliable college freshman who simply did not return from exams. Of a 17-year-old Brenda and a 16-year-old Hilda last seen downtown. Of girls as young as 13 simpy not coming home.
This breaks my heart. This is more bad news for a place beseiged by a viscious drug war. A place I loved after spending long, enriching days there with nearly two dozen teens a few years ago. Today I am remembering lost sisters, daughters, friends. I am hoping for an end to the madness.
My father and I were the early risers in my house growing up. He made cinnamon toast and cream of wheat; he drove me, in the dark, to the skating rink, where I practiced double lutzes and flips (and tried to control my scratch spins) before the first bell at Radnor High. We were known, in our family, as the morning people, and I thought nothing of that until I went to college and discovered that I was one of the few out at dawn. One of the few crouched beneath the lamp of a not-yet-winter day.
I married a late sleeper and gave birth to one. The mornings have always been my own. But here at Hilton Head I found my morning brethren, out on the beach, waiting for sun. It's a sweet salmon blue out there before the sun cracks the horizon. And then the sun is a fireball. It's a globe of pink fire that puts a fuzz down on the lens. It defies accuracy, and capture.
This morning, we morning people stood and watched the sun do its thing. Then we got to work beneath its glaring streak, being the regular people we have also taught ourselves to be.
In the flat strike of afternoon sun, we were escorted (first slowly, then not) into the bay by a rubber-boat captain named Abby. He promised dolphins. He told stories about strand feedings—dolphins who assaulted the muddy margins of low-tide creeks with gang slams against miniature fish. It happens nowhere in the world but here, he said, and he said, too, that only a privileged few have seen it. We wanted to see it. We did. Strand feedings of a violent magnitude—600 pound dolphins throwing their bodies to the shore.
Afterward we were out on the open sea, or, at least, the wider, deeper bay, following in the wake of a shrimp boat. We were a small thing among the bigger beasts of the sea–the 1,000 pound dolphins with their war scars, their scratch marks, their torn-into fins, their babies. They came near enough for touching—almost. They nudged beneath the underbelly of the boat. They roared at us from either side, and the camera was not fast enough.
Except for once or twice.
Our idyllic three and a half days have come to their end.
But oh, it was something. Oh, it was.
And if you ever have a secret urge to spend a few hours with dolphins, ask for Abby at South Beach, Commander Zodiac. He's the real thing. He still loves the job he does.
I was the original girl workaholic—taking a motley medley of jobs as soon as I could, in any place that would take me. I remember the stink of the mimeograph machine at a life insurance company. The presents I failed to wrap well at The Mole Hole, a Hilton Head gift shop. The catering gig and the library shelves at the University of Pennsylvania. I was working up through my sixth hour of labor, and whenever my baby slept I was back at the machine, spooling through the corporate newsletters I wrote for a freelance dime—CompNet News, one was called. A Rohm and Haas epistle called, I think, Rohm and Haas Quarterly. A bevy of pieces for the Hay Group. Exciting stuff.
I was always working.
This summer has slowed me down. The economy has left its mark on us all; certainly it has impacted the boutique marketing firm that I run. I know that I need to start worrying about this in a more active and effective way, but somehow I've loved the just-being-alive time not working like I once worked has afforded. The new friends I've made. The new dance steps I've learned. The new novel I'm writing. The long conversations with my son. And these few days in Hilton Head. I've had the moon and the sun in the palm of my hand. I've had herons not minding my portrait taking. And just a half hour ago I watched the moon slip away above the head of this straight-spined palm tree.
I watched it, and I cried for the fact that I took the time to see it.
The lagoons, this morning, were mirror glass, drenched with the pink of the dawn sky. The egrets were a white, implacable strike. The herons were steel blue. I was alone on the bike path, biking miles.
And after that, yes, to the sea. This sea. No shark in sight, not even a pelican. But there was a chill in the underskirt of the current, and the full moon was yet high in the sky.
I brought books to read, but I have never left the tomboy me behind. I'm still running, I'm still aching, I'm still and always reading weather.
It rained early, but I was out on the bike—almost alone beneath the Spanish moss of Sea Pines. You glide here, on the wide macadam. You go and you go and you go—past the big horses of Lawton Stables, out to the lighthouse of Harbour Town, and on.
It had stopped raining.
I went down to the beach with my camera. A friend—a choreographer—has been talking about sharks and how they move, how they move him. I thought perhaps I'd photograph a dolphin or two, watch them move, be moved.
There were no dolphins. I stood at the edge of the sea and waited. Pelicans. Sun rise. Cloud break. No dolphin. And then, two feet away, no more, the startle of an animal, near. It couldn't be what I thought it was. But no, it actually was: A shark at my feet.
Seriously.
I've been coming to Hilton Head since I was a teen. I have never seen a shark.
It became my companion. I'd move, and it would come near. I'd begin to walk along the shore and it would swim in parallel. I was—moved, perhaps? Blessed? A shark so near, and not threatening. A shark, sea-colored, in the deep fin art of choreography.
Tell me you don't need a suit like this one—all quilted up and caped. Don't need this mask, the set of this jaw, these fleet and fine rubber-toed shoes.
