Freedom Seeker: A Son's Suggestion

Again, early this morning, I retreated to the stables.  Slipped in, unquestioned.  Watched.  Suddenly:  a panic.  A three-year-old stallion—this three-year-old stallion—wanting out.  With his back hooves, he kicked away at his slatted stall, unhinging the wood, pacing, splintering again.  He reared and he whinnied, and up and down the stables, the geldings, the mares, the one-year-olds answered.

I stood just this side of the stallion with the perfect neck, watching him ache for his freedom.

Later, as I made dinner, my son said, in response to a story I had told him, "Mom, have you considered doing fewer favors?"

I remembered the stallion, kicking the slatted wood down.

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Thoughts on the Book Blogger Convention, and special thank you's

We spoke of many things at the Book Blogger Convention on our author/blogger relationship panel.  I learned a lot from my fellow panelists, Nicole [Linus's Blanket], Amy [My Friend Amy], Bethanne [The Book Studio], Kristi [The Story Siren], and Caridad Pineiro [Caridad Pineiro's Blog].  Transparency and respectfulness were two recurring themes.  So was the need to blog not with an eye on gain, but with an eye toward community.  I spoke of my respect for bloggers who take time to read books, take time to craft their opinions, take time to share those opinions with the world.  I revealed my recurring worry that there are bloggers out there who have been kind to my books and that I, the author who does not Google Alert herself, does not know and has not said thank you.

Today an angel whispered in my ear, You may want to check out these two blogs, Books and Movies and You've GOTTA read this!.  I did, and may I now say, publicly, thank you, to both the angel and these two generous readers of The Heart is Not a Size.  I learned from both reviews, as I always do, and they are particularly helpful to me today as I turn my attention to a scene in a book that features horses.  Write longer, one urges.  (I am trying.)  Stay focused on the root of people.  I am working on that, too. Thank you both, so much.

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Shoeing a horse

He'd come from Florida to shoe the horses, to wield 28 years of knowing.  I asked him, Did he mind if I watched?  He said he didn't mind much.  I asked him, How is it that the horse does not flinch as each of those six, long, sturdy nails are driven into that one hoof?  He said, Think of the tip of your fingernail.  Would you feel it, if a nail were driven through?

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After all that, I came home...

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Two boys, a girl, and no books

Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field on the occasion of the best-attended soccer match ever in our city.  U.S. vs Turkey.  The U.S. wins.  The crowd is a stampede.  The girl survives (and has fun).  The horses are down the street when she gets home.

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James Lecesne and Virgin Territory

"I have been told," a friend wrote, "that the BEA is a non-event."

For so many reasons, it wasn't that for me.

Consider (among so much else), this:  I spent an Egmont-sponsored lunch rotating through tables with actor/Laura Geringer author/activist James Lecesne (I struggled with the listing of those attributes; James is all three, equally, and more).  We interviewed each other.  We discovered intersections.  We looked across the table and saw, in each other, an author who cares, first and foremost, about kids.

He went off to his thing after that, and I went off to mine, and by fluke and accident and perhaps fate, we ended up on the same train going home.  I had his book, Virgin Territory, in hand.  He had Dangerous Neighbors.  I have long nurtured a dream of seeing someone read one of my books on a train.  James was my first sighting.  I doubt it gets better than that.

When you adore someone, you want, you ache, to adore their book.  James makes that easy with Virgin Territory.  It's a book about a boy who has lost his mother and has a trembling relationship to faith.  A book about a town, Jupiter, Florida, that is rearranged by a possible sighting of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the face of a golf-course tree.  Faith seekers flock to the tree. A carnivalesque atmosphere ensues. Dylan, our hero, finds himself among new friends who believe that miracles erupt amidst the stirring of two things:  great desire and surrender to risk.

Supremely fluid, generous, and original, Virgin Territory is well made; it is seamless.  It takes the time to unfold characters that are new, complex, easily liked.  It paces perfectly—speeds up, slows down.  Its pieces fit its pieces, if you know what I mean.

You don't find many books like this—YA or otherwise.  And you don't find many people like James.  Buy the book and read it.  And after you do that (or before, if you insist), check out this trailer from the extraordinary documentary, After the Storm, which features James in a glorious Mad Hot Ballroom kind of tale about a musical that helps restore the kids of New Orleans.

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Scenes from the Book Blogger Convention...

which was so well run, so informative, and so rippled through with companionable energy:

The Javitz Convention Center.  Yours truly flanked by the gorgeous Natasha (Maw Books Blog) and the stunning Nicole (Linus's Blanket).  The faithful attendees, of the very last BEA week day, after the very last session, as seen from the very last seat of the Author/Blogger Relationship panel discussion.  Yours truly with the one and only Lenore.  Yours truly with the always-kind Melissa of The Betty and Boo Chronicles.  And never last and never least:  The fabulous Amy of My Friend Amy (in person!) as well as the very dear and intelligent Wendy of Caribousmom. 

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Scenes from the BEA

I was out of the house by 4:30 AM, and the day unfurled at lightening speed (save for the trains, which were both on the rather too late and slow side).  In the first photo:  The Egmont lunch for authors, booksellers, and librarians, held on the upper floor of a garment-district art gallery.  In the second:  Egmont Publisher Elizabeth Law, the remarkable James Lecesne (about whom I will soon be writing far more), Laura Geringer (who edits both James and me), and yours truly (in pink, because who else would wear pink on an 18 hour day spent among crowds and on trains?).

A huge thank you to all of you who stood in that line for the end-of-day, end-of-convention signing— I looked up, and there you were, and I won't forget the gift of your patience and enthusiasm.  Thank you to all of those who found me and stopped to say hello.  Thank you to the impeccable and beautiful Mandy King (I will always be grateful for our time together, and for all that led up to it).  Thank you to Amy Rennert and Louise (you know why).  A lasting thank you to the Egmont team—Elizabeth Law, Doug Pocock, Mary Albi, Rub Guzman, Regina Griffin, Greg Ferguson, Nico Medina, and Alison Weiss—who put together such a show, and who have welcomed me to the family in ways that I have never before been welcomed. (Nico, please note that I am thanking you despite your refusal to wear 19th century garb in support of my 19th century book.)  Thank you, Laura, for being there throughout.

I came home to see my boys (a midnight rendezvous) and to attend to corporate work.  I'm back on that train in a few hours, to join book bloggers at a convention and to speak about author/blogger relationships.

The horses are down the street; I'll sneak into their world early Saturday.

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A student of teaching

It was hot, it was humid, it was teaching at Chanticleer in an unpredictable spring, but those 15 Agnes Irwin girls were willing and far more than able—reeling themselves backward and forward in time, willing themselves to remember. 

The thing about teaching is you never know.  You prepare your prompts, you know your own heart, you know what you want to leave behind, but you do not know what will make a student vulnerable to the process.  I never teach the same thing twice.  I have become a student of teaching. 

It is 4:22 AM, dark.  I'm about to set off for the Big Apple where I will, at too long last, meet so many of you who have sustained me here.  Until then.

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What does our time on earth add up to?

I'll be joining the writers of Agnes Irwin on the sloping terrain of Chanticleer today; we'll be at work on memoir.  Last night, while again not sleeping, I found these words in Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Far Away.  They are the right place to begin.

"We are a dynamic country, fast-paced, ever-onward.  Can we make sense of love and ambition, pain and longing?  In the center of our speed, in the core of our forward movement, we are often confused and lonely.  That's why we have turned so full-heartedly to the memoir form.  We have an intuition that it can save us.  Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect.... Often without realizing it, we are on a quest, a search for meaning. What does our time on this earth add up to?"

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Right Now

More peonies from the garden.  The rocking chair I once carried a mile home, nine months pregnant, in the heat of July, from an antique store.  The door to my office.

I have been finishing corporate projects.  Dumping old files from cabinets.  Taking books to libraries.  Fixing a split roof.  Renovating a laundry room.  Painting doors.  Taking clothes to Good Will.  Mailing gently used textbooks to Amazon.com.  Rearranging my son's room so that it actually accommodates my son (he may be a lot like me, in many ways, but my minimalism flares against his I-may-need-that-laterism).

I have been preparing to teach high school writers all day tomorrow, within the shade of Chanticleer.  I have finalized my course description for Creative Nonfiction 135 at the University of Pennsylvania, next spring.  I have been creating two piles of things—one to take to New York on Thursday for the BEA (table 29, 3:30, among so many other wonderful scheduled interludes), and one to take on Friday, for the Book Blogger Convention.

I have been dreaming of horses.

Next week, in the quiet of a clean, swept-through house, in the reprieve of just two remaining corporate projects, I will begin again my work on Small Damages, the novel inspired by southern Spain.  It is infinitely close, two months or so away from being right.  I will not try to write it in snatches.  Not this time.  I know what it must be now.  I won't be afraid of its own emerging will.  I will write it quietly through.

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The winged peony mutates (and a quote from Nine)

Last night, watching the movie Nine, these words:  To create is to forgive yourself in public. 

You could teach an entire course on that, I thought.

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Dangerous Neighbors: The Research File

Mapping the story, making things right.  Scenes from a research file.

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A deep kindness

Great thanks to Natasha of Maw Books Blog for this extraordinary review of The Heart is Not a Size. 

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She was the perfect bride

(so calm and so in love with him), and he is so deeply in love with her. Congratulations, Moira and Yuo-Chen. 

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Annie Dillard on noticing

I knew what I was doing at Paw-Paw:  I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving.  I was having my childhood.  But I was haunting it, as well, practically reading it, and preventing it.  How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend?  Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, my own loud awareness damning us both.  Too little noticing, though—I would risk much to avoid this—and I would miss the whole show.  I would wake on my deathbed and say, What was that?

—   Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

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Vast

Jeremy and I sat here, high above the vast Devon Horse Show Grounds, late yesterday afternoon.  The fair is a week away, but work—sanding, painting, stuffing the carnival shelves with fuzzy victory toys—goes on.  Sitting in the ultimate VIP box with not a soul around, Jeremy and I spoke of ambition.  We spoke, too, of what a mother is or should be as a son rounds the corner on 21.

Two housekeeping notes:  I will be signing at the BEA on Thursday, May 27 at 3:30, Table 29.  The next day, at the Book Blogger Convention, I will be joining the Author/Blogger Relationships panel, which is set to begin at 4:00.

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Where the student shines

Regular readers of this blog took a journey with me last fall as I made my way through my first semester at the University of Pennsylvania—not as a student, but as a teacher.  This past week has been full of the sweet dividends such teaching can yield (the students return, they inspire, they even get married), and last night I was gifted once again with the chance to read with Miss Kimberly Eisler, who worked through essay, memoir, interview, profile, and literary reportage with me in my Advanced Nonfiction class.  Joined by her parents, her grandparents, and her boyfriend at a remarkable salon gathering at a Park Avenue penthouse, Kim read her untitled poems; she made us think and laugh.

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Dangerous Neighbors: Unspeakable Happiness

To all of those who have carried me forward, who have believed: 
Thank you.

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The week ahead

I'm headed into the Big Apple today (though not by way of clydesdales, sadly) to talk about the power of the Kelly Writers House program at Penn, to read with Kimberly Eisler, one of my truly talented students, and to witness the indomitable Al Filreis teach a poem (that should be something; hope he doesn't call on me).  Two days later, I'll head back down into Philadelphia to see my first Penn student, Moira Moody, say I do to the man she loves.  I'm banking on Dr. Filreis showing off some highly ecclesiastical moves at Moira's wedding. I'll take hip hop, too. Or even the cha cha.

By mid-week next week, I'll be spending the day at Chanticleer (the site of Ghosts in the Garden and Nothing but Ghosts)—teaching memoir to the aspiring writers of Agnes Irwin, thanks to the invitation of Julie Diana, who is not just the head librarian at Agnes Irwin, but the wife of the fabulous writer, Jay Kirk.  Thursday and Friday, back in New York, I'll spend some time with editor Laura Geringer and the glorious Egmont team; the book bloggers I have come to love; Amanda King, Gussie Lewis, and Jennifer Laughran, booksellers extraordinaires; and maybe even grab a few moments with Amy Rennert, my west-coast based agent with whom I often speak but whom I rarely see.

I am not, by nature, a sustainably social person, and so, when I return home next Friday evening, I'll be grateful that one of my very favorite events of the entire year—the Devon Horse Show—will have rolled into town.  We moved here in large part because the fairgrounds are just down the road, because these horses do trot by just after dawn, because I like few things more than walking through the shadows of stables, fitting my hand to a sweet mare's nose.  I like the sound of clop and whinny, the tinny music that accompanies balloon dart games and Ferris wheels.

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The Day's Harvest

(my peonies are in bloom, my irises, too)

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Lost Photo

My mother and me, on the occasion of my graduation from the University of Pennsylvania.

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The Heart is Not a Size: responding to a reviewer's gentle prod

In her generous review of The Heart is Not a Size, Jeannine Atkins, a professor of children's literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author, most recently, of the wondrous Borrowed Names—wrote:  I loved learning about Mexico, though might have liked seeing a bit more of the landscape the girls move through, because seeing anything through Beth Kephart’s eyes is a treat.

It's the sort of prodding most writers need—that what if? question asked charitably from one with a knowing eye.  And it's a prod that comes, oddly, on the very day that I discovered (much earlier, this morning) that much of what has been ailing Small Damages, my ten-year odyssey of a novel that takes place in southern Spain, might be pinned to my growing unwillingness to trust the reader to dwell with me in that gorgeous, glorious landscape.  I have felt, increasingly, the writerly need to hurry things up in my books, to move plot along, and especially with Small Damages I have given Carmona and its Necropolis, for example, too short a shrift, have moved too quickly through bullrings. 

Jeannine's words, found this afternoon after a long day of corporate consulting, are oddly timely and reassuring.  Press harder.  Go deeper.  I will.  Thank you, Jeannine.

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Traveling Library

Over the next ten days, I'll be back and forth to New York City on behalf of a fundraiser for Penn, the BEA (thank you, Egmont, and can't wait to see any of you who may be there on Thursday, May 27th), and the Book Blogger Convention (thank you, Amy Riley).  Travel means time to read, and at the moment, I've got these books to choose from, thanks to some aggressive recent book buying:

On Whitman (Writers on Writers) by the extraordinary (in person and on the page) C.K. Williams

Old Friend from Far Away by Natalie Goldberg

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

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Carolyn Forche: a poet still vested

Years ago, outside of Prague, I spent an afternoon with Carolyn Forche—a train ride away from the city where she had read, the night before, from one of my favorite poems ever written, a haunt of a poem in honor of Terrence des Pres.  I think her often—of her and the stories she told to those who had gathered there, in a Czech backyard.  Grandmother stories.  Oven stories.  Stories of war.

A few weeks ago, I was stopped by these lines in a new Carolyn Forche poem called "The Lightkeeper," which appears in full in the May 3rd issue of The New Yorker.

Forche remains a poet vested with power:

... You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid.  Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes.  Go toward the light always, be without ships.

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Japanese maple, adorned

The maple wearing its leaves like a dress of feathers.

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St. John's Presbyterian Church

I boast about my church, St. John's, but why shouldn't I?  Some of the best people in the world are St. Johnsians—Juarez-traveling, El Salvador Shelter-supporting, inventive, investing, funny, dancing, kid-rearing, house-building souls.  And it is also the people of St. John's who threw this brunch today for a very special man who has interned with our church these past two years.  This is the way women and men who care send others on their way.  Grace.  Generosity.  The things I learn from my friends at St. John's.

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Altogether now

There are, it sometimes seems, not even six degrees of separation in the writing world.  Today, during Alumni Day at Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I shared this moment with the tremendous KWH deputy in charge Al Filreis (I would take one of his extraordinary classes, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough), Alice Elliott Dark (whose short story, "In the Gloaming," was selected by John Updike as one of the best of the last century, and who read from it beautifully today), and Moira Moody, a writer and almost bride, who was Al's student before she was mine, and, after Al and I sent her on her way, a student of Alice's at the Rutgers-Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program created by none other than our mutual friend, Jayne Anne Phillips.

But that's not at all.  Dear Moira was also the inspiration for "Moira" (is inspiration too broad a word for such a flat-out stealing of a name and persona?)—the star of the zany corporate fable, Zenobia, that I penned with then-Shire CEO, Matt Emmens.  

Altogether, then, on a gorgeous meander of a day.

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Still Love

Two days ago, while in line at Whole Foods, a friend approached with some news. "I've fallen completely in love with your husband," she said.  And when I didn't say anything, she continued: "Head over heels."

It's not an uncommon line in my world; I've been told the same thing by any number of women who have been charmed by my husband's Latin bearing, unusual stories, and incredible talent for the samba.  But in this case, I wasn't even certain that my friend had met my husband, so when I asked her to clarify, she said five words—Still Love in Strange Places—which is the title of the memoir that I wrote about my husband, his family, and the ways in which El Salvador, war, and coffee growing have shaped them.  "I just read the book," she said, "and I love everything about him.  Everything.  I want to meet him."

I smiled at this, of course, and thought of how often I have wished that my husband, a visual artist, would find the time for the books or essays or poems I've written.  He hasn't often, but he did read and bless Still Love, and perhaps because of that, the making of Still Love stands as one of my favorite experiences as a writer.  I worked for all those years to understand.  He opened the book, and he read.

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Three Minutes from Home

Three minutes from home, I stopped by the side of the road and took this photo of the storm.  Sun, as I wrote yesterday, just over there.  Darkness descending on me.

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The Sun Rain

Just now, coming home from a ballroom lesson with John (Where is the dance? I asked him; It's in the balance we create between each other, he said) I drove through sunlit rain.  Half the sky clear and the other full of gray shout. 

Like dance, I thought.

Like time.

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University of Pennsylvania Alumni Day (getting ready for)

Tomorrow I'll board the train and head down to my alma mater for Alumni Day.  I'll take the twenty minute walk from 30th Street Station through the Drexel University campus toward the University of Pennsylvania campus, then head up Locust Walk toward Kelly Writers House, past all the tents and hoopla, where I'll join Alice Elliott Dark for a reading. 

That much I know for sure.

What I don't know yet is what I'll be reading.  Not precisely, not yet. Though I think I'll begin with these words from Good People, the novel for adults that I've been working on all these many months.

The baby is missing.  The baby is not where I had left her—checked the rope and strapped her in, pulled my weight into the branch above, and said out loud, This is good and nice and sturdy.  I had nudged her high and sung to her, True, true, the sky is blue, and she smelled like baby.  There is not one single other thing that smells like baby, that cheeks against your cheek like the cheek of a baby.  I had kissed her.  I had promised, I am coming right back, Baby. 

            There was a pluming plane overhead.  Two white trails of smoke, and a second plane—smaller, chasing. I had wanted a blanket so that I might lie nearby, so that all afternoon it would be Baby in her swing and me on the spine of the earth below, watching the ants in their jungled green, waiting for the red-tailed hawks to slice the plumes from the past of the planes.  It is twenty-eight steps to the back door, which is red because I’d painted it red, and it is nine steps to the downstairs closet, but I’d forgotten:  I’d left the blanket upstairs, in the trunk beneath the bed, beneath the hooked rug Mama was working when she passed, beneath Mama’s collection of hats.  There are thirteen steps up, and there are thirteen steps down, and when I opened the red door where the brush strokes had dried rough around the brass plate, Baby was missing.

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Author? Writer?

Earlier this morning I had to define myself for the purposes of an upcoming event, and I stumbled.  There was to be a single one word descriptor, followed by a bio.

One. Word. Descriptor.

Author? I wondered.  Or writer?

Writer feels like where I am, just now in my career.  Author is what I think I'm supposed to be (when I grow up, when I get all this, when all this gets at least a little easier). 

Do you feel as I do, about those words?  Does the word author seem somehow enthroned?  Or am I obsessing?  Again.

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Comcast-ed

This afternoon, while waiting for our son to finish an interview in a Philadelphia office building (he's only just arrived home from college, and we wanted to take him out to dinner to celebrate the completion of his sophomore year), my husband and I wandered into the Comcast building on JFK Boulevard.  I'd watched the building go up a few years ago (indeed, the whole city did; you can't miss it), but I'd never gone into the lobby.

It's wild in there, I discovered—seemingly wooden panels erupting into the scenes above (and just as suddenly the scenes disappear and the "wood" settles back in, only to precipitate another visual eruption) and strange, storybook figures doing balancing acts far above one's head. I needed that kind of disorientation today, and in discovering it, I found myself remembering myself years ago, a University of Pennsylvania freshman to the sophomore who was Brian Roberts.  He was just a guy who liked to dance back then—a nice guy, a very decent one—he was that to me, at least, who had no idea what actually lay in store.  Today, as the Comcast CEO, he's one of the wealthiest men in the world, a man who often uses his position on behalf of public good.  The past can seem strange, when set within the context of the present.  The future lives in this building now.  History only lives in my head.

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What a Girl Wants: Letters to Teen-aged Self

Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray had us all thinking hard, again, for her terrific series, What a Girl Wants. This time we authors were challenged to write a letter to our teenaged self, suggesting the novel or novels we should be reading right then/back then.  My response is here, below.  But for really interesting reading—Neesha Meminger, Laurel Snyder, Sara Ryan, Lorie Ann Grover, Zetta Elliott, Tanita Davis—travel over to Chasing Ray.

"Dear Beth, The world doesn't conform to your own ideas about it. It leaks. It scrambles out toward unseen possibilities, and between the cracks, beauty lies. Read Michael Ondaatje. Read Coming Through Slaughter, his pastiche of a book about Buddy Bolden and New Orleans and crimes of the heart. Watch for how Ondaatje himself walks onto the page and stays there. That’s what writers must do. That’s what you must do, when you begin to write for real. Open yourself and leave some of it behind. Let the world know how you loved, let it see how you hurt."

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