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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Five-day in person memoir workshops. Monthly memoir newsletter
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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.
I'll be the first to admit: I've been less than my sunshiney self of late—lots of snow, lots of late work nights, a winter cold, not enough Zumba, and one small snafu in the publishing business that had my heart sunk real low for a spell.
It was, therefore, a very happy thing, when my friend, the humorist Anna Lefler, wrote with a bit of Zumba-quality news this week: one of her pieces was up on the esteemed literary site, McSweeney's. I wasn't just happy for this unquestionably talented, supremely hardworking blogger/writer. I was happy to have cause to laugh out loud, a sound these four walls had not heard for awhile. Funny business is hardly easy business. Anna Lefler makes it seem like it is.
(I'm not going to tell you what her piece is about, by the way. You have to click on the link and read it.)
I'm going to assume that it will be spring (wouldn't it have to be?) by the time the Philadelphia Book Festival rolls around on April 17th and 18th, so I'm thinking iris colors. I'm also inviting you to come meet me and two fantastic YA writers—Elizabeth Eulberg (The Lonely Hearts Club) and Patrick Carman (Skeleton Creek and Trackers)—on the Sunday, April 18th YA panel. Elizabeth, Patrick, and I will be on an outdoor stage that afternoon, 2 PM. Sun, I'm thinking. A sprinkling of clouds. No rain.
Last night, so many of us waited for the final flight of Olympic skaters to perform, and when they entered the ice, I held my breath. So much is at stake, always, for these athletes—for anyone who has named a dream and held to it.
I don't need to report the scores; they're known. Kim Ya-na's record-breaking, cobalt blue performance. Mao Asada's steely, silver triple axels. The sweeping extensions of bronze-medalist Joannie Rochette over elastic knees. And let's not forget the American, 16-year-old Mirai Nagasu, who skated last and flawlessly in the wake of some of the most emotional performances the Olympics has ever seen. We were taught, by these young women, that it is possible to be exquisitely brave or simply exquisite, when the entire world is watching. We were reminded that sometimes power and grace are a single thing.
An arm uplifted is a hand extended. A sideways glance is a dream.
Sometimes (it's intermittent), American Idol is on in this house; a few weeks ago, while photographing that precarious icicle, I walked by the screen and snapped this photo. It's Simon, obviously, disagreeing with Ellen, while a singer who has just left her heart on the stage awaits some kind of verdict: Is she good? Does she have a future as an artist? Should she defer her dream, or hold on?
Who is the expert? Whose voice matters? To whom do we-who-are-striving listen to? These are age-old questions, and every artist faces them; each of us, no matter how experienced, wonders. Because while, in some ways, artists are defined by the work they've already done, most artists I know hold that the work they're doing now is the work that counts the most.
And yet: Artists are not going to please everyone. Artists don't have that power. Gangbusters action or poetry. Conservative or risky. Over-the-top hysterical or rather straight-up. The occult or contemporary realism. Life issues or gossip. Right now or in the future. Easy reading or a deliberate tangle. You can have some, but I can't think of a single book that contains them all, and because this is so, it is a tricky business to calculate: What counts the most, and will my work be among the counted?
I wouldn't want to live in a world in which every opinion is the same. I wouldn't want to be operating inside a single standard. I doubt that you would, either. So that what I've learned, in my dozen years of publishing books, is that knowing who you are, as an artist, counts for a whole lot, and locating those voices who can help you do better work—who ask questions you respect, who judge a book not by a pre-established coda but by its own ambitions, who care about artistry, if you, too, care about artistry, or who are experts at action, if that's your thing—counts for a whole lot, too.
You can't please the world. You can always get better.
Yesterday, Ruta Rimas, who has been seeing The Heart is Not a Size through its pre-publishing days at HarperTeen, wrote to say that an early copy of the hardback has arrived at her office.
Contest, I thought.
And so here is a question for any of you who might like to win a copy: Where in the world do you hope to go next, and why? Leave your answer in the comments section here, and I'll choose a name at random by March 10th.
Heart, for its part, takes place partly in Juarez, a place I visited in 2005. Here's a scene from the novel:
Despite the sun and the uptilting slope of the hill, these kids didn’t walk.Even the brother who was carrying his baby sister never slowed for a second, his body bent forward at the waist.There were brothers who came with brothers and clusters of girls and those who came from what must have been east by themselves, all of them dressed in parakeet colors, and I remember a pair of shining patent leathers, throwing the sun back up to the sun.I remember taking that photograph.Sun like bleach, like stain.
Riley’s sapphire eyes were platters; for one bright instant they turned and took the me behind my camera in—took me in, and I snapped that portrait.The loose hair at the back of Sophie’s neck corked, anticipated, seemed ready to flee, but it was Drake who went to tell Mack, and Mack who brought Roberto, and Roberto who called out to the children by name, waving them up the hill faster.The first to reach the top of the hill was a pair of brothers with bright blue eyes and red paisley bandanas that tied back their thick, black hair.Some buttons on their shirts were missing. Their pants were light and loose.When they got to where we were they hung their heads a little bit, but that didn’t disguise their smiles.
The others were right on their heels.A boy in a strawberry-colored sleeveless shirt who had lost his front teeth.The girl with the black patent shoes.Several children—both boys and girls—wearing the same red paisley as the bandana boys.There were streaming colors in the hair of the girls—crimson bows and silver strings, wide navy blue bands striped with mango—and I kept thinking how much those kids must have been loved, how beautiful they’d been made by their mothers before they’d left their shacks and gone into the streets and trusted us to receive them.I thought that, and I took photographs.Portrait after portrait, and then again I turned the camera to Riley’s face, as she stood there in the circle of children, as she reached her hands toward them.
Today I would like only to honor Joannie Rochette, the Canadian figure skater who lost her beloved, 55-year-old mother to a heart attack on Sunday and who skated a flawless and love-filled short program last evening at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Rochette did not grow up rich. Her parents lost their first child before Joannie was born. With her father working extra shifts at a metals factory to help pay for his daughter's skating, Joannie herself took on employment, as a 16 year old, as a maid in a hotel.
You need so much to afford to skate. You need heart, above all else, to skate well.
You need your father, there with you, at the hardest time in both of your lives, and you need your mother close. Last night, Joannie Rochette's mother stayed close.
Miguel heads for the jeep.I climb in beside him and slam the door and he drives—past the house into the fields of bleached-out grass, over earth rising and collapsing, into the thick of the dust.There are check points—that’s what he calls them—and at each, Miguel hops out, turns the key in a lock, swings open the gate, hops back in, drives forward, stops, then locks the gate behind us, until finally we are out among the bulls, jerking along like some African safari.He tells me the facts as he thinks them up, and when he has the English to explain:The bulls fight when they are four.They weigh 480 kilos.They wear the brands of their birthdays on their back, the cortijo logo.They have nice, straight backs and horn geometry.
We scatter the herd, break them out of the shade until they are near, running beside us—fast in a straight line, awkward on the turns, annoyed.Miguel keeps talking about the finest horns, the best backs, the beauty.In a few weeks, he says, he will take the six bulls that he loves best and pack them into a truck and send them off to a bullring.Bullfighting is poetry and mind, he tells me, and when his bulls die well he does not feel the sadness; he feels the pride.
Sometimes writing is just so hard. This morning I would almost say it's too hard. The only hours I have to give to it are the hours I should be sleeping. I force myself to my desk in the 3 AM dark, and nothing works, the rhythms are off, I can't get my footing, I ask myself, Have you not worked this very page at least four dozen times before? Should you not already hear its music? Don't you get it? Can't you? What is it going to take? I read a page or two from a novel I love, the work of another author who has what I don't feel I've got, and I say to myself: Well. That is writing.
Frustrated, I turned to my blogging friends for succor and discover this—a review of No Such Thing as the Real World, the HarperTeen collection to which I contributed. I am no less frustrated with my writing self today. But thank you, My Friend Amy, for reminding me that sometimes the stories are within reach. Thank you so much.
My cousin Libby gave my brother the gift of family photographs years ago—slides, mostly, taken by my father's father, which my brother systematically recovered and scanned. This is the mystery photo in the bunch. My father's father and mother to the left. My Uncle Lloyd (architect of the Waldorf Astoria and other grand buildings) and Aunt Anne beside them. The gorgeous Marilyn Monroe-like creature and the woman behind her (we don't know who they are).
And then the child—dressed so finely in blue silk and turned-up sleeves and determined to sour the family pose. I wonder who she is. I wonder if she recalls the moment, or would, were she to find this picture here.
How can I thank all of you who have stopped by this blog these past few days, turning my own private party into an actual, peopled party? Those of you participating in the House of Dance paperback contest. Those of you who share my joy regarding the designation of The Heart is Not a Size on the Indiebound list. Those of you who were there with me, when Dangerous Neighbors entered this house as ARCs. I have often pictured us together in a room, and that is one of the many, many reasons I'm looking forward to the upcoming Book Blogger Convention. At long last, I'll get to meet so many of you. I'll get to say thank you in person.
Books, too, give us a chance to leave a permanent record of our gratitude. I love the look of the interior pages of Dangerous Neighbors because they are just so classy and era appropriate. But I especially love the dedication page, which is illustrated above. I dedicated Dangerous Neighbors to Laura Geringer, the editor who first invited me to write for the young adult audience. Who talked with me for a year before I had the courage to try. Who read my YA books, in succession, not just once or twice or even three times, but until they were as right as I knew how to make them. And who opened the door for me with Dangerous Neighbors by taking it as her first book to Egmont USA.
For Laura Geringer. Because.
Because I would not be writing young adult novels without her. Because I would not be taking my characters as far as I have without her. Because she has so radically changed my writing life.
Because she has, in all those ways, introduced me to all of you.
I was on the phone with a client. I was working. I was on the computer and the phone with a client. I was working. I noticed that there was sun outside, but I noticed nothing else, and so the UPS man surprised me today. He doesn't often, but today he did. Only now, opening the front door to gauge the weather do I discover this:
Dangerous Neighbors has arrived, in immaculate Advanced Reading Copy form.
Have I mentioned how much I love this Neil Swaab cover? And you should see the interior pages. The packaging like an object lesson in book art.
I have, as some of you know, been working on the same novel for the past decade—one that takes place in southern Spain. It's never been about getting the landscape right, the details. It's always been about the plot. Were I to speak now of all the transmutations that plot has gone through, you'd think that was the story itself.
But it's not, and at long last, the book is in hand. It is altogether, in one place, and here then, here now, is my favorite part of writing: the calm that comes from knowing that a fortifiable structure is in place, the joy of doing more to broaden and deepen the themes. This is like dancing when you finally know the steps, and all you have to do is hear the song.
Okay, so I just had to remove a few exclamation points up there in the title, so as to appear more my age, but: I cannot even begin to say how happy this news makes me. The Heart is Not a Size joins 11 other teen titles such as Carolyn Mackler's Tangled, Jennifer Hubbard's The Secret Year, and Swati Avasthi's Split on the American Booksellers Association's Spring 2010 Children's Indie Next List.
Here's what makes me feel even more blessed. Heart was nominated for this huge honor by none other than Mandy King of The Boulder Book Store, who wrote this:
"Beth Kephart has written another must-read book for teens in this story of a group of teens who travel to a Mexican border town to work to help the residents there. She isn't afraid to tackle such big issues as parental pressure, anorexia, and death, and she does it all with compassion, honesty, and beautiful writing." --Mandy King, The Boulder Book Store, Boulder, CO
Mandy King: Sunlight.
A few months ago, I created this video—a brief reading from the book's opening pages, accompanied by the photographs of the gorgeous children of Anapra.
In a few short weeks, House of Dance, my second novel for young adults, will be out as a paperback with a slightly revamped cover.
Those of you who know me a little know this: I love the freedom that dance affords me—the freedom to be my somewhat zany self, the freedom from the mind-bend of at-the-desk problem solving, the freedom of movement. House of Dance, which received a number of starred reviews and has begun to show up on state lists, takes place in a version of Dancesport Academy of Ardmore, PA, where I continue to learn to dance with the likes of Scott Lazarov, Jean Paulovich, John Larson, Aideen O'Malley, Magda Piekarz, Tim Jones, Cristina Rodrighes, and Tirsa Rivas, and among so many friends. I made this "trailer" for the the book with footage that I shot at the studio and around town.
In any case, the point is: I'm having a paperback contest. Those of you interested in receiving a signed copy of the paperback should leave, in the comment box, your definition of what dance is. Two winners will be selected from among the participants, and the two winning definitions will be featured on my blog.
It is February, 1876, an unusually warm year in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill has at last frozen over. The skaters are out:
From where they stand, the sisters see a game being played out on the river—two groups of boys whooshing a silver pail between them with sticks. The girls and women tend to hover near the river’s shore, or drift out farther, west and north. One girl in a gray-blue coat is sailing out and fast away on a diagonal, her coattails lifting up and flapping behind, revealing a skirt made entirely of summer yellow. With her shoulders pressed forward and her blades pushing her on, she seems intent on vanishing.
“Where do you suppose she’s going?” asks Anna.
“Perhaps to Birdsboro,” Katherine guesses, as they move across the frozen earth toward the frozen ice. “Or Valley Forge.” But just as Katherine predicts a long journey for the skater, the girl performs a miraculous pivot and begins to sail toward the shore, lifting one leg behind her as she does and holding herself up like an L, on an assured leg, causing one of the boys with the stick and the scarf to stop and stare. He hollers for her then and others do, too, and she remains intrepid above the steady foot on the frozen body of the Schuylkill. There are cheers. Applause that would be so much louder if it weren’t for the muffs and gloves.
Elif Batuman’s odd and oddly profound study of her favorite Russian authors is also an exploration of the question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?
However: I am going to read Lilian Natel's The River Midnight first. She's an impeccable blogger/thinker/writer. I've been waiting a long time to curl up with her book.
I didn't think I'd be able to watch the 2010 Vancouver Olympics following the tragic death of luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. I didn't think I could.
But slowly I've been drawn in by the stories of the other athletes, the quality of the production, the vast whiteness of Vancouver, and, of course, the figure skating. Two of the loveliest-seeming pair skaters ever—Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo—took the gold last night, eighteen years after they began to skate together under the direction of a coach who has given his life, truly his life, to building a program that saw three Chinese couples place in this Olympics' top four.
In both the short and the long program, across a wide variety of teams, elegance dominated. The gorgeous costuming (the longer, etherial skirts, the use of buttons and tucks, the pale pink of fabric roses sewn discretely into a seam, the underpower of color). The quiet orchestrations of meaningful songs ("The Impossible Dream," Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever"). The one-handed lifts. It was as if skating had (for the most part) stopped shouting and starting being.
I watch beauty like that through tears. I'll never forget this short program by the winners of pair skating gold.
I returned to the gym today with a more functional toe and with the energy I always have when finding my way back to something that I love. My friends were there—yes, I will call them my friends—and we took that one side of the Zumba room that we've come to think of as ours, and we danced—Brenda leading the way. It doesn't matter what I look like when I dance Zumba. No one in that room stands as judge. No woman has to wait for a man to say, Will you dance with me?
When it was over, one of my Zumba friends mentioned that she'd been reading Into the Tangle of Friendship, my second book, a memoir, published what seems years ago. She spoke of the book as if it had just been written yesterday, as if it were brand new, and in that way she gave it back to me. Driving home, I felt enormous melancholy—for the books I've written, for the books I haven't written, for the words I haven't found yet.
This morning I was working my way through Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires.Working my way through.
It's a dense book, but I've never been opposed to that. It incorporates multiple points of view, multiple storytelling sounds. It centers on one particular year—1951—at Mount St. Gabriel's, an all-girls school, but it weaves across time and through repercussions as that year is recollected in an elderly nun's purposefully dry, "official" memoirs. The cast of characters is rather gigantic, and the tangents are so multitudinous that I found myself setting the book down and wondering how the author (a three-time National Book Award finalist) managed to keep track of them all. Perhaps I also wondered how we readers are expected to, and whether or not there'll be sufficient pay-off in the end.
But what is stopping me more, is the sound, in this novel, of the young teens about whom it is mostly about. "Well, unlike Tildy, I never needed to have just one special 'best friend' I could tell everything to," one 16 year old says. "Probably Mama has filled that role for me. We're still girls together, giggling in the darkroom about how interchangeable most boys are." This 16 year old has a sister who is 14. The sister often sounds like this: "We can entertain ourselves. Chloe is a very interesting person to be with, and she finds me interesting."
A long time ago, when I was a frequent reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, Michael Pakenham, the editor, cautioned me against having an opinion about a book until I had in fact finished reading it. I didn't pronounce mid-course opinions then, and I'm not pronouncing an opinion here, but I am describing one reader's experience. I will continue to work my way through, for many readers have enjoyed this book, and sometimes stories just need time to unfold. I'm 130 pages in, and I've got 263 pages to go.
Sometimes, all the elements of a novel you've been writing seem to be in place (voice (not just the characters' voices, but the novel's).check; character motivation.check; momentum and suspense.check; leitmotifs if you're into leitmotifs.check; etc.) and you say to yourself: There it is.
Then you look back and you realize that the novel's been lacking something that doesn't get taught, and perhaps isn't even always valued, but it matters a whole lot to you. I might use the word "tenderness" to describe this thing. The heart blurring the boundaries around the head.
You can't write tenderness while sitting at your computer when (even on a Sunday) client work is rolling in. You have to walk away, into silence.
Late yesterday afternoon I made my way out, to the mall. I was not original in my plan. You would have thought it was Black Friday. Or two days before Christmas.
It was Valentine's Day Eve. It was also post-blizzard. The lines at the registers were epic. I persevered. I have been wearing the same things (in fabulously creative mixes and matches, but nonetheless, the very same things) for quite the long time now, and besides, I had a gift or two to buy. I'm not big on shopping, and I was never very good at standing in line, but yesterday I had no choice.
So I paid attention. I watched men buying their gifts for their women. I watched mothers and daughters. I watched friends out on a spree.
But it was this one couple that made me stop. Middle aged, for sure, both tall and perhaps not so recently at any gym. She was trying clothes on. He was gushing his praise, suggesting a jacket for the skirt, a belt for the dress, a pair of earrings. There was so much love and, it seemed, genuine adoration in the air that soon I was swept up in the happiness of it, and soon I was complimenting their taste (which was exquisite) and soon they were suggesting a dress for me, predicting a best size.
Wherever I went, then, in the mall, they were there—their arms thrown around each other, their bags dangling from their shoulders. "Hey," they would say, and update me on their travels, and I would update them on mine. And always and forever he couldn't take his eyes off of her. And she could not stop being grateful.
I love that kind of love.
Happy Valentine's Day to all of you, my blogging friends.
The compacted ice on the streets wasn't going to stop us, nor the roadblocks, nor the hour-plus delays on SEPTA. The plan was to take my father to the city for a great meal and for a show—The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber—as part two of our celebration of his 80th birthday. Broadway stars Jeremy Kushnier, Deone Zanotto, Kathy Voytko, Kevin Kern, Laurie Gayle Stephenson, and the unbelievable Howard McGillin were to sing from 31 selections. We wanted to see them. Transported on a slow train through iced ridges, we made it.
Some time around 10:15 PM, Howard McGillin began to sing "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera. I don't think I took a breath until he was done. He is tall, thin, compelling. His voice is power and innuendo, a sweet slide of soft and pure around the edges of supremely certain volume. Having performed The Phantom on Broadway more than 2,500 times, having sung this song, unmasked, who knows how much more, Mr. McGillin made us feel as if he were just discovering the words and the music for the first time.
I don't know how he did it. But he did, and he will do it again.
Honestly, it can happen. The pressure of 17 concurrent client projects (so many moving parts, so many open computer files, so many business languages and discrete technicalities). The yearning for time not just to dream about a novel, but to write it. The phone, that rings and rings.
You need to get away. You need to drive.
Yesterday, toward sunset, I said, Please. Please can we get the one car with the bigger wheels going? Can we disappear, for just an hour, to horse country?
We did.
I still woke up with a choke in my throat. But I began yesterday with a walk and ended it with a drive. And that is something.
(And may I just say thank you to those of you who stop by this blog and speak to me about the photographs. You give me a reason to take my Sony out into the world. I know, Kristen, very little about photography. I have an intuitive sense for framing and focus, for the way light moves through a day. I would fail any test about F stops. Thanks, all, for giving these photos purpose.)
The snow is high past my knees, and many of the roads here are not yet plowed, but this morning, with a bad case of cabin fever, I set out. I think I live in one of the world's prettiest places. It's not exotic. It's not nearly perfect. I don't often belong. But when snow falls and wind blows I can walk within 30 minutes to a scene like this—all open space and blue. I can count the stripes between the trees, and I can talk to myself about the novel I am writing or about a problem that is tricking through my mind.
I passed just five cars in a 90 minute walk this morning. The silence was gorgeous.
About five minutes after I took this photograph of this snow-encumbered greeting, the sky ripped open with a bolt of lightning. I counted one beat, two.
The blizzard's here. Thick snow. Blowing wind. I'm not sure what this day will bring, and so I make a quick stop at this blog from the office depicted above.
I mentioned yesterday that a bungled transition (once identified) can give an author a new lease on her own book—a new way in. Yesterday I entered into a home, in my novel-in-progress for adults, that I'd only ever observed (in those pages) from the outside. The broken transition took me here:
Cloris pressed her hand against her heart and stared at Sophie through the wire mesh of the door.Now she exhaled and looked again at Sophie’s feet.“Come in and see her.Come say hello.”
“Oh no, Cloris, really.I can’t.I’m behind on a deadline.”
“Let me give you a preview of life going forward:Sometimes time is of the essence.Sometimes we do what we can right now, because we don't get a second chance at second chances.”
Sophie stared at Cloris and felt her worrying pressing in.She turned and studied her own dull house from the impossible yellow of Cloris's stoop.She glanced at the bowl at her feet.
“I don’t have much time,” she said.
Cloris jiggled the door handle, let Sophie in.Purple and green splashed the walls—lime green straight up to the wainscot, lilac up above, like an Easter hyacinth.The paintings that hung in Cloris’s house weren’t paintings; they were dioramas—cardboard cutouts in picture boxes depicting scenes from Alice in Wonderland.“It’s my fetish,” Cloris had once said, when Sophie had asked.“The Queen of Hearts.The White Rabbit.Alice big and Alice small.There’s so much dimension to it.”
“But where did they come from?” Sophie had wanted to know.
“A garage sale,” Cloris had answered.“Best garage sale in the history of the galaxy, down by the Boulevard.”
The first flakes of the fabled thundersnow have started to fall. Home will be the globe now, so they tell us.
Today, while talking with clients, while reviewing proposals, while sending an email or two, I had this thought about the novel that I wrote for adults, a novel that needs another round of attention before I send it out newly into the publishing world.
If a single transition—in a poem, in a story, in a novel—is broken, then the whole is broken; it is untenable and marred.
Find the broken transition. Fix it. And when you do you will find the novel (the story, the poem) opening itself to you in ways you could not, before, imagine. You will find your novel capable of more. Yourself, too.
Last night, following a dizzying 11,000-word client project day interrupted only by an hour more of shoveling and my perfect virtual walk with Katrina Kenison, I sat staring, comatose, at the 10 PM newscast on TV. The guy was using terms like "possibly 20 inches of more snow" and "thundersnow." I decided, being a writer of fiction and all, to pretend it just isn't happening.
Here, though, is what is happening instead, thanks to some very wonderful people out in the blogosphere:
Drea and Sara over at Traveling Arc Tours are hosting a tour of The Heart is Not a Size. Any of you who might wish to read an early copy can check the terms and rules out here.
Meanwhile, My Friend Amy has written to share the exciting news that I'll be sharing a panel with her and a few other fabulous book bloggers at the May convention. Go here for details on that.
In March, I'll be the author mentor of the mega-cool International Book Bloggers program, created by none other than Lenore (whom I believe I'm going to meet at the convention in May!). Find out more about the program by clicking here.
Finally, those of you who have glanced to the left of this post lately know that Heart is part of the HarperTeen 28 Days of Winter Escapes book-a-day giveaway. Heart will be featured on February 25th with, among other things, an interview focused in part on my idea of romance. Romance. That's right. I was asked about romance. More information can be found here.
and I'm beginning with Katrina Kenison, who took a virtual walk with me this afternoon (we were on the phone; we live many states apart; I walked by this stream; I took a picture. Snap.). Katrina's newest book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, came out this past fall and has been doing what thoughtful books do, over time—which is to say that it has been gaining momentum. Visit Katrina's web site. Watch the video she's made. Let her tell you about the life she has been living. You'll see why her book is touching so many lives, and why it's likely on its way to becoming a word-of-mouth bestseller.
I'm moving next to Rebecca Skloot, whom I met years ago at Goucher College, when she was teaching, and her dad, Floyd, was teaching, and I was teaching—and it just went down like that: teachers teaching. Rebecca was talking even then about a book that she was writing, something, she kept saying, about the immortal cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. We talked about structure in the abstract back then, and over the next many years I either heard first-hand or read (on Rebecca's blog) about the journey she was taking with a book she so believed in that no amount of raised eyebrow on the part of ersatz publishers had the power to diminish. Rebecca had a story to tell. She had a story that defined her and defined us and had, she knew, to be told. She was in New York City writing, she was in her beat-up Honda driving, she was at a friend's farmhouse revising: Wherever she was, she was determined to get this story told.
You've heard of that Henrietta Lacks story in the meantime, right? You've heard Rebecca on ABC News, Rebecca on Fresh Air, Rebecca on All Things Considered. You've seen Rebecca in the pages of Oprah and let's not forget Rebecca three times in one week in the New York Times or Rebecca on her four-month book tour. We're talking about that Rebecca Skloot, my friends. The one who never stopped believing in her dream.
Finally, I am shouting out today on behalf of one of my very dearest friends, Alyson Hagy. We won a National Endowment for the Arts grant years ago. We started a correspondence. We're in touch, because I'm lucky, nearly every day, and Alyson has seen me through thick and thin, she has sent me her weather via email, she has cheered me through teaching because she's a teacher herself (the likes of whom Michael Ondaatje, Don DeLillo, Phillip Gourevitch, Joy Williams, and Edward Jones come to visit), and she has sent me early pages of her books to read because I so believe in her. Alyson's Ghosts of Wyoming came out a few days ago. It's already been featured, brilliantly, in the Boston Globe, The Believer, New West, and Denver Post, and do you want to know what Susan Salter Reynolds of the LA Times said about my friend Alyson this weekend? Do you?
Reynolds said this: These eight burnished stories confirm Hagy's importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness.
"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."
— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter
Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet blue, toward black.
This is my home, my view, my slice of somewhere, and again and again, it appears in my books.
I write about suburban Philadelphia because as a teen I lived here and as an adult I returned here. I write about Juarez because once, in 2005, I took a trip across the El Paso border that changed my life. I write about a cortijo in southern Spain because I've been there, because once a man tall as royalty took me out into his dusty hectares in an open-to-the-sky jeep and said, Might I introduce you to my fighting bulls? I conjure a secret poet at Radnor High School because I once was one of those, and I story ghosts through a garden much like Chanticleer, down the road, because I spent two years walking through, week after week, and because a stone I had made for my mother rests there, beneath the katsura trees, and because I don't know where I'd be without seeds and all they beget.
I write where I've been, who I've been, what feels like mine. I have this place that I love. I begin here.
[Paley] insists that life continues beyond the confining plots of tragedy or comedy; she hates plot, "because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real, or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."
A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter, pg 462,
Leave it to Paley to so brilliantly express this particular propulsion that in so many ways defines my own approach to my work: Everyone deserves the open destiny of a life.
I know they said that snow was coming, but I was so entirely buried in work that I raised my head just long enough to say, Snow. Oh. Okay. Snow. Then buried my head once again.
I just woke up. I just looked out the dark, snow splattered windows. I saw the porch rail toppled with at least two feet of white, the porch sculpted with drifts of perhaps four feet, the blue back of the car weighed down with white.
The word "snow" has an entirely new meaning now, in the Beth Kephart lexicon. The likes of this I've never before seen.
I wish I had a working fireplace.
NOTE: This photograph was taken at the 2005 Venice Biennale. I've been waiting for a moment to use it. It symbolizes me, in my private clothes, submerged by work.
Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls “a golden age of reading,” in which he would “consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.”
Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: “I don’t have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I think I’m a writer.’ I started making sentences I didn’t know I was capable of.”
I think I'm a writer.....
I am reminded of a certain correspondence that sprung from a certain 1996 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, to which I'd gone at the invitation of Jayne Anne Phillips, whom I'd come to know the year before in Prague. I met Brooks Hansen, the extraordinarily imaginative, genre-hopping author of such books as The Brotherhood of Joseph, The Chess Garden, The Monsters of St. Helena, John the Baptizer, and Caesar's Antlers, at Bread Loaf. We exchanged a few notes afterward, and in one, Brooks—perhaps inadvertently—shifted the way I thought of myself, insisting that it wasn't what one had published that rendered one a writer. It was what one could do with words.
Not a writer yet, is what I had thought of myself up until then, for I only had short story and essay publication to my name, no book. Becoming a writer, is what I began to understand—a category that I continue to slot myself into today: still becoming.
For how boring it would be, how anti-climactic, to have already arrived.
NOTE on the photo: I took this photograph in Vicenza in 2005, in Palladio's Teatro Olimpico.
I know that it doesn't make much sense to go ballroom dancing with a smashed-up toe, but I've skipped Zumba this week and taken funny, peg-legged walks, and I just couldn't help myself, so I went—climbed the stairs to DanceSport, opened the door, donned my un-girly shoes, and risked it.
I don't think there are enough words for dancing. The ones we use are too often used, and they are rather stultifying. Swirl and twirl—like two bad-hair day sisters. Sashay—if you are doing that, are you really dancing? Twist and roll—sounds painful. Gliding—a fine bit of self-puffery, me thinks.
Maybe all it is (for me) is that I'm being myself—that I'm being happy and not necessarily useful and nobody stops me. Yeah, sure, so maybe Jean rolls his eyes at my spastic reprieves, and maybe somewhere deep inside his elegant Belarussian self he's thinking, Lord, this is some way to make a living. But if this is the case, he doesn't let on—doesn't make me feel old, ugly shoed, sleep deprived, disappointing, academic, too intense, over-the-hill, or elsewise. For those 45 minutes, I'm dancing, and that's the only word there is.
For the 11th question of her What a Girl Wants series, Colleen Mondor asked a number of us one of her typically challenging questions: What does it mean to be a 21st century feminist, and on the literary front, what books/authors would you recommend to today's teens who want to take girl power to the next level?
Lorie Ann Grover, Laurel Snyder, Loree Griffin Burns, Margo Raab, and Zetta Elliott all came through with reliably interesting responses. I was caught up in a series of corporate projects and could not respond in time.
Today, however, I'd like to put my two cents in by recommending Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx to readers of any age, gender, or race who wish to understand and celebrate just how hard women have had to work to put their voices on the page—and how women's voices have and will continue to shape us.
Anne Bradstreet, one of this nation's first women writers, entered print, in Showalter's words, "shielded by the authorization, legitimization, and testimony of men." In other words, Showalter continues, "John Woodbridge, her brother-in-law, stood guarantee that Bradstreet herself had written the poems, that she had not initiated their publication, and that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making."
No vanity allowed, in other words, and no leaving those dishes in the sink.
Showalter's book—which yields insight into the stories of Phillis Wheatley, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Buck, Shirley Jackson, Harper Lee, Sylvia Plath, S.E. Hinton, Grace Paley, Joan Didion, Lorrie Moore, Jayne Anne Phillips, Sandra Cixneros, Amy Tan, Louis Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gish Jen, and so many others—is itself a piece of history, for it is, unbelievably, the first literary history of American women writers.
Showalter suggests that the development of women's writing might be classified into four phases: feminine, feminist, female, and free. Anyone who wants to know just how we got to free (and to ponder, with the evidence, whether or not we're really there) should be reading this book.
They were in high school. They were in college. They were between the ages of 13 and 42, post-partying after a soccer game and celebrating a birthday. They were shot down in cold blood this past Sunday by gunmen who barricaded the street with their cars, infiltrated a concrete house, moved from room to room with guns held high, and let the bullets fly. Some 14 are dead; more are critically injured. One was named Adrian Encino, 17, a recently state-honored academic light, who died in his grandfather's arms.
Someone was looking for someone who perhaps testified in a recent trial. That's how one version of this story goes. Someone was looking, and so, of course?, a murderous rampage.
They call Juarez one of the world's most dangerous cities. The bloody border city, they say. The murdered women of Juarez, they remember.
Five years ago, I was there. Five years ago, the children of Juarez gave me some of the greatest happiness I've ever had—the greatest sense of purpose. They gave me the beginning of a book I'd write, a book about finding unexpected beauty in cities far from home.
I am sickened and saddened by the never-ending bad news of Juarez. 2,600 people murdered there in 2009. And what does this most recent massacre bode for 2010?
One Christmas my mother's gift to my father was a photo album. Thick wood cover. Black interior pages. My mother's handwriting, in white, beneath each picture. This is something we'll treasure and, I hope, add to, she wrote, for it will become more precious as time goes by.
Beneath this photograph, she wrote: Here we are: Bethie at 5 months. Jeffie at 2 1/2 years.
I'll be the first to admit: I've been less than my sunshiney self of late—lots of snow, lots of late work nights, a winter cold, not enough Zumba, and one small snafu in the publishing business that had my heart sunk real low for a spell.
