Towering Books

We had to move four of our 14 bookshelves ten inches west.  I had cleared but two of them and stepped back when I felt a wave of—despair? gluttony? overwhelm? joy?  Yes, I knew I had been triple stacking my books.  Yes, I knew that there were plenty of them, that every month or so I am compelled to donate a dozen or more to my local library, and still I navigate book spill.

Still, seeing a mere fraction of my total books out there, like this, on the floor produced in me a desire to go get some air.  I opened the front door.  I looked down at the stoop.  There sat a box of ten brand new books, all sweetly wrapped and virgin.

Call me what you will, but at least there's this:  I put my money where my mouth is, when it comes to books.  I buy because I love these things, and because buying helps keep my industry alive. 

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The Quickening Maze/Adam Foulds: Reflections

These are among the things required of a reader:  Patience.  A willing suspension of disbelief.  Time.  The withholding of judgment (at least for awhile).

I brought these things to Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze.  I also brought the elevated expectations that I associate with Man Booker Prize finalists, not to mention my interest in insanity and asylums.  I felt at home within the very first pages. Foulds' prologue sings; it augurs:  He'd been sent out to pick firewood from the forest, sticks and timbers wrenched loose in the storm.  Light met him as he stepped outside, the living day met him with its details, the scuffling blackbird that had its nest in their apple tree.

It was after that that I lost and never did quite regain my footing in this historical novel purportedly about John Clare, the nature poet, and his time (1837) at an asylum called High Beach.  The story has all the makings of greatness—appearances by the poet Alfred Tennyson (who lives nearby because his melancholic brother has been committed), tangents involving forest-inhabiting gypsies, a population of mentally ill and delusional patients, a lonely teen girl and her too-beautiful friend, the wrongly committed and the wrongly empowered, and a starring role by Matthew Allen, who owns the asylum and dabbles in impossible industrial ventures. Though billed as a novel about John Clare "and his vertiginous fall into madness," we see about as much of him as we do the other members of this sprawling cast, and therein, I think, lies the problem.  So much cutting in and out within the confines of a relatively short book diffuses, so that what might have a deeply engaging story—a story of a man losing, finding, losing himself—becomes a puzzle of too-many parts, forcing the reader (this reader) to focus primarily on the mapping of characters as opposed to Clare's internal combustion. 

I struggled, in other words, to suspend my disbelief.  I struggled to believe in these characters as people.  I found myself thinking far more about the mechanics of the novel—about how it had been made, about novelistic choices.  With the important exception of the prologue, which is gorgeous, I was also far too aware, all the way through, that I was reading, by which I mean:  I kept studying the composition of the sentences, rather than losing myself to their sense or meaning.

I am—of course—in the minority with this, and every book has its right and proper audience.  Let me hasten to say, finally, that I will absolutely read another Foulds title, for his talent intrigues, as does his capacity to locate a truly interesting place and time in history.

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A talent for reading

This is my incredibly beautiful niece, C—queen of the lacrosse fields, a fifth grader taking sixth grade math, a practicing piano student...and a reader.  She professes to having read every single Benedict Society (late at night, for hours at a time), is caught up, fast, within the worlds of Rick Riordan, and has now read The Penderwicks four times through.  "You buy me the best books," she whispered to me, this Thanksgiving, words that made me happier than I can say—words that sent me straight back out to the bookstores yesterday, looking for the right next things for C's library.  There's something that binds readers, isn't it true?  And C and I will always have this—these books we love to share. 

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Never Let Me Go/Kazuo Ishiguro: Reflections

I stood in the Orlando airport bookstore at 6 AM, searching for a story.  There were the usual suspects—Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Cutting for Stone, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Half-Broke Horses, Sarah's Key, Little Bee—some of which I've already read, some of which I'll never read, and then there was Never Let Me Go, the Kazuo Ishiguro novel recently made into a feature film.  If I knew little about the story, I knew I'd loved Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and so I put my fifteen dollars down and made my way toward the gate.

Readers of this blog know that I'm not a fan of a certain kind of science fiction, and for the first several chapters of this book, I found myself in unfamiliar territory, reading of "carers" and "donors" and "completing." My guide to this strange land was a narrator, Kathy, who gets to explaining it all in her good time.  She retraces her childhood history in an odd school called Hailsham.  She tells us of her best friends, Ruth and Tommy.  She withholds, for a time, the worst of the facts animating her life only because those facts are to her mere (or almost mere) matters of fact, and because what interests her is what interests the rest of us:  love, friendship, fate, the tiny nearly indiscriminate details that turn a life this way or that.  She is calm when she has no right to be.  She is human, except, perhaps, she is not.  She is bound to a destiny laid out for her by a world that has found a way to cure the big diseases, at a cost she never labels horrific, grotesque, nightmarish, unright.  She leaves such judgments to us. 

As a narrator, Kathy relies on no flourishes, few metaphors, a paucity of adjectives.  She reveals what she remembers in the order that she remembers it, and so that means we read through a maze of clauses that begin, "What happened then was..." or "Before I get to that I should explain..." or "Another thing I noticed was...."  Kathy's not a writer.  She's a carer.  Kathy's not like you and me; why should she dress her story up?  If I typically want more from the sentences on the page, I was, by mid-book, perfectly satisfied with Ishiguro's artistic choices and anxious to see the story through.

I finished the book just now, having risen early to complete it.  I am left haunted—moved as every human being should be by the prospect of a world in which health (the power of some over the destiny of others) is the awful great divide. 

I had, by accident, left The Quickening Maze at home.  I'll start on that this afternoon.

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Our Holiday Greetings

The holidays give me an excuse (and I love having this excuse) to work with my artist-husband on a homemade card, something we've been doing for what seems like a good forever.

This year, Bill, who has been working with complex software to model and en-robe fantastical figures, decided to create a juggler who, it seemed clear to us, was a master of joy.  And so on this One Day Past Thanksgiving, I send his joy (and ours) out to you.

Happy Holidays!

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Happy Thanksgiving

I have everything to be thankful for today.  Two blessings sleep above me while I write.  My friends are out there, out here, alive.  My garden sleeps; it waits for me.  My books are near (new titles, old favorites).  I am aware of gifts—physical, felt. 

And the world turns.  And the world is.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Just Kids/Patti Smith: Reflections

I couldn't stop reading Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir.  I was supposed to be doing other things—was in the land of mouse ears and Grumpy, among writers and teachers, in a hotel nestled around this cloud-reflecting lagoon.  But Patti Smith writes poetry, she tells a story, she searches for truth, and Just Kids is so full of the surprising line, the arresting scene.  It's full of Patti Smith herself, a rock and roller with a vulnerable heart, a scorcher of a performer who nonetheless craves the sacred companionship of books.

Just Kids is advertised primarily as the story of Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and that it is.  But it is also the story of Smith's ascension through art—the years she spent choosing between buying a cheap meal and an old imprint, between being an artist or a writer, between being Mapplethorpe's lover and his best friend.  She tells us about the conversations that generate ideas among artists and friends, about coincidences that set a life on its path, about the clothes she wore and the mis-impressions she couldn't correct, about a kind of love that is bigger than any definition the world might want to latch onto it.  She yields an entire era to us, and though her writing is all sinew, strength, and honesty, she does not once betray her friends, does not invite us to imagine privacies that should remain beyond the veil.

This is, then, a revelation of a book, an exemplar.  I could quote from every line.  I'll simply give you the beginning:

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River.  I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge.  The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle.  A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

You don't assess writing like that.  You honor it. The National Book Award Nonfiction Panel got this one just right.

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Priya Ganesan reads Dangerous Neighbors

Among the dozens of emails that floated in during my short time away was one from dear Priya Ganesan, one of two sisters I often write about here.  Priya and Maya have been part of my blogging world from the very start, and they are not just bright and important young ladies (writers, readers, academic stars); they are model sisters.

Thus, when Priya wrote to say that she'd read Dangerous Neighbors, I was eager to hear what she had to say.

I'll let you discover her wonderful words for yourself.

Thank you so much, Priya.  These holidays begin with you.

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My ALAN moment

I found myself in Orlando at the ALAN convention; I also found co-Egmont USA authors James Lecesne (Virgin Territory) and Tricia Rayburn (Siren).  Egmont USA's Katie Halata, who coordinated our days so spectacularly, is snapping this photo. I didn't know what to expect of ALAN; this was my first time there.  But what I found were teachers who—mostly on their own dime, taking their own vacation days—had carved out time to learn about new stories and where they come from.  There is a powerful commitment to our young out there; I felt the heat and passion of it through the day and over the course of the dinner that Katie hosted—a dinner that included such guests as Matt Skillen, Susan Groenke, Melanie Hundley, Shannon Collins, Steve Bickmore, and incoming ALAN president, Wendy Glenn.

ALAN is a class act.  I was proud and happy to be there.

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Taking Patti Smith and Adam Foulds for a Ride

Because Lilian Nattel is a very brilliant author and reader, I trust her, and when she sang the praises of Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze back in late June, I knew I'd be reading the book sooner than later.  And when the dear and deep and perpetually risk-taking Elizabeth Hand wrote (long before the National Book Award list had been unveiled) that I absolutely had to read Just Kids by Patti Smith (she'd reviewed it for the Washington Post), I said, All right, Liz.  I will.

Yesterday, released for the afternoon from client work, I headed to the Chester County Book & Music Company, which is another version of paradise on earth.  We're talking an indie book store here that feels a city block deep, and those who work there stack their favorite reads up and down end shelves.  I get lost there, and I don't mind one bit. 

This afternoon, I board a plane.  Smith's coming with me.  So is Foulds.

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How to Read the Air/Dinaw Mengestu: Reflections

I have been struggling to find a simple way to recount the deeply quiet, deeply moving nature of Dinaw Mengestu's second novel, How to Read the Air, a novel that feels so searching, so dispelled that it is difficult to remember that it is not, in fact, memoir.

Air is the story of a young man so scarred by the anguish, anger, and finally submerged violence of his parents—Ethiopian immigrants who did not grow up to become themselves in this land of opportunity—that he lives at terrible remove from himself.  Jonas is the name of this unlucky couple's son, and as the novel opens he is newly in love with a lawyer, Angela, whom he will soon marry.  In short order (and with Angela's help), Jonas gets a job teaching English at a New York City academy.  In similarly short order, the two begin to carve out psychic and spatial distances within their 500 sf basement apartment.  There are lies that they do and do not tell one another.  There are games played and never won.  Jonas is a man who won't be provoked, and often that looks like indifference to Angela, who is desperate to know that she is truly loved.  That she is safe inside that love.

Don't all relationships hinge on conversation, of some sort?  Don't we expect each other to answer questions, to reflect back, to find some center of perceived truth?  Is civility just as cruel as violence, when the civility feels empty, fraudulent?

Jonas is not a bad man.  Indeed, he is a character with whom readers can easily empathize, and that is because Mengestu makes us privy to the now and the then of the thoughts in his protagonist's head.  We see him sifting his parents' past, looking for clues.  We see him leaning on fabrications, assumptions, and possibilities to give himself a sense of place, or having once been placed, inside the tether of a home.  If he is able to construct the story of his psychic inheritance for his students, he is not able to deliver that story to his wife, and she requires such binding in.  If he is able to know what love is, what it should be, he is unable to act on what he knows:

In our rush to presumably better ourselves we had both missed what had otherwise always been obvious—that it often didn't take much more than careful consideration of each other's needs to secure a degree of happiness.

There is an impeccable quality to Mengestu's prose—a calm, collected rise to despair and violence.  He puts a smooth-faced mirror to life—giving us much that we don't know (the plight, let's say, of Ethiopian immigrants) and giving us so much that we can at times know all too well.

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A metaphor is:

"Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer's metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition."

— Leon Wieseltier, in his gorgeous New York Times Book Review review of Saul Bellow:  Letters

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See you in Orlando (?)

This is Thirtieth Street Station, Philadelphia, 'round midnight, snapped with my raspberry-colored SONY digital that is a lot happier taking wide angles than it will ever be deployed in an up-close shot.  I'll be taking that camera with me on my quick jaunt to the ALAN conference, in Orlando, and I'll also be taking my love of this city as I talk about Dangerous Neighbors on an historical fiction panel also featuring Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Jeanette Ingold.

(And once I see dear fellow Egmont USA author James Lecesne there's no telling what I'll be talking about!)

Maybe I'll find some of you there.  I hope so.

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Mayor Michael Nutter, First Book, and Yours Truly: A Few New Scenes

Readers of this blog know that I had the privilege of spending part of an afternoon with the students of KIPP, in the company of Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, in celebration of First Book, that wonderful organization dedicated to ensuring that every child has a book to call his or her own. More than 100 copies of Dangerous Neighbors were given to the ninth graders that day, a chance for the Mayor, First Book President Kyle Zimmer, and me to spend some time with young Philadelphia readers.

This morning, Regina Cronin sent along the photographs taken by Michael Tolbert—images that return to me memories of a most spectacular day. Thank you, Regina and Michael (and First Book and Mr. Mayor).

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Leaf Loss

They had held on the leaves, my leaves.  The persimmon of the maple trees.  The sun of the ornamental pear trees.  The oaks, with their resilient hints of green.  But in the night (two nights ago), the winds blew hard, and the rains fell slanted, and the leaves could hold on no more. 

Autumn escaped me.  It always does.  And now winter is blowing in.

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You Are My Only (an excerpt)

My Keds make whisper hurry hurry sounds across the cement walk.  In the broken places, in the cracks, it’s getting sloppy.  I feel a dampness sinking in around my toes and wish I’d remembered socks, but I’m not going back and it isn’t cold, just a little chilly beneath the eye of the moon.  They searched the whole woods—the police and their dogs.  They went partway up the railway tracks on the opposite side of the trees, until, with the dark and the rain, they called for quitting and asked for more photos, said they would call out all the forces.  I don’t know where they’ll go tomorrow, what leads they think they have, who they imagine would do this, or why, what time they’ll drink their coffee and start.  But I can’t wait. I won’t. The moon is my lamp, and I follow.  My heart is a sick, soft place, and my lungs are very small.

 — excerpt, You Are My Only (forthcoming from Egmont USA, fall 2011)

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When will you, can you, write the perfect book?

I spoke, last night, about having not yet written the perfect novel.  I wonder how many authors ever really think they have?  But this morning, my father wrote, and then another (we call her Soup), following up with that train of thought, both asking a version of, Do you see your writing coming closer to the perfect book?

And the answer, honestly, is this:  I am taking more risks.  I am pulling harder on language.  I am going darker and deeper, and coming up lighter; I am balancing more ambiguity for longer stretches; I am working those broader swaths of gray.  I want to achieve a work of art that lasts.  I want to be able to read every line in an entire book aloud and not be swept through—at any point—with the sudden desire to change a word, drop a prefix.

Writing is hard. If I thought I'd mastered it already, I'd be done.  I don't want to be done.  Not yet.

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Eating our cake (too)

Last night, at the Radnor Memorial Library, I had the chance to look back over a lifetime of wanting and dreaming.  Opportunities such as that one don't come around too often, and they only exist because other people make them happen.  And so this morning I would like, first, to thank Pam and Molly, of the library, dear souls both, who set the chairs in perfect rows, ordered in a beautiful cake, mixed up a cranberry punch, and (mostly) put up with me and my projection nerves.  Thank you to Hannah of Children's Book World, who arrived with so many books in hand.  Thank you to Jim, who filmed the talk.  Thank you to my husband, Bill, whose tech know-how enables me to tell the stories I want to tell.  Thank you to my dad, who comes every time.  Thank you to my friends who kept the promises they'd made and trekked out in the rain.  Thank you to the Radnor community and to the teachers in neighboring districts and to the students who will be writers one day.

I worried the weather would keep you away.  Thank you for being brave.

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Radnor Memorial Library Talk: A glimpse at this evening's remarks

Where does our love for stories begin?  Who yields to us the possibilities?  Of what is an author made—or a dreamer?  It started for me, way back then, with parents who loved me, and who loved one another.  This photograph is taken from a scrapbook that my mother began for my father in the early 1960s.  It was his Christmas present.  My parents were only just beginning to build their lives, but my mother understood that it was important both to live well—alivedly, happily, with music, with puppets, with hula hoops and fanciful cakes—and to remember how that living had gotten done.  She captioned the photos she collected for my father, pasted them onto black paper, and in her Christmas note to him wrote that, “It’s not very evident at times, but I did restrain myself from being too corny.” 

Tonight I’m seeking patterns and meaning in the lyric of my own life.  I’m questing after answers:  Where does our love for stories begin, and how do we love those stories back?

Please join us at the Radnor Memorial Library, 114 West Wayne Avenue, Wayne, PA, for a talk about life, my city, and Dangerous Neighbors. 

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Poets are solitaires, with a heightened sense of community...

Bill Moyers:  Do you remember the first time you truly experienced words, somehow, as part of your being?

Stanley Kunitz (poet):  I used to go out into the woods behind our house in Worcester, Massachusetts, and shout words, any words that came to me, preferably long ones, just because the sound of them excited me.  "Eleemosynary," I recall, was one of my favorites.  "Phantasmagoria" was another.

***

Moyers:  Once in East Africa on the shore of an ancient lake, I sat alone and suddenly it struck me what community is.  It's gathering around the fire and listening to somebody tell a story.

Kunitz:  That's probably how poetry began, in some such setting.  Wherever I've traveled in the world, I've never felt alone.  Language is no barrier to people who love the word.  I think of poets as solitaires with a heightened sense of community.

— from the indispensable The Language of Life:  A Festival of Poets (Bill Moyers)

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Take One Candle Light a Room by Susan Straight/Reflections

I first met Susan Straight back in 2001, at the National Book Awards festivities. She was there because her novel, Highwire Moon, had been nominated for fiction the same year Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was put into the mix.  I was there chairing the Young People Literature's jury.  We'd been writing to each other and talking on the phone, but Susan's southern California and I'm Philadelphia, and it took a touch of fate to bring us face to face, blue eye to green, her daughter saying hello to my son, both of us dangling fancy earrings.

Two weeks ago, Susan sent a copy of her newest book my way.  It's called Take One Candle Light a Room, and in the cracked places of these past few nights, I've been reading.  The book is complex, and alive.  It sounds just like Susan (patois and poetry), and if you want to see Los Angeles through the eyes of a "walkin fool," if you want to try to imagine how the legacy of slavery passes down through the prickled blood, if you want to root for a boy who can write poems and dream big but nonetheless finds himself a gun-toting refugee from the law, let Take One Candle take you there.

Susan's heroine is a southern California, light-skinned travel writer named Fantine Antoine.  She's not married, she's not settled, she goes from place to place to see.  But there's somebody she does love hard, somebody who has power over her, and that's this poem-writing 22-year-old boy named Victor, the son of her murdered best friend.  When Victor gets in trouble with the law, Fantine Antoine runs after him, toward Louisiana, which takes her, in so many ways, running the long way home. This is a violent story, but there's also love in it—love for places, love for language, love for this boy, who has a talent with words.  Here, for example, is what Victor can do on a page:

The Villas—#24—The Balcony
What you don't understand
Is
The snarling jeweled nightbird can be
Beautiful
Even when it wakes you up at two
flying in circles
A silver rope a silver beam tied down? tethered anchored
No escape for the pilot
Either

Caroline Leavitt, whose CarolineLeavitville blog is essential reading for writers, interviewed Susan recently.  I loved reading what both had to say.

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The light at the end of her tunnel (Colleen Mondor sells her first book)

A week or so ago, Colleen Mondor, Chasing Ray blogger and Bookslut reviewer (among other things), wrote to say that she would soon be able to share big news.  And so I waited, knowing, as I did, that Colleen had been at work for several years on a book she'd called THE MAP OF DEAD PILOTS.  It was a book inspired, in part by her work as co-owner of an aircraft leasing company, her knowledge of Alaska, her love for boundary-stretching literature, and her passion for melding fact and the imagination.  And it was a book agented by one Michele Rubin of Writers House, whose belief in this project Colleen has described in posts spanning several years.

This was an author and agent who would not give up.  Not in the face of so many almosts.  Not in the face of a rapidly changing industry.  Not in the face of so much that can feel so bleak when you are on the waiting side of a coin.

And so, this week, I waited for Colleen's news.

It came yesterday—news that this book, described in Publishers Marketplace as being "about Alaskan pilots navigating a world that demands close communion with extreme physical danger and emotional toughness" has been sold to Holly Rubino at Lyons Press.  It will go on the fall 2011 list.

I could not be happier for Colleen, who has cheered so many of the rest of us on, has gotten us talking about important book issues (diversity in storytelling, honesty in jacket design, the value of nonfiction for the young), and has never bowed to envy or bitterness.  Colleen Mondor has sold her first book, and she'll tell you more about it here. 

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The ALAN YA Historical Fiction Panel

On Monday, November 22, I'll be in Orlando, FL, joining English teachers and writers for the yearly Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English.

I'll be sitting on a panel moderated by Ricki Berg of Rockville High School entitled "Finding Myself in the Past:  YA Historical Fiction and Fact."  My two co-panelists are women I can't wait to meet—Susan Campbell Bartoletti (The Boy Who Dared, They Called Themselves the KKK) and Jeannette Ingold (Paper Daughter, The Window, Mountain Solo, and others).

I hope you'll join us for the 1:50 PM session.

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Yellow facing red

Maybe this photo is enough?  This yellow facing red sizzled by sun, a stone cross in the distance.

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A book takes a journey; a book is framed by light

I was standing right here, on the edge of an old cemetery, watching the sun light up the earth, when Laura Geringer's final notes on YOU ARE MY ONLY buzzed in on my phone.  I read them through.  I looked back up.  The sun had rearranged itself, and yet the day was bright. 

I began this book three years ago, inspired by the legends of urban explorers and by the haunting stories I had heard about a Philadelphia asylum known as Byberry.  I was encouraged to keep writing by the magnificent Lauren Wein, of Black Cat/Grove, and by my sustaining agent, Amy Rennert.  I was helped to think harder by memorable conversations with Marjorie Braman of Holt.  And after Laura Geringer (Egmont USA) read the book, I reimagined characters into their younger selves and watched to see what might happen.

What happened, in the end, was light.

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A walk in the four o'clock hour

If the work keeps you bound to the desk (your mind clouded, your shoulder bones crunched, your fingertips hollow), do this, at least:  Wait for the hour in the day when the sun pours not down but through, and meet it halfway.

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It was the way

It was the way the buildings weighted down while the river kept on (kept on).  The way the sun would not be thwarted.  The way old and new was now.

Set a novel in it.  Film a movie.  Write a poem.

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Photo Shoot

I wrote, a while ago, about all the babble that goes through my brain when a camera is pointed in my direction.  I am not, within, what I am without.  Do any of us achieve that perfect correspondence?

But for the recent Pennsylvania Gazette story about the life I've lived through books, I was invited to a enter the cinematic world of Chris Crisman, another Penn grad who has made it his business to appease and to ease and (somehow in the midst of it all) to make art.  You would never know it, by looking at this shot, but the lens was so close to my face when this picture was made that I suspected Chris of doing a study on the tangle of my eyelashes.  (Lancome, next time, I was thinking to myself.  And also:  I wish I'd gone to bed last night.)

Clearly, though, Chris knows what he is doing, and I share this outtake from the shoot today because Chris made Memorial Hall, a Centennial-era building, the true and deserving subject of his shot.  It's a beautiful place, newly and justly restored, and can't you just picture it back in 1876—the crowds massing in the high heat of summer, eager for the art within?

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A Saul Bellow Sky

This is the view through my office window, at just this moment.  I look up; I see the sky.  I look at my screen, and I see these words quoted in Michiko Kakutani's review of Letters by Saul Bellow:

To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others.

Yes.

And also:  Yes.

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There will be, Lawsy writes to say,

a Dangerous Neighbors e-book.  Available come January 4, 2011, she says, wherever e-books are sold. 

We love our Lawsy.

We are grateful, still, and nonetheless, for books and lamps to read by.

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Hunger

I haven't traveled nearly as much as I long to lately, but my life journeys me down so many roads.  So that yesterday afternoon, in the still, a friend arrived and here we sat talking, among other things, about her passion (proven, honest) for being part of hunger's cure.  We talked numbers, and we talked families.  We talked about what local farmers can do and already are doing to help bring nutrition, and not just empty calories, to North Philadelphians in need.

"We need new ways to tell our story," she said, and all through the night I dreamed.

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More Scenes (and a promise)

I have two new books to read this week—Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air and my friend Susan Straight's Take One Candle Light a Room—and I am eager for those quiet hours, eager to escape into the worlds that others have created.  I'll be writing about those books here, as soon as I know just what to say.  

In the meantime, and finally (I promise), these last images from the Radnor High Hall of Fame weekend: 

In the first, my friend Ellen, who knew me in my years at Penn, stood beside me at my wedding, invited me to stand with her at hers, and has remained so dear.  In the second, "Precious" (and precious) filmmaker Lee Daniels, the extraordinary athlete Chris Sydnor (we ran track together, but let's just say he was a tad more talented in the speed department than I'd ever be), and yours truly, on four-inch, non-sprint-able heels.  In the third, my former English teacher, the inspiration for my fictional Dr. Charmin (Undercover);  she said she had hoped to write a perfect introduction, and oh, she did. Finally, it all begins with our parents, and here is my father, who I am so glad could spend the day with me.

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Representing: Radnor High Class of 1978

The magnificent, big-hearted, beautiful-eyed Lee Daniels, the mind and soul behind "Monster's Ball," "Precious," and so much else, brought us to tears with his remarks at the Radnor High Hall of Fame induction ceremony. 

I won't forget these past few days. 

Not. 

Ever.

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What the brain will do

It's a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.

Loren Eiseley, quoted by Carl Klaus, in The Made-Up Self

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Radnor High Hall of Fame, an image from moments ago

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Radnor High Hall of Fame, Induction Day

Today I'll be inducted into the Radnor High Hall of Fame.

I type those words.  Sit back.  Wonder how that ever came to be.

I spent last evening in the home of Radnor graduates, parents, and administrators who are all working toward giving students the best education that can be gained.  I spent it talking to Nancy Carpenter Barnes, a fellow inductee, a well-known artist, the former president of the Barnes Foundation, and an Emmy-winning producer for public TV.  I'll spend today not just with Nancy, but with Lee Daniels, the film producer and director; John Galloway, the theologian; Christopher Goutman, the award-wining producer, director, and writer; Paul Michel, the federal judge who, among other things, served as an assistant prosecutor in the Watergate trial; Charles Ryan, the investment banker who created Russia's leading investment bank; and Chris Sydnor, the extraordinary athlete and coach.  The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer and the music writer and producer Andy Mark, both sadly deceased, will be remembered as well. 

The inductees will share this moment with the teachers and students of Radnor High, and I will be introduced by the very woman who inspired the smart, encouraging English teacher in my first young adult novel, Undercover.  She could not have been more than 25 back then.  She paired my reading of Juliet with a Romeo reading by my secret crush.  She read between weak, overwritten lines and saw the seeds of a writer.  I'll stand with her today.


There's more about this day here.  There is so much in my heart.  I don't even know who to thank.  But few honors have affected me in the way that today does.  I wish my mother were here to see this.

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The gracious Bookslut review of Dangerous Neighbors

In Colleen Mondor's wonderfully informed Bookslut November round up, she's taking a look at mysteries—books like Double Trouble, Fixing Delilah, Zora and Me, The Painted Secret, and Tell Me a Secret.  I was happily surprised to discover that Dangerous Neighbors was included in the mix, and I am honored.  Colleen clearly puts her heart and soul into every review she writes, every opinion she offers. 

A few words from her November column here:

First and foremost, this is a love story to the Philadelphia of long ago. Kephart has steeped herself in the city’s history and it shows, especially in the detailed way she writes about the Centennial events and displays. But it is also the story of a secret love and how keeping that secret can be especially appealing to a teenage girl -- how it can lead her to forget about everyone else and how watching that secret grow larger and larger can torment those who keep the secret with her. Dangerous Neighbors is about sisters and a city and a whole lot of love and tragedy. While not a thrilling mystery it is a confection of singular depth nonetheless and just as irresistible.

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In preparation for my upcoming Radnor Memorial Library talk I look back and find

...the very first page of the very first notes I ever took, for my very first writing workshop.  I was a mother already.  I was way too old to be a newbie.  But there I was in Spoleto, Italy, in July 1994, and there, before me, stood Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown.  In two too-short weeks they taught me most everything I still know about the making of stories. 

I'll be reflecting on the idiosyncratic evolution of this writer's life, among other things, at the Radnor Memorial Library, November 16th, 7:30.  I hope you'll join me. 

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The Made-Up Self/Carl H. Klaus: Reflections

If the titles designating the four parts of this slender paperback seem, at first, daunting—"Evocations of Consciousness," "Evocations of Personality," "Personae and Culture," and "Personae and Personal Experience"—there's nothing but good stuff in between.  Delightful ruminations on the poetics of self, the possibility/impossibility of tracking the mind at work, the grand seductions and sometimes promise of what Klaus, the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, calls "The literature of interiority.  The story of thought. The drama of mind in action." etc. We get satisfying reflections on Montaigne reflecting on Montaigne, pithy quotes from nonfiction masters, mind teases that force us to conclude (again and again) that writing (and reading) the personal essay is both a mine field and an irresistible enterprise.

Every time I teach memoir or essay, I yearn to be writing it again.  This happened to me during the online book club ("Literature of Bearing Witness") that I was recently leading for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.  Memories leak.  Assertions are disproven.  The mind set free veers, trembles, and ultimately discovers something that might have been, something that might still mean something.  If only we knew for certain what about any of it was/is/could be argued into true. 

Reading Klaus put me right back into that danger zone—that thirst for trying to write the personal all over again (and yes, dear readers, I do realize that I write the personal every day on this blog).  Klaus gave me new essays to read (note to self:  read more Didion; get a copy of David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," get Anatole Broyard's Intoxicated by My Illness). He gave me experiments to try out on myself.  He gave me cause to think, and he made me smile, and it was all delivered with the kind of companionable prose that made me feel like I was in a classroom, which is where, so often, I want to be.

I have said this a few times this year; I grow redundant:  We have entered, I believe, a new era of memoir making and personal essay writing.  An era in which the forms feel noble again—better explicated, more sound, more open to new possibilities.  I grow increasingly tempted to write toward the true.

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Main Line Today on Dangerous Neighbors

Many thanks today for this shout-out from one of the best magazines our Main Line has to offer, Main Line Today.  I am less than good at many things, including generating brief summaries of my own work.  This single paragraph is a gift.  Thank you.

Dangerous Neighbors
By Beth Kephart (Egmont USA, 192 pages)
In her 12th novel, award-winning author and Main Line Today contributor Beth Kephart escorts readers into the world of 19th-century Philadelphia—onto the Centennial grounds, over the icy Schuylkill River, down Walnut Street and through Rittenhouse Square—as twin sisters Anna and Katherine experience love, tragedy and a coming of age. Set against the backdrop of the 1876 Exhibition, Dangerous Neighbors celebrates the often-mysterious bond between twins. Entertaining, haunting and unforgettable.

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The sky is a dirty green-gray bowl (a sliver of excerpt)

Sometimes you write the scene and, a few weeks later, you actually see the sky you'd dreamed into words.  This then, from You Are My Only, which is due out from Egmont USA next fall.

A storm is coming.  The moon is lying low, out of the way, and the sky is a dirty green-gray bowl.  Autumn has pushed me around to the window, which is thick as some old encyclopedia, nailed shut.  She lies on her bed with her goggles on, humming some strange little tune. 

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