On the eve of the inaugural Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series program, my mother came to me in a dream. We were walking, down. To either side of us the view was green. There was an alter at the bottom of the hill, a white gleam, and something about its architecture that she wished to share with me. That was all. That, and she seemed to be at peace.
Years ago, E, C, and I stood here, at this stone banister, looking down on the University of Pennsylvania's quad. We wore straw hats and alma mater colors. We had become what we had set out to be—degreed and ready for the world.
My freshman-year dorm room was in the far corner, on the fourth floor. My memories were of Spring Fling, Arlen Specter's son, the roommates whom I could not rescue and the ones who rescued me. E and C had been there throughout the best and worst of it—allowing the artist in me to talk to the scientists in them, enduring my endless hunt for emptiness in a decidedly urban place, staying near while I danced without regard in the quieting rooms of dying parties—and they are still in my life today. Yesterday, I sent E this photo. She replied, It really is beautiful, and so green.
That's how it struck me, too, yesterday, as I walked the campus with my camera. That's how it strikes me today, as I sit here at this desk, the day closing in around me. My mind is loose and wild and indeterminate with time. I am back then. I am right now. I'm ether and nether.
We considered foreground and background in English 145 yesterday—the interplay of primary and secondary, the fringe of context, the depth that is gained by incrementally adjusting the writer-observer's depth of field. We took our cameras out and searched for the iconic, then asked ourselves what lay beyond the chosen subject, what defined the borderlands, how the borderlands in turn shadowed and shaped the subject.
For my part, I returned to the Quad at Penn—my home during a tumultuous freshman year, when the new was alarming, and the raw was very real, and I was saved by a sophomore downstairs who played Bruce Springsteen loud in his room. We were just friends, but friends mattered most. They are what now come into view when weather and mood return me to then.
The image above is drawn from the new Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea," and introduces the words and images of my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, who (as I've said previously here and elsewhere, forgive me) played a pivotal role in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Those of you who might interested in reviewing a brief segment from the film can go here, to the WHYY web site. I never heard my great-grandfather's voice, obviously. It is fascinating to hear it rendered by this voice actor and to see photographs that I have long had in my own personal trove revealed to the wider world.
Thanks to Libby, for sending along the link.
For the second readergirlz contest, I've chosen a topic close to my heart—choreography—and called it The Story Song. Please find the details below:
I read books to meet new characters, to go new places, and to find out what happens. I also read to learn how the author has chosen to choreograph the narrative. Is it a straight-forward telling, or a book that turns round on itself? Does the story speed up and slow down, are there embedded refrains, which themes recur, which details, and why? Watch this video, then share with me one of your own poems or short (up to ten lines) pieces of writing. Tell me, with your submission, just how you thought about the piece as lyric. What, in other words, was your choreographic strategy?
Send your entry to me at kephartblogATcomcastDOTnet by October 25, 2009. The author of the winning paragraph will receive a signed copy of House of Dance, a novel about a young girl who, in taking care of her dying grandfather and learning about the life he once lived, decides to offer him one final gift. The winning work will also be posted on my blog.
Extraordinarily fine work was submitted for the inaugural readergirlz writing contest, which asked writers to yield a brief piece of a fully lived emotion. In the end, a single winner would not do. Please join me in congratulating the winners here, below, who are all receiving signed copies of Undercover. And please join us for the second of the four contests, newly posted here.
Jennifer Petro-Roy is a librarian/graduate student in Library Science with eventual aspirations to be a young adult librarian/young adult author; she is at work on a memoir about her battle with and full recovery from anorexia and exercise addition.
Erin McIntosh likes writing poetry on windows and tulip stems, standing on roofs during dust storms, and Arizona sunsets.My worth was in flesh, visible bones, rib cage mere piano keys to play.
Sweat and footfalls placated the fear. Body tense, I calculated my worth.
My mirage beckoned, grasped, screamed, pulling me deeper.
Can't stop, can't stretch, can't grow, can't be.
Just me. Am I enough?
Supplement my worth with nothing.
Prove I am through negatives and loss.
Fear. Relief. Fear. Always fear.
Until a step. A struggle. A Sisyphean slip.
Again. Stone in place, the view belongs to me.
We met our boy for a weekend in New York City. He is tall, upright, happy. Taller, perhaps, than he was just a month ago, when we dropped him off at college for his sophomore year, and he is happier than, well, ever?
Where, I wondered, does such happiness come from, and how might it be kept near? Beside him, I walked Broadway in the tinseled dark. Beside him I laughed out loud for no good reason. You made me a mother, I kept thinking, as I watched him. No one else, but you.
What, I've often wondered, is the language of choreography? How is the idea of movement communicated; how does it evolve? What lives within that mysterious shift space of motion and narrative?
When I began to take ballroom dance lessons from the choreographer Jim Bunting, at DanceSport PA, I had the chance, at long last, to ask questions. Ultimately I had the chance to visit Jim while he was at work on a piece with two young dancers—to watch him yield his story to them. I wrote a bit about all of this in a piece that recently appeared here, in The Dance Journal. The essay opens with these words:
Love walks down the street and sits in the park in the sun. It tenders its hand in apology or desire, corrupts the knees, revokes the arch of the foot. Love is the story, never finally told in words and, perhaps, never finally told at all, though one gets fleeting glimpses of it in the choreographic work of Jim Bunting.
Ken Burns has been at work on a six-part documentary called America's Best Idea—a series that will tell of the making of our national parks. Since my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, played a pivotal role in the creation of the Greak Smoky Mountains National Park, he, along with his good friend, photographer George Masa, will be featured in the stories told.
(I've written about my great-grandfather from time to time, both for literary journals and here, on the blog.)
The photograph here is of Horace Kephart's son, George Kephart, my father's late father. Though Horace was absent during the majority of his children's youth—ensconced among the Appalachians, recording their ways, advocating on behalf of earth and stream, living a life that to many remains a mystery—few people were as proud of Horace Kephart as this son. I think of him looking down right now, and smiling.
The series begins this Sunday night. A viewers' guide is featured here. Concurrent with this event is the release of a long-hidden Horace Kephart novel, Smoky Mountain Magic, that features an interesting foreword by my cousin, Libby Hargrave, and a beautiful introduction by long-time Kephart scholar, George Ellison.
A quick reminder here that today is the final submission day in the inaugural readergirlz writing contest. I have loved reading through the entries that have been received thus far. If you've written a short piece inspired by the idea of writerly vulnerability, I invite you to send it in for consideration.
The winner will be announced and featured this coming Monday.
"My Grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree. She could read thunder."
— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
I read Running in the Family for the fourth time, in preparation for a class conversation on Monday. I come across the lines I remember loving and the lines that strike me as being brand new. This line here is an old favorite—the surprising synesthesia, the resurrection of the grandmother, the utterly indelible attributes. People are known for many things. We pile up our store of anecdotes. At the end of life, what will define you? What would it be to be the one memorialized by a gift for reading thunder?
Dear B, the card read, Happy Unbirthday! I thought you might be interested in the ghosts that haunt a fellow Pennsylvanian. Kate is now a colleague of mine.
When your birthday is in April and you receive an unbirthday gift in September, you are stopped in your tracks. When the gift comes from Alyson Hagy, a friend of whom I've written here before (her books—Graveyard of the Atlantic, Keeneland, and Snow, Ashes—on my shelves; her gifts to me strewn across the window sills of my house; her words of wisdom and weather a boon in my life), you pay careful attention.
The gift in question was a book of poems, back through interruption. The Kate was Kate Northrop, who has joined Alyson at the University of Wyoming, which has knit together (very much under Alyson's influence) one of the most exciting literature programs in the country, featuring teachers such as Brad Watson and Harvey Hix and Alyson herself, not to mention a cast of extraordinary visiting writers—Michael Ondaatje, Joy Williams, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, Sigrid Nunez, and Dorothy Allison among them.
The point is: Alyson knows literature, she knows talent, her ear is adept. back through interruption is, I have discovered in these intervening days, a marvel—an exquisite parlaying of image and idea, a masterful jumbling of time. In poem after poem, Northrop turns incident into narrative, supposition into something that feels absolute and true. She gives you lines like this:
It was too urgent being human.
and this:
They are making matchbooks speak.
and:
...Is it
your business
after all, where a garden
winds up?
This is a book with which one settles in. This is a friendship for which I'm grateful.
So I said to Jean today, I said, "Jean." (We were about to step onto the dance floor to take on our Broadway/fox trot/Charleston/Quick Step/Lindy Hop/Jive. I was delaying the inevitable.)
"Yes?" Jean asked. (He raised one of this fantastically elastic eyebrows and gave me his best Belarussian stare.)
"Do you sometimes just feel like..." (I stopped inside my quandary, did a little run-around-my head in search of the right words.)
"Like escaping yourself?" he asked. (He lowered his one eyebrow then, in favor of his other, which did a little mathematical dance up high, right along his hair line.)
"Yes. That's it. Like escaping myself." (My eyebrows are not complicit with my moods. I would have raised one, if I could.)
"Yes," he said. "I have felt like that. Except that escaping yourself can't be done. You're always with you."
"I am always with me," I acquiesced. "Always." (For what he said was true.) I shrugged then, and then I stood. Sometimes it's just easier to dance.
In question number seven of her fantastic series, What a Girl Wants, Colleen Mondor asked us to reflect on whether historic MG and YA fiction addresses socioeconomic status more effectively than contemporary titles, and whether or not readers need to read about people who are experiencing their same financial struggles, or prefer to live vicariously inside socioeconomic fantasies. As always, I had to think long and hard about this one. Check out what Jenny Davidison, Zetta Elliott, Melissa Wyatt, Laurel Snyder, Sara Ryan, Loree Griffin Burns, Kekla Magoon, Mayra Lazara Dole, and I had to say about the topic. As always, I wish that I could be in a room with these bright lights, talking the issue out.
We danced the tango for Magda today. She helped us to see it through her eyes—shifted the balance in things, taught us the momentum that builds from a rightly strengthened spine, helped us close the piece in, so that we danced it, mostly, for each other.
But maybe that's not why she's entered our lives at this time—all this making right of a single dance, to be performed in a month, for a few hundred people. Three minutes—less—and it will be over, done—the steps worked out or not, the final leap syncing with the music or not, the rondes arcing wide or not—and what, she wondered, what (she asked us) will we have when it is over? What happens after that? What will this tango mean, this thing that we have built from Scott's choreography, and from (now) Magda's perfecting touch?
What will we have, and will we know how to dance—finally and rightly with each other?
Magda is supposed to be teaching us how to move. She is teaching us something richer, altogether.
Yesterday the brave souls of English 145 at Penn lobbed Natalia Ginzburg, Paul West, and Annie Dillard around the room—declaiming, declaring, rebutting, suggesting, insisting on asynchronous points of view.
West, via his essay "Remembrance of Things Proust," emerged variously as brilliant, smug, teacherly, full of his own conceits, and ultimately vulnerable. Ginzburg, with her classic "My Craft," riled the suspicious among us with her declaration that, "When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy, memory acts with greater force." In "To Fashion a Text," Dillard won the hard-to-win with her words, "What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect, or to tell the truth about something. You don't do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field... Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong."
We took a break. We caught our breath. We leaned in toward the end of the day. We sat for a moment with Larry Woiwode, his words: "All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."
Finally we agreed to read Ondaatje's Running in the Family, perhaps my favorite memoir of all time. It's not just story. It's not just language. It's the making of memoir, revealed.
Bright hue and sky. The strange pot hanging sideways, which is the sign. The virgin bird on the broken wall, and the quick flick of the camera's eye.
Take it home. Remember.
My mother went to college after she had raised the three of us—choosing Villanova as her academic home and remaining an essential fixture on the campus long after she had graduated in the top of her class. She and my father sponsored aspiring historians and contributed to funds. They befriended Villanova scholars and dreams.
Shortly after my mother passed away, my father decided to make her presence at Villanova a permanent one by creating and endowing The Lore Kephart, '86, Distinguished Historians Lecture Series. Working with a team of historians and administrators (including my own dear friend Paul Steege), he has, in her honor, launched what will be an extraordinary yearly lecture, open to the entire community.
Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson, Ph.D. will give the inaugural lecture—"Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief"—on September 30, 7 PM, in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. The George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Princeton, Dr. McPherson won his Pulitzer for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, a book that went on to sell some 600,000 copies and precipitated a renewed interest in the Civil War. In 1998, Dr. McPherson won the Lincoln Prize for his book, For Cause and Comrades: When Men Fought in the Civil War.
My father, I, and all of the Kepharts hope those of you who live near enough will join us for this evening of celebration and learning. Registration for the free event happens here.
It was not easy to get a note from a friend from whom I haven't heard from awhile that said, I have been living with cancer. She is young, beautiful, a wife, a mother, talented, and she has been living with cancer. I read what she has written about her journey so far, and I think: This is not a journey that I would know how to go on, or know how to write of, or know how to endure, but there she is, in her own way comforting me, speaking of good doctors, a loving husband, the surround of friends and children, the future. She is speaking of what will happen next, a few days from now following her second chemo treatment, when her hair will begin to fall away.
No, I think. No.
But my friend Denise writes on: I am going to be one of those way cool artsy women with the scarves and big earrings.
What is my choice, then? Only this: To be one of those made-braver-by-her friends who will go out in search of the world's best earrings.
To keep the thoughts one has to oneself.
Sometimes the quiet emanating from the second bedroom in this two-bedroom house is so percussive, aggressive that I have to stay away.
Sometimes the quiet is a peacefulness. I open the door, step in.
I think of the time (and money) that book bloggers pour into their craft—all that reading, posting, commenting, all that mailing and sorting, all those events—and I ask myself: How did this come to be? And, Where would I be without book bloggers?
For truly: Where would I be? I am a writer of literary books—no commercial giant, no Personality, not the glam gal on the limo tour. I care—enormously—about the books that I write. I want them to find their right readerly homes. I know that, without readers, I do not have a writing future. But I have little control over the fate of my books. They are released into the world, and I wait.
It’s the angels with wings who move in after that—angels, by which I mean book bloggers. Those souls whom I have never met, who live in places I have never seen, who take an interest. On the release date of Nothing but Ghosts, this past June, I woke to a virtual book launch party that had been engineered by no other than My Friend Amy and Presenting Lenore. I had not seen it coming. I could not believe my eyes. I told everyone—for weeks afterward—that something extraordinary had happened. “They threw me a party,” I kept telling friends. “They believed in this book, and in me.” They had thrown open the doors to their own community, and invited me in, to stay. I have met extraordinary bloggers in the aftermath of that party. I have found, within myself, a deeper faith in the kinds of books that I try to write—literary books that cross genre borders, that will live or die solely on the recommendations of readers, readers who also happen to be book bloggers.
I am getting teary-eyed writing this. I am thinking about all those book bloggers who have come into my life since I myself started blogging two years ago—the stories they’ve told me about themselves, the books they’ve insisted that I read, the love that they have given, so freely, to me. I would be not be who I am without these souls. That’s a fact, firm and unyielding.
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I have found the time, after too much time, to look back over the 186 pages of the novel-in-progress I had been writing before edits of other books came in, and client work, and a mini-house makeover (paint, the excision of cob webs, the scrubbing of a deck, the lightening of closets). I sat there, yesterday and early today, on the living room couch, and I read.
The proper foundation, I have discovered, has been laid.
It is time to take the book forward, to see, as E.L. Doctorow in this wonderful New York Times video interview says, just what the book will reveal itself to be. You work it out as you go along, he says.
Yes, indeed. You do.
It's dark when I leave for Wednesday morning Zumba, and for a few deluded minutes I think of myself as the only one about. But when I arrive at the gym, the lights are on and the doors are open and the guy behind the desk is indeed there behind the desk, reliably amiable, asking: "You awake, yet? You ready?"
In the group exercise room, we are 20 or so rumple-haired, sleepy-eyed women only half-prepared to dance tango, flamenco, salsa, samba, Bollywood. We are women unknown to one another, save for the 75 minutes that we spend here each week, and though I do not know my companions' names, I know how they dance, I know how they laugh with all of us at all of us, I know that I am aware, week to week, when one among us has gone missing. There are so many people in our lives—the grocery-store cashier, the bank teller, the man in the barber shop who waves hello—who are known to us by their gestures, not their names, and on whom we rely, nonetheless.
This morning while we danced cha-cha under the brassy lights at the gym (and under the powerful guidance of Brenda), I looked at the women all around me and thought of Annie Le, the 24-year-old Yale graduate student and bride-to-be who was murdered just days before her wedding. I thought of how we live our lives expecting the next day to come, and the next, and of how, sometimes, we take for granted the people who people our lives. I don't want to take others for granted. I want them to know that I don't.
My father was a University of Pennsylvania student long before I was, and yesterday, while sitting along Locust Walk watching the parade of life and learning go by, I picked up the phone to call him. "Hey, Dad," I said, "guess where I am?"
"On the train," he wagered.
"Nope," I told him. "I'm out here, on Locust Walk."
"I'll tell you a story about Locust Walk," my father said, and he went on to describe an apartment building that he had long ago shared with a roommate. "He got the bed," my father said. "I got the couch. It was a good-enough arrangement."
I told him how the old apartment building was gone, replaced by a glamorous cathedral to academia, and how the apple vendor from whom I had, as a sophomore, religiously bought my fat-apple lunch was gone, too, and how nothing, really, was the same as it had been; and yet everything was also deeply familiar. The way the kids sat in the sun to read. The way the music poured down from open windows. The way the stacks on the fourth floor of Van Pelt Library still reeked of the same variety of dust.
"I love it here, Dad," I said, something, I realized, I had never said as a student, when Penn seemed too big and I seemed too small and I could not get my footing. Or maybe I am less afraid of living now than I used to be. Maybe I've grown more capable of joy. I'm just glad that my dad is there, and that I can tell him that, at long last, his alma mater makes me happy.
Confession: I neither google my name nor go looking for reviews of my books, and still sometimes I'm following a chain of comments, or dear Anna Lefler will send me a link, or someone will write to me and say, "hey," and I come across some gift that has been strung out there in the blogosphere, and I think, Oh Gosh, I almost did not thank this soul for that.
Today I came across a most exquisite Ghosts giveaway on the very-fine GalleySmith blog. If I said any more about it you might not be tempted to spend time on that site. And so that's it. That's all I'm saying. Visit GalleySmith.
This is a reminder to you under-25 writers out there about the readergirlz writing contest that is now up and running. Please visit the readergirlz author-in-residence site to watch a brief video that features yours truly talking about the importance of vulnerability in writing. The contest prompt is described below. The winning work will be posted on this blog.
"I believe that the stories that touch us are written by authors who remain vulnerable to the world - who leave themselves open to the raw wounds and the glorious possibilities of yearning, outreach, and hope. Watch the video, then write no more than ten lines of poetry or prose expressing a fully lived emotion. Send your entry to kephartblog AT comcast DOT net by September 25th, 2009. The author of the winning ten lines will receive a signed copy of Undercover, a novel about a young, aspiring poet who discovers the beauty that lives within her."
Yes, this is a photo of San Francisco, just beneath that great and golden bridge, and yes, Penn is urban and east coast and miles from any bay. But this photo is the right photo for my present mood, for I've just returned from the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, where I travel now not as student, but as teacher.
Those of you who follow this blog know how many different ways I've danced the syllabus through. You know how many books I re-read before selecting passages to share ("Autopsy Report," by Lia Purpura; a snatch of Livinia Greenlaw: the opening homage to a photograph in Jayne Anne Phillips' Black Tickets). You know how much music I listened to before I chose the songs that would inspire a piece about weather and mood, (a Soweto Gospel Choir classic) or the jib and jab of conversation ("Arrimate Paca" by Eliades Ochoa). But what you didn't know, perhaps, was how eager I was to meet the students, whose work I had the privilege of reading over this summer.
Today I met the students. They are as fine as the weather we were granted.
The Heart is Not a Size will not be released by HarperTeen until March 2010, but it is often on my mind. In this brief video montage, I read from the book's prologue. The photos were taken in July 2005, during the trip to Anapra that inspired the story. The music, a haunting piece called "Alex to Himself," is by the supremely talented Jordan O'Connor.
I have written of how much I love my home—not just the tiny tudor where I work, cook, sleep, read, dream, entertain, but the neighborhood itself, which is history and horses, big trees and the cracked urns that show up in neighbors' yards, recalling an era past.
Last weekend I went to the bookstore twice, and among the many books that I carried home was Devon (Margaret Depiano and Stephen Diaddezio), a self-published photo history of my hometown. I live on the grounds of The Devon Inn, pictured above—once "the social center" of the Main Line. It was here where the wealthy came to "summer." Here where they played polo and hunted for fox and played golf (my own house sits on the former 40-acre golf course) and participated in a horse show ritual that ultimately became The Devon Horse Show. I went to that horse show as a little girl. We bought our house here because I wanted to be near it as an adult. I write about it each May when it comes to town, and it is featured in my forthcoming novel, The Heart is Not a Size. I lean on history, in most everything I do. I am forever hunting down ghosts.
And so it was with enormous pleasure that I sat yesterday leafing through the collected sepia photographs in this lovely book and reading about man-made lakes and 20-acre farms, piano recitals and a maple-wood ballroom floor that measured 50 x 70 feet. Fire would haunt this inn. Times would change. The massive structure would be other-purposed, until it was deemed no longer relevant. But in my mind's eye, the Inn still exists. And still the horses clop by.
It would not be possible to say just how much I loved Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief, though if I told you that it sits directly beside The Book Thief in my estimation, you would perhaps begin to understand.
It's the sort of novel I wish I knew how to write—a straightforward, plot-rich escapade about a one-handed boy on the lam from the orphanage from which he has been taken by a story-spouting graveyard robber, who isn't half as bad as that description makes him seem. One thing in this book directly leads to another with language so pure and alive that I wanted to do nothing else yesterday but lie beneath a blanket with this book in hand.
Tinti demonstrates, in The Good Thief, a perfect ear for timing, an incredible knack for creating original characters, and a huge heart. The book feels Dickensian, but somehow modern, too. It is set in the crumb and crumble of mousetrap factories and grimy pubs and cadaver-brewing hospitals, and yet there's so much light in it, too. Ren, our hero, is on a journey. He has Saint Anthony on his side, not to mention a cabal of secondary characters who are hardly secondary.
Published for adults, this is classic YA material, too, demanding to be read (read? consumed!) by all ages. I know that I'll be buying extra copies for nieces and nephews quite soon.
The distance between now and then is the ants,
Dance studios bring together souls from the middle of this country and the middle of another, guys who aren't precisely big on books and guys who are, mambo kings and samba sensations. In other words, they bring together people like Scott Lazarov and Jean Paulovich, who are pictured here. Scott is the artistic force behind DanceSport PA and one of the best choreographers anywhere (on Tuesday afternoons my husband and I dance Scott's brilliant tango; when I wrote House of Dance, I used Scott as the model for Max). Jean is the champion ballroom dancer, dear friend, and teacher who thinks I can pull off a Broadway/foxtrot/quickstep/Charleston/lindy hop/jive routine in time for a late-October showcase.
I'm not quite sure whom Jean thinks he's kidding, but I will tell you this: Yesterday, when fellow-dancer Julia was watching Jean and me kick slam our way through the routine, she suggested (with that merry twinkle in her eye) that Jean turn me loose on the stage alone so that I can do what I was already apparently seeming to be doing, which is to say, making it all up as I went along.
In any case, we do spend a lot of time with the good people at DanceSport, and the photos I sometimes post from there were all taken as part of a big web project—photography, design, writing, programming—that we have undertaken here, at the company that I run with my husband. Late last night that DanceSport web went live.
Probably in this case the title says it all, for this is Magda, a world champion ballroom dancer who comes to Dancesport a few days a week and gives to others what she knows. She does it without temper or stomp, without conceit. She dances for you and with you, so that you might align, however briefly, with the slip light of her grace. She raises her arm and her hands are liquid, and for a fraction of an instant you are liquid, too—seeing possibility, hearing song, finding new religion in the uninterrupted, the continuous. Choreography is made up of parts; Magda weaves the parts into a whole. Dance is made alive by the slow abbreviated by the fast; she shows you how.
And when she says, Put your hands on the small of my back so that you can see what I am saying about the spine, you are reminded of how weightless beauty is.
I was finishing work on one more corporate magazine story and (almost) finding the energy for the next when I happened to look up and out through my office window, toward the garden that has grown wild with summer rain.
There she was. White, pure, perfect with her imperfectly matched eyes. I reached for my camera, opened the door, thought only to photograph her from afar, but (I swear to you), she turned and began hurtling toward me—zipped through the green with jungle speed and took the porch steps two at a time. She stopped at my feet, closed her eyes, arched up. I lost my fingers in her fur.
There is so much beauty to her. I tell her this and her ears fold back, but she doesn't watch me vainly, doesn't turn her back to me with arrogance as beautiful women sometimes do. She stayed for a long time.
Afterward, she watched me from the deck as I stood in the lamp light of the kitchen window.
To whom does she belong?
"I have been," I said, one afternoon in Union Square, "admiring your hat."
She laughed. She turned. She smiled. I lifted my camera, and she did not protest.
Now she's always here, and without the photograph, I'd have forgotten the best details. She'd be vapor and sense, a vague wasn't there once?
The more I write, the older I get, image is my foothold.
Those of you who have been following Book Blogger Appreciation Week know just how much effort its creator and myriad (tireless) support persons have put into announcing, promoting, supporting, and delivering the 2009 BBAW Awards Shortlists, which have been announced today (because these good souls never rest, not even on Labor Day). More than 1,000 blogs have been sorted through, screened, and considered. Now that the shortlists are up, it's up to the rest of us to go visit those blogs that may be new to us, and to vote for the winners.
I've been quite lucky this year and have been shortlisted—along with Neil Gaiman's Journal, Maureen Johnson Blog, Meg's Diary, and Scobberlotch—in the Best Published Author Blog category. Whomever thought to include me, whomever judged my work, I embrace you with a very large thank you. I don't believe my name has ever before been in the same sentence with these fine writers, and it's a privilege.
Kelsey Coons is family—the daughter of my cousin, Linda, and thus a Kephart by blood. Like her sister, Brianne, she is athletic, gorgeous, smart. Like her sister, she had a knack for making my mother smile. She always makes me smile, too, especially since we're also united by our love for dance (and for the show, So You Think You Can Dance).
Last fall Kelsey took a college class called Rhetoric of Style and chose the chapter "A Talent for Living" from my memoir Ghosts in the Garden as the subject of her final paper. Yesterday she asked if I would like to read it, and of course I said I would. I wanted to know Kelsey better. As it turns out, she taught me a whole lot about myself. About how I use semi-colons (as fulcrums). About how my use of the rhetorical I and you allows me to "generalize (my) personal epiphany to apply to reader who may make their living other ways." About how I use parentheses to validate word choices. About the emphasis I place on sounds. About the chemical mix of my choice in pronouns.
It is stunning to come up against the thoughts of one who has counted, literally, the syllables in your sentences, who has weighed the anaphoric series, who has discovered the rationale behind your own word choices, and not just your word choices, but your vowel choices. It is, in fact, humbling, to be found out—to have what you thought were your secrets parsed. On every level of her assessment, Kelsey got this right. She saw what it was that I hoped to do with words, and word parts, and expressed it far more intelligently than I myself would know how to do.
This blog post, then, is to honor Kelsey, and her talent for paying such close attention.
Because I loved Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, I eagerly purchased her newest, The Little Stranger back in May, shortly after it had been released here in the states. If I wasn't precisely certain about the premise, I knew that I could trust Waters' sentence-by-sentence sensibility and her immaculate grasp of Britain in the 1940s, which is when this book takes place.
It took me awhile, frankly, to sink in with the story. I found dozens of reasons not to keep going, to look elsewhere, to read other books in between, for the first 100 pages seemed static, possessed of a when-will-something-happen? quality that thwarted my best intentions. Still, this was Waters and so last evening, I sat down with The Little Stranger and told myself that I could do nothing else until I'd finished her book.
I'm glad that I persevered. There is much to learn from the way that Waters fashions sentences and takes her time in this story about a country doctor, a crumbling British estate, and a family that one-by-one succumbs to the possibility of poltergeists. Whether or not this estate house is actually haunted (or simply occupied by increasingly hallucinating persons) is the open question that dominates this book. Waters does an outstanding job of leaving the matter unsettled. She is also enormously adept at imagining the many ways that a ghost might knock about a house, and she does a classy job of making the strange seem absolute—of pushing the impossible up against the mundane, of presenting multiple varieties of innocence and blame, and of leaving it all for the reader to decide.
I enjoyed watching Waters work throughout these pages. Often I stopped to reflect on how different my own approach to storytelling is. I believe, for one thing, in the power of the unsaid and the unseen—in deliberate gaps and break points. Waters believes in methodically exposing every detail, then taking at least one other (sometimes two) glance(s) back. There's something in that, certainly, something to be learned, though the part of me that seeks out the liquid in stories, did hope, in parts, for more momentum here, and less of the claustrophic.
Still, it was by and large a pleasurable read, and now here I am, just back from the bookstore—my second trip in two days. I've got many titles here that I hope to soon be sharing with you. But for now I'm going to take a small reading break and finally fit The Little Stranger up on the shelf.
I met Annika along the high plateau of Chanticleer, and she told me stories; then we walked. She has come to know this garden better than most—located the cotton flowers (white and pale pink), the butterfly on a man's blue shirt, the strange dish of red that passes for a flower in the woods, the place where the artichoke had bloomed. I told her stories of asparagus and of cutting gardens; I showed her the rock that recalls my mother, down in the bed beneath the old katsura trees: the wedge of sun between us.
This slice of afternoon had not been planned; not really. It was nearly spontaneous and might not have happened had I not decided simply to be this weekend. To finish reading one fat book, and to buy two more, to go on (as I do) with my friend Andra, who listens and understands. To make dinner something simple and to talk at length by phone with my son, who seems far away and near at once, attuned to every speck of stuff he's learning.
It's beautiful out there today. Live it, I tell myself.
There was a crash here yesterday that no one heard. There was me, hitting the wall. I might have been that sheet of paper that one fists up to toss. I might have been wrinkle and toss.
In the aftermath I sat alone thinking about bloggers. About those I have come to know over the past two years, since I began this blogging journey. I was thinking about the tremble of words that get proffered out here, the colorations of life, the shake points, the anchors. About how we come to know and love these souls whose faces are not known to us—how we follow their stories, how we are pulled up short when those stories disappear.
For many of the bloggers for whom I've come to feel a kinship are on the verge of such disappearance, or are already gone—their real lives taking them down another path; their ears tuned to new songs; their confessions, admissions, atrocities, humor, opinions put aside, at least for now, or yielded to others.
This, then, is to say to them: I will miss you. And: I understand.
I should say, for some of my Facebook friends have inquired, if, by way of this post, I am announcing an end to my blog. I am not. I am feeling melancholy, as I just said in a Facebook comment, about how much of our lives go on unknown to one another, about how we grow attached to people we will likely never meet, and about how others' lives snap off, in the mid-sentence of our reading. I will still blog. It is the journal that I keep, the conversation that I cherish. But things shift, and I do, too.
Words remain the great urgency.
Because I realize, now, that I can complete this Centennial book, and that it will be the book I hoped it would be, because I knocked a dozen things off my must-be-done-around-the-house list and placed a half dozen calls so as to fix the rest, because I won my war with the spider webs, at least for this hour, because I walked to Whole Foods and got the air in that way, because my son called and he is happy (and wise), because my father is coming for dinner, because I am using commas any which way I want, I splurged on dahlias.
Autumn is near.
It has been walking-and-sitting-outside weather, but I've been inside, piled high with work, feeling sunk beneath innumerable pressures. I'm in the final leg of a major edit of the Centennial novel, finishing up a client project, trying desperately to get the house in order, looking for time to get myself in order, too, before the academic year begins at Penn.
And I am missing books. I am missing easy strolls through bookstore aisles and time spent hovering over recommended reading tables. I am missing time on my deck, a book in my lap.
I am ten pages into Graceling; I'll finish that when some of this work clears. After that, I am headed to the bookstore to find out whether books like A Gate at the Stairs (Lorrie Moore) and Crow Planet (Lyanda Lynn Haupt) and Parallel Play (Tim Page) and Zeitoun (Dave Eggers) and Border Songs (Jim Lynch) and I'm So Happy for You (Lucinda Rosenfeld) are for me. I'll likely come home with some of those; no doubt I'll find and revel in the unexpected, too.
In the meantime, a big hug to Bermudaonion, for her deeply kind review of Undercover today. Bermudaonion has a lot in common, it seems, with my protagonist, Elisa. Which means she has a lot in common with me.
A few days ago, I wrote of my new role with readergirlz, as author in residence. Today readergirlz is rolling out my first writing vlog, which is titled Remain Vulnerable. Visit the readergirlz blog and watch the video. Then participate, if you choose, in the writing contest we outline there. The winner will receive a signed copy of Undercover.
Sometimes the finches that play in the trees beyond my office window mistake the glass for air and knock their heads, and always I worry. I get up to see if the banged-up bird is okay; usually, thankfully, it is.
But today the finch that knocked hard into the window pane did not get up from the deck, where it had landed, and my heart sunk. It flipped itself to its feet, but its right wing had been made crooked with the collision. I crouched near and spoke encouraging words. I wished I knew something about splinting a wing, or someone who would know what to do.
Every five minutes I rose from my desk, walked to the door, and checked on the bird, which had closed its eyes and was taking shallow breaths and summoning, it seemed to me, some kind of strength. But then—just now—when I opened the door, the little green-gold finch was gone. It wasn't on the lawn, it wasn't farther down the deck. It must have found a way to fly.
Whatever else happens today, there was this.
Would you consider, author and readergirlz co-founder Lorie Ann Grover wrote to me last May, being our readergirlz Author in Residence from September through December? Writing a monthly blog about the writing life? Participating in readergirlz chats? Attending a live online party?
I did not have to think twice. This is readergirlz—perhaps the most esteemed site for young adult readers in the world. It's the brain child of Justina Chen Headley, Dia Calhoun, Holly Cupala, Melissa Walker, and Lorie Ann herself, with no small support from the postergirlz, Little Willow (who makes it all happen technically), Jackie, Miss Erin, ShelfElf, and HipWriterMama. There's real content on this site—deep plunges into the world of good books—and I've been honored to come to know these creators and doers over the past many months.
So here I am—the first official readergirlz author in residence. I'll have vlogs for you about writing themes—as well as writing contests. Please do stay tuned.
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