My hummingbird consents to a portrait session

The glads are in their last moment. 

My hummingbird doesn't mind.

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Faith/Jennifer Haigh: Reflections

It's been a long time since I've written about a book on this blog—many pressing corporate projects added to some responsibilities on my own two forthcoming books (compromised by a little too much time in the dance studio) have thwarted my best intentions.  Throughout all this time, in the smallest increments, I have been reading Jennifer Haigh's Faith, a book highly recommended by many of you.

Faith is a sister's story about a Catholic family.  It's about a year—2002—during which priests across Boston are being accused of molestations, tried by rumor and innuendo before they are tried by the facts.  Sheila McGann's brother, Art, is one of those being accused.  Little by little, Sheila pieces his story together, moving in and out of the facts of her broader, complicated Catholic family with nearly omniscient knowing.

What struck me with greatest force, as I slowly read the book, was this very omniscience.  Over and again, Sheila McGann finds a way to relate far more than she could have possibly witnessed herself—integrating the broader narrative via things overheard or told, through letters, through every possible means of imaginative empathy.  The book begins with a simple sentence:  "Here is a story my mother has never told me."  It sends a signal that what we are about to read is the forthright conviction of a sister who has worked hard to weave together a wholly defensible, but never utterly knowable truth out of stories mostly borrowed.

The search to know is often a jagged enterprise, self contradicting and unsure.  Faith is anything but that:  It is smooth, continuous, full.  Haigh has Sheila dwell not just with Art and those with whom he surrounds himself, but with their brother, Mike, their mother, their mother's second husband, Ted McGann. No stone, in Faith, is left unturned.  Everything is both delivered and explained, and at times I wished that Haigh had delivered less in the way of explanation—had left more for the reader to ponder and parse.

Still, I have enormous respect for the great research that is represented here, the Catholic knowing so embedded in each page.  I have respect for the time Haigh clearly spent coming to terms with her characters and seeing their stories through.  Clearly, Haigh sought to take us beyond the awful headlines of molestation into the workings and demons of the modern Catholic church, and this she does with deep care and telling compassion.

I have new books to turn to now, and after this evening's dance showcase, I'll be getting to them.  A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (Margaret Drabble) will be my next iPad read.  After that, I'll be reading Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document and Ransom Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, both of which arrived yesterday.  I need to get my life's balance back.  These books will, as most books do, help return me to me.

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Perhaps I am not a woman after all

Why is it (why?) that most women who take up the ballroom dancing thing love everything about it—the dance, sure, but also the sparkle and get-up, the false lashes, the fake tans, the glitter cheeks (not those kind of cheeks), the form-fitting spandex, the low-plunging neck lines, the high-cutting thigh lines, the razzle, did I mention the shoes?, did I talk about the spotlight?—and I personally cannot summon enthusiasm for anything but the dancing itself?

About which I am plenty enthused.

Another way of putting this:  I'm supposed to dance in a showcase on Sunday, this coming Sunday, and I still don't have anything to wear.  So that there I sit, in a studio abuzz with talk about tailor-made dresses, hand-stoned dresses, new satin shoes, fine hair, sequined headbands, items that require tape measures and pins, thinking:  I haven't even been to the mall (which is not, by the way, where the fine ballroom dresses are known to live).

I didn't grow up thinking about beauty the way most girls did.  I grew up wondering how hard I could kick the ball, how fast I could run the race, how well I could rhyme my poems.  I am, therefore, at a deficit.  And perhaps am no woman after all.

To the mall I go.  You can picture me there.  And I don't want to hear a thing come Sunday about the ruthless wild country that is my hair.  There's only so far I am willing to go and besides, my clients need me to stay right here, near the desk, on this side of invisible, where clothes don't matter one bit.

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Talking about Special at the Beth Cafe

I found this gathering spot tucked away on an artist's street in Berlin, and was tempted to go in, claim it as mine, disappear.  Sometimes the world just beats you down and you think: It's too hard. I can't. I won't. I'll travel far, open a wee cafe. I'll change my name, and they can't find me.

But then: The weather changes or a note floats in or someone makes you laugh or you don't (at last!) ruin the cha-cha.  Today it was a call from Tamra Tuller of Philomel that shifted my mood.  I'll just say this:  The care she has taken of Small Damages, my Seville-centric novel that she recently acquired, has been nothing short of extraordinary.  A year away from publication and already the page proofs are in, immaculate, and gorgeously designed.  She takes the time to call and ask about a hyphen here, two extra words, a number.  I don't think she knows how valued she is, though I tell her.  She makes it sound like nothing special.

Except that it's something very special.

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Advocate for yourself. Always.

We learn this lesson, but we can't forget it:  In all that we must do, should do, are, indeed, privileged to do when it comes to honoring the dreams of others, we cannot lose sight of the promises we have made to ourselves.  Our own tender ambitions.  Our nascent possibilities.

If you have made something beautiful, protect it.

It's just one life we're given here.

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Jan and Lana Dance the Jive (for real, ladies and gentlemen)

How often I can be found here on this blog, talking dance, yearning for it.  How many books of mine have taken a choreographic turn or stopped and lived at, say, the very House of Dance?  I've been blessed by teachers who sway me toward better—Scott Lazarov with his impeccable choreography, Jan Paulovich, who insists that I hear the music and is so artfully exact, John Larson, the King of Standard, Cristina Mueller and her Thursday wonders, Aideen O'Malley who does it all, John Vilardo, who worked me out of paralytic fear early on, and others, too.  Blessed is me.

I'm not terrific at dance, but I keep trying, and I console myself with the thought that the trying matters.  This coming Sunday I'll be trying again in a DanceSport Academy showcase—dancing the cha-cha with my husband and a waltz with Jan Paulovich.  I'm not exactly ready for either dance.  But the hours tick on, and Sunday comes.

Today, though, I share this video of Jan Paulovich and his partner, Lana Roosiparg, who dance so magnificently together.  This is what they do, these teachers, when they are free to be their ultimate dance selves.

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Hummingbird (2)

Getting closer, but still frustratingly blurred.

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River Race: A Prequel Excerpt

Some 14,000 words into my prequel to Dangerous Neighbors, I stop to share a fragment from an early chapter.  The scene takes place in 1870, but I wasn't alive back then. To imagine the moment fully, you have to take this photograph of the Schuylkill River, Boat House Row, and the Waterworks, and dial it all back by 140 years.

The crowd is on its feet—the hats and the veils and the kerchiefs like flags in their hands.  William fits his hand over his eyes to block the sun and looks to the tugs behind the rope lines, the crowds along the bridge, the carriages that have pulled up short along the river’s west bank. There’s not an empty back of granite in the cliffs, not an empty square in the stands, and when the holler goes out, Francis leans in close.

“Schmitt’s got the lead,” he says.

The sculls cut the river’s blue.  They turn the bend, and the roar builds; the roar is a mighty wallop of sound as Schmitt and Street and Brossman and Lavens dig the river hard—Schmitt ahead and every single person yelling, every hand pumping the flag of something white or red or yellow or blue, so that it seems to William that an entire nation of birds has swooped in and is testing its plentiful wings. Francis yells loud as the best of them. He throws his broad, white hand to the sky like the finest bird of all, and now, beneath the Girard Avenue Bridge, Brossman and Street mangle their oars into each other's, and the crowd calls out, “Foul! Foul!”

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That rain you hear — that lightning and thunder?

It feels like this to me.

The heatwave is gone.

I shall think again, and write, and dance.

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In which I finally get my hummingbird shot

It's not perfect. I wish it were sharper. National Geographic wouldn't be impressed.

But all summer long I've been trying to capture one of these dear little creatures on film.  I have let the tulip vine grow messy with the hope of a seduction.  I have not brought the glads inside for the same reason.

Hummingbirds are easy, my friend Mike once said.  But hummingbirds have eluded me. I have waited years.

I have a family now.  This one's mate was just a white glad down.

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How do we spend our time: Around the World in One Day

I have been thinking about how people spend their time.  About what we do when heat overtakes us, or horrific news erupts, or dreams are crushed, or people disappoint us.  About how we show those we love that we do love them.  About how we make time's passing matter.  The other evening, while at dinner, my son was explaining what matters to him when choosing friends.  "I don't want to spend that much time with people who spend too much time judging other people," he said, naming a top criteria.  I thought about me:  Do I spend enough of my own time not judging?

During this past week of both celebrating birthdays and escaping heat, I have found myself at more restaurants than usual, watching those at neighboring tables spend the great portion of their time interacting alone with their own jewel-encrusted phones.  Three teen sisters never once spoke to one another.  They texted, the three of them alone on their phones, through the lemonade, the salads, and the shared dessert.

How do people spend their time? 

How is a day delivered and consumed by a gardener, say, in Dubai, or by a man who is in radiant love?  Yesterday, I read a story I encourage you to read about the making of a documentary film based entirely on YouTube footage.  The story, which appears in the July 24, 2011 New York Times Magazine, was written by Adam Sternbergh and is subtitled "How more than 80,000 videos and 4,500 hours of raw footage turned into one unexpectedly emotional 95-minute movie."  The film, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, was edited by Joe Walker.  From the story:

"I noticed fairly early on that a lot of men with very good cameras were taking beautiful pictures of their very beautiful girlfriends backlit in parks," Walker says. So they tagged all those clips "My Beautiful Girlfriend" and built a montage out of them.  Other tags included "Ablutions" and "Footwork." "So many people shot their own feet walking, we could have made a continuous 12-hour film out of people walking," he said. "We could have made a film out of watermelons. We could have made a film entirely shot by women named Linda...."

Read the whole story.  Watch a few of the clips here.  And ask yourself what film you'd make about the life that you are living.

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Harry Kyriakodis: Generous Historian

This morning I want to—absolutely need to—stop and thank Harry Kyriakodis—lawyer, librarian, historian, writer, tour creator and giver, and owner of what he estimates is "the largest private collection of books about the City of Brotherly Love."

I knew Harry's name (I suspect that all Philadelphians researching Philadelphia do).  I had received correspondence from him during my involvement with Sam Katz on Sam's film series, Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. But I wasn't so certain that Harry would relish an email during one of the hottest weekends on record from a certain writer of Philadelphia tales.  I mean, with his own book—Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront—just now launching and a series of new Harry tours planned, would Harry really have the time to respond?

Somehow, he found or made the time.  Into my inbox came aerial views and maps, archival photography, notes from tours that Harry has given, URLS that directed me to the very things that I was seeking.  It will take me days to fully absorb the wealth of what is here.  But it took me no time at all to recognize the supreme generosity of this man.

I've just ordered Harry's new book and I'm certain that it's going to teach me many things about that other river—the Delaware.  Here's how the book is described on Amazon:

The wharves and docks of William Penn's city that helped build a nation are gone--lost to the onslaught of more than three hundred years of development. Yet the bygone streets and piers of Philadelphia's central waterfront were once part of the greatest trade center in the American colonies. Local historian Harry Kyriakodis chronicles the history of the city's original port district, from Quaker settlers who first lived in caves along the Delaware and the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793 to its heyday as a maritime center and the twentieth century, which saw much of the historic riverfront razed. Join Kyriakodis as he strolls Front Street, Delaware Avenue and Penn's Landing to rediscover the story of Philadelphia's lost waterfront.

About the Author
Harry Kyriakodis is a staff attorney for the American Law Institute and ALI-ABA Continuing Professional Education. He is a producer of teleseminars for ALI-ABA and has been the librarian for both organizations since 1992. A historian and writer about Philadelphia, Harry has collected what is likely the largest private collection of books about the City of Brotherly Love: about two thousand titles, new and old. He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides and has lived at Pier 3 Condominium at Penn's Landing since 1997, when and where his fascination with Philadelphia's waterfront district began. Harry regularly gives walking tours and presentations on this and other unique yet unappreciated parts of the city for various groups. He is a graduate of La Salle University (1986) and Temple University School of Law (1993) and was once an officer in the U.S. Army Field Artillery.

Harry, I am grateful.  Like my dear friend Adam Levine, who taught me so much about my river, the Schuylkill, you haven't simply accumulated a wealth of knowledge.  You have made it your business to share it. 

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At the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

I spent the swelter of yesterday at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania—reeling through old Philadelphia newspapers, studying the 1860 Smedley's Atlas, reading the tiniest guidebook I've ever seen (it fit in the palm of my hand, had been produced for the representatives of a 19th century pharmaceutical conference), and finding (miraculously!) precisely what I'd come for.  Some of this was sheer good fortune.  Some (Smedley's Atlas) came at the suggestion of the extraordinarily knowledgeable people who staff HSP.  I am grateful.

A day of research is a gift.  It opens a story out and forward. 

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Lostness to Foundness, or how I write, at first

For two months, I allowed myself to grow lost inside the Dangerous Neighbors prequel that I'm writing. Let the research take me where it would, let myself obsess over William and his troubles, took up residence with secondary characters, old machines, hominy men.  You can't write a book if you can't get lost, and a book won't breathe—can't breathe—until you've followed loose ends, unraveled tangents, stayed the purposeful course of not precisely knowing.  You have to write what you won't keep to find what is worth keeping.  Lostness is foundness, in writing. 

It wasn't until today, then, that I printed the 50 pages I have written and sat down with them in a fan-assisted room (oh, this weather).  I was surprised by what I had.  I was intrigued by what was missing.  And I knew, sure as I know anything about tensions and rhythms and novelistic pacing, that a big event was needed, round about page 24. 

"What are you working on?" my son asked, about two hours in.

"Listen to this?" I asked him.  He sat near the fan and I read.

"Very interesting," he said, when I was done.  The arch in his eyebrow was lifted higher.  "Going to be a good one."

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A wholehearted (unpaid!) endorsement for Blurb.com

This is a brief, unpaid endorsement for Blurb.com, an internet service that has made me happy throughout the creation of Fragment to Whole, a collection of my University of Pennsylvania student's finest work; Berlin (you can view that photo album, which my husband designed based on our collective photos of Berlin, here), and The London Diaries, a 40-page collection of emails and photographs that our son sent home during his six weeks abroad. 

I have no ulterior motives in telling you this (trust me). It's just that I can never help myself when I find something I love—a person, a book, a movie, a dish, a place, a face, a garden.  Here, then, is something I add to the list—Blurb, where you can make your own books and keep your memories safe.

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Faces and Fiction

Sometimes I'll be hurrying through my file of photographs in search of one thing and come upon a forgotten other.  That just happened here.  I took this photograph a few years ago during a city dance competition.  I loved everything the young man's expression had to say.  No portrait had been planned, and yet a portrait had been taken.

I was lucky that way with my research today.  My imagination failed me, so I turned to old newspaper stories, circa 1871.  Today the truth was bigger and more shocking and more rife with possibilities than that which I'd been conjuring in the sullen heat with my eyes half closed.  I'm glad I remembered to think and seek beyond myself.

Finally and most importantly:  Yesterday we celebrated my son's birthday.  Today we celebrate my husband's.  My room is a mess with the remnants of gifts given.  Now out to a restaurant for dinner.

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Intense, Other-Oriented, Keen

Toward the close of my session with Joan Kaywell's truly welcoming and intelligent University of South Florida class of teachers and writers, Joan asked me how I would describe myself.  Edit yourself into just three words, she said. 

I am, of course, incapable of brevity and so went on about vulnerability and a quest for beauty.  Joan let me stumble about for a bit before she disclosed the words she would attach to me:  Intense, Other-Oriented, and Keen.

When a certain lovely gift arrived from Joan two days ago, there those words were again, as an AKA.  I think Joan probably knows me better than I know myself.

Thank you, Joan.

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The YOU ARE MY ONLY Q and A/Pre-Launch Guide

I have been so grateful to those of you who have written to me about YOU ARE MY ONLY.  You do this author's heart a whole lot of good.

It occurred to me that it might be helpful to answer some questions in a broader format, and so I have prepared this new permanent page for the blog, featuring a Q and A, a list of upcoming appearances, a glimpse of an early review, and contact information.

It can all be found here.

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My Baby Turns 22

How did it happen?  And how did it come to pass that I would be so hugely blessed with a son who, to this day, to this very moment, fills my world with the brightest possible light?

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The Author House Party: Join Elizabeth Mosier and Me For a Literary Mother/Daughter Evening

On Tuesday, September 20th, I'll have the great pleasure of joining the always gracious, perpetually brilliant Elizabeth Mosier for an Author House Party created by Lynn Rosen, the mind and heart behind Open Book.  Elizabeth's smart new novella, The Playgroup (which I've had the privilege of reading early) will be available that evening, as will her YA novel, My Life as a Girl.  I'll be reading from and talking about my Philadelphia-centric books Dangerous Neighbors and Flow. All in all, I know that I'll have fun, because I'll be near two writerly forces whom I've grown to love.

I hope you'll join us, and even spread the word.  In the meantime, take a look at all the other wonderful things that are being offered this summer-fall through the Literally Speaking Author House Parties. It's a fabulous line-up.

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In celebration of rivers, rowers, and the work we won't neglect

In the writing of the slender book that became Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, I moved in several directions before I settled on a form.  For a long time the book was a collection of stories about people, most of them imagined, who lived by or near the river at different junctures in time.  Today, I was remembering a piece I'd written about a character I'd originally named Lennie—a young woman who goes to the river in the 1870s to row.  This is a fragment torn from the original draft.  I publish it today in celebration of all my friends who do row or have rowed that river, including Katherine Wilson and Pam Sedor. I publish it, too, in celebration of all of us who work and rework our books, who keep thinking them through, until they are the best that we can make them and the world makes room for them.

She wore her scull upside down on her head like a hat, her hands on the riggers.  She rolled it over and laid it down, pulled the oars through the chokes, fastened the gates, and settled her heart.  She planted her feet in the stretchers and oared her way out, her back facing forward, her mind on her father’s words:  Shoulders to the sky, Lennie.  Knees at an angle.  Catch and drive and always finish.  Feather the blades so you’ll fly.  She left her hair loose, a dark burst about her face.  She let the breeze into her blouse.  She listened to the river, and to what the river had to say.  She went and she went, always beginning. 

Toward the wirework of the Girard Avenue Bridge. Toward the ghost of John Penn and the animals that had come to town in ’74 to live in their fanciful abodes:  the Fox Pens, the Wolf Pens, the Raccoon House, the village for the prairie dogs, the stoned-in pits for bears, the house of birds.  It was coming on to four o’clock, and she rowed: oars in, oars out, the commotion of animals up the hill.  A hawk, she noticed now, had flown in from the east, its red-tipped wings and tail mirrored in the river’s surface.  One of the reflected wings kept breaking apart and resurrecting itself with each of her oar strokes, as if it could attach to the scull its own flight.

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My dad, at the beach (1955)

Because it's a pretty day out there, and because I wish I was among the beachers, rolling and surfing and reading my book (which is Jennifer Haigh's Faith, at the moment), I post this 1955 photo of my dad — years before I knew him.

He looks happy and tan.  In other words:  he hasn't really changed all that much.

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Melissa Walker Earns Her Place in New York Times Book Review

Melissa Walker is adorable.  She's the author of five YA books, a sometimes guest on big TV shows, a name you'll find in the Times Style section, a magazine writer, a voice on NPR, and an observer of our times.  She is also out there on a daily basis telling the stories of how other writers' novels came to be, how they settled in with their jacket art.  A few years ago, when I knew few souls out here in the Land of Blog, Melissa made a video log after she read my second young adult book, House of Dance.  It made me cry.  Later, she gave me room to tell the cover art stories of several of my novels.  Melissa, moreover, is part of the reason that I had the good fortune to serve as the Readergirlz inaugural author in residence.  Melissa reaches out, is what I'm saying.  She reaches out all the time, even as her own career and fame and family grow.

For many reasons, then, I am here today celebrating Melissa's debut in the pages of the New York Times Book Review—a Carlene Bauer review of Small Town Sinners, Melissa's fifth book, debuting Tuesday.  It's a glowing review, noting, among other things:

Walker has written a credible and tender evocation of the moment when a young person’s beliefs begin to emerge and potentially diverge from the teachings of a family’s religion. Lacey’s blind faith may not be entirely understandable to those who have never believed as she does. But for teenagers raised in more evangelical homes, as I was, the character’s spiritual life will ring absolutely true. 

"YOU SO ROCK!!!!!" I wrote to Melissa, when I saw the review at 4:30 this morning.  And that's because she does.  A big blue ribbon to Melissa, then, on this happy day.

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Celebrating Musehouse: Philadelphia's New Center for the Literary Arts

Today I join my fellow writers and readers and thinkers and dreamers in celebrating the planned September 10 opening of Musehouse, a Chestnut Hill center dedicated to the writer's life and craft.  Musehouse, which is described in this Philadelphia Inquirer story by staff writer Kristin E. Holmes, will apparently offer a range of workshops, readings, and lectures for writers of all kinds.  It is the brainchild of Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, a former English teacher and award-winning poet, a mother who has borne an unimaginable loss, and an idealist who won a $50,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation. 

I encourage all those Philadelphians who have been seeking shelter for their aspirations and words to seek out this home come September.  I know that I'll be making a visit.

 

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Small Damages, a horse named Tierra, and a recap of a crazy week

This has been quite a week here at the old household.  Our son returned from his six-week stint abroad, regaled us with photos and stories, then promptly began his internship at a remarkably innovative advertising agency (while filling the coffers with night work at the local theater; last night's midnight showing of the new Harry Potter was, he reports, sold out).  On the Fusion Communications front, six new client possibilities and projects floated in, thanks to our new website, while familiar (and much-loved) clients kept us occupied, too.

In the world of books, both YOU ARE MY ONLY and SMALL DAMAGES came in for page proofing within 24 hours of each other.  YOU ARE MY ONLY (Laura Geringer, Egmont USA, October 25, 2011) is two weeks shy, I'm told, of being sent off to the big printing presses.  SMALL DAMAGES (Tamra Tuller, Philomel, Summer 2012) is headed toward bound galleys.  Both books took me on a journey and hold an immeasurably special place in my heart. I am grateful.

In the hub-bub of it all, we at Fusion created a very small Berlin book for a photo contest we wanted to enter. We didn't have the time, but we had the desire. Let's just say it went down to the wire.

Finally, in the midst of searching for photographs for assorted other purposes, I came again across the picture above, taken earlier this summer at the Devon Horse Show.  She is the living incarnation of the horse, Tierra, who takes a star turn in SMALL DAMAGES.  She'd been out there, it turns out, all along.

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The (very small) Berlin Photo Album

Berlin: Where Am I by Beth Kephart and Bill Sulit | Make Your Own Book

A Blurb.com enterprise

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Berlin: A Prose Poem

We came to Berlin to discover the places in between.  The fresh scrawl of sprayed paint.  The sudden lark of a solemn boy.  The brume that settles just ahead of storm. 

Between buildings resurrected, among sculptures re-adhered, beneath the dome that bowls up and through an effervescent sky, Berlin is defiantly alive.  It is point and color counterpoint, love in the park, a neon thatch of hair, a colossal strike against despair.

Where am I?  The question.

The answer:  We were there.

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You Are My Only: a small excerpt

Because I finished working through the last of the copy edits of You Are My Only this week, and because I have lately been hearing from a few early readers (and I thank them from the bottom of my heart), and because this photograph reminds me of Autumn, one of my characters, it occurred to me to post this small excerpt from the book, due out from Egmont USA in October.

I hear the creak of a bed. I hear another blow of giggles. Finally Granger walks to the curtain and snaps it back, and there Autumn is, standing on her own thin cot in a gray T-shirt and a red puff skirt, throwing a ridiculous curtsy. Through the small round of the window behind her, the sun comes in and where it hits her hair, there’s a burst of yellow orange.

“What happened to you?” she asks me.

“Be nice,” Bettina tells her.

“It’s a question,” Autumn says, “is all.” And now she curtsies again, pinches the red puff up into her skinny fingers, cracks her legs at her knees, and says, her voice gone solemn, “Welcome to State.”

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For my 2,000th post there is only this:

Me, smiling back at you.

Thank you, all of you, who make this space a happy space and make possible my broader reach into the world.

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My son, the photographer

For my 1,999th post (yes, I know: the writer of shortish books has not managed to go shortish with her blog mania), I am featuring one of the photographs that my son shared with us yesterday, during a glorious review of his six weeks abroad.  The London Eye, as seen by him, on a sunny British day.

No (more) words needed.

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May B./Caroline Starr Rose: Reflections

Ten years ago, I was spending these heated summer days reading through 160+ books written for children and teens.  Picture books, middle-grade books, history books, biographies, verse novels, novels—you name it.  I'd been asked to chair the Young People's Literature Jury for the National Book Awards.  I was serious, as I tend to be, about the responsibility.

Among the books that rapidly made its way to the top of my pile was Marilyn Nelson's Carver: A Life in Poems.  Here was George Washington Carver's life told with lyric majesty.  Here was poverty and agriculture, botany and music, and I loved every word. Nelson's book would go on to be among the National Book Award finalists that year.  It remains a book I return to repeatedly, cite often, keep tucked into a special corner of my shelves.

It seems fitting, then, that I have spent much of this warm, quiet day with Caroline Starr Rose's magnificent middle grade novel-in-verse in hand.  It's called May B. and it takes us to the Kansas prairie, where young Mavis Elizabeth Betterly, a struggling reader in school, has been sent fifteen miles from her home to help a new homesteader out.  Tragedy strikes, and May B. is soon alone—fending off winter and wolves and the flagellation of self doubt until:

It is hard to tell what is sun,
what is candle,
what is pure hope.

That is May B., thinking out loud. That is the quality of the prose that streams through this book—timeless, transcendent, and graced with lyric spark, moving, always, the consequential story along:

She rocks again.
"The quiet out here's the worst part,
thunderous as a storm the way
it hounds you
inside
outside
nighttime
day."

And:

He had that look that reminds me
someday he'll be a man.

Caroline Starr Rose is both a teacher and a writer (and a fine blogger).  She wondered, she writes, how children with learning differences, such as dyslexia, made their way, years ago, and May B. arose in part from that question, as well as from Caroline's own love for social history.  I listen for rhythms in the books I read, and I found them aplenty here.  I look for heart, and found that, too—abundant and dear. Special books fit themselves into special places, and May B. has a new home here on my shelves—right beside Ms. Nelson's Carver and Jeannine Atkins' Borrowed Names, where versed, artful, backward-glancing works for younger readers go. 

A non sequitur, perhaps:  When I finished reading May B. an hour or two ago, I realized something.  I have at long last collected enough fine young adult literature of different genres and slants to teach that YA course that I have so often been asked to consider.  Ideas form.

May B. is due out from Schwartz & Wade Books, January 2012.

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The Jaycee Dugard Story: Immeasurable Dignity and Extraordinary Grace

Just eleven when abducted by a known meth-addicted sex offender, Jaycee Dugard endured eighteen years of deepest horror.  By thirteen she was pregnant.  At fourteen, without medical care, she gave birth to what would be the first of her two daughters by this monster of a man. She had but a fifth grader's education, and yet, in an environment Diane Sawyer properly calls "degranged," Jaycee homeschooled her little girls—teaching them what she knew, protecting them from a brand of evil that seems, frankly, impossible.

Our own troubles are no troubles when we read of stories like Jaycee's, now being published by Simon & Schuster as a A Stolen Life.  Her kidnapping haunted me years ago, when it first made headlines, and her rescue deeply played into my imagination as I wrote about Sophie's struggle to break free in You Are My Only.  I have spent some of this early morning watching the video clips from Diane Sawyer's  two-hour interview with Jaycee, which will air this evening, and I have been so deeply moved by the beauty of this young woman. Jaycee Dugard is a survivor, she says, and not a victim.  She looks for what is good.  She is a mother raising girls of whom she is deeply, rightly protective.

Dignity and grace.  Dugard newly defines these words.

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Headed Home

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Dana Spiotta. Stone Arabia. (Read it.)

Back on May 21st I made the audacious announcement that I had just read the book of the year, which is to say that I'd just finished Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta.  Audacious because I'd already been singing some pretty sweet blog tunes about many a fine read this year.  Audacious because I've not yet read the forthcoming Ondaatje or Otsuka, or, indeed, the entire fall line-up.  Audacious because, well, who am I, anyway?

But if one must stand on a cliff, why not stand on Stone Arabia?  This brother-sister story is original, foundational, heartbreakingly sad and heartbreakingly funny, and I don't need to repeat myself, because I called it back in May.

But, hey.  It's nice to have some company in that assessment, and so I give you here Kate Christensen's words, published today, on behalf of the New York Times Book Review.  Christensen calls Stone Arabia "a work of visceral honesty and real beauty."  See what else she has to say.

And if you want to know what big question lies at the heart of this novel, listen to Dana herself, live from YouTube.

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Joan Kaywell and her students: the morning after

I spent more than two hours yesterday afternoon/evening in the virtual company of Joan Kaywell and her University of South Florida students. We talked (by way of Elluminate) of many things—of the role of color in my stories, of whether or not I write to specific audiences, of the role that research plays, of the dominant influence of topography and nature in my work, of whether or not I ever look back and wish I'd written differently, of the three words I might choose to describe myself, of whether or not I'm still writing five metaphors a day, of whether I believe that books can save lives, of the family sacrifices I've been willing to make for this writing career (answer: almost none), and of the ways in which books get introduced into classrooms, for Joan's graduate students are primarily teachers, an essential, direct line to students' hearts.

It was a remarkable conversation.  The questions were researched and intelligent, the students' insights were generous, and the group moderator was more dear than dear with an opening Power Point presentation on my life and work (how odd it was, but also so touching, to see my own words quoted back at me).  Joan Kaywell, I have learned, is a remarkable teacher and young adult advocate.  Thank you, Joan and your students, for the privilege.

And as for those metaphors:  I give myself the daily tease, now, of pairing a photograph to a story or blog column.  There's always grand purpose behind my choices.  Can you guess the meaning here?

Can you guess where it is? (hint: think royally wed)

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Meet the Dear Reader Giveaway Winners

I knew Dear Reader was a happening place months ago, when I was invited to stand in as a guest columnist for Suzanne Beecher.  Dear Reader is where a book-reading community gets built, where book clubs find their inspiration, and where conversations gather speed and force.  For my own guest column, I wrote about the young people I've met in my time as a young adult novelist—the passions they stir and the things they teach, the many ways that I am hopeful for and with them.

It was a special opportunity, and so I did something I've never done before—offered all six of my young adult books (the seventh,the Seville-based Small Damages, won't be out until next summer) as a summer giveaway.  And oh, what a response we have had.  I've heard from school principals and librarians, grandmothers and moms, fathers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts.  I've heard from young writers and young readers, students on the verge of college and students on the verge of applying to master's degree programs.  I've received notes from all across the country and all around the world.  Many readers have asked for YA books featuring a male teen; I'm 6,000 words into writing one of those.  Many described their particular passions, their favorite books.

I had originally thought that I would give all six books to a single winner, sweepstakes style, but as I read these notes through and considered the huge volume of mail, it occurred to me that there were some very right and particular titles for some very particular readers.  Here, then, are the winners, with the lines or thoughts that triggered my own "I have just the book for them" responses.  Please know, all of you, that I read and considered and valued and had a very hard time choosing winners.  I hope you'll look for books that sound interesting to you and let me know what you think.

Undercover, my first young adult novel, about a young, Cyrano-like poet and her discovery of her own beauty, to 14-year-old Kyla Rich, who wrote, "My 12-year-old sister and I love to read. .... you can never read too much, especially with how much you can learn from reading: Learn about the world, about scholarly things that you'd learn in school, or, sometimes, about yourself. I never really knew why I read so much or why I liked it but, as I read your Dear Reader, I realized why. I read to understand, to know beyond myself. Exactly what you said in your Dear Reader. I guess that might be another reason I write. My sister and I are writers, unpublished of course, and we write to craft the kind of books we like to read, to give someone joy, to help someone, maybe even start a craze. We write for even that ONE person who likes our books, even if it is just one. At least someone cares enough to read." 

House of Dance, about Rosie's quest to find a final gift for her grandfather (and her discovery of a wonderful cast of ballroom dancers), to Patricia Corcoran, who wrote, "I'm 63 years old and have read for as long as I can remember. Except for when I was growing up, I didn't read Young Adult books. I don't know why, but I didn't. About 3 years ago, I started reading them and thoroughly enjoy the ones I've read so far. I have 2 grandchildren, Gregory who is 9 and Emily who is 8. Both of them like to read and, of course, I encourage them to do so. I've set a goal for myself to learn more about the young adult books, their authors, the book awards, etc so I can be more knowledgeable in this genre of books. I'm so pleased you have the relationship with these young people that you do.What an enrichment they are to your life and how fortunate you are to realize this. Thank you again for sharing this most enjoyable column. The way you described these young people will help me understand and enjoy the young adult books I will be reading in the future."

Nothing but Ghosts, a mystery that stars a bright young woman named Katie, who has recently lost her mother and is trying to understand how one survives loss (a journey that takes her into the garden of a recluse and into the care of a fine and fashionable librarian), to Lisa Moss, a librarian who wrote, "Our department, technically, covers up to 8th grade. But so many of our kids don't ever leave! Oh, sure, they move on in school and read bigger, not better, books from the adult department - but so many keep coming back to us. They volunteer in our Summer Reading Program. They visit during Spring Break.  They tell us stories from their first jobs. And the first thing they all do is go over to the new YA display to see what's there! Once a connection is made, it is there forever."

The Heart Is Not a Size, about Georgia and Riley, whose bestfriendship is tested when they travel to Juarez, Mexico, to build a community bathroom for a squatter's village, to Janet Valentine of Orlando, who is contemplating joining a teenage mission trip and wrote, "You portrayed teen-agers in such a positive light, my husband will be so happy that I read your column and it makes me lean more towards accepting this ministry.  Maybe I will learn a lot more from them than the other way around."

Dangerous Neighbors, about twin sisters, set against the backdrop of Centennial Philadelphia, to Jean Brady, who wrote, "It is so uplifting to see life from someone else's viewpoint, to walk beside someone solving a mystery, though often fiction; to learn more about decorating, recipes, and the like."

You Are My Only, the alternating stories of a young mother who loses her Baby to mysterious means and a teenaged girl breaking free from a reclusive home, to Pat Harmer, who wrote, "I just read your column that you wrote to fill in for Suzanne Beecher. I was so moved by how you expressed the young people. And I am going to recommend your books to my granddaughter, who will be thirteen this fall. She has yet to find an author that she really enjoys, and therefore does not read as much as I would like her to. And perhaps your books will be the ones that drawn her into the wonderful world of reading. Thank you so much for the inspiration."

My thanks to Caroline Leavitt, the wonderful novelist and friend and Facebooker, who suggested Dear Reader to me in the first place.

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Elluminating with Joan Kaywell and her doctorate/master's students

Tomorrow evening I'll be here at my desk, but not precisely here at my desk, as I interact with the doctoral and master's students of Joan Kaywell's University of South Florida class by way of camera eye, microphone, and Elluminate software.  Joan tells me that Elluminate is like Skype on steroids.  She tells me, too, that I don't need to prepare for a thing—that the class has read Dangerous Neighbors and is ready to talk.  Joan probably doesn't know that I hyper-prepare for everything.  Perhaps I'll clean my office, then, in high anticipation.

I'm eager to take this foray into long-distance guesting.  Even if (as some of you know) I am less than techno-savvy.

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The Coffins of Little Hope/Timothy Schaffert: Reflections

These words from The Washington Post's Ron Charles drew me to The Coffins of Little Hope:

The Coffins of Little Hope is like an Edward Gorey cartoon stitched in pastel needlepoint. Its creepiness scurries along the edges of these heartwarming pages like some furry creature you keep convincing yourself you didn't see.

You're in, right?  You want to know more?  I bought the book, I got in and I stayed, from the very first line:

I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin's-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn't quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like.

 .... to the last:

You were young only minutes ago.

Reading the pages in between was like watching the lights of a carnival go on—the hurly burly commotion of color, the hyperkinetic blink of possibility, the flavorful oddness of a sui generis cast of characters.  There's Essie Myles, an 83-year-old obituary writer for the local, small-town paper.  There's the possible kidnapping of a possible daughter (yes, that's right, we never know for absolute certain if the kidnapped daughter is a scam or a true loss).  There's the final installment of a famed young adult book that's being printed by Essie's press.  Parts of that book get leaked (or are those parts the real book?)  Gentle weirdnesses come and go (but have they left forever?).  These small-town people face all kinds of trouble (or they make it up), and Schaeffert can't say no to the sweet tangent. 

It's a wild bob and weave.  It's profoundly and preposterously well-imagined.  There are lines here, plenty of them, that most writers would give their polished eye tooth to lay a claim to.  Taken together, Coffins is a delight—a book that you cannot wrangle with.  Just let it happen to you.  Stumble off, dazed.

     

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The Dear Reader Guest Column and Six-Book Giveaway

Today I'm honored to be stepping in as guest columnist at Dear Reader, while Suzanne Beecher, the creator of this marvelous book- and book-club centric site, takes a well-earned vacation with her grandchildren. I'm talking about the younger, life-changing readers I've met in the column (you all know who you are!), and as part of the program, I'm hosting my biggest-ever book giveaway—all six of my young adult novels (including my final galley for the forthcoming You Are My Only) are being offered.

Join us for the fun.

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Watching WASTE LAND and Visiting Immaculata with my Salvadoran mother-in-law

My Salvadoran mother-in-law (the star, in part, of my memoir, Still Love in Strange Places) has been in town, nursing a leg that has borne the brunt of a brave life—an early operation, a terrible accident at Nora's coffee farm, repeated torques and falls.  Just two weeks ago, yet another cast was removed, leaving Nora commandeering a borrowed cane.  So that she is here, and we look for things to do that will not tax her further.

Yesterday we drove Nora to Immaculata University, where, in 1952, she spent a year studying with her Salvadoran girlfriends.  A dear nun let us in through a back door, showed us the elevator, and we were in—walking the halls that Nora once walked as an eighteen-year-old girl in a brand-new (and only briefly borrowed) country.  Horses brought the students the mail, we learned.  The girls smoked across the street.  A taxi ("very cheap, you know") would take them down country roads, to West Chester, where they would buy the "more delicious" food.

This afternoon, we've been sitting together watching WASTE LAND, the Academy Award Nominee for Best Feature Documentary, which can be instant-queued from Netflix.  I could hardly do a better job of succinctly describing the essence of this deeply moving, so ultimately humane film than the film's own web site, so I paste that description in here. 

Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT and COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) and co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley have great access to the entire process and, in the end, offer stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.

Watch this movie straight through its closing credits, and you'll sit in silence afterward—reminded of the power of yearning over having, of making over done, of open hearts versus decided ones.  Sit with those you have come to love, and reflect on what finally matters.

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Every time I start writing a book

it's as if I've never written one before.  I forget how hard the early days are.  I do too much research, overcrowd my head, rush toward those bits of plot I know, leave too little room for language.

Then I remember what it is to take it slow.  To back it up.  To make the story, line by line.  To allow an afternoon to pass without writing a single word.  It's all right, I remember, to sit here dreaming.  It's fine—in fact, it is essential—to write what I won't use to discover what I will. 

Will the game of pitch and toss stay?

I don't know. 

Will Molly return the penny? 

It might not matter, after all.

Except that it all matters.  It's process. 

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living long

I put those hydrangeas from yesterday's thank-you vlog to good use (here and elsewhere) and deeply enjoyed having our friends John and Andra join us (and my husband's world-traveling, coffee-farm-managing Salvadoran mother) for an evening beneath the sweetened skies.

I may be writing and reading at an old snail's pace these days.  But I am living long.  And that counts, too.

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a vlog in celebration of blooms, fireworks, news, you

A thank you vlog, in a stolen moment.

For Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jill Santopolo, and Philomel, for their faith in Small Damages.  For the gift of hydrangeas.  For the quiet now of making a house ripe for guests.  And for Q who forgives me even when knows should be know.... :)

Happy Fourth of July Weekend to you all.

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Which photograph tells a more invigorated story?

They are the same three boys. It is the same pair of steps at the Berlin cathedral. Only seconds separate the scenes.  But it seems to me that these two photographs tell very different stories, just as the two nearly identical sentences I have been working through this morning would each take my new novel (only 3,000 words long at the moment) into very different directions.

In the early writing of a book, the smallest-seeming decisions both delimit and define.

It's all so fragile.  It takes so much time.

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the future of publishing: a note in honor of my up and coming friends

I am quoting now from a comment I received earlier this week from Liviania, one of my very first young friends in this blogging arena.  Her words, entire:

I'm at the Columbia Publishing Course right now, and one of the themes is that publishers need to be more transparent. They need to talk about what they do, so that authors understand the value of a publisher versus just putting an ebook on the internet themselves.

Your editor, your copyeditor . . . you blog so frequently and beautifully about the team behind your books. I'm sure they appreciate it even more than you can imagine.

I write about my editors, my copy editors, my dream editors, those collective teams because they matter to me.  Because they have changed the way I've thought about books. Because they have made room, from time to time, for my stories, while keeping me safe from myself.

Judging from the quality of the minds of my students and of those younger bloggers who have befriended me both on this page and off of it, I can say with absolute assurance that there is a rising class of editorial types—a stellar cadre of wordlovers and wordsmiths, grammatical giants, and opinionated tastemakers that will define our next generation of books if we, as a culture, remain open to them.

We must, I think, remain open to them.  Eric Felten, writing in the Wall Street Journal (which has lately emerged as a hotspot for book talk) is of that opinion, too.  Here he is, opining with a piece he's called:  "Cherish the Book Publishers—You'll Miss Them When They're Gone."

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