Inviting you to a commemorative evening

This is a page torn from (or falling out of) my Radnor High School scrapbook, a place where I keep the ribbons we—the tennis team, the track team—won, a place that houses all the goofiness and wonder of then.

It was to this scrapbook that I returned in late March of this year, when I received word that I would be inducted into the Radnor High School Hall of Fame this coming November.  The news came as an utter surprise to me.  Few honors have moved me so thoroughly; few upcoming events have been anticipated so eagerly.  I loved my high school and I've placed some of my own stories, including Undercover, within a reimagined version of it.  At Radnor, I had an English teacher who cared, who set me on the path that I am now on.  That very same English teacher, Dr. Maryanne Caporaletti, will introduce me during the induction ceremonies, where I will be joined by Lee Daniels, the director/producer behind such films as Precious and Monster Ball; Christopher Goutman, currently the head writer of As the World Turns; Paul R. Michel, a federal judge; the theologian, John Galloway; the musician/producer Andy Mark; the international banker Charlie Ryan; the football star Chris Sydnor; and the family of Eygptologist Henry George Fischer.  Previous Radnor High Hall of Famers include David Brooks, Sally Bedell Smith, Janis Grant Berenstain, and Anna Moffo.

Pamela Sedor of Radnor Memorial Library has offered to make this moment in my life even more special by setting aside the evening of November 16th at 7:30 PM for what will be my first reading from Dangerous Neighbors.  I'll talk as well about my years at Radnor and about what is next in my writing life.  I hope those of you who live near can join us.

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Joining the long list of the many things I am really bad at

is standing in as myself at a photo shoot.  I don't know how it is done.  I don't know how anyone stares placidly into the glass eye of the lens, or away from it, chin a-tilt.  Even when the chosen photographer is outstanding, as surely Chris Crisman, today's poor victim, is, I cannot be me in front of a camera, cannot give up the self-conscious glint, cannot stop imagining all the ways I'd rearrange the proportions of my face.  I cannot, most of all, stop imagining being him, the poor photographer, who took on this noble trade to do far more, I'm sure, than photograph an author who spends most of her time alone at her desk, or at a gym or studio, sweating.  I'm either boringly still or impossibly active.  I am not what pictures are made of.

Still, as with all difficult things, there is a lining.  That lining lies, for me, in getting to watch this remarkable photographer at work.  His portfolio speaks volumes.

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My little bit of news (a new book deal)

I am very happy, on this day, to be able to announce that I have sold my thirteenth book and my sixth YA novel to Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA.  I've posted fragments from this book on this blog over the past few years.  I've written the story—about the irrevocable ways that an unthinkable kidnapping affects the lives of two young women—until it was alive and right, until it became a story pierced through with light.  I am entirely grateful to my agent, Amy Rennert; my editor, Laura Geringer; and Egmont USA's own Elizabeth Law for giving me this opportunity.  I cannot wait to share this novel with you.

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An evening with Andrew Bacevich at Villanova University

Yesterday was another day of privileges—a morning spent in a visionary's office reflecting on the fate and future of our city, an evening spent in the company of Villanova University leaders and political commentator/New York Times bestseller Andrew Bacevich (The Limits of Power, Washington Rules) on the occasion of the second Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture series. 

My father created the series with the hope of generating a sustaining conversation around important issues in our community.  He created the series to honor the memory of my mother.  Last night, again, hundreds of people turned out for the occasion—hundreds—students, faculty, neighboring residents, and long-time family friends.  A year of planning goes into a night like that one, and we Kepharts have a tremendous community at Villanova to thank—a president, Rev. Peter M. Donohue, and a dean, Father Kail Ellis, who spend the evening with us, who charm us; a committee of esteemed historians, including my friend, Paul Steege, who help identify the right lecturer (last year they chose Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. James McPherson); and a staff of individuals who make the evening seamless.

Toward the end of the evening, following a remarkable lecture and passionate Q and A, I received a text message from my son, who is off at school.  His thoughts, he said, were with my mother.  He imagined her looking down in peace.  I did, too.

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Club La Maison and my Phillies moment

I love my gym, Club La Maison.

That's a sentence this strident-non-joiner, this independent, this I-take-my-walks-alone-(mostly)-thank-you-so-very-much person never thought she'd think, let alone write, let alone blog for public viewing, but I find that sentence creeping up increasingly as I make my way to the club at all hours of some days to dance cha-cha or to punch air or to knuckle down and sprint against my gorgeous friend Sarah.  I've found Joy there (both a woman and a feeling).  I've found instructors who are so incredibly good at what they do, so unfailingly enthusiastic, so encouraging, so moonwalking fabulous that I've given up my solitude to be in their presence.  I'm never going to look good at the martial arts stuff, but they're not laughing me out of the gym.  My arms are still pathetic skinny sticks, but the strength-infused make like they don't notice.  I break the rules on Zumba tango; Brenda lets me pass.  I still don't know how to stand perfectly straight, but Valerie, the city's top posture expert, allows a little slouch between our talk.

So, truly, when I showed up yesterday for the gym's fall extravaganza, all I really wanted was to burn 450 calories and to chill with some of my friends.  I got that in spades, but I also got a raffle ticket.  I could, I was told, slip it into any one of the prize-promising  buckets. I went for the Prize Supreme:  Tickets to see my Phillies clinch (because you know they could) the division title.  Today.  Tickets, a cap, a T-shirt, a water bottle, honest to goodness—sounded like a piece of heaven to me, and when they called an hour later to say that I had won, I asked if angels had been involved.

I've been up like a crazy woman pounding away on corporate work so that I can have this afternoon free.  I don't care if there are clouds in the sky.  All I see is sun.

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A Conversation with Jay Kirk, Author of Kingdom Under Glass

I found this marvelous creature at the gas station today; he was taking a ride on a bike.  A wonder, I thought, and then I thought of the cabinet of wonders that are unlocked by Jay Kirk's book, Kingdom Under Glass:  A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals.

Jay's book, his first, is due out in a month from Holt; I had the pleasure of reading an advance reader's copy. As one who majored in the History and Sociology of Science at Penn, I was fascinated by Jay's protagonist, Carl Akeley, who didn't just revolutionize taxidermy and fit out the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York with his lifelike creatures, as the jacket copy explains, but wrestled big cats and won, stared into the haunted eyes of massive elephants and lived to tell the tale, and somehow did not evaporate beneath the glaring African sun.  Akeley was a character of outsized proportions, and Jay has brought him to life in every vivid color and with a vocabulary that had me keeping dictionaries near.

I asked Jay a few questions about Kingdom.  He kindly replied.

You say in your notes that you have a "near-allergic avoidance of the subjunctive."  How is the subjunctive too often abused?  How did your stance regarding the subjunctive ultimately help you shape your book?

I don’t know if the subjunctive is abused, per se, but I do feel pretty averse to its overuse in nonfiction.  For one, I think it tends to enfeeble a story when an author is too frequently falling back on “Carl very well must have been thinking…”  or “Akeley in all likelihood was on the verge of…” or “she very well could have been feeling blah blah,” and other forms of demurring along this line.  It’s kind of flaccid and takes away from the authority and immediacy of the prose.  It distracts.  Not that you can avoid it altogether, of course.  It’s definitely mandatory if you need to qualify some kind of pseudo-attribution to a character that isn’t citable.  But the easiest way to avoid it is to be as absolutely rigorous as possible about the things that don’t fall under the strict category of “fact.”

Can you give me an example of what you mean by what doesn’t fall under the category of fact?

Well, a lot really!  Especially when you’re trying to bring human characters to life based on their own very subjective and limited interpretations, i.e., diaries, correspondence, etc.  But let me give you an example of where I might use a detail I don’t know existed for sure, with absolute and total certainty, yet where I felt absolutely justified leaving out any subjunctive qualifications.  What I am often conscious of employing, in these cases, to develop scenes without crossing the boundary into fiction via pure speculation/invention, is inference.  As an example, there’s this one scene where Carl and Mickie are on the Uganda railroad, aka “Lunatic Express,” and I describe them as wearing the same goggles everyone else is wearing to protect their eyes from the clouds of red dust that filled the passenger cars.  Now, neither Carl nor Mickie ever made mention of these goggles in their diaries, or anywhere else, nor did I ever see a photograph of them in said goggles.  However, from reading Charles Miller’s exhaustive Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism, I did learn that in addition to all the other discomforts of the train ride (ceaseless thirst, bad food) “dark goggles were also advised… as protection against the desert’s red dust which penetrated every compartment in billowing red clouds…”  That certainly doesn’t prove that the Akeleys wore those goggles too, it still is not a fact, but I do know that Carl and Mickie were sensible, well-equipped travellers, and I’m comfortable enough with the likelihood (inferring from the general to the specific) to omit the milksop subjunctives.  Not to pick a fight with imaginary agonists, but for anyone who just doesn’t buy it, I would have you consider how cognitive scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that a hundred percent certainty is never possible anyway when it comes to memory—so even if Carl himself had written that he firmly remembered wearing those goggles, it’s just as possible he could be confusing his own memory with the interposing memory of all those other passengers wearing goggles, leaving the poor objectivist reader hung up on absolute certitude facing the same dilemma: fiction or nonfiction? 

Akeley’s life is grippingly fantastical.  In writing about Akeley in the way that you do—so much loving detail, so much vivid rendering—you necessarily had to choose some scenes over others. Can you describe your decision-making process?

It’s obscene, the amount of things I was not able to include.  But it would have been equally obscene to try and include everything.  There were just so many, many things over the course of his life, and his five truly unbelievable expeditions to Africa, all stuff that I would have loved to have kept, and that I really struggled over cutting, but in the end, the over-arching, or maybe under-lying, themes of a book do dictate making omissions that if I were writing a biography proper would be sinful.

You have always been a writer, and always, too, a reader.  What books have shaped your idea of what nonfiction can be?  What nonfiction should not be?  What boundaries can still be broken with the form?

Too many great nonfiction writers come to mind: Geoff Dyer, Lawrence Weschler, Erik Larson, Dave Eggers, Norman Mailer.  I really loved The Executioner’s Song.  But, for personal pleasure, I still find myself reading more novels than anything, because the thing I love best is that deep sense of story.  As far as boundaries waiting to be broken,  I think nonfiction has a very open field.  And for that reason alone it’s tremendously exciting to write.  You’re kind of always giddily asking yourself: can I get away with this?  I mean, look at Akeley, he was an artist working in a completely “nonfiction” field and he broke every boundary, but it didn’t require fictionalizing his material in the least.  I mean, he used his subjects’ actual skins.  There must be some sort of metaphor there for the grisly work of writing nonfiction.

You have a huge vocabulary, and you have fun dispensing it.  What words did you discover in the writing of Kingdom that have become a lasting part of your everyday talk?

A few words jump to mind that I picked up, though I can’t say I’ve yet to work them into my everyday talk:  Brainspoon.  Haversack.  Spoor.  Xylonite.  Puggaree.  Bovril.  Askari.  Gerenuk...  On the other hand, I guess I am more apt to use the expression “bully!” nowadays.

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs—you put them all to good use in Kingdom.  Do you have a special relationship to any particular parts of speech?

I like sentences that keep things in motion.  That do their job, which, in my opinion, is to advance the game in some way, to move the story along.  So, with that in mind, I’m a fan of any part of speech that’s doing its job and helping out the sentence.  I’m in favor of strong verbs and of course nice carbon-based (concrete) nouns, the words that make up all the vivid things to look at and touch and bounce the senses off, nouns like “tusk” and “bootstrap” and “indiarubber.”

How do you know when a sentence is done?  A passage?  A book?

I know a sentence is done when it feels riveted in place.  When I cannot revise further.  When all the extra verbiage has been junked, and the genetically inferior sentences dragged off to the slag heap, and everything has been compressed to the point where it all somehow feels essential, where all the words are doing their job.  Sometimes I just suddenly realize, oh, I guess I’m done.  And then I have to get myself out of the house as quickly as possible so as not to print off another draft and pointlessly fiddle with it.

 

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News is coming

Stay tuned.

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A Dangerous Neighbors review and radio talk

And since I seem to be posting inspirational images today, here's one I took at the Please Touch Museum—images of the Observatory at George's Hill.  My Dangerous Neighbors heroine Katherine seeks to see the world from places high above, and towers like these figure in my story.

I post this image, this towering image, to thank the 1st Daughter for her incredibly generous review of Dangerous Neighbors and for her extraordinary words about the book during her interview with Nicole from Linus's Blanket for the Blog Talk Radio Show, "That's How I Blog!"

 

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Dangerous Neighbors interview and giveaway

I'd posted this image long ago, before Dangerous Neighbors was a book with a home or a future. But this is Operti's Tropical Garden, where some of the novel action takes place, and I post it now so that it might send you fluttering toward the Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia, who is hosting a me interview and Dangerous Neighbors giveaway.  She asked some great questions about sisters, inspirations, research.  I hope my answers lived up to her curiosity.

Oh, and Cecelia:  Authors are flattered to answer reader's questions, especially when it comes to readers like you.

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We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication/Judith Warner: Reflections

I wrote last evening of spending time in the company of people I admire—of clients who become and remain friends.  That post was prompted, in part, by the all-employee meeting conducted by Shire Pharmaceuticals—an event that took place beneath a wide, white tent on a morning that recalled summer far more than it augured fall.

Judith Warner—bestselling author of Perfect Madness, former New York Times blogger, once a special foreign correspondent for Newsweek—was among those who, as an invited guest, made that all-employee meeting so special.  Her newest book, We've Got Issues, released earlier this year, tells the story of Warner's journey as a journalist who had once assumed, like so many others have, that we are a nation dangerously prone to over-diagnosing and -medicating our children.  This was the state of things, a fact, a reality so transparent that she'd agreed to write an entire book about it.  She'd signed a contract called "UNTITLED on Affluent Parents and Neurotic Kids." She was set to collect her arsenal of facts in support of her theory that "the kids we saw making the rounds of doctors and therapies were no more than canaries in the coal mine, showing the first-line symptoms of the toxicology of our pathological age."  Her book would be on the shelves in but a few years' time.

Except.  Except sometimes writing is the only path toward knowing, and the harder Warner worked to prove her point, to sway her audience, the more quicksandish her proposal became.  In her quest to meet parents who proved her point about the desire for quick diagnoses and easy fixes, for drugs that could turn report-card Cs into stellar As or, perhaps, ease the overscheduled child into one more resume-building activity, she encountered instead the heartbreak of those who were watching their children struggle and who did not know where to turn. She found herself jolted by questions that didn't have easy, or obvious, answers.  She discovered a fact that began to haunt her:  "Five percent of kids in America take psychotropic drugs.  Five to 20 percent have psychiatric issues.  That, according to my math, just doesn't add up to a pattern of gross overmedication."

What do you do when the argument you seek to make (you promised to make) is porous?  What do you do when your own world view can't be supported by the facts?  If you are a writer with the integrity of Judith Warner, you stand back, reassess, look harder.  You write a book with a brand new title, and you chart new journalistic territory by writing passages such as these:

If we live in a time when the brains of non-ADHD kids are shutting down from mental overload, if we live in an era when even our young winners are "a bit less human," the it's fair to say that normal life is now "sick."  But that's using the word "sick" as a value judgment, not a medical category, and it's urgently important not to confound the two.  For to do so does a real injustice to children with mental health issues and their parents, and also makes improving empathy and getting better help for those children all but impossible.

The issues are tangled, and complex.  Psychotropic drugs can be abused; sometimes they are.  But by and large, Warner writes, it's time for all of us to bring more compassion to this issue, and less headline-borrowing judgment.  There is no love like a parent's for a child.  We are all, in our way, working toward rightness—hoping to be heard, hoping to be helped, hoping that education, therapy, and science (for it takes all three) can keep our children safe.

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Safe Harbors

I want simply to say that, in this life, it is possible to know who your true friends are, and on this day I had the privilege of seeing or hearing from some of those whom I count dear.  The band of brilliant men at a favorite client company who make me feel welcome, who tell me their stories, who listen, absent all hierarchy.  Dear and beloved Reiko, who sends me light.  Sarah, who will meet me at the gym at the long day's end so that we can Cardio Jam our way to sanity (I need it more than she does; she keeps me company). My husband who, his injured hand so slowly recovering, decides to try to cook tonight.

The seas are rough.  I am grateful for safe harbors.

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On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner/Susan Thornton: Reflections

I find myself reading John Gardner these days—his thoughts about writing, his encouragements about teaching, a little of his work itself.  Last night, while waiting for an event to begin, I sat down with On Broken Glass, Susan Thornton's memoir about her tangled affair with John Gardner before, throughout, and after his marriage to the talented writer and teacher Liz Rosenberg—right up, indeed, to the day when a motorcycle accident took Gardner's life and foiled the plans for his wedding to Thornton.

Thornton, who had met Gardner at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, was an aspiring writer.  Transfixed by the white-haired man who seemed to know something about everything (perhaps even a lot about everything), she became his friend and then his lover, absorbing the sorts of inconstancy and intensity that might be expected of the idealizing mistress of a man who, in Thornton's words, "liked to set up close, incestuous love relationships where the women involved knew each other, were kept off balance, were expected to bow to his demands." Herself a drinker, she tolerated Gardner's excesses.  In love with a man who was not properly hers, she tolerated, or at least learned to live with, his many indiscretions.

On Broken Glass is not, by any stretch a lyrical memoir, nor one that aspires to universal proportions.  It is instead Thornton's story, studiously recalled.  Reading through, I wondered about many things—about the damage we do to one another, about why we allow so much damage to be done to ourselves.  But I also wondered about passages such as this one, wedged within the final pages: 

Gerry (Thornton's current husband) and I have worked hard to build a partnership.  Early in our marriage I idealized John, wished he had not died, yearned for his charisma, his charm, the sense that I had with him that anything was possible.  It has been very difficult for Gerry to live with a woman who yearned after a lost, perfect partner.  Until I became sober, I could not see the unmanageability of John's life, how his drinking damaged him, how it twisted his thinking and his relationships, how my drinking damaged me.  In our married life, Gerry and I have faced genuine hardship.... For a long time I lost hope.  I felt I would be unable to use the gift God had given me, the gift of expression in writing, that I would ultimately fail at what I had felt so strongly was my life's purpose.

Can writing be our life's purpose? I wondered.  Should it be?  And how best for a writer to speak (if at all) of his or her own gifts?

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Can you teach writing?

The age-old question.  I have always said this:  You can teach yourself (or others) to see beyond what is near, to spend time with what you're not, to bear in mind the symphonic construction of a passage, or an idea.  You can teach process:  Don't hurry.  You can teach living:  Go out, adventure, return.  You can fracture safety zones.  But the job of a teacher, most of all (I think), is to know what others have written and what another must read, right now, this second, in the midst of the long journey.



 

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What makes for YA? A reader opines

When, I sometimes ask myself, did my writing life begin?  Was it at nine, when I started penning those crazy purple poems?  Was it at sixteen, when my English teacher noticed?  Was it when Natalie Kutz answered a letter I'd written her, or when Iowa Woman accepted my first essay?

Or was it when I won a certain grant, my first, and upon that occasion had my first reading and also met (it's funny how this happens) people who have remained friends throughout this writing life?

One of those friends is a writer who goes by the name of Sam Gridley.  His novel, The Shame of What We Are, is due out soon and he's started a blog that is (in typical Gridley style) provocative and intriguing.  Yesterday, this Mr. Gridley was inspired, following his read of Dangerous Neighbors, to reflect on the level of thematic maturity acceptable in books labeled YA, as opposed to the level of maturity he has lately found elsewhere.  It's a post worth reading. 

Postscript:  In my I-keep-waking-up-at-3AM-to-work-on-corporate-projects state, I failed to note that Mr. Gridley's review does include a reveal, shall we say, of a key plot point.  Short version:  Spoiler Alert.  Thanks, Sarah!

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Room/Emma Donoghue: Reflections

I was three years into writing a book that in some ways deals with the multiple strains and awful unknowing of a kidnapping when I learned about Emma Donoghue's new novel, Room.  Within a nanosecond, it seemed, Room had become the rage—awards listed and best selling.  I did what I could to filter out the news until I had written the final sentence of my own story, set it aside, let it breathe.

That was several weeks ago.  Yesterday and early this morning I sat with Room and read it through.  It is not at all the story I have written, but it fascinated me nonetheless—to walk this terrain with the talented Donoghue, to see just where her mind went as she conjured the five-year-old narrator, Jack, who in a language nearly his own tells the story of being sequestered for his first five years in an 11 x 11 foot space with his mother.  Ma was just nineteen years old and a college student when she was stolen straight out of her life.  She has found a way to survive and to mother in an unyielding room whose only view to the outside is via a skylight.  Songs, games, stories keep the two alive.  A daring escape leads them to cacophonous Outside.  Outside doesn't just confuse Jack.  It often angers him.  Ma, for her part, is relieved and abraded.  She will suffer a long time, as victims do.

The reviewers have been most keen on Jack's linguistics—his peculiar but never confusing way of speaking.  It's like reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, except that instead of moocows and nicens little boy named baby tuckoo we have a narrator who depicts his confinement to us in expressive, open language:  I jump onto Rocker to look at Watch, he says 07:14.  I can skateboard onto Rocker without holding on to her, then I whee back onto Duvet and I'm snowboarding instead.

It is Jack's own bright world, for he knows no better.  It is his mother's hell; she tries to protect him.  Donoghue gives us Ma's ache through her naive-wise son's eyes.  Because we know more than Jack can, we are made queasy, uncomfortable, prickled.  Because Jack is telling the story, we have hope.

I admire writers who create scenarios that are as tight and fortified as Jack's 11 x 11 room and yet find a way out, a gap between the bars, a path toward resolution.  Room had me turning the pages, intent, always, on finding out what happened.  It is a book, as many have said, that won't be soon forgotten.

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Classic texts: On Becoming a Novelist

Among the many books I read or began reading this weekend was an old one by John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist.  I don't seem to do many things in the right order in this life of mine, and I should have probably read a few how-to's, or at least taken a university class, or something, before plunging into this writerly life of mine.  And yet, there's something very sweet about discovering, in Gardner, the sort of instructions or notions that I've stumbled my way toward by virtue of writing poorly for a long time and reading handsomely well.

From Raymond Carver's introduction to Gardner's text:

It was his conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a serious handicap.  But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs:  if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it.

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Half a Life/Darin Strauss: Reflections

Dignity is a word I have long associated with Darin Strauss.  His refined mind and sensibilities were on display in novels like Chang and Eng.  A certain quietude pervaded interviews.  When I learned that Strauss was sending a memoir into the world, a memoir entrusted to McSweeney's (and hence, in some fashion, to the multiply talented and deeply generous Dave Eggers), I knew for certain what I'd be reading next.

I read Half a Life this morning, grateful for every white-steeped page.  It is, as you must have heard by now, the story of an accidental death—the story of what happened one day when Strauss set out to play some "putt putt" with his high school friends.  He was 18, behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile.  On the margin of the road, two cyclists pedaled forward.  Of a sudden, there was a zag, a knock, an "hysterical windshield." A cyclist, a girl from Strauss's school, lay dying on the road. She'd crossed two lanes of highway to reach Strauss's car.  He braked, incapable of forestalling consequences.

It was forever.  It was always.  A girl had died.  A boy had lived.  Strauss spent his college years, his twenties, his early thirties incapable of reconciling himself to the facts, of entrusting them to friends.  There's much he can't remember perfectly.  There are gaps, white space, breakage—all of which, in this McSweeney's production, is rendered with utmost decency—the thoughts broken into small segments, big breaths (blank pages) taken in between.  There is knowing here, not shouting.  There is an exploration of guilt, and no bravado. 

Half a Life sits now, on my shelf, beside Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home—two memoirs that transcend precisely because they are so quiet, so well considered, so honorable. These books, along with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning, give me hope that memoir, the form, is finding its center again.  There may not be any sure-fired truths, but there are consequences.  There may be stories, but they are always tangled.  There may be ache, but there is solace, too.  There may be drama, but in drama's wake, we stand.  In need of understanding.  In need of one another.

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Proust was a Neuroscientist/Jonah Lehrer: Reflections

As a former memoirist and ever-ongoing blogger, I think and read a lot about memory—how it works, why it is so radically imprecise, how it shapes us.  I bought Proust was a Neuroscientist, then, because I was primarily interested in Jonah Lehrer's Marcel Proust chapter, subtitled "The Method of Memory."  What is new, I wondered, in memory science?  How did Proust, so many years ago, anticipate the workings of the brain while lying in bed writing and rewriting his so many pages? 

The Proust chapter didn't disappoint, yielding, as it does, the science behind such statements as "we have to misremember something in order to remember it."  But the rest of the book drew me deeply in as well, with its pairings of Auguste Escoffier and "the essence of taste," Paul Cezanne and "the process of sight," Igor Stravinsky and "the source of music," and Gertrude Stein and "the structure of language," among others. A former technician in the lab of Eric Kandel, Lehrer takes a thoughtful look at how some of the great artists anticipated, or somehow understood, just how the mind receives and assembles signals. 

So that we read, for example, that "[Stravinsky] realized that the engine of music is conflict, not consonance"—a fact neuroscience has underscored by proving that it is the "desperate neuronal search for a pattern, any pattern...that is the source of music."  Whitman, for his part, was certain that "when it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the stage" long before neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was able to provide scientific testimony on behalf of the "body loop."  Virginia Woolf wrote of the divided selves, the endless contradictions that inhabit (and haunt) our individual beings well in advance of the split-brain patient studies that demonstrated the chaos that lurks within.

"This is why we need art:  it teaches us how to live with mystery," Lehrer writes in his coda.  A simple claim, perhaps.  But a sustaining one.

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In one gigantic act of bravery

I decide (will I regret this later? I'll probably regret this later) to upload a clip from a dance practice session.  John (my instructor) and I are dancing to Natalie Merchant's wonderful rendition of "The Janitor's Boy."  We're not yet ready for showcase prime time (we have a few weeks more before the event) and Scott, who is recording this for us so that I can see all the things I have to fix (which would be plenty), is explaining to a passerby that this is a "campy" foxtrot.  Campy?  Me?  Really?

Whatever it is.  Whatever it may be.  I dance because it frees me from my own head, which is, at times, not the most eloquent or elegant place to be. 

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Spotted.....

This is to say thank you to my friends—Mandy, Kathye, Melissa, others—who have been sending me photos of Dangerous Neighbors on shelves in stores around the country.  I myself have not seen the book in an actual, breathing, humming store as of yet; my few forays in that direction had been met with the news:  But we just sold our last copy.  So I live vicariously through all of you, and this morning, through Melissa Walker, who wrote, as a caption to this photo she took:  Great placement for you on the lead shelf at B&N in Union Square! 

Thank you, B and N, and thank you, Melissa!  And what a great season of books in general.  What a time to be part of the chorus telling stories.

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Dangerous Neighbors: The Cecelia Bedelia review

The other day, my husband was driving us along in his jalopy (well, it's not really a jalopy; it just feels that way) when I spied a circa 1920s, lemon-toned vehicle puttering up behind us.  It made me happy, this open-to-the-sky old timer—because it exists, because it was and no doubt will again be driven on a blue, blue day.

Yesterday I was doing what I do (which is to say, I don't remember exactly what) when Jenny wrote to suggest that I take a look at the Cecelia Bedelia review of Dangerous Neighbors.  I clicked and dialed in, and I felt blue skies above me, a breeze through my hair.  I especially treasure this well-loved reviewer's sense about who this book might work best for:

Recommended for: fans of literary fiction, spectacular young adult literature, history, tragedy, deliverance, and descriptions so well rendered that they seem tinged with the magical. 

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Philadelphia, Dusk

(taken from the eastern end of the R5 platform at 30th Street Station, 7:17 PM, Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death in my bag)

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Lucky Life (again)

This morning, driving home from the dentist, I thought back on what the morning had already yielded.  Clean teeth, thanks to Loretta.  Time enough to read the Proust chapter in Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist (recommended to me by Haverford College's Tom Devaney).  Continuing email conversations—about John Gardner, about the after life of projects, about NYC graffiti, about children—with new and trusted literary friends. An invitation (thanks to Elizabeth Mosier and the generous folks of Bryn Mawr College) to spend some time in the company of the master writer, Rick Moody.  A peace-inducing note from my friend, the actor/activist/writer James Lecesne, about the why of writing, the real why.  An invitation to dinner with a beloved client.  A note reinforcing this afternoon's plans, where I will spend time down on the Penn campus with the editor of a favorite magazine, before going off to celebrate another client's grand achievement, before coming home, late, to a dinner with my husband.

And then these words, sent along by my poet friend, Joseph.  Subject line:  Beautiful Quote.  Quote:

 “The great interests of man:  air
and light, the joy of having a body,
the voluptuousness of looking."
             -Mario Rossi 

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Small Damages: my novel of southern Spain

There are books that one works on for years, then sets aside, then works again for years.  Small Damages, my young adult novel of southern Spain, has been that book for me, and when I finished it at last, six weeks or so ago, I felt reprieved.  Now I miss writing this book.  I suppose that happens.

We drive past groves of olive trees and vineyards, one road, then another to Seville.  The landscape grows used up and the air reeks with gasoline, and Miguel and I hardly talk, and when we do, he’s not letting me in on any secrets.  When the thick walls of the city are finally in view, Miguel slows down and sits forward and messes with the clutch.  He parks Gloria on one of those sidewalky streets, and I open my door and get out. 

Above us are balconies and orange-yellow building slopes, the slick of tiles, those lizards.  Nothing is tall but still and everywhere the buildings ribbon the sky into blue.  We walk along beside the fortress walls, letting the women with the strollers pass, turning our faces from car smoke, stepping out of the way of the streams of dog pee that trickle away from the walls.  Everything is different and everything’s the same, and I don’t talk, and Miguel doesn’t talk, and finally he stops and rings a bell.  I hear keys in the doors beyond the wall and then one iron grate door opens, and then another one does, and now I’m staring at some old lady in the courtyard of a house.  It’s like standing inside another doughnut, this one made of stone. 

The air is greenhouse air, hot and muggy.  The tiles on the floor are cracked.  A miniature fountain is filled up with oranges, half of them rotten, half green. There are white birds like small moths, swooping and perching.  A skylight overhead lets in the sun, and the stairs circle around, off to one side; they are iron and thin and they look creaky.  Whomever she is kisses Miguel on the cheek and tells him to go skyward, then tells me too, in Spanish.  She has been told about me, I can tell.  She is glad that my linen dress is ironed.  I feel her eyes on me as I climb the winding stairs up high, and now there are steps that twist the other way, and suddenly I’m on a rooftop standing not underneath but inside the sky.

I feel you turn inside me, swim toward the edge of us.

I feel dizzy but there is no wall to hold me.

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Before I ever knew what dancing was

(what it meant to lock the shoulders in, to ease the knees, to rock the hips, to let him lead) it looked like this to me.  Which is to say free.

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The Glamour of Grammar: the portmanteau

Despite the fact that I have two full shelves dedicated to grammar books, collections of quotes, and dictionaries, I am no linguistical babe.  I'm just going along for the ride, mostly, reading my grammar books like I might read a novel, stopping and grinning over the nuggets I find.

This morning, in Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar,  I was reading about blended words, otherwise known as portmanteaus—multidude, slackademic, Octomom, blog, even—and thinking back on all the fun I've had making up terms and getting away with it. I do more of that on this blog than I do in my fiction, but in the book that I've just completed writing, there are characters so set outside the norm of social exchange that their way of speaking necessarily involves their own idiosyncratic construction of language.  It was thrilling for one such as me, a rule breaker at heart, to live inside that sphere for the past few years.  I'm already missing the writing of that novel.

Oh, and yes.  That really is a chandelier hanging from the shovel face of a backhoe.  I found it yesterday upon leaving the gym, where I'd been Zumba dancing.

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Dangerous Neighbors/The Dear Author Review

It is true:  I have never quite understood how to write a big-bang, headline-grabbing, release-embargo of a book; I don't have a Mockingjay in me.  And so it means an awful lot when a reader chooses to fall in with a world I create—to spend time there, to give it a chance to breathe.  I read a review just now of Dangerous Neighbors that will stay with me for a long time.  The entire Dear Author review can be found here. 

Among the words that transcend for me:

Your writing style is one completely original to the world of young-adult books, and it’s beautiful.  So beautiful.  I read this book very slowly just to absorb the meaning of everything.  Every passage flowed and ebbed with emotion and depth.  This is the type of book that proves that the young-adult genre is more than just a commercial one.

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Andrew J. Bacevich to speak on behalf of The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series

On Monday, September 27, 2010, (7 PM, Connelly Center, Villanova University), Andrew J. Bacevich, PhD, a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, will speak at the second annual Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series. A graduate of West Point with a PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, Dr. Bacevich is a "Catholic conservative" and the author of the much-discussed The Limits of Power.  He is also a father who lost his own son, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, in action Iraq.

Having titled his talk "Whose Army?" Dr. Bacevich will reflect on civil and military relations in the U.S. since World War II, a talk that will inevitably move Dr. Bacevich toward a question he has recently asked in the press:  "Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"

My mother, in whose memory my father created this lecture series, would have loved the intellectual rigor that Dr. Bacevich will no doubt bring to this talk.  She would have loved knowing that her love of knowing was again bringing so many together.  This morning, in moving through my files in search of an elusive contract, I found instead an essay my mother had written while she was herself a student at Villanova.  Mom received her college degree late in life, but when she set down to academic business, she soared, earning top recognition as a scholar.  "Books are, have been, and always will be jewels of contentment for me," she wrote in the essay I was lucky enough to rediscover this morning.

A legacy passed on, in so many ways.

Please join us for this lecture, which is open to the public.

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Let's Take the Long Way Home/Gail Caldwell: Reflections

If there was ever a book I wanted the moment I heard of its existence, it was this one. 

If there was ever a book that conformed to my abstract idealization of it, it was, again, this one—Gail Caldwell's finely crafted, thoroughly beautiful, absolutely heartbreaking Let's Take the Long Way Home.  This is, of course, the story of Caldwell's dear friendship with the writer Caroline Knapp—the story of long walks taken with beloved dogs, of the glass face of rowed-upon water, of pasts and imperfections and desires entrusted, one to the other, of a cancer diagnosis and of a death, Caroline Knapp's, when she was at the prime of her life  and the center, in so many ways, of Caldwell's world.

Home is a memoir filled with perfectly wrought particulars:  "I often went out in early evening, when the wildlife had settled and the shoreline had gone from harsh brightness to Monet's gloaming, and then I would row back to the dock in golden light, the other scullers moving like fireflies across the water."  But it is also a memoir so wise and teaching, so fundamentally true ("...it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but breathing") that it occurrs to me that anyone who has ever suffered loss—which is to say anyone at all—should buy this book and keep it near for all the wisdom it has to offer. 

For that is what Home has most abundantly to offer—hard, lived-in wisdom for souls who lose and hearts that break.  Home is not a tale about how Caldwell survived the loss of her best friend, though Caldwell has survived.  It is instead both instruction and allegory on the power of kindness and small gestures, the fidelity of friendship and memory, the tenacity and tenuousness that make us our own complicated people in need of other complicated people.  Caroline Knapp is no longer here; she isn't.  But because Caldwell has written such an exquisite book, she can now be found, by all of us, in the bright, ephemeral gloaming. 

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My next three reads are in the house

and I am so excited. 

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In the classroom

I'm about to do one of my most favorite things, which is to get in the car and drive a little while and join a classroom of younger readers and writers.  This group of students had Nothing but Ghosts as required summer reading, and I'm going to try to recreate the making of that particular story for them before leading them toward writing of stories of their own.  We'll focus on spark points, tangents, and theme.

This, for me, is what it's all about.

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What do you do when Facebook blocks you from your own party?

This was the question that presented itself to moi about ten comments into the hour-long Facebook party we were throwing on behalf of Dangerous Neighbors.  You have abused the comment function, the Facebook blue box informed me. It will be hours, or perhaps days, before you can leave a comment again.

Oh. My.

This is why it's still good, in these social media days, to have a telephone nearby.  For that's the implement I used.  I picked up the telephone, called dear Amy Riley and persuaded her to be Facebook me, for at least a little while. She's darned good at any time, this Amy Riley.  She is also, I learned tonight, very fine in a crisis.  So, Amy, thank you for being me (the job is still open, if you can stand it) and Nicole, thank you for soldiering on, for all of us.

And thank all of you who came to our party.  We had a lot of fun.

If you don't understand any of this, well, then.  It's my blog.  And perhaps you had to be there.

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Gratitude to recent reviewers of Dangerous Neighbors

On this brilliant, beautiful morning I stop to thank three special reviewers of Dangerous Neighbors.  A writer is grateful, always, for those who take the time to read her books—who sneak them out from the tower of abundant choices and settle in.

My thanks this morning to reviewers who helped me think newly about this book that was so many things and represented so many dreams before it became Dangerous Neighbors:   Caribousmom, Amy's Book Obsession, and Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness.

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Talking books online, with Penn alumni and parents of Penn students

The fearless and fabulous Al Filreis, who (with his finely chosen cohorts) makes the world of the Kelly Writers House (at the University of Pennsylvania) turn, has recently posted this year's roster of online book discussion groups, which are conducted for Penn alumni and the parents of Penn students.  Those of you who might fall into either category should take a look at what is being offered here, which, in Al's words, "include a month-long group led by English professor Jim English on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go; Emily Steiner, distinguished medievalist, leading a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; a 10-day group on Nabokov's Lolita; others on writing about food, Edward Albee's plays, on anonymity and the internet, and the literature of bearing witness led by an award-winning Penn alumna writer."

I happen to be the Penn alumna writer conducting the discussion group on the literature of bearing witness, a full description of which is here:

In "Accident and Its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner," (Writing into the World), the exquisite essayist Terrence Des Pres reconstructs the death of John Gardner—a motorcycle accident, or was it an accident?—along a lonesome road (or was it lonesome?). In "Memory and Imagination" (I Could Tell You Stories), Patricia Hampl tells a story, several times, about learning to play the piano. The facts keep changing because Hampl's memory does, because memory is a tortuous bend; it is never, in Hampl's words, "just memory."

The past is loaded. Memory shifts. Yet we live in a world in which honesty matters. We want to believe the stories we tell ourselves. We want to believe one another. In this on-line discussion, we'll be exploring the perils of bearing witness with Des Pres and Hampl as our guide.

 I hope those of you who may be Penn folk and interested in any of the groups will get involved.  We're going to have fun.

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The flowers are ready (for the DN Facebook Party)

If much is unknown in my life at the moment, here are some of the facts:  A breeze blows in through my window at dawn.  I'll be joining a classroom of younger readers at a local school tomorrow, which must mean that school is back in session.  And flowers can get me through most anything.  These (now) virtual flowers are in honor of my virtual Dangerous Neighbors book party, which is happening tonight on the Beth Kephart author page of Facebook, 8:30 PM eastern time (see the sidebar tab on this blog).  We'll be conducting a live chat (mediated by Amy Riley and Nicole Bonia of Winsome Media, who actually know how such things happen).  We'll be playing some games.  And I'll be giving away a framed Centennial something, along with a signed book and some signed bookmarks.

We hope to see you there.

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I have finished and my vision's blurry

the first full draft of a book I have utterly rewritten (my longest novel ever, by several thousand words).  I have finished, and my eyes are blurry.  It's lack of sleep. It is emotion.  I need to print this book now, hold it on my lap, pay careful attention to each sentence, track the days to make certain that the day by day action is calendared right, pay careful attention to character diction.  That's the fun part.  The delicious part.  The work without anxiety part. 

But I need some sleep between now and then.

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My conversation with My Friend Amy

Amy Riley has been a force for good in my life since she mentioned my little blog on her very big blog and introduced me to her wide circle of friends.  She has known me through three books now, has generously supported each one, has taught me many things about books and life, and once I even had the chance to meet this book angel here, at the site of the first-ever Book Bloggers Convention, which she, but of course, helped organize.

A few weeks ago, Amy and I began an e-mail conversation that had me reflecting on the joys, fears, and behind-the-scene-ism of the writing life.  We talked at length about Dangerous Neighbors and about what's next and what I hope for and what I cherish.  It's all here.

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The story unfolds

but it only unfolds after you have lived with it for a long time, bargained pieces of it away in exchange for new space, new possibilities.  A story I have now written four times has, at last, lost its tenuous webbing and false bridges.  It has come unto its own.  I traded a 40 year old woman for a 14 year old girl.  I took retrospect and made it present time.  I took two elderly women and gave them a boy to raise.  I took darkness and pierced it with light.  I have thirty pages yet to write.

I will save them, with what I know now, for another sacred day.

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We're having a party (on Facebook, with a great giveaway)

We waited a few weeks, until Mockingjay grew just a tad quieter, to celebrate the launch of Dangerous Neighbors with a Facebook party.  I say "we" here, but in fact I refer to none other than Amy Riley and Nicole Bonia of Winsome Media, without whom I look tres retro (or is the word old-fashioned?) when it comes to celebrating, via social media, a new book.

But I digress.  What is happening is this:  On this Thursday, September 9th, from 8:30 to 9:30 PM eastern standard time, we'll be talking about Dangerous Neighbors live, having a contest or two, and offering what I hope you'll think is a really fun prize (or prizes).  I spent about two weeks looking for just the right thing with which to celebrate this book, and if you heard me hollering happiness yesterday, that's because I finally found it. 

So watch this space for more details, and go onto the new Beth Kephart Facebook page so that you can join in on the fun.  You can find that here.

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Dangerous Neighbors, Bookstack, and the review that filters in

I have learned, through the years, to step lightly in the weeks following the release of a book—to not search for reviews, to not hope for big things, to let the world find me, when the world is so moved.  I live this way knowing that I risk the possibility of failing to thank a good heart who has taken the time to read my book, and if I have failed to do that, I apologize.  But I cannot otherwise find the proper emotional balance to accompany the launch of a book.

This morning I've been at work on a novel that is undergoing an enormous transformation, and for the past six hours I've done nothing but work on a primary scene.  I turned for relief, just now, to my blog roll, and there found the cover of Dangerous Neighbors staring back at me.  The blog is Bookstack, one of my very favorites, for it is authored by Becca, a woman who has brought me news of many books that (she's always right) I've loved.  Becca is also a woman who understands what is to be the mother of a son already off on adventures.

Becca's words about Dangerous Neighbors will stay with me for a long time.  I link to them here, with gratitude.

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On the matter of acknowledgments

Yesterday, my copy of Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass arrived, a book I'll be eagerly delving into later this long weekend.  I've known Jay through much of this book's creation, have been privileged to read a long, early chapter, and have been astonished (and been made grateful) by the research-inspired stories that he tells.  In a few days, once I've finished reading, I'll be able to report on the book here in greater detail.

But for now, let me say this:  I may stand in the minority with this, but I believe that acknowledgments, in books, actually matter.  They tell us something about the person behind the story.  They tell us something about the web work of his or her life.  Jay's acknowledgments, in Kingdom, carry on across four pages, and from every sentence of thanks there leans humility and grace.  There are stories upon stories inside Jay's acknowledgments, and I am lucky to be among those noted.  But mostly I smile at Jay's words for his wife, Julie.  "I would skin a pack of wild dogs for you," he writes at the close of a long paragraph.  The thing is:  I'm pretty sure that he would.

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Still smooth sailing

I am happy to report (at 5:16 AM) that I have successfully awakened from the dream (nightmare) in which I arrived at a conference to give my Dangerous Neighbors talk with only my The Heart is Not a Size notes in hand.  One should be able to speak off the cuff about one's own books, you say?  Tell that to Beth, the nightmare dreamer.

Sidenote:  Melissa Firman, you may find it interesting that you were the one tasked with introducing me.  You did an excellent job.

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Storm coming in (a how I write post)

It's all different now — the way I write, the way I think about writing.  I had had goals, once — four pages a day, say, on writing days.  Now it works like this:  I spend a few hours each new scene day simply dreaming.  The next day I scribble thoughts and lists.  The next day I type some bad sentences into the computer, knowing that the next day, the fourth day, I'll write the scene in a way that will allow me to move on toward dreaming the next scene (though when I print the entire book, I'll no doubt rewrite every scene).

Once I wrote a scene each day.

Now it takes me four days to craft two, perhaps three new pages.

It's how it works for me now.  At least with this book.

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What is it

about old photographs—the way, more and more, they stop me in my tracks.  Here, on the pages, of a book my grandfather wrote, is a portrait of him and my grandmother young.  "We met at Shin Pound," the caption reads.  "The weapon was a borrowed prop."

Maybe I got my tomboy heart from her.  The tie and vest, so fashion forward, and so in sync with him.

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Must writers be likable? Does it help if they are? And who the heck am I?

Ask anyone who knows me well:  I have my flaws.  Here I am, for example, with my impatient face on, waiting for a berry to ripen.  Not any old berry, mind you, but the berry I want, which is taking its time in the sun.  (I may indeed be insulting the berry for its stubbornness, quietly, beneath my snappish tongue.)

Would my handful of very kind readers read me less (to continue) if they knew that:

• I combine the impossible traits of seeking perfection, impatiently?
• I write long books that become short books because so many of my original sentences are preposterously bad?
• I want to be writing, I want to be finished writing, I want to be writing again?
• (to be clear:  I'm inconsistent)?
• I fall asleep during the runway portion of every single "Project Runway" show?
• I create bullet lists pummeled by non-sequiturs (but not when clients are watching)?
• I love animals and own no animals, which is to say:  I'm a neat freak who remains inconsistent?
• I am mindlessly and heedlessly improperly punctuating this bullet list of flaws, because I think — no, perhaps I presume — that since it's my blog I have a right to do so?

These are among the issues that Jennie Yabroff does not exactly hit on in her Newsweek essay, "The Man We Knew Too Much," her thought-provoking essay on Jonathan Frazen, a man, she writes, who has critics praising his new book, Freedom, "without letting their feelings about the seemingly insufferably self-important writer color their views."  Will readers, she wonders, be as kind?

... the Internet has exposed writers to a level of personal scrutiny formerly reserved for pop stars and teen idols, making it difficult to separate how you feel about an author's personal life from how you respond to his work, despite your best efforts to read the writing, not the writer.  Gawker opines on which writers are "book hot," while publishing blogs report not just on how much authors receive for their books but also how they spend the money.

Yabroff is right, of course—it is difficult not to see, or to try to parse, the cults of personality now growing up among big-name, big-ticket writers—not just Franzen, but Gaiman, Green, Foer, Collins, and Rowling, to name but a few.  I remain, of course, under the radar, my flaws not subject to widespread discussion, my life not the stuff of Time cover stories or Huffington newsflashes.  But this question is interesting, and I present it to you:  Does what you know about who authors are influence your reading of their books?

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My mother's talents

I honestly don't think anyone ever had better home-made meals than us kids, growing up in my mother's house.  Her soups were healing, her meals were tender, her desserts (cheesecake, carrot cake, birthday cakes, sand tarts, checkerboard cookies, and oh! those Christmas cookies) were the kind you couldn't find anywhere else (no bakery, no restaurant)—not nearly as good, not nearly as well made.  She often worked just from an idea, not from recipes.  She seemed to take what she could do for granted—it was just something she did, this meal making, to keep us fed.  I wonder what she would make now of all the cooking shows, of all our rush to invent, create, make good with ingredients bought not at the Pathmark, which is where she shopped in those early years, but at Whole Foods and Farmers Markets. 

The older I get, the more effort I am putting into every meal.  When I succeed, it is the day's accomplishment.  I wish my mother had felt that way.  I wish we'd been able to convince her (for we tried) of just how good, how irreplaceable, she was.

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