Nothing to say, nothing to do

I've just now returned from visiting our son, happily ensconced in his third year of school.

Hey, he says.  And that's all I have to hear.  Everything riddling and wrong, everything knotted or unstrung fades away.  He's near.  I'm whole.  The sky is every color; the leaves are gold.

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Words to live by

This past Wednesday, while walking the hallways of the KIPP DuBois Collegiate Academy, I was stopped in my tracks by these seven words. 

Is there anything more to say?  I don't think so.

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The Pennsylvania Gazette Feature/Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt

The University of Pennsylvania has been extraordinarily good to me—inviting me to contribute to the pages of The Pennsylvania Gazette and Peregrine; trusting me to teach a small class of brilliant undergrads; putting me at the helm of an online book group; asking me to read with Alice Elliott Dark, or to sit on panels with Buzz Bissinger, or to join David Remnick for a Kelly Writers House dinner; and to come to know, even better, the likes of fellow teachers Jay Kirk and Karen Rile. 

Earlier this summer, John Prendergast, the editor of The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote to say that he'd read Dangerous Neighbors and that he looked forward to having a conversation.  We had that conversation on a sunny day sitting on a row of skinny benches while a tennis match played out before us.  I was my breathless, enthused, and sleep-starved self (as you'll read) and John was the thoughtful man he is.  Several weeks later, the photographer Chris Crisman and his team met me at Memorial Hall and put up with me long enough to take my picture.

It is a generous story, accompanied by one of my favorite scenes from the book.  It will always be cherished.  And Chris, thanks for pulling your camera lens back.  You know what that means to me.

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Oh, he said

"You're a photographer?"

"I have a camera," I said.  "And I like taking pictures."

"Then you have to come here," he started walking, "and see this."

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Philadelphia at Night: A Portrait (and a fine Dangerous Neighbors review)

I returned home from my afternoon at 1209 Vine to spend an hour reading the latest thoughts, impressions, and declarations of the online book discussion group that I've been leading for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.  I then turned right around, hopped the train once more, and headed back to the city for the launch of Jay Kirk's first book, Kingdom Under Glass, an altogether wonderful affair conducted within the halls of the Academy of Natural Sciences.

It was near midnight when I crossed the river and looked south, toward the newly rehabilitated Main Post Office Building at 30th Street.  My city photographs well, any time of day or night.

In between the travel and the book-club talk (and, okay, true, a few corporate assignations), I received word of this gorgeous review of Dangerous Neighbors over at Alison's Book Marks, which concludes with words that any writer of non-vampire texts yearns to hear:

Different from anything I have ever read before, Beth Kephart raises the bar on Young Adult novels. She proves that you don't need vampires and werewolves to capture this audience's attention, and bring them on a journey they will not soon forget.

  Thank you, Alison.

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Where the heart is: 1209 Vine Street, Philadelphia

Today I sat in a teacher's room listening to children sort b's from g's, and pigs from bibs, all under the encouraging eye of a reading tutor.  I watched a multi-purpose room take on countless purposes and, shortly after noon, absorb the ninth graders of Philadelphia's KIPP DuBois Collegiate Academy.  I listened to Kyle Zimmer, president and co-founder of First Book, as she told stories about the revolution that book ownership yields; listened to the mayor of my city compare books to passports; listened as one sponsor after another made promises they plan to keep about literacy, education, and tomorrow.  And then I watched as Dangerous Neighbors made its way into the hands of those KIPP ninth graders, stewards of our future, all.  There were so many people who made today happen, and key among them is a young lawyer named Heather Steinmiler, who seems to do many things in many ways on behalf of the children of Philadelphia.

My dear friend Jan Suzanne Shaeffer was in the room today, and it is because of her that I have these photos to share.  I looked out, saw her sunny face, and took calm from it as I stepped up to the microphone.

Gratitudes.

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By Nightfall/Michael Cunningham: Reflections

If I have at times been mildly bewildered by some of the plot points in Michael Cunningham's new novel, By Nightfall, I have never been less than enthralled by the sentences this artist makes, by the craftsmanship of this intimately close-over-the-shoulder rendering of one Peter Harris, aesthete in mid-life crisis. 

The story can be easily summarized—Peter and his wife, Rebecca, are comfortably married but perhaps privately disillusioned when Rebecca's much younger brother arrives, a beautiful bi-sexual with a wayward touch who is using drugs again.  Peter finds the brother's presence distracting, even deconstructing.  He is reminded, increasingly, of his own brother, now dead "of a virus." He questions nearly everything about him—his career as an art dealer, his history as a father, his reasons for marrying Rebecca—while maintaining, throughout most of the book, the sheen of business-as-usual.

We are given, through Cunningham, Peter's history, and at times I found it difficult to bridge connections between Peter the child, Peter the adolescent, and Peter the middle aged.  My disorientation was utterly beside the point.  For there are so many pleasures in this book, so many passages I envied for their ease and suggestible insights.  Let me share just two with you here:

Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness.  You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good.  We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it. 

Or how about this Gatsby-esque moment, which we find early on in the book:

They are crossing Central Park along Seventy-ninth Street, one of hte finest of all nocturnal taxi rides, the park sunk in its green-black dream of itself, its little green-gold lights marking circles of grass and pavement at their bases.  There are, of course, desperate people out there, some of them refugees, some of them criminals; we do as well as we can with these impossible contradictions, these endless snarls of loveliness and murder.

When I grow up, I want to write at least one sentence like at least one of those.

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Where do the years go, and the children?

He sat by the water's edge, thinking.  He was a student, here from Gabon.  He titled his poem, "The Dream of the American Soldier."

I miss him.  I miss all of them.  Five years have gone by, in the meantime.

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Joining the Mayor of my City, on behalf of First Book

It is the children, always the children, who give me hope.  The ones I've met in gardens, who shared their poems with me.  The ones who read Kipling out loud, so loud, that the story became a song.  The ones who extended my own vocabulary by giving me elements of theirs.

And so it is a tremendous honor to be asked to join Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter; Lehigh Valley County Executive Don Cunningham; First Book President and CEO Kyle Zimmer; KIPP Philadelphia Charter School CEO Marc Mannella; and Host Committee Chair Heather A. Steinmiller, among others, for a celebration of the good that books can do in children's lives.

First Book, which was mentioned in this recent New York Times Magazine story, was founded nearly twenty years ago by a corporate lawyer who tutored children at a soup kitchen by night—a lawyer who came to believe that books were critical to the health of families, and of nations, and who has, in the intervening years, overseen an organization that has delivered more than 70 million books to programs serving children in need.  KIPP Philadelphia Schools is a network of charter schools born of a nationwide system known as Knowledge is Power Program.  The event, which will take place at 1209 Vine Street this coming Wednesday, October 27, at 12:30 p.m., at the location of the KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy/KIPP Dubois Collegiate Academy, will kick off the Third Annual Book Bash, which will be held in New York on December 10, during the Pennsylvania Society Weekend.

I've been invited to talk a little bit about Dangerous Neighbors, a book that all 108 ninth graders will be given during the event.  You can't imagine how happy that makes me—to be part of a day in the life of a brand new school, talking about a city I love, talking about once and talking about tomorrow.  I thank Laura Geringer, Egmont USA, and the good people at First Book for all the convergence that has made this possible.

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You Are My Only: There, breathing

Sometimes the only way to finish writing a book is to read a book you haven't written, and this weekend I distanced myself from You Are My Only by reading By Nightfall, the new Michael Cunningham novel.  Between reading, I went off to Skippack.  I took a walk.  I took my big camera out and found my way to the back side of an old cottage at the Willows, where I discovered this tank, its clock forever corroded by time.

It was, all of it, a restoration.  I returned to my own novel in the middle of last night and read it through once more, adding, subtracting, but not by much. 

It is there.  It is whole now.  I can breathe.

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Dangerous Neighbors: The Philadelphia Inquirer Review

Sometimes angels appear in your life.  This has certainly been the case with Elizabeth Mosier.  To my great surprise and wonder, it is Elizabeth's review of Dangerous Neighbors that appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. I read these words and, literally, wept.  But mostly—mostly—it is how this review is written that takes my breath away.  Elizabeth Mosier explains this book better, and more beautifully, than I have ever been able to explain it myself.  She teaches and leads, in all that she does.

Teenagers can smell a fake, or a lesson, a mile away, so authenticity is key to persuading them to suspend their disbelief. In Dangerous Neighbors, Kephart's fifth book of young adult fiction, 1876 Philadelphia is rendered realistically in exquisite sensory detail: the flowers and foods and fabrics of the Centennial Exhibition, all the "noise and crush of progress" encroaching on a city once so quiet you could hear a runaway pig squeal in the street or a girl "flat-fingering" a Schubert piano piece.

This living history - the "unfinished pile of City Hall like a half-baked cake," the just-built Academy of Music, masted ships afloat on the Delaware - makes the old city new. But what makes Kephart's work feel true is its authentic adolescent sensibility, which she artfully conveys.

Here is 17-year-old Katherine's love for her twin sister, Anna, which sometimes seems like a battle unto death. Here, too, is Katherine's angry scrutiny of her unfashionable suffragette mother, who abandons home and hearth to fight for her daughters' futures. And here is romantic love as Anna experiences it: forbidden and dangerous, secretive and sweet (literally so, as Bennett the baker courts her with cranberry pie), a rebellion against her parents' matchmaking plans.

Kephart understands the trap and allure of being chosen - Anna is picked as the family's marriageable beauty, identical Katherine as their father's favorite - particularly for Katherine, a young woman who doesn't yet know who she is, whose future has vanished with her sister's death in a fast-changing Centennial world.


Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20101024_Girl_and_nation__coming_of_age.html#ixzz13GZi1ctU

Gratitude is an insufficient word.

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Because it's like this

Last Sunday I met Cat at Whole Foods. Cat is one of Elizabeth Mosier's two beautiful, artful daughters, and she had questions for me—questions about the writing life, the reading life, the remembered life.  Noting that I site many of my stories near my home—in or around Philadelphia, at the garden down the way, within the province of the four-cornered town, up and down the roads I've driven for nearly three-quarters of my life—she asked me to explain why.  She wanted, I think, to know what about this geography, this landscape inspires me.

I'm sure I didn't have an articulate answer.  Often, I don't.  I had, instead, all these images in my mind's eye—the slant of the sun, the black cows, the rows of unharvested corn, the pockets of color on the ridge at the Willows.  Today I went out and took a photo for Cat. 

This is it.

This is why.

This is because.

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The glamorous life? Celebrating White House/Black Market

Writing may be a lot of things, but it is not, most of the time, the glamorous life.  Let's take this past week, for instance.  Were you to have driven by my house at nearly any hour of the day/night, you'd have seen the lights in the old office burning.  If you had stopped to stare in (and thank goodness you didn't), you'd have born witness to yours truly—hair frazzled, eyes blackened, shoulders slumped, Phillies T-shirt on.  I was dumping ten chapters of a book and writing ten new ones.  I was chatting with the brilliant members of my online Penn book group (and let me tell you, these people impress).  I was writing magazine copy for my corporate clients and teasing out a suite of new proposals, and, yes, I will admit, I was sitting here crunching into yet another chocolate chip cookie.  This was my week, this is my life.  Glamorous it isn't.

Sometimes, however, one must be fit for the world, and over the next several weeks, I must somehow become worthy.  Or, at least, dressed for events that range from talks and school assemblies to wondrous lunches and book panels.

And where do I go, when I'm in need of some beauty?  To White House/Black Market, but of course.  The clothes fit and they withstand the test of time.  They have some razzle dazzle, some style.  Add to that the fact that this year, White House/Black Market celebrated its 25th anniversary by honoring those who have survived breast cancer (one of whom, I'm so proud to say, is my friend, Denise), and you get the kind of store that I believe in.  [I urge you to watch this incredibly moving video featuring the 25 women WHBM is celebrating.] 

At 5:30 this afternoon, I was there, at the Ardmore location, looking weary, acting overwhelmed, asking for favors.  Here's what I have going on, I said, and within minutes, thanks to the loving, competent, creative, patient staff there, I was—is the word equipped?—to be a social person again.

It means more than they could probably know.  So I'm telling them right here.

(Now if I could only fix my hair.)

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We're Still Alive (go Phillies!)

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He tells a story

The trees are losing their leaves.  It is my favorite time of year, and also the most melancholy.  I was here, working on revisions to YOU ARE MY ONLY, when my son called.  He'd written a story for his fiction workshop.  He was describing its warp and its weft. 

How did you get to be you? I wondered, as I listened, as I watched the leaves beyond the window fall.

For he has emerged as an extraordinary writer, a young man with an empathetic imagination, an ability to manage an exquisitely complex plot, a heart and a head tuned in to words.  He was my muse, always.  He is my teacher, increasingly.

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From whence did this blog come?

In April 2005, following a tremendous bout of insomnia, I began, again, to write poems, a medium I had sidestepped for years.  Soon I was working visually with those sounds and songs of the lines and, with my husband's help, converting my photographs into washes of color that could frame and hold each poem.

It would have been nice to publish a book like that, but when it became clear that that wasn't to be, I began a blog—became a self-published poet/photographer, if you will, until the blog took on a life of its own.

Today I wish to thank Sam Strike, for her Radnor High Hall of Fame story in Mainline Media News.  I wish to thank Colleen Mondor, too, for including me in her most recent, and provocative, edition of What a Girl Wants.

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The 13th book has a title

and that title is YOU ARE MY ONLY.  Words taken from the book itself, but calmly discovered by my agent, Amy Rennert, and her associate, Robyn Russell, during what was, for me, a panic-stricken week.  I now have editorial notes and will be spending the next few weeks deep within the book, stretching characters and scenes.  If I am less than present in the blog-o-sphere during that time, I hope you will forgive me.

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On Waiting

Years ago, I received a call from a local high school about a young poet who hoped to spend some time working with me.  He had been an inconsistent student, but teachers had seen, in his writing, in his habits of reading and of mind, great promise.  I invited him into my world.

He was, as it turns out, extraordinary, and in his first assignment for me (for he was a photographer as well as a poet, and we had much in common and then again, hardly anything at all in common), he photographed this place.  He wrote it down.

Yesterday, while waiting for notes on a novel, I traveled to his (I will always think of it as his) abandoned greenhouse, stole past the fence and the no trespassing signs, and stood—wondering what became of him, wondering what would become of the novel.  A question gets asked, and a door opens.  Glass breaks.  Sun fights its way in.

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Great House by Nicole Krauss/Reflections

It is a book that folds.  It is a book whose mysteries are coiled and whose resolutions are many and mostly what we see coming wasn't what was coming after all.  With Great House, Nicole Krauss has assembled a somber, riveting meditation on the place of things in our lives (symbolized, in this case, by a massive, 19-drawered desk).  She has introduced fantastical details into harrowing, philosophizing prose.  She has declared fifty-year-old women old and mothers incapable of protection and children capable of lies and fathers capable of loving too much and too little, and, mostly, lovers incapable of knowing one another.  She has declared writers incapacitated, and also incapacitating.  It is raw.  It is hugely sophisticated.  It is frightening, it induces a form of wonder, to imagine living inside this book for as many years as Krauss as surely lived inside this book.

Great House is featured on the cover of today's New York Times Book Review.  It was nominated, this past week, for a National Book Award.  Word of this book is everywhere, and you don't need me to lay out its plot—such as it is—or to explain how it is an interlocking of short pieces that build to a long piece that step back down toward a quiet denouement that is, nonetheless, full of psychic violence.  You only need to know what the prose sounds like, how the searching scratches deep into the page, and so I will quote from it here, leave you to your own devices:  Read it or not. 

The words of a protagonist-writer:

And as we spoke a picture of myself emerged and developed, reacting to S's hurt like a Polaroid reacting to heat, a picture of myself to hang on the wall next to the one I'd already been living with for months—the one of someone who made use of the pain of others for her own ends, who, while others suffered, starved, and were tormented, hid herself safely away and prided herself on her special perceptiveness and sensitivity to the symmetry buried below things, someone who needed little help to convince herself that her self-important project was serving the greater good, but who in fact was utterly beside the point, totally irrelevant, and worse, a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words.

The words of a lover:

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break.  And it's there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

The words, again, of a lover:

All my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin.  Imagine myself into her loss.  Trying and failing.  Only perhaps—how can I say this—perhaps I wanted to fail.  Because it kept me going.  My love for her was a failure of the imagination.

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An Afternoon with Jessica Francis Kane

Every now and then, an author whose book I loved emerges from her brilliant pages and becomes a correspondent, an email friend.  That has been the case with Jessica Francis Kane, whose The Report is an immaculate work of fiction—bright, sensitive, complex, provocative.  I found the book almost by accident at this year's BEA.  I read it in a matter of days.  I enthusiastically endorsed the novel here, and Jessica and I began a correspondence that I have treasured. 

Today, Jessica came to town—or to a town thirty minutes down the road—and kept an entire coffee shop in her thrall while she answered questions put forth by the proprietor of Wolfgang Books, the sort of innovative independent bookstore that makes me proud (once again) of the Independents.  It was, in all ways, a lovely afternoon—an affirmation of all the good that still percolates up and through fine books.

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What literature is

what literature is:  that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.

Quoted by Dwight Garner in his New York Times review of Roland Barthes' posthumously published Mourning Diary.

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On the eve of my twentieth year, I declared

Perhaps the greatest gift that a speaking invitation yields is the chance (the excuse) to stop and collect one's thoughts.  That's what I've been doing these past few days, as I prepare for the talk I'll be giving at the Radnor Memorial Library in mid-November.  I want to read from Dangerous Neighbors that night, and I briefly will.  But I also want to look back at the road that brought me here—at the bad poems and the kind criticism, at the doors that opened and shut, and, mostly, at the percolating passion I have always had for my city.

In hunting for proof (or explanation) of this passion, I have come upon strange, forgotten queries, notes, promises, explorations, and exhortations, including a history of West Philadelphia that I decided to write (apparently for no one) at the age of 23.  I have also discovered this fragment of a poem, penned on the eve of my twentieth birthday, misplaced apostrophe and all. 

"The city is my lifetime," I declared, hints of the grandiose abounding.  It could not yet have been (despite my "long living").  It is, perhaps, now.

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A Break Out Book? A girl can dream

My husband is of the opinion that an artist (or writer) should simply know when a work is done, or right, and I admire the notion, respect the theory.  But there is also, for me, something peace-giving, something necessary, about a trusted reader's response.  Late yesterday, at the end of an angst-filled many weeks, my agent called to let me know that she had read this wholly rewritten book of mine—this book that began as one kind of adult novel, became an utterly different kind of adult novel, and then, in the fury-heat of this past summer, was rewritten for a different audience and sold on the basis of early July pages to Egmont USA.  I have cared so deeply about this book, believed so thoroughly in it, and yet, to be alone with your own raw book is to be alone with your own raw self, and sometimes the soul seeks ease. 

I now have the ease of Amy Rennert's words to me:  Beth, this is your breakout book.

Perhaps number 13 will be lucky number 13.

I would really like that to be so.

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The Perils of Bearing Witness

In a few days, I'll be teaching this online book club discussion for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania—revisiting familiar texts and reviewing some new ones as we weigh the perils of bearing witness—to our own lives and to the lives of others.  Among the many seemingly "simple" assertions we'll consider is this one, made by Patricia Hampl in her essential text, I Could Tell You Stories: 

Memoir must be written because each of us must possess a created version of the past.

 Agree?  Disagree?

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On Stage

His hand had splintered in the meantime

and we were no younger than before

and the poem of us

is the try of us,

and he had found the song.

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These are the legs

of one of the best amateur dancers the nation has ever seen.  It was a privilege to share the stage with her during yesterday's showcase rehearsal.

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A weekend of dance

It has crept up on me—the DanceSport Academy Annual Showcase—a many-hour extravaganza of dance-loving people having fun.  Or, we tell ourselves that it's fun.  Or, afterward, no matter what has happened, we remember it as being fun.  I prefer those waiting-in-the-wings moments, hidden behind the curtain, watching my friends.  I yield, every time, to the camaraderie.  I try to forget that I've been too buried in corporate work to give the performances my rehearsing all.  I'll dance a Viennese waltz with my husband—tune out the nerves, listen for the song.  I'll dance that campy, broom-swinging fox trot with John Larson.  I'll take photographs in between and hope that one or two of them turns out.

The photograph above was taking during a Dancing Classrooms final.  These are children, the flower fallen from her hair.  These are kids, enjoying their now.  I'm going to be thinking about them when I take the stage.  I am going to remember that, no matter what happens beneath the spotlight, it's a lucky thing to have bend in your knees and hope tucked in your heart.

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The heart pounds; it is rewarded (a Dangerous Neighbors review)

Booking Mama dresses her blog in pink, and so this bloom is for her, for she has read Dangerous Neighbors and given it the kindest review.  I will be honest:  my heart pounded when I realized she'd posted her thoughts.  One feels an enormous responsibility to readers who have been thoughtful and helpful to earlier books, and when I published Dangerous Neighbors, which is indeed quite different from my other novels, I worried about losing some of the faithful.  I am so grateful that Booking Mama opened her heart to this story.

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What are you working for?

I didn't have time for Zumba today, of course I didn't.  Stay at your desk, I told myself.  Just keep working.  Get that project done, make that call, return that email, write that story, do not stop because if you stop you'll be behind again. 

On the one hand, the chance to draw a thin blue line through another four to do's.

On the other, my friends, a little morning laughter, sweat.

What are you working for? I asked myself.

So that I can live, I answered me.

I was out the door.  I was at the gym.  Standing beside Sarah.

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Dangerous Neighbors: The School Library Review

I have Egmont USA's Greg Ferguson to thank for inspiriting this afternoon with the good news of a very kind School Library Journal review for Dangerous Neighbors, the final words of which I quote here, and Pamela Sedor and Ann Pagano to thank for the Radnor Memorial Library event poster above.

I honestly don't know what I'd do, on some of these darkish, headed toward winter days without this kind of light.

Thank you.

Ultimately, it is through chance meetings with “dangerous neighbors” and caring strangers that Katherine begins to consider the possibilities of her own life going forward. Her forgiveness of Bennett and herself gives birth to a sense of hope and helps this tenderly crafted story end with a positive spin. Kephart has painted a vivid picture of the Exhibition. Readers can practically smell the roasted peanuts and feel the bruise of crowds shoving by as she creates a lively setting against which a quiet, desperate struggle is played out.–Karen Elliott, Grafton High School, WI(School Library Journal)

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In search of a title

What do you do when the very perfect title you'd picked out for your new book is—uncomfortably, sadly, a fact discovered late in the game—a title David Foster Wallace used for a short story a few years back?  What do you do when nothing else seems to fit?

You find a quiet place in which to think, for one thing.

And you call your son, a genius at titles, among other things, who, years ago, when a certain untitled book was a day away from final catalog copy, called out to you, from where he was writing,

But Mom, he said, isn't that book (a memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man) about how there is still love in strange places?

Still Love in Strange Places? you said. 

Yeah, he said.  Something like that.

Two minutes later you were on the phone with Alane Mason, your W.W. Norton editor.  We have a title, you told her.  She didn't skip a beat.  She agreed.

Late last night, you called your son.

I need another miracle, you said.

Give me a day or two, he told you.

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An evening at the Kelly Writers House

This is the season during which the work days never end, and the skies darken for long stretches, and the rains come, and the tree limbs scratch their chaos into the tired stucco walls of this house.

This is that season, again.

But last night, through what was cold and what was dark, I made my way by train and collapsed umbrella to the University of Pennsylvania campus, which Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian have turned into a second home for me.  I traveled there to hear New Yorker editor David Remnick speak of journalism—then and now.  I traveled to sit with my dear student Kim, and to hear of her life, how it unfolding.  I traveled for the chance to chat with the great fiction writer and teacher, Max Apple. I traveled to sit among students intent on learning all they can—there, here, now—and among teachers and working writer/editors (Dick Pohlman, Avery Rome, more) who are generous with their own stories.

A gift, all of it.

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From the novel newly sold

The light of the real day is gone.  The lamplight is harsh.  My mother’s hands are blue blooded and thin and heavied down with her chin, and in the silence I remember her years ago, on the floor of a lost house, beside me.  She’d bought a long roll of waxed white paper and pots of finger paints and said, “We’ll paint what we dream.”  There wasn’t white in her hair.  There wasn’t night beneath her eyes.  She’d unrolled the paper across the whole wide of the floor and all afternoon we painted dreams.  Hers were blue like sky.  Mine were yellow-pink, like sun.  Afterwards, for the whole next week, her fingers were the color of the purple inside shadows.

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When the black squirrel flies

(taken yesterday, on a certain college campus, while walking with a certain beautiful son.)

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Gratitude for the Cybils Nomination

My thanks go out this morning to 1st Daughter of There's a Book, who has been so kind to Dangerous Neighbors, and who (a friend whispered in my ear) has nominated the book for a Cybils Young Adult Fiction Award.

I owe her a bouquet like this, and more.

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A novel in which everything is perfect is waxwork

I find this in the NYTBR Jeanette Winterson review of By Nightfall, the new Michael Cunningham novel. 

I find it, and I celebrate it:

Good novels are novels that provoke us to argue with the writer, not just novels that make us feel magically, mysteriously at home.  A novel in which everything is perfect is a waxwork.  A novel that is alive is never perfect.

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Happy Birthday, Aideen

It was her one day.

She wanted none but the dark

and the dance of us.

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Through the rain, he came

Those of us on the east coast were hammered all yesterday and late last night by rain.  It was unremitting and sometimes cruel—felling trees, swelling rivers, flooding homes—and all the while the wind whipped and through it all, my son was coming home.  He'd made the plans two weeks before.  He was to have arrived by 10 PM, the passenger in a friend's car.

I stayed at my desk, working, picking up his intermittent texts—we're near the tunnel, we're through the tunnel, we're close to the fifth exit—until finally a text announced the name of a neighboring town, and then at last he was home.  I don't think the kid has ever been hugged that hard.  I don't think he's ever looked that good.

What am I today, but grateful—to his friend, for driving intelligently; to the forces that be; to him.  Nothing we win or do or are promised in this life can matter like the people we so deeply love.

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