In Memory

Perhaps the best thing about the corporate work I do is the people it allows me to meet—the visionaries who take risks and build companies, the researchers who discover new cures, the developers who have ideas about the renaissance of West Philadelphia, the leaders of not-for-profit organizations who seek out ways to change the lives of the kids of North Philly.

For the past nearly twenty years, I've had the privilege of knowing Mike Cola, now the president of a pharmaceutical company, but mostly, to me, a well-read, inventive, and so brilliant man who has always placed people and family first.  Mike wouldn't want me talking about all he does, almost invisibly, for so many.  But perhaps, today, he won't mind if I commit this post to the memory of his father, Rudolph Alexander Cola, who passed away on Friday and whose life will be celebrated later today.

The obituary lists just some of Mr. Cola's achievements.  He was a man who, in his lifetime, signed a professional baseball contract with the Philadelphia Athletics, became a decorated veteran during World War II, won new air pollution control regulations as a member of the Philadelphia Air Pollution Control Board, coached both baseball and basketball teams, and, as a physicist, developed 23 working patents responsible for such things as cathode ray tubes and flat-panel plasma displays.  He was also a man famous in my own neighborhood for spending nine years developing educational software applications for a young man who'd suffered an early brain injury—developing that software and sitting there, with that young man, making certain that he learned.  So much of who Mike is reflects, I suspect, so much of who his dad always was, and I don't think I've ever sat with Mike, in all these years, when Rudy Cola did not in some way factor into whatever it was we were talking about.

So that today my heart is heavy for Mike, heavy for his whole family.  But I am also grateful for the many ways that this father lives on in his son.

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Dangerous Neighbors: A Booklist Hot Teen Title

According to that wonderful Egmont USA team, Dangerous Neighbors will appear on the Hot Teen Titles list in the September issue of Booklist, accompanied by this gracious review.  I am grateful, to say the least.

Even though the twins’ father warns them to take care of each other with the admonition that “dangerous neighbors” live nearby, the girls are convinced that together they are invincible. Yet Anna is no longer here, and Katherine, tormented by grief and guilt, is determined to join her. Using the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibit where ice cream and elevators are introduced to a rapt nation as her backdrop, National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart juxtaposes Anna’s and the nation’s optimism with Katherine’s grief and refusal to face the future alone. Kephart gradually unwinds the twins’ tragic story of Anna’s surreptitious love affair with the baker’s boy, the couple’s isolation of Katherine in their frantic search to be together, and Katherine’s gradual refusal to be responsible for Anna’s welfare. Similarly she unfolds the Centennial itself, slowly exposing its seamy underbelly, even the fire that destroys the shantytown that surrounds it and threatens the glorious fair and its participants. It’s a beautifully crafted, carefully researched historical novel that captures the essence of a single historic event while exploring the universality of love, grief, guilt, and the mysterious twin connection.

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My Husband's Art

Some of you know that my husband suffered a rather unfortunate injury to his left hand this summer, a tendon/ligament-slicing series of cuts that necessitated surgery, patience, and healing calm.  Somehow or other, though, with elbows standing in for fingers, and a clunky cast weighing down the Option key (this, at least, is how I imagine things), he's been back in his studio, telling whole stories with a single frame of digital art.  I'm rarely privy to Bill's process or his results, and this image, too, he cautions, is not nearly done.  But I love it, and I have gained his approval to share it on this blog, and so I do, with a simple title:  My Husband's Art.

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Note to self

Write the story you haven't written with the words you've not used yet.

Dream every page alive.

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I worked on a book most of this day

and I didn't write a narrative word.  I made lists (what would be in that box?).  I took walks.  I found this front-yard sculpture in the back streets of St. Davids and wondered how it would feel to be so blue, so upside down, so on display.

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Excerpt from a work in progress

She walks the path, creaks open the door to the old Volvo, turns the motor over.   I run.  Up the stairs and into the attic, over the crossbeams and the pink fluff, toward the window.   Outside the sun is pale and liquid.  The crows are black and big.  They knock their way around the sky, then knock back down into the crooked tree.  Flying and settling and returning and flying and now the biggest crow caws down from the wide, green crown, and looks through the window at me. 

            I throw the sash up, push my head out, and watch as the sergeant crow stares and blinks, hops branches and twigs, hunches up his rubbery wings.  When the door to Joey’s house swings open wide, the sergeant flies and the other crows fly, and now when I look past the tree, I see Miss Cloris standing at the edge of her porch, wearing a rainbow-striped tee and a bow in her hair.  She lifts her glasses from the string around her neck and fits them to her nose and stares up at cross parts of the tree, like she’s wondering if the crows were a dream.  She stares for a good long time, then shakes her head.   “Now that was a bonafide crow party,” I hear her say to Harvey, who has scratched in beside her, held himself to the ledge of the porch, looking like he’ll fly, too, any second.   She hums a little something, puts her hand on Harvey’s head.  He wags his tail, stupendously.  “You bad old pup,” she tells him, and now when she looks up into the crazy branches of the tree, she stops and shades her eyes with her hand. 

“Hey,” she calls.  “You growing an aviary over there?” 

I shrug, don’t answer.

“You know what an aviary is?”

“Not really,” I say.

“It’s like a garden of birds.  Takes a special someone to grow one.”

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Nearly Dawn

The sun has not yet risen on this day, but it will, and soon we will drive a rented van along familiar roads, toward that long goodbye.

I am ushered on my way this morning by the kindness of readers of Dangerous Neighbors, who put so much of themselves—their intelligence, their openness, their willingness to read an author who has, it is true, moved from genre to genre, from place to place, from time period to time period, seeking the perfect backdrop and mood for a story.  Thank you to:

Sandy Nawrot of You've GOTTA Read This! for this review.

The Book Smugglers, for seeking out 1876 Philadelphia and having this to say.

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The day comes

and there's nothing we can do but understand that the boy, not really any longer a boy, must pack his things and return to school.

So that the hallway is now a tower of boxes hallway.  And the shirts have been washed and steamed.  And the last batch of summer cookies is cooling on the racks.  And my heart sits somewhere near my chin.

This is the ritual of the season, and when I saw one of my very best friends at a store today and she turned and I looked into her eyes, I knew that she, too, is deep in this season of goodbyes.  And when I hear from my friends, from all across the country, I recognize the melancholy in their voices.  You hold your breath your entire parenting life, wanting the child to be happy.  And then he is, and then he is gone, and you are where he was, older and unable to hold the image still. 

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Hand crafts

I have told the story of my great-grandfather here before—the Horace Kephart of Great Smoky Mountains fame, whom Ken Burns brought to life with care and meaning in his most recent series, "National Parks: America's Best Idea."  Kephart was the father of six when he left his life as a librarian to travel and then to live mostly alone in the Smokies; one of his children, a son named George, would become a forester and an official in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.  He would also be my grandfather.

This tiny porcupine-quill basket is among the many artifacts George Kephart left behind.  Recently I helped my father take this and a series of other Indian-crafted baskets to an auction house, with the hope that a collector will rightly make room for them.  It is hard, however, to give up family history, even if one doesn't quite know, nor will ever know, how a basket this tiny and carefully made came into the possession of a handsome, taciturn man.

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Humor me

I'm thinking that it's the atmospheric pressure, but migraines have been going around in these parts—I get one and then a friend gets one and then we pretend we don't have them, and then our heads hurt.  While I was just now trying to do the very right thing and focus on my corporate work (instead of banging my hurting head against my desk) a friend (who today has a migraine) wrote to tell me that she appreciates it when I make room for humor in my blog.

And I'm thinking:  Me?  Beth Kephart?  Humorous?  I mean, I'm kind of funny looking, but you can't really see that from where you sit, can you?  (Can you?  Tell me you can't.)  Then I remembered this photo that I took while walking through Atlantic City's Tropicana complex the other day.  It's an image of an image of the hotel's house comedian, and right beneath his inviting pose is a name that tugs at my heart:  Bob Kephart.   He may be a distant cousin, this Bob.  He may be an uncle's stepson (well, maybe not).  But whomever he is, he's a Kephart, and aren't all Kepharts related, and doesn't that mean that I still have potentiality (as opposed to potential) when it comes to putting humor on this blog?

I'll report back as soon as my head clears.

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Collisions

This is New York City in the May sun, and today is Philadelphia suburbs in the threatening-to-rain, but nonetheless (there is a point) the scene is one of collisions. Fashion and sky, church and commerce, sun and shadow, boot and spike, leaf and cotton in the Big Apple.  A sudden infusion of corporate work, a smattering of book launch details, an in-progress manuscript, humidity hair, dance videos, unpaid bills, and the boxes of a boy's return to college abounding here, in threatening-to-rain.  Last night I was listing all the ways that I had failed in the previous 24-hour period to my husband.  He fell asleep before I'd finished the list. 

Take a deep breath, I tell myself.  And also:  Live the day, no matter.  And finally: Ask for forgiveness and hope it will be given.

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A cover story, an interview, a giveaway, and unrecordable emotion

Today I am in debt to the many who have embraced Dangerous Neighbors and made today, its launch day, alive and so beautiful, in so many ways.

Thank you, Amy at My Friend Amy, for doing so much, so quietly, so dearly — for finding the energy, for working (with Nicole Bonia) toward the ideas and the ideals, for coining the phrase The Beth Effect, for believing in the power of hope, and finding it.

Thank you, Melissa Walker, for asking me to tell the cover story of Dangerous Neighbors for your Barnes and Noble blog at Unabashedly Bookish. 

Thank you, Holly Cupala, for inviting me to share some of the secrets behind Dangerous Neighbors (and to conduct a book giveaway) for your own wonderful blog. 

Thank you, Deborah at Books, Movies, and Chinese Food, for your gorgeous review and for so kindly posting your thoughts on Amazon.  What a kindness.

Thank you, Anna Lefler, beloved comedienne and faithful Twitterer.

Thank you, Mandy, for more than I can ever tell or say.

Thank you, Karen Mahoney, for this incredible blog nod (and a fantastic list of other blogs you cannot live without).

Thank you, Elizabeth Mosier, for your party-hat wearing (even if it did unsmooth your enviably smooth hair).

Thank you, Jay Kirk, Sy Montgomery, Katrina Kenison, J.C. Castner, Kate Moses, Hipwritermama, Erin McIntosh, Lorie Ann Grover, Melissa Middleman Firman, Jill Santopolo, Rody Gratton, Paul DiLorenzo, Andra Bell, Ivy Goodman, Nate, Laura, Kelly, Tirsa, Caroline Leavitt, Steph Su, Serena, Jenny, Staci, Ed Goldberg, Meg, Novel Novice, Richard, Liz, Jan, Barbara, Jerry, Rosellen Brown, Allie, Kathye, and Alyson Hagy.

Thank you, all of Egmont USA, and thank you, Amy Rennert, for calling, and thank those of you who encourage champagne and a little private reflection on a day that so much corporate work calls, and thank you phenomenal, good-hearted bloggers, and any that I have inadvertently missed. I don't mean to miss goodness.  Ever.

For so many reasons, this book feels like my first, ever.

I have all of you to thank for that.

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Forgive me, but

I have had a glass and a half of wine, and I am myself, my emotions near the surface.  No, my emotions are the surface.  They are the unhidden, unbidden me.

Lately my father has been leaving things at my house—old publications featuring stories of mine (Risk and Insurance magazine, let's say, where I was the Benefits columnist, a job I could do in the middle of the night so I could be a mom in the daytime).  Sometimes I look into my father's packages right away and sometimes I forget, and only today did I find this photo (I took it myself, 21 years ago) of my mother, my father, and my three-month-old son.

Oh, how the passing of time breaks your heart.  Relentlessly.

For this same boy, this night, texted me from a Phillies game, where he'd gone with a friend. "It's such a beautiful night," he wrote.  "And we have such great seats."  Why does something like that make me cry?  Why does a phone call, thirty seconds later, from Elizabeth Law make me cry harder?  "Dangerous Neighbors launches tomorrow," she says, after we chat about a million other things.  "And I want you to know that we at Egmont are proud of this book."

Something like that, or close to that.

Elizabeth Law, calling me.

Dangerous Neighbors, a book I care about more than I'm willing to admit, launching tomorrow.

My son, texting me from a Phillies game, where a soft rain is falling.  I am happy. 

Look.  Life is full of a thousand oddities and more regrets.  It is the why not me and the why me and the indignity and the shame.  It is also a son and a book and a father, redistributing memories.  What does it mean to launch a book about a city you love?  What does it mean?

It means your heart is full.  It means right now is the right right now.

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Giveaway, Girls' Life and Jenny Loves To Read reflect on Dangerous Neighbors

Adventures in Children's Publishing graciously interviewed me last week about Dangerous Neighbors' journey to bookstores, and then offered to run a book giveaway to boot.  Please head on over if you're interested in winning a signed copy of the book (and reading a little bit more about how this story came to be published).

Girls' Life has surprised me with this beautiful review of Dangerous Neighbors today, closing (or nearly closing with the words):  Dangerous Neighbors is a great book about the bond of twin sisters, love, and losing the ones you love most. National Book Award Finalist, Beth Kephart, takes a story set centuries ago and makes it something we can relate to today.

And Jenny (a Philly girl who loves to read whom I only discovered last week with her great Centennial history postings) had endearing things to say about the book as well, concluding her review with a question that made me smile (you'll have to read her review to discover which aspect of the book stumped her), and noting, along the way, This book is full of love, loss, guilt, and peace. This is a tall order to fill but Kephart's writing brings it all together into 192 pages. Yes, 192 pages can you believe it?  

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Before I ever wrote a book like Dangerous Neighbors

I was this little girl wielding a fat black pencil, trying hard to be good.  Katherine, my Dangerous Neighbors heroine, has grown up feeling responsible—trapped by that, unable to escape it.  She may be a 19th century character, my Katherine.  But I understand her very well.

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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand/Helen Simonson: A Passage

It was this kind of downpour day, and I cherished the excuse to read deeper into Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, a truly affecting debut novel by Helen Simonson.  What does love look like when it's new and you are not?  How does a man getting on in age combat the lusty greed of the son he sired?  What is it to stand in a familiar place and watch the coming end of day?  What is it to be proper in England and also, impeccably, falling in love with the Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali?  Simonson's writing is enviably clear, perfectly transporting, not a wedge overdone.  Let me give you, at least, this:

They were at the lower fence now, and he was aware that one of the nails he had added was bent in half and shining with evidence of his incompetence.  He hoped she would see only the view beyond, where the sheep field fell away down a small fold between two hills to a copse thick with oaks.  Mrs. Ali leaned her arms on the flimsy top rail and considered the trees, which were now blending to a soft indigo in the fading light.  The rough grass on the western hill was already dark, while on the eastern flank it was losing the gold from its tips.  The ground breathed mist and the sky showed night gathering intensity in the east.

My thanks to Lilian Nattel and Ravenous Reader, trusted readers and bloggers, who were early in singing this novel's praises.

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Phoenixville, PA

Last night, in search of a way to make the familiar new, we set out for Phoenixville, 25 minutes down the road, a town that was immortalized, perhaps not entirely justly, by Alice Sebold in her controversial second novel, The Almost Moon.

As passers through, we find much to love.

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The things writers carry

Sometimes I carry my images with me, place to place, until the book I am writing is ready for them, or until I am.  The toting feels physical, material.  I stand straighter, breathe easier when I get the image down.

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The summer of laundry

I shall call this the Summer of Laundry, a many-week sweep during which my son, over the course of his every day, would trade his gym shirt for his work shirt for his hanging out shirt for his going out shirt, and in between all that, the rest of the house was very hot and very sweaty. Every other day, there were piles, and with a one-handed husband (the cast comes off in a week; the therapy shall begin; the healing, this time, will take time) and a son rarely home, the piles of things were left entirely to me.

Here are the things one can do while also doing laundry:  Test a dialogue sequence in one's head.  Try to recall the outlines of last night's dream.  Blithely ignore the bad news on the other room's TV screen.  Watch the spider nimble across the ceiling.  Make up words and speak them out loud, since there's no one near to listen.

Here's what not to do:  Count the days until one's son will be gone.  That's heartbreaking business, and one can't possibly bear it, laundry and all.

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Tall Philadelphia and Life in the Thumb

 In Dangerous Neighbors, Katherine is forever climbing towers and hills to get a better view of her city, something I am prone to do today.  I took this shot of my city from the Cira Centre bridge, just across the Schuylkill River, on the west side.  That's the new Comcast building, rising tallest in the center.  Far beyond, to the right, is William Penn balanced on the top of City Hall.  It wasn't all that long ago when no one dared build any higher than Penn's generous bronze hat.  As one who has loved this city all her life, I am astonished, always, by how rapidly things change and disappear.

One thing, however, does not change, and that is my gratitude to those who make the time for books, and then make even more time to articulate their reactions.  Today I thank Life in the Thumb, for her very kind and very wonderfully structured review of Dangerous Neighbors.  It means so much.

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Descent

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Where I go

These past many weeks long, my friends have written from far-off, quiet places—cabins near the shore, cabanas high on the beach, the slip of land beside the lake, a grandfather's lodge.  They've been reading and writing, staked out on a chair, cracking clamshells at night, throwing a lobster to the grill.  These are writers and readers, taking time away to do what they most love to do.

We haven't had that sort of summer here (though I have yearned for such a day or two).  Now it's August's end, and a single week remains before our son disappears for another university semester.  We have to go somewhere, we said to one another, and so we did what we tend to do when we have less than 24 hours within which to travel—take the 90-minute drive to Atlantic City.  We don't gamble.  We don't swim.  But we walk the boardwalk at night, have dinner, talk.  We're together, and that is what matters.

We leave before nine in the morning.  I take a beach walk before we do.  This was Atlantic City, just after dawn, today.

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Sisterly

This morning, the very dear and very smart Priya turns 15, and because her sister, Maya, adores her and hopes to surprise her and knows that we are out here wanting the same, she asked if we might post a little something in remembrance of this special day.

I had been wondering about what I might post, and then I had an idea that took me back into an old wooden photo album.  Perhaps, I thought, there is a photograph of me and my sister, something I might share.  I turned every page, didn't find the right shot.  I sifted through envelopes stuffed into the book's back pages.  It was in the very last envelope that I found this image, something I don't remember ever seeing before.  I must have been four here, my sister newborn.  Our mother more beautiful than one can say.

Happy Birthday, Priya, from one sister to another.

Love,

Beth

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Philly Girl

Though I moved a lot when I was a kid, I always came home to my mother's Philadelphia—its suburbs on the fringe, the University of Pennsylvania campus (as a student), tiny apartments on Camac Street and Gaskill Street, back out to the fringe as a new mother, then in and out, these days, to visit clients or to teach at my alma mater (recently tied for fifth on the U.S. News and World Report university ranking, I was proud and pleased to read the other day). 

I consider myself, in other words, a Philly girl, and so when Jenny Girl took the time to put together this remarkable look back at Philadelphia's Centennial, I felt immediate kinship with her.  I may not like a lot about growing older.  But I do like knowing where home is (and who my neighbors are). 

Thank you, too, to Readergirlz this morning. Their friendship represents another home.

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The smell of rain,

the yaw of an old birch branch,
the scattering sky.

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When the review teaches

Thoughtful reviews teach a writer, and I learn, always, from those who have sat with a story and wondered about its shape or proclivity.  Write Meg's review of Dangerous Neighbors is one such instance.  I loved reading and learning from what she had to say.  Meg is not the first reader hoping to hear more about William and his travels, and as I wrote to Meg yesterday after discovering her review, I am grateful that she suggests the possibility, for William does live boldly in my imagination.  I hope, someday, to have a chance to write his story.

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Dangerous Neighbors: The Teacher's Guide

It comes full circle, at one point—the reading and research one does, the teaching one loves, the books one writes.  Dangerous Neighbors may be my twelfth book, but it is the first book for which I've ever created a teacher's guide.  The behind-the-scenes history of the Centennial can be found in these pages.  So can the irreducible Mrs. Gillespie and perhaps my favorite Philadelphian of all, George Childs.  But mostly this teacher's guide offers a range of classroom exercises—from team projects to personal essays to broad discussions about community, innovation, media, even classified ads.  I hope that this guide opens doors for both teachers and students who recognize that the past—its lessons, its influences, its legacies—is alive in the right now.

The guide can be found here.

Thanks to Egmont USA's Elizabeth Law, Mary Albi, Katie Halata, Nico Medina, Greg Ferguson, and Rob Guzman, who cheered this guide on, and made it better.  Thank you to Stacey Swigart for paying close attention.  Thank you to the original William for teaching me a dash of In Design.  And thanks to Elizabeth Mosier, for saying, Why don't you....

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Excerpting Dangerous Neighbors

Sometimes a reader finds a story's heart, isolates it, and returns it, enriched, to the world, and that is what happened when Laurie of Reader Girls read Dangerous Neighbors and put forward her "favorite excerpt."  The lines she identifies were the hardest to write, because they were, to me, the most important.

Thank you, Laurie.

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Boot Talk

I was thinking about Caroline Leavitt when I found these boots in a Lambertville store. But I've been also thinking, lately, about the un-anticipate-able nature of the writer journey, how little we know when we journal our first free sentences or write our first poems or say to someone, I'll be a writer.  I knew nothing; I knew no one; I know but a few things; I love who I know.  I couldn't see it coming, all the way back then, could not imagine now.

I only knew:  I cannot live without the strut and sound of words.

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Sun catching wheel

I can't wholly explain my fascination with old spinning wheels, for I don't sew, I don't weave, I don't know fabrics.  I do like what hands can do, what they promise, and I like the shadows that spokes convey to the wall.  Some say there should be more chairs in this house, and certainly (judging from the piles) there should be more bookshelves.  But I'm giving my wheels their room to spin, to catch the light and fold it.

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I Cannot

Tree, tree, house, tree, tree, on the opposite side of a wall.  The big growing things, and the solid, built thing, and none of it safe, nor certain.

There will be weather.

There will be cancer.

There will be news.

Sometimes all we have is our naked empathy.  We want more for our friends than we can give them.

I want to say I'm sorry.  I want to change the news.

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Father of the Rain/Lily King: Reflections

I had been wanting to read a Lily King book—The Pleasing Hour or The English Teacher, say—but life got in the way until this summer, when I decided to begin at the now in King's career, with Father of the Rain.  I read no description of the book, and no reviews.  Father was a Lily King book, and it was time. 

Bloggers, not long ago, were debating the value and promise of stories told in the first-person present —a conversation that I (known to lean in that direction) followed with interest.  Some bloggers will not, it was revealed, read a book told in the right now.  Others will give young adult novelists that room, but not those writing for adults.

With Father, King artfully demonstrates just how powerful first-person present can be—not just when she is channeling 11-year-old Daley throughout the first section of the book (Daley as the child trapped inside her parents' bewildering divorce), but again when she takes us into Daley's life as a post-graduate student (when she forgoes love and a career to help her willful, alcoholic father fight his demons) and, finally, when she introduces Daley as a wife and mother caught in the final months of her father's slow dying.  Over and over, we feel the anguish of a daughter's love for a tormented (and often downright cruel) man, we hear the brittle snaps of faith, we balance on the thin, tentative thread of believing that perhaps this time, perhaps at last, the father will redeem himself and earn the daughter's love.

There is a difference between a ruinous relationship and a ruined one.  King's first-person present navigates the border lands.  It's a suspenseful navigation, an artful one, in which nothing is absolute or predetermined.  Daley doesn't know what's going to happen because she's living inside the right now.  We live it with her in the sort of profound fashion that no other tense would have allowed.

After I finished Father, I wanted to know more about Lily King and discovered, on her web site, two fascinating interviews.  King is a real-thing writer; there's so much merit in what she has to say.

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Long August

I've never been a fan of summer—have never had that kick-back, turn-it-off, do-nothing personality.  I'm not knocking the carefree, believe you me.  I see what kick-back does for others.  I know how calm they can be.

This summer—when the heat locked us down (an impenetrable cloud), when the economy wheezed,  when I had far more unknowns in my life than knowns—has seemed especially long.  Books have kept me company; dance; the ladies of Zumba; some new friends; some stalwart ones; all of you.  I've not wanted the summer to end, for that means taking my son back to school.  And yet I've yearned for far less heat and much, much less uncertainty.  I have yearned for an autumnal breeze.

Yesterday that breeze began blowing.  A hoped-for corporate project surfaced—a substantial project, a think project, a project for a client I've always loved.  A long conversation with my son yielded a promise to take one of our famous long walks.   An email hinted at a possibility (only as of yet a possibility) for a book, mostly written, that means the world to me.

Hold on.  That's what summer teaches.  Maybe next summer I'll learn to go carefree.

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What is Beauty? This is.

I found her at the Devon Horse Show earlier this summer, before the heat had swept in, before I understood that this summer would be a slow walk through time, when I would have to learn to measure the days differently.

But I thought her beautiful—radiant was the word—and that is how I feel today, reading these two reviews of Dangerous Neighbors.  I had been trying to explain to my son what it meant to be on the verge of releasing a book like this one—the hopes one has, the fears, the gratitude I feel toward all of you who have reached out to me, so kindly.  Then word of these two reviews came in, and I started to cry.

Thank you, In Bed With Books.

Thank you, Lillie of Read My Mind.

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Sold by hand, sold by heart: the independent booksellers

We speak of independent booksellers as selling by hand, and that they do, and for that, we (readers and writers) are grateful.  But it is also enormously true that independent booksellers sell by heart.  We see that each time in the Indiebound lists are unveiled—booksellers putting themselves on the line for books and, consequently, for those who write them.

Today I send this flower—a burst of light, an otherworldly shimmer—to Mandy King of The Boulder Book Store in Boulder, CO, who put her heart on the line for Dangerous Neighbors, suggesting it to the Autumn 2010 Children's Indie Next List, where it joins a remarkable slate of new titles.  She's bigger and brighter and better than this flower.  My picture is but a mere approximation.

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In Which Pretty Freaky Argues Toward Beauty

It was here, at Pretty Freaky, a provocative site developed by the writer, teacher, and artist (among other things) Elizabeth Collins that I discovered words that stopped me in my virtual tracks.  Collins was writing about Dangerous Neighbors, among other summer reads.  More to the point, however, she was writing about what gets published today: 

The author is a past finalist for the National Book Award but I actually felt irritated, reading the galley of this novel (sent to me for review), that such beautiful prose would probably not see the light of day if not for this author's past awards and a publisher willing to take a risk, as so few seem to be nowadays (which is sad and horrible for all of us, actually).

I am not sure that Kephart's scintillating words will be properly appreciated or speak to a huge audience of contemporary readers, though I sincerely hope they will, and if there is adequate or skilled marketing/PR, it will happen. But 'Dangerous Neighbors' should be read and hand-sold by booksellers, and sold by word of mouth promotion.

I quote Elizabeth at length because I have a point to make—a point to reiterate, I should say, about the fact that Egmont USA—adequate and then some, skilled beyond measure—is the publisher (urged along by editor Laura Geringer) who took the risk and made Dangerous Neighbors happen, who believes that books like this one still have a right to exist in this world.  Don't think that I took or take that for granted.  Don't think that I ever lean back on past books or good fortune and say to myself, Well, if you had that, you will also have this.  Don't think I see myself as having any edge up, because believe me, I do not.  We are all fighting out here—our hearts on our pages, our doubts a thick mist, the unknowns obscuring the knowns—and when we find a house like Egmont USA that takes a risk on a book like Dangerous Neighbors, we count ourselves extremely lucky.  When we find a blogger like Elizabeth Collins, who stands up other beauty-seeking books, other beauty-making authors, we know that we are in good company.  

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The blogging wither

"Blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as active bloggers dropping by half between 2006 and 2009," report Tony Dokoupil and Angela Wu in a Newsweek story (August 16, 2010) titled, "Take This Blog and Shove it!  When Utopian Ideals Crash into Human Nature—Sloth Triumphs."  Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are alive and well, the authors tell us, because they "offer clear benefits to users, including the ability to easily stay in touch with friends, indulge in a game of Mob Wars, share baby pictures, or watch videos of fashion models falling down, in exchange for their time and efforts."  Twitter, meanwhile, with its 50 million tweets a day, seems possessed of many lurkers and is not, apparently, a place where many choose to stick around.  "Between 60 and 70 percent of people who sign up for the 140-character platform quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report."

What people are seeking, apparently, is rewards—rewards for building content, rewards for leaving comments, rewards for checking in.  It comes as no surprise, of course, and indeed I've noted, among my blogging friends, a true shift, over the past year, in terms of those who shiver on the doorstep of a blog, and those who come to stay.

Tenacious, stubborn, call me what you will—I'm still hanging out my blogging shingle.  Blogging is no experiment to me, no call for attention, no wanting of rewards.  It is a place where some of my thinking, my photographs, my living lives.  It is a place where I've met you.

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Dangerous Neighbors: The Starred Publishers Weekly Review

Because I am too happy to patiently sit and transcribe the entire, beautiful starred Publishers Weekly review for Dangerous Neighbors, I am going to share with you Greg Ferguson's favorite line, for he (Greg, of that fabulous Egmont USA team) is the one who let me know that this gift exists, and who, indeed, has let me know about each review in its turn.  Thank you, Greg.

"Conjuring sharp, meticulously detailed images of fair exhibitions (The wonders of the world slide past.  Parisian corsets cavorting on their pedestals.  Vases on lacquered shelves.  Folding beds.  Walls of cutlery.  The sweetest assortment of sugar-colored pills, all set to sail on a yacht"), Kephart evokes a tantalizing portrait of love, remorse, and redemption."

PS.  Egmont's also fabulous Alison Weiss just provided me with this link to the whole review.

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Dressing up for Dangerous Neighbors

The other day, I posted about my unglamorous self—my puffy hair and anti va-voom status.  I do not wish any of you to conclude, however, that I am not blessed with a cadre of utterly beautiful friends, who can rock a room or a Zumba class with effortless glam.  One of those friends is the dear Jan Shaeffer, whom I met on a river boat following a reading from my book Flow, and who has knocked me out every single meeting since with an invincible and still un-selfconscious style.

It was Jan who encouraged me to put more fashion into my stories, and with Dangerous Neighbors I had not just the excuse but the desire.  I wanted to know what Katherine and her twin sister would be wearing in a city unusually warm and swampy, even for 1876 Philadelphia.  I wanted a picture, in my mind, of the little girl with the caged bird, Snow, whom Katherine follows into Operti's.  Among the books and resources that enabled me to see the past was Dressed for the Photographer:  Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840-1900, by Joan Severa.  It was here, on page 361, that I discovered my little girl.  Here, in part, is what Severa writes of her:

The woven cotton plaid of the dress is in smart, dark tones, possibly dull greens or indigo and red, and the enormously wide sash is probably a heavy red silk ribbon.  The full coat-sleeve style and dropped shoulder of the seventies are here exemplified, with the piped deep bias cuff showing clearly with its button and buttonhole trim and white cuff facing. A rather large collar of coarse white lace, a girlish fashion, is centered by a rosette of the lace at the front, and a gold chain encircles the neck.

The child's face is well-framed by the contrived tiny ringleted bangs, the tiara comb holding the back hair into deep side puffs, and the glistening corkscrew ringlets of the back hair. 

A description that would do my friend Jan proud.  And I like it when I can make Jan proud.

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Dangerous Neighbors: Work commences on a teacher's guide, and gratitude for a beautiful review

In October of 2008, the Please Touch Museum, the first museum in the U.S. designed specifically for children aged seven and under, opened the doors to its new home in Philadelphia's Memorial Hall—an act of revitalization genius.  For it was there, in this gorgeous Beaux-Arts building, that the nearly 10 million visitors who came to Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition in 1876 took in the sculpture, paintings, and engravings of artists from 19 different countries.  In total, the 250 buildings that comprised the Centennial Exhibition covered nearly 285 West Philadelphia acres.  Today, nearly all of those buildings are gone; Memorial Hall, thanks to ardent preservationists, doesn't just remain.  It thrives.

It also explains.  For in the generous basement of the Please Touch Museum sits this 20' x 30' model of the fairgrounds.  Built in 1889 and transported from place to place until it was given this remarkable home, the model recreates the Exhibition at a 1 to 192 ratio.  The photograph above is of the Main Exhibition building, where much of the action in Dangerous Neighbors takes place. 

I was thinking about all of this today for two reasons.  First, because Serena Agusto-Cox has published today her very thoughtful description and analysis of Dangerous Neighbors on her popular blog, Savvy Verse & Wit, prompting, as she does, a conversation among her avid readers (thank you, Serena, and thank you, Serena's readers). 

Additionally, yesterday I was honored by an email from Elizabeth Mosier, who read the book at once (how she does this sort of thing, with her schedule, I'll never know) and wrote to me with a list of word-spreading ideas.  One of those involved the creation of a teacher's guide, an idea I've been playing with for some time.  I'm not sure I'd have jumped the fence, however, had Elizabeth not encouraged me in that direction.  And so today, at the foot of this desk, sit many of the books and newspaper/magazine articles that helped me find my way into the Centennial.  I'm going to take my time creating this guide, and I'll post about it when it is done.  But between now and then, picture me developing classroom prompts around topics ranging from progress to feminism to sibling love and rivalry. 

All ideas, as always, are welcome.

    

 

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What are authors supposed to look like?

I have hair that, on any given day, might be confused with a dandelion puff gone wild.  I have an unsunned face, morning raccoon eyes.  I'm never glamorous.  I don't know how to try.  I'm at my absolute least glamorous at the club where I dance Zumba, and mostly I don't worry about this.  We are there to sweat.  (right?)  We are there for power.  (girl power!)

Today, however, I took an advanced reader's copy of Dangerous Neighbors to my friend, Joy, who is and has been a million wonderful things in this life and is currently the hottest chick on the Zumba floor, though she claims that she's in her seventh decade.  Joy is a Kindle reader, a former bookstore owner, a doll of a blond with gorgeous round eyes.  I took her Dangerous Neighbors because I had been promising her I would, and so there she stood, my book in her hand, when another of her friends addressed her.  She asked Joy what that blue book was.  Joy looked at me to explain.  I did my two-minute spiel and then the woman looked confusedly my way.

"You're an author?, you say.  Of this book?"

I nodded.  "I am."

"Isn't that remarkable," she said.  "When you think about meeting an author, you think she is going to look different somehow, stand out.  But I guess that's not really the case, is it now.  I mean, you don't look any different from the rest of us?"

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Illyria/Elizabeth Hand: Reflections

Elizabeth Hand was always a cut-above writer. One need only take a tour of her web site, where she posts journal entries from her 16th year, for proof.  What can you say about yourself when you are sixteen etc. years old and the world is either terribly hard or wonderfully simple on account of the world 'love'? she wrote then.  It was less like building a house than colonizing an island, this freakish, lovely, marvelous atoll that rose from the gray wasteland of St. Brendan's High School like some extravagant Atlantis we'd willed into being, she writes now, in Illyria.  All of our previous alliances and identities were tossed aside—jock, freak, egghead, cheerleader, anonymous.

Illyria introduces cousins, Maddy and Rogan, born on the same day and young teens when the story begins in 1970s Yonkers.  Left mostly to their own devices, indispensable to one another, predisposed to theatrics and magic, they know no bounds, this Maddy and Rogan.  They live life at its most urgent.  When they are cast in a high school production of "Twelfth Night," they are brilliant together and wild together, feral and dangerous and suddenly, in the eyes of their extended clan, in need of taming.  Their love affair is doomed and desperate.  Its vestiges will haunt Maddy for the rest of her life.

And, indeed, Maddy tells this story from the perspective of well on—from all those years later, when the intimate details are yet fresh and vivid, but the how-this-story-ends is well-known, too.  Many things will strike a reader about Illyria—its unapologetic intelligence, its unashamed incest, its nearly supernatural force—but perhaps it is the novel's point of view that struck me with greatest impact, the sense that Hand is writing out of the vulnerable, present need to make sense of a time and a place at once mystical and rooted in brand and street names.  Fog floats across the gorgeous cover and fog floats throughout the book, but never at the expense of a clenching specificity. It happened, but it couldn't have.  It was, but it isn't.  It's now because then is always now.  All of that is here.

One can always tell the difference between a story that beckoned an author—suggested itself, teased—and one that demanded.  Illyria made demands on Hand.  She answered them, resolutely.

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From me today only this:

shadows against near night.

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Pamela Paul on the adult embrace of young adult literature

Several years ago, when I was just beginning to understand the transcendent possibilities of young adult literature, I wrote an essay for the Chicago Tribune, which the Tribune then titled "Welcoming posture of youngsters lures more writers." (February 5, 2006)  Why, I asked, were Adam Gopnik, Isabel Allende, Michael Chabon, Louise Erdrich, Sue Halpern, Marilyn Nelson, and so many others writing for younger readers?  I posited this possible explanation:

While some might claim that the wild success of the Harry Potter series has raised the stakes of--and interest in--writing for the younger reader, I'd like to suggest that something else might also be at work, something about the very hospitability of the young reader's mind. For aren't young readers typically blessed with capacious hearts and souls? Don't they tend to welcome the slightly askew into their midst? Don't they walk straight into topsy-turvy worlds, hail the wraith, admire the ghost, listen with care to the talking tree? Young readers, by and large, care more for stories than for labels. They censor less. They want the writer to get it right, or so it seems to me.

Today, in a wonderful essay for the New York Times Book Review, Pamela Paul explores why so many books labeled "young adult" are bought and savored by those well past their teen years (while also discussing the book club phenomenon Kidlit).  Among the reasons put forth:

...good Y.A. is like good television.  There's a freshness there; it's engaging. Y.A. authors aren't writing about middle-aged anomie or disappointed people.  (Amanda Foreman)

A lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot.  I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives.  (Lev Grossman)

There's an immediacy in the prose.  I like the way adolescent emotions are rawer, less canned. (Darcey Steinke)

I know that many of you who read this blog read across genres and labels (and I am grateful).  I wonder how you, then, might answer the question, Why are so many adults reading books that are (at the very least) marketed to teens? 

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Illyria: writing up to teens

Had it not been for Colleen Mondor's high praise, I might never have known about Elizabeth Hand's Illyria, an alternate reality that seems supremely tragic.  Because oh my goodness, is this a book, is this writing at its no-holds-barred, no-compromises best. When I say, as I have been known to say, that the best of young adult writing honors the intelligence of teen readers, expects vocabulary and delivers it, leaves explication in the reader's hands, and entrusts the reader with the odd and the new, I am referring to writers like Markus Zusak and John Green and Rita Williams-Garcia and now, with Illyria, Elizabeth Hand, who yields sentence after sentence of un-redundant perfection in this strange and unapologetic tale of kissing cousins.

I'll be writing more about the story in a blog to come. I will be musing, too, on the power of past tense in a story like Illyria.  But for now, on this Friday morning, might I give you this—Hand's description of the boy cousin, Rogan, who "looked like he'd fallen from a painting."

He had high cheekbones in a feline face—not like a house cat's; more a cougar or a lynx, something strong and furtive and quick.  His nose was like mine, although it had been broken more than once.  His mouth was wide and surprisingly delicate, the only thing about him that might have seemed girlish.  Until he smiled, and showed narrow white teeth that were also like an animal's.  He had huge, deep-set eyes—wary eyes, which made it slightly alarming when he suddenly turned them on you—and they weren't Tierney blue but a true aquamarine, the palest blue-green, changeable as seawater in sunlight or cloud.

Find out more about this book, and about Hand herself, here.

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In which I am asked questions by the brilliant Caroline Leavitt

A few days ago, Caroline Leavitt, the extraordinary, award-winning novelist, hilarious Facebook chronicler, and truly generous soul asked me questions inspired by her reading of Dangerous Neighbors.  I had to clear the grateful tears from my eyes before I answered.  Please visit Caroline's site (where many authors are featured; you should be visiting anyway) for the conversation in which I answered, among other things, stunning questions like this one:

The novel meditates on what it means to have “dangerous neighbors” or to feel lost in a new country (or new way of being) where everything is so rapidly changing. There is also the sense that Katherine wants ownership of her sister in terms of loving her. She wants to keep that world small, even as the world around her--and her sister's world--are expanding. In the end, despite the losses in the book, Katherine actually finds surprising connection and hope. (There’s a spectacular few scenes of her carrying a stranger’s baby all over the Centennial.) Even though this novel is set in 1876, the whole idea of dangerous neighbors is remarkably current to me. Would you agree or is this simply my own interpretation speaking?

And please read here, for my thoughts about Caroline's upcoming novel, Pictures of You.   

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Savvy Verse & Wit reviews Undercover

In the midst of launching new books or struggling to write them, we are reminded, by gracious souls, of stories that did once make their way into the world; we are reminded that that is possible.  Serena Agusto-Cox affords me that gift this morning, with her kind review of Undercover, my first novel for young adults, and the most autobiographical of them all.

Thank you, Serena.

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Beth, the naif

So there I was, working through my emails, when one floated in from a trusted friend who wants to help me celebrate the release of Dangerous Neighbors, which is slated for an August 24th release.  Perhaps we should delay the celebration until the 26th or so, she suggested, due to the other (she was being uber nice and threw in that kind word, other) big YA release coming out on the 24th.  

Do you want to know how dumb I am?  Do you?

I did not know to which book she was referring.

That's how dumb I am.

I think I should spend more time inside air-conditioned rooms.

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Silence. Exile. Cunning.

Even if you take a drive—45 minutes, two hours from home—you may find yourself feeling refreshed again, a wise writerly friend wrote yesterday.  Most of all, don't be afraid of silence.  Silence, exile, and cunning is what Joyce advised.

(I love my friends.)

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Literary Friendship (on The Huffington Post)

It was Katrina Kenison (The Gift of an Ordinary Day, Mitten Strings for God) who introduced me to Jennie Nash (The Threadbare Heart, The Only True Genius in the Family, The Last Beach Bungalow, The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming, Raising a Reader).  Katrina was sure that Jennie and I were like-minded souls, and Katrina (who knows many things, who can be trusted) was right.  Jennie and I became instant friends and we have remained close, though she is a west coaster and I am an east coaster, and though she has lately been writing novels for adults and I have lately been writing for young adults.  We share motherhood stories, frustration stories, breakthrough stories, and when my mother passed away, Jennie sent a gift—a purse knitted from yarn that, Jennie said, looked like the colors of the sky on the day my mother passed away. (Jennie also sent red lipstick for my first ballroom showcase number.)

When Jennie, then, sent an email today, brief as brief could be (it simply said:  Writing about you today), I clicked on the link.  It took me to The Huffington Post.  It took me to these words, from dear Jennie.

Thank you, Jennie.

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