Pulling back the curtains on my city
Monday, January 31, 2011
City Hall, the mayor's home, as viewed from the 22nd floor of the former PSFS Building, now the Loews Philadelphia Hotel.
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April 20/ 7 PM
Keynote Address
1st Annual Writing Conference: Brave New Words
Pendle Hill
Wallingford, PA
May 6 - May 11
Currents 2018
Five-Day Juncture Memoir Workshop
Frenchtown, PA
June 3/2:45 PM
The Big YA Workshop
2018 Rutgers-New Brunswick Writers' Conference
300 Atrium Drive
Somerset, NJ
June 5/7:00 PM
Launch of WILD BLUES
Wayne, PA
June 10/9:30 AM
The Personal Essay Workshop
Philadelphia Writers Conference 2018
Sheraton Hotel
Philadelphia, PA
September 28/9:30 AM
One-day Juncture Memoir Workshop
Chanticleer Garden
Wayne, PA
Read more...She didn’t bother with a shower, just got in the car and drove. Yesterday’s rain was gone, and in its place was a cataclysmic green. When she got to the long ribbon of road, she eased her foot off the pedal and looked for the black cows that had moved from one hill to another, most of them nosed into a herd, only a handful come down to the thick picket fence to watch for the cars burning through. It was Sunday, and the traffic was light. For as far as she could see there were cows and corn, the fence holding things in, the green of the trees on the ridge beyond.
It is so primal, this thing called trust. So basic to our survival. Without trust could we attach to one another, could we love? Could we forge societies and build institutions? Speak and believe that we’ve been heard? Would we set up housekeeping? Trade one thing for another? Lie in another person’s arms? Dare to procreate? Freely slip away to conjecture, to be curious, to dream? We’d be at war every day of our lives if we didn’t trust. We’d be anxious, jumpy people. We’d be on-guard, fenced-in solitaires — withered souls with narrowed eyes.
A missing child. A devastated young mom. Two girls—one traumatic event.
Emmy Rane is married at nineteen , a mother by twenty. Trapped in a life with a husband she no longer loves, Baby is her only joy. Then one sunny day in September, Emmy takes a few fateful steps away from her baby and returns to find her missing. All that is left behind is a yellow sock. Fourteen years later, Sophie, a homeschooled, reclusive teenage girl is forced to move frequently and abruptly from place to place, perpetually running from what her mother calls the “No Good.” One afternoon, Sophie breaks the rules, ventures out, and meets Joey and his two aunts. It is this loving family that opens Sophie's eyes, giving her the courage to look into her past. What she discovers changes her world forever. . .The riveting stories of Emmy and Sophie—alternating narratives of loss, imprisonment, and freedom regained—escalate with breathless suspense toward an unforgettable climax.
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Where in life we sometimes (allegedly infrequently) fall in love at first sight, in reading we may fall in love with the special, singular qualities of another's voice; we may become mesmerized, haunted; we may be provoked, shocked, illuminated; we may be galvanized into action; we may be enraged, revulsed, and yet!—drawn irresistibly to experience this voice again, and again. It's a writer's unique employment of language to which we, as readers, are drawn, though we assume we admire the writer primarily for what he or she "has to say."Read more...
Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant’s work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction. (This is Prose, who then goes on to note the exceptions to the rule while returning to her theme that the "short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.")
Reflecting our dazzlingly diverse culture, the contemporary American short story is virtually impossible to define. Where once the “well crafted” short story in the revered tradition of Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce was the predominant literary model — an essentially realist tradition, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic — now the more typical story is likely to be a first-person narration, or monologue: more akin to nonliterary sources like stand-up comedy, performance art, movies and rap music and blogs. Such prose pieces showcase distinctive “voices” as if fictional characters, long restrained by the highly polished language of their creators, have broken free to speak directly and sometimes aggressively to the reader — as in boldly vernacular stories by Junot DÃaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson and T. C. Boyle, among others. (Yet Edgar Allan Poe, as long ago as 1843, brilliantly gave voice to the manic and utterly convincing murderer of “The Tell-Tale Heart” — perhaps genius is always our contemporary.) (This would be Oates)What, I wonder, do you expect when you read a contemporary short story? Where do you expect it to take you, and by what means? Where do you hope it will leave you? Who is, in your opinion, the best practitioner of the short story today?
Your temporary madness, Kate would call it. Your solitary confinement. Becca lived, and then she wrote it down. She listened for music inside silence. She had made a commitment to the unalloyed, the unveering line, the raw wound, the relentless grab at authenticity, and now she was two poems away from a new collection. “I’m calling it Heart Blue,” she’d told Vin, a few nights before. “Or that’s what it will be, when it’s finished.”Read more...
... taking up a new, cognitively demanding activity—ballroom dancing, a foreign language—is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses, and expand or create functioning networks.Ballroom dancing—did you see that folks? It ain't just about the glitter and the gloves.
National book award finalist Beth Kephart has written another gorgeous novel full of characters that are slowly brought to life. By the time the end of the novel came around, I found myself fully invested in the life of Katherine and those closest to her. This book held my attention from beginning to end, first because of its suspenseful opening and then its enlightening flashbacks, showing what has brought Katherine to such a dark time in her life.
Beth Kephart is such a fantastic writer that I am always in awe of her prose and story telling ability, so much so that reviewing any piece of literature from Kepharts small but growing canon is always hard for me to accomplish. Kephart is astonishingly capable of making her characters come to life in such a way that putting down the book to do menial tasks such as walking the hound become impossible. Which is why August of 2010 will always be known to me as the month that I learned walking the dog while reading results in severe coordination disability, causing walking into a pole, nose bleeds, and incredible embarrassment to all who try. This life lesson is just one of the things Kephart has taught me while reading her books.Thank you so much, Pam. Read more...
Every day, life gives us an intimation of this. We sense that, inside us, every 'we' we once were (and will be?) coexists: the innocent self-absorbed child, the sensual young man generous to a fault, the adult, feet planted firmly on the ground yet still clinging to his illusions, and finally we are the old man who knows that gold is just another metal; as his eyesight fails he has acquired visionSo that we meet the family as the boy recalls his family—the sensationally imperfect and wholly loving mother who abruptly pulls her children from school; the father who joins them at a safe house outside the city; the brother Midget; the comrade Lucas; the surviving grandparents. It's just a family and they're just living—trying to keep the toads from committing suicide in the pool, playing killer games of Risk at night, mixing up their chocolate milk, watching nostalgic movies, and staying, always, one step ahead of those who hope to disappear them. You know how this story ends within the very first line of the book: "The last thing papa said to me, the last word from his lips, was 'Kamchatka.'" But Figueras writes with such excellent authority that we are soon hoping against hope (as a ten year old boy hopes against hope) that fate will spare this family, that Houdini magic will keep them safe.
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