a video message on the eve of a new year

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so he likes to dance, so it runs in the family

Getting ready for New Year's Eve.

A very happy and safe day to you all.

And to peace in 2012.

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The Solder of Limb Shade, remembering my mother, five years on

My mother is five years gone this day.  
Two years ago, I wrote this poem for her.  
It still belongs to her.

The Solder of Limb Shade

Where you are is not

where you are,

beneath the granite bench

and the heart-footed deer,

under cover, under the solder

of limb shade.

You are not sunk you are not skidded past

by wind.

You are not level, rise, diaspora, root,

nor the chime, pretty as it is,

above the stone field and its tulips.

But once, in a restaurant,

they played your song,

and the house that I have built from almost nothing

is hung about with birds.

You gave your final word

to me.

You said.

You are.

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Hope is personal. Thoughts at year's end.

I've been wanting to say something for a while, haven't known where to begin.  I'll start like this:  It was quite a year.

Amidst other things, I released a book called You Are My Only, a book I'd spent a long time writing.  I had, perhaps, too much hope for it, or that's what I thought at first.  As it turns out, I had the wrong idea about what hope is, and where its embers live.

Hope, I learned over the course of this year, is answered in the middle of night and in the heat of the day by kindness you don't see coming.  It is given wings by extra-ordinary readers who take time from their real lives to read your book, to think about it, to tell you and others how the story lives in them.  There was no official blog tour for You Are My Only, no physical tour, nor radio, nor TV (though I will always be grateful to my friend Darcy Jacobs, for her kindness to the book in Family Circle).  I had a book launch party but there were few books to be had.  And nonetheless—nonetheless—You Are My Only found its right homes.

If I tried to thank all of you who taught me what hope is and what it looks like this year I would not succeed.  There were so many moments, so many gifts, so many gestures, so many wild acts of compassion, so much unfathomable generosity.  Hope was born.  Hope was launched. 

At the end of this year, I want to stop and thank all of you.  I also want to stop—just plain stop—and thank the young woman who started so much of this for me:  Amy Riley.  It was Amy who discovered my blog a few years ago, when Nothing but Ghosts was set to come out.  It was Amy who threw a surprise launch blog party that year that left me in trembles.  Amy has been there ever since.  She has rallied her enormous community of friends around me—opened doors, built bridges, quietly insisted.

And there she is, at the end of this year, naming You Are My Only as one of her top books.

There are official lists.  There are personal lists.  Hope is entirely personal.

Thank you, Amy.

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by my mother's stone, by my son's side

This is the last Christmas that we'll call our son a student, or that he'll think of himself that way.  I am aware of the passing of each day.  I gladly accept every hug.

I gladly accept, too, his heart.  His willingness to rearrange this very afternoon so that he could join me in a winter trip out to my mother's grave.  In two days she will be five years gone.

"But you're so busy," I said, when he offered to come.

"No, no, Mom.  I'm not too busy.  Not too busy for that."

We stood before her stone, a polished red granite.  We placed a basket of greens by the stone.  We remembered her out loud, one to the other, and then we walked this path to the car.

He understands honor, this beautiful, grown-up kid of mine.

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Enchanted (utterly) by The Artist

We escaped a day of rain and headed for the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, where "The Artist," a film I'd been eager to see, was playing. 

If you watch this trailer you won't benefit from any explanation I might offer.  It's all there—the silent film star's liquid eyes, the irradiated charisma of up-and-comer, the end of one era, the beginning of another, the wordlessness, the story.  It's a beguiling film, a French play on Hollywood traditions. 

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The articulate travail of existence: from the adult novel in progress

When you write as I do—in surges, in stolen time—it is easy to lose sight of your own projects, to tuck them away and out of the aim of hopefulness while you wait for others to read them.

This morning I remember the adult novel-in-progress.

If thirty acres is thirty acres, land never ends.  The stream winds and spills, the rocks break and fracture, the moss grows green between trees, and the squirrels go off on their mad, fugitive runs; these squirrels did.  In the thrill, expectant burst of May, in the hours after Vin drove off, Becca went deeper into the woods.  Across the sodden polish of the stream, over the flat back of stones, toward the rim of pine and in through the grove of tulip, white birch, oak.  Beneath her boots, the carapaces of dead bugs crunched—beetles, she guessed, centipede specters, the lovely, unlucky ladybirds. Into her hair floated cast-off things, dander, twig debris.  Glorious, primeval things, she thought, a huntress by then, a seeker, for she had the Leica with her, and the idea of that boy, and the words from the paperback he’d left behind:  the articulate travail of existence.

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This is where I want to be.

This is where (in my imagination) I am.

Happy Boxing Day to all of you!

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Reading Boleto for Christmas

This afternoon, once the final big meal is cooked for our small but happy family of three, this will be me on the couch, the sun floating in, Alyson Hagy's Boleto on my quilted lap.  I started reading this gorgeous novel the day it arrived.  Irrefutable deadlines and pressures took the pleasure from me.  But just this morning—one boy upstairs still asleep (we passed in the night at 4 AM; he was just finishing a scene he had been writing and I was getting up to finish a client project), one outside in his workshop, making art—I began to read again. 

I have not yet been able to put words to just how much I love this book of Alyson's.  I cannot describe her talent, the deep and never show-boating knowing that fills her every page.  I cannot say what an honor it is to have an early copy of this novel in my home, or how lucky I am to have Alyson as an ever-enduring friend.  But I began to tell you something of Boleto here, when I quoted from the very first page, and in a moment I will quote to you from a page deeper in.

Somewhere in Wyoming, Alyson's preparing a dinner for six.  She's been out snowshoe-ing this morning with her son.  She's been looking for, in her email words, "deer trails, moose tracks, pine cones recently flaked by squirrels, chickadees, ravens." 

But before all that, she wrote this:

... He could always recall the peculiar stink of his mother's lilac blossoms when they thawed out in the spring.  He could practically write lyrics to the music the field mice made in his bedroom walls, or the midnight bawling of cows and calves.  These were the truths that were fixed inside him.  They hung like well-used tools on a workshop wall.  People were not fixed.  People slipped away like weather over a horizon.  You could love a person all you wanted, all that you were capable of, but a person would not settle once you left them behind.

If there is justice in this literary world, Alyson Hagy will become a household name in the year about to dawn.

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Let it snow

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Stasiland/Anna Funder: Brief Reflections

And so I began to order books about Berlin—dozens of them.  And day after day after day they arrived, gifts to myself in a frantic season.  I read the arcane text books, flip through the second-hand photo albums, study a self-published, printed-upon-my-demand memoir that could not be more ripe with detail, and rise, very early today, to read Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall.

Let's just say that, despite the fact that this book has been translated into 20 countries and won prestigious prizes, I was not prepared for the stunning depth of research here nor the profoundly beautiful shape of the sentences. This is a book by a woman who set out to tell the real stories of those who were both condemned by the wall and protectors of it.  There is, as the flap copy tells us, "the heartbreaking story of Frau Paul, who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall."  There is the story of the "Mik Jegger of the East." There is an old woman, Miriam, who was once 16 and determined to flee.  She nearly made it; she was almost there; she was imprisoned and tortured instead.

Anna Funder, the author of this exquisite book, is an Australian by birth.  She gained an outsider's inside view.  Every single sentence here is designed, thought through.  Listen:

I pour more beer. It's the second, or maybe the third, and it is loosening up the afternoon. For a moment I am an eye in the ceiling corner. I see two women, like reflections of one another, at an old table in an old kitchen in East Berlin. One has her sleeves rolled up, the other draws her black jumper over her fists, bringing them out only to smoke. This rooms seems small shelter from the outside world because the colours of the yard have seeped in here, grey and brown—apart from the tiny blue pilot light above the sink, and the remains of pink sauce in a pan.

Stasiland was originally published in Australia and the UK in 2003. Perhaps, I thought, there had been something new from this author in the meantime.  (A girl could hope.)  A touch of a few buttons, and there was the welcome news.  Anna Funder does indeed have a brand new book—a first novel based on fact, called All That I Am.  You can learn more about it here, even listen to this beautiful writer talk.

Anyone interested in the surprising reach of the Nazi past, anyone who loves a real writer, should be as tempted as I am to buy it.

(I'm not just tempted, of course.  I will buy it when it is released by Harper in February of next year.)

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Little Miss M. is turning 12 today

Let's get the party started!!

If you want to know more about this beautiful, funny, talented princess of the ballroom dance floor who never makes fun of the old people she is dancing with, go here.

Or.  Just raise a glass to her Twelfth Year.  We're wearing pink today, in her honor.  We're also not counting our calories.

What, after all, is love for, if not for young ladies who dance, and who make us happy?

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what my nephew can do

We had Thanksgiving this year at my brother's home, and after the many dishes had been consumed, I followed my nephew upstairs to his room, where his latest adventure was roosting.  He'd decided—no whim, this—to buy the multifarious components that constitute a real, video-game playing computer, and to assemble them over the course of an afternoon or two.

I'm not the smartest person when it comes to computational things.  I'm not even in the middle of the pack.  But it was with great happiness that I sat on the floor with Owen as he explained what went where, what almost blew up, how he kept his cool, and how (in addition to all else) he had nearly achieved a fully color-coordinated device.


I love that kid.

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Best. Of.

The happiest time in my writerly life is the time when I am writing.  The most unnerving is just ahead of a book's release.  Will others read the book as it was meant to be read—ease into its rhythms, find its heart?  Will characters who meant the world to me mean at least a little something to another?

The pre-release of You Are My Only was, for me, a particularly nervous-making time, and there were many who were there for me and with me through that angst.  None of it is forgotten.  Not an ounce.  Among you was a certain John, who had read Dangerous Neighbors for Dear Author, written with great heart and intelligence about it, and become a friend.  I have not been kidding when I have said, in the past, that John might as well be a New York Times reviewer for all the care he brings to books.  It's almost impossible to think that college and career still lie before him.

In any case, I had been out to the movies one night and was in the passenger seat of the car when an email buzzed in from John.  He had just read You Are My Only.  He was writing to tell me what he thought.  "Why are you crying?" my husband asked me.  "Because the book mattered to someone," I said.

Yesterday John posted his Best of 2011 list for Dear Author.  There sits You Are My Only.

Thank you not just for this, John, but for so many gestures of great kindness.  I can't wait to see where your life takes you.

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waking up to loveliness

There is nothing quite like the sleep that comes after a day spent cooking and an evening spent celebrating.  Last night, in other words, I slept (sleep: I recommend it).

This morning I woke to these beautiful words about You Are My Only from a woman so dear to me that one of the book's characters was both shaped by the goodness of her heart and christened with her name.  My friend is in Australia right now, living an adventurer's life and writing about it here.  She's miles away, but she's close.

Love to you, Mandy.

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Following the Voice, Finding the Soul: My Cynsations Post

I feel as lovely as this creature today, for my words have found their way to Cynsations, Cynthia Leitich Smith's deservedly famed and remarkably generous blog.  She is an author who cares about other authors.  We're all better off for her bestselling books, and for her care.

My post is called "Following the Voice, Finding the Soul: The Making of You Are My Only."

It begins like this:

I think, when I write, about voice. I begin there. Not with the color of the characters’ eyes, nor with the plot. Not with a sweet synopsis or even a one-page outline that points from here to there.

The whole thing is here.

Thank you so much, Cynthia. 

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Beautifying the Sentence: today is the day

National Novel Writing Month-ers, today is the day.  Send me your best revised sentence (the before and the after) from your NaNo novel and you will be entered into a contest to win either a signed galley of Small Damages (Philomel) or a signed copy of You Are My Only (Egmont USA). 

For details and for thoughts about what makes a good sentence, please go here.  The contest winner will be announced on Christmas Eve. 

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our holiday wishes, a photograph taken during an early morning ride

We will take the moon in full,
the snow as it falls.

We will find the ephemera
above the trees, beneath the slaking clouds.

We will look up and see
and in that moment pause
for the sweet true stillness of winter.

Season's Greetings to you all.

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The Philosopher Kings: a documentary

We can forget that we already have so much of what matters.  We can worry ourselves on, insist on ourselves, seek our own ascendancy, pursue our moment.

And then we watch a film like this one, a story about custodians told by custodians, and we remember:  Love is the biggest thing, and life is not what we achieve for ourselves but what we achieve for and with others. 

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Not Musty: The British Museum

I thought the British Museum would be musty, strictly artifactual, thick around the middle, full of sad, plundering tales, half glyphs, faded graffiti.

It was hardly those things (if we overlook the plunder).  It was bright and white, a Spiralgraph.  It was—with all the hustle of morning school children and their bands of overseers—alive.

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Emmy's Christmas Eve

In You Are My Only, Emmy and Autumn spend Christmas Eve together in a hospital, Emmy reading aloud from a borrowed book.  This was one of my favorite scenes to write, and when the future of this book was in doubt, when it seemed possible that it wouldn't be any book at all, I would return to this scene and write it again and imagine that Emmy and Autumn were worth fighting for. 

This morning, Bonnie Jacobs writes to say that The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader has chosen to excerpt this scene on her blog. Peace, I think.

Without further anything, then, Emmy and Autumn at Christmas:  here.

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every now and then, a girl needs to get herself some flowers

I thought these were the sweetest little things.

In other news:  We have a tree.

There will be Christmas.

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Cover Reveal: Nichts als Liebe (Nothing but Ghosts, the German edition)

When Nothing but Ghosts is released this summer from Taschenbuch Ausgabe, it will be translated by Cornelia Stoll, whom I am told is one of the very best, and it will have this cover.

Since I am now at work on a book that takes place in Germany, this all makes me extraordinarily happy, and hopeful.

Thank you, Jean McGinley, for helping to make this happen. Thank you to the acquiring editor, Julia Malik, for having such faith.

Thank you Taschenbuch Ausgabe and Cornelia Stoll for Nichts als Liebe. 

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Wonderstruck/Brian Selznick: Celebration

I will confess to this:

Late in the darkened day, dozens of gifts finally wrapped, most of the cards out into the world, the house clean, the boy's room ready for the boy, and the clients happy, I stopped.

For my dear niece Claire, I'd bought a copy of Wonderstruck by the masterful Brian Selznick.  I hadn't wrapped this gift yet.  I'd wanted to take time with it, so that Claire and I could talk about it later.  Those soft yet crystalline pencil drawings.  Those two stories that become one.  That old-time New York City.  That cabinet of wonders.  Meteorites and movie stars.

Six-hundred thirty-five pages of art.  A book dedicated to Maurice Sendak.  A book that, in this late hour, in a time where I've been feeling that brand of holiday rush and sad, felt just right, felt perfect.

Yes.  This was the one.  This was the book for my big-hearted, big-eyed beautiful Claire.  This was the moment that finally ushered in my Christmas.

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why do we write for the younger reader? because of this. always.

I sprinted outside when I saw the mailman coming; I was eager to conduct a quick exchange.  But when I realized what it was that he was handing me—a fat envelope containing a bright red folder, a folder full of thank you notes—I stopped in the cold gray air.  Stopped right there in my tracks.

I'd visited Mrs. Skrzat's classroom at The Eighth Grade Center at Springford just before I'd left for London.  I'd sat in a classroom talking about what we believe in, what we write, what we reach for, how we live.  And then, in a mad fury, I had dashed off.  Not forgetting those dear students—I never do that.  But imagining that they would soon forget me.

My high school friend Cynthia Feimster had arranged for the morning.  I want her, and Mrs. Skrzat, and all those students (they made me think, they made me laugh) to know that l hold that memory dear.  Every single letter in this bright red folder of letters is an indelible treasure.

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Guess what I did to chill?

My son is closing out the second-to-last semester of his college career.

I tremble when I write that.

Papers have kept him up until 6:45 AM.  Finals are filling his days.  He'll exit the final final at the final hour — 7:30 Friday night — and then we'll bring him home.

Yesterday afternoon he called us in a snatch of stolen time.  "Guess what I just did to chill?" he asked.  I had many possible answers; I kept them to myself.  When we said we didn't know, couldn't possibly guess, he answered like this:  "I wrote.  I wrote what I wanted to write.  A new installation in my mystery series.  Can't wait to read it to you when I get home."

You know how I've always said that writing, for me, is medicinal?  I am sitting here feeling just a mighty bit of glad that I passed that part of my weird genetics on.

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Oeuvre

When you are pressed, as I have been pressed, it is easy to forget that some things, sometimes, do get done.  Books are conceived.  Books are written.  Thanks to Maureen of Barnes and Noble (Devon) for this display.  (I am to blame for sneaking Small Damages in there.  It just looked so pretty.)

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I breathed; I read the opening of Boleto

It's all moving at lightning speed around here, and frankly, I'm not keeping up.  "Breathe," a friend said the other day, and so, over the course of a train ride to Philadelphia yesterday morning, I neglected all other pressing responsibilities and did.  I breathed.  Which is to say, I read the first pages of my friend Alyson Hagy's new novel, Boleto, which had arrived by way of uncorrected proofs from Graywolf Saturday morning. 

I have known Alyson for a long time.  I have read every book she has written.  I have read some of her stories twice.  I have treasured every email, learned what she has generously taught me, savored the quality of her—no fair-weather friend, this Alyson Hagy.  She is always there, she is never self-important, she takes time even though I am not entirely sure how she finds a speck of time, for she is as deeply involved in the life of the creative writing department of University of Wyoming (Laramie) as she is in the university's sports program.  She snow shoes and plays championship tennis on the side.  She celebrates students, other writers, townsfolk, horsefolk.  She also writes books.

Oh, good Lord, does she write books.

My entire mood changed as I read the opening pages of Boleto.  My heart beat slowed.  For once again Alyson is doing something new with language, she is pulling me in, she is calming me with the tremendous grace of her talent.  I recalled the tone of Kent Haruf's Plainsong as I read, one of my all-time most favorite books.  I thought of how Alyson never stays in one place, is never happy with a single note, is perpetually tempted by language.

Here, for the time being, are the opening sentences of Boleto.  You are going to hear so much more about this book.  And not just from me, I swear.

She was a gift, though he did not think of her that way for a long time.  He paid twelve hundred dollars for her, money that came straight from his single account at Cabin Valley Bank.  She was halter broke, and trailer broke, and she had been wormed for the spring....  He knew twelve hundred dollars was a bargain for a strong-legged filly with papers.  He knew that even before he saw her.

Yes, reading Alyson Hagy is breathing.

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I've Been Getting Older Lately: The She Writes Guest Blog

Not long ago, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (a novelist, memoirist, teacher, and dear friend), invited me to contribute a post to She Writes, "a community, virtual workplace, and emerging marketplace for women who write, with over 15,000 active members from all 50 states and more than 30 countries."  Reiko herself had been invited to spearhead a series of front-page stories called "The Daily Mentor," and you can find her series on the She Writes front page all throughout this week.

I was, of course, more than delighted to contribute.  I share my post with you here; it will go up at noon on She Writes.  Please check out the entire site and register to join, if you haven't already.

When Rahna Reiko Rizzuto invited me to submit a guest post for She Writes, I remembered, as I often do, a day Reiko and I once shared in Manhattan.  A long walk.  The rocks of Central Park.  A story she was telling about the Hudson River.  Turtles.  I remembered that day, and then I remembered all the years before and after, when Reiko and I have been friends.  And then I had this thought, small and essential:  None of any of that would have ever occurred if it hadn’t been for books.  Because that’s how we met, Reiko and I—through the books we’d been writing, through the books we had read.

I’ve been getting older lately, and I’ve been realizing this:  I feel most at peace among those who recognize the power of books, who work to write or protect or celebrate them, who value them, who buy them, who will write an email, 4 AM:  I’ve just found a book that I know you will love.  Some may see this as an elitist thing.  I see it as anything but.  Lovers of books are lovers of stories, and stories are foundational, heart-centric, core.

Publishing is hard, full of abrasions and deflations, unnecessarily brusque, unnaturally confusing—or, I should say, publishing can be those things.   But writing books and reading them, loving books and sharing them, is a different matter altogether—it is a peace zone, a shelter.

I will have published fourteen books by the time next summer rolls around, and what stands out most for me, in all these years, is not the reviews or the awards or the sales figures (never the sales figures!), but the community of book lovers, book bloggers, book friends that I have found and kept, the community that has kept me.  What stands out for me is the walks that I have been privileged to take, the conversations I have had, the rescue and the shelter, the promise and the passion, those turtles sunning themselves on those rocks. 

Something true and affirming has emerged from it all.  Something real, and honest. 

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If I Could Give You This

If I could give you the sound of Vespers within the stone walls of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church.  If I could give you the ride back to my father's house.  If I could give you the pink edge of the sky, or the lawns alight with Christmas.

If.

I can only give you this.

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Beautifying the Sentence: a contest reminder

In early November, just as the National Novel Writing Month was getting under way, I posted a contest, the gist of which was this:  Share with me your best revised sentence, post NaNo, and you'll have a chance to win a copy of either You Are My Only (Egmont USA), which just went into its third printing, or Small Damages (Philomel), which has not been printed yet (but I have a spare handful of galleys).  I'll also be posting your work on my blog.

For more details and examples of sentences improved and empowered, please go here.

The contest closes December 20th.  The winner will be announced on Christmas Eve.

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A Little You Are My Only News

I've never been to Brazil, but I have longed to go.  For the time being, You Are My Only is going in my stead, thanks to the good work of Amy Rennert and the Jenny Meyer Literary Agency, Inc.  Brazilian-Portuguese rights to the book have been sold to Novo Conceito.

You Are My Only also, as many of you know, went into a third U.S. printing this week.  For that enormous bit of good fortune, I have the world of generous bloggers and independent booksellers (and of course Darcy Jacobs, of Family Circle) to thank. Thanks today especially to Serena Agusto-Cox, who placed You Are My Only on the D.C. Literature Examiner gift book buying guide.  Check out the entire list for some spectacular recommendations from a very fine reader.

I thank you all.  From the bottom of my heart, I do.

Many thanks, too, to Elizabeth Law of Egmont USA, for being the bearer of good news.

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On Berlin, Re-reading, and Book of Clouds

David Bowman has an interesting and timely back-page essay in The New York Times Book Review this weekend.  It's called "Read It Again, Sam," and it celebrates books fine enough to be read again.  Patti Smith reports on her plan to read again An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.  Stephen King professes to having read Lord of the Flies eight or nine times.  Bharati Mukherjee reveals that she re-read all of Louise May Alcott at least a half-dozen times at the tender age of 9.

And you?

Earlier this week, while on a plane home from London, I reached for Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), a book I'd read at once upon its release in 2009.  It's just the right size for an eight-hour flight (with a nap tucked somewhere in between), and I'd wanted to re-read it because I craved the surreal mood it had engendered within me—the fog, the mist, the strange; I craved the Berlin at the book's heart.  How had Aridjis achieved her effects?  I would examine this.  I would study it.

I had remembered Clouds as a lyric of a book, and indeed extraordinarily beautiful images float throughout. But what was also fascinating to me, upon my second review, is that Aridjis is not tricking her reader with language here; she is never overreaching.  Indeed, some of her oddest moments and most surreal, memorable constructions are rendered with thoroughly uncluttered, even straightforward prose—a glorious effect that I had not deconstructed my first time through.  So caught up was I in the mood of her Berlin—in the underground worlds, in the residues of a sinister past—that I failed to see that passages like this one, describing an abandoned bowling alley beneath the streets, had been meticulously and not (until the very end) metaphorically put forth.  Aridjis gives us the facts.  She lets us do with them what we will. 

After traversing several dark, damp rooms, plowing ever deeper into the labyrinth, though it was hard to tell how many doorways we'd actually crossed, we arrived at the so-called Gestapo bowling alley, a rectangular room, somewhat larger than the others as far as I could tell.  Our guide asked us to fan out so that everyone could see and directed his flashlight at different spots.  I stepped out from behind a girl with pigtails and began to look around.  It was a pretty chilling sight.  Everything, it seemed, was just the way it had been left decades ago.  At the center of the room lay a metal contraption, about eight feet long, an obsolete machine once used for spitting out wooden bowling balls, and with its rusty corners and thin bars, it looked, at least from afar, like a medieval instrument of torture, like those racks to which victims were bound by their hands and feet and then stretched.

I would not have known this about Clouds had I not read the book a second time.  I would have carried with me a false idea about Aridjis method—a first-blush idea, not a studied one.  I loved the book even more the second time I read it through.  I loved it, though, for somewhat different reasons.

Always, in perpetuity, Clouds will be a signifier for me—a book that in large part sent me to Berlin this past summer, a trip that subsequently led to my own work on a new (and very different) book set in that city for the beautiful Tamra Tuller of Philomel.  Without Clouds, I would not have taken that trip, in other words.  Without Clouds, I would not now be sitting here, surrounded by books and films about Berlin's past.  This was a book that had deserved a second reading.  Most good books do.

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happiness immemorial

"You look happy," I told a friend yesterday.  We were at the dance studio, a dark storm lashing against the window glass. 

"Of course," he said.

I asked him why, half a joke, a plea for sun on a rumbling day.  He began (it was easy for him) to enumerate.  Youth was on his list.  Health.  Love.  Opportunity.  Dance.  Not riches, he said.  He wouldn't want riches.  Riches wouldn't make him happy.

A little girl came in, next to dance.  She put on her shoes, he bowed to her, they walked down the hall, arms linked together.  I went out into the storm and for the rest of that night, my friend's happiness was mine, his celebration of what we have right now, this moment.

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Christmas in London, then home

We went from place to place, as fast as we could.  We loved our time with family.  I stopped for no scene, calibrated nothing, just lifted my camera above the crowds and shot, trying to freeze the color.  At the British Museum, on the last day, we stopped and paused and stood.  On the flight home I studied the skies and feared that all the color would be lost, remembered the state of the house as we had left it — Christmas packages high in one corner, but not a light, not the smell of pine, no Santa or ornament or bell.

My sister, though, had thought ahead for me.  There was a package by the door, tall and skinny.  There was a tree inside, lights, wooden ornaments.  There was, in other words, Christmas.  I set to work and there it stands—by the window where I work, subverting gray weather.

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Jill Lepore and the electrifying evening

I'd like to use the word "electrifying" in the following post.  I'd like to use it several times.

Because that's the word that kept coming to mind throughout our time with Jill Lepore, who last evening graced Villanova University as the third speaker in The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series.  If I had allowed myself to wonder, theoretically, how one young woman could have already achieved so much in life—she's a professor of American History at Harvard and one of my very favorite writers at The New Yorker; she's published books on topics ranging from the Tea Party to the origins of American identity; she's gone to Dickens camp and read 38 volumes of original Ben Franklin; her work has won the Bancroft Prize and been a finalist for the Pulitzer; she's even co-authored a novel—I stopped wondering two minutes after she walked into the room.  The answer is pretty basic, pretty simple:  Jill Lepore doesn't waste an ounce of her intellect on posturing or presumption.  Her enthusiasm is equal to her intelligence.  Her facility with language, structure, theme is all in rather happy accordance with her capacity to sleuth her way toward truth.

She was extraordinary last night.  She was—here it comes—electrifying as she spoke about Jane Franklin, Ben Franklin's sister and truest correspondent (for more on the topic, please click here).  My mother would have loved Jill Lepore.  She would have sat there as I sat there, on the edge of a seat in a crowded room, happy to be in the company of one that exhilarating, that engaged. 

There are so many who make an event like this happen.  I'm particularly grateful to my friend Paul Steege, a Villanova University associate professor of history who sits on the speaker selection committee, to Diane Brocchi, to Father Kail Ellis, to Marc Gallicchio, and to Adele Lindenmeyr.  And of course, none of this would be possible without my father, Horace Kephart, who had the foresight to create this lecture series in memory of the woman he loved. 

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My interview with Pamela Paul, the NYT children's book editor

We'd been in London until late last night, celebrating the christening of this enormously special little boy.  Among the packages we'd carried with us was this beguiling deluxe pop-up version of The Little Prince, the Antoine de Saint-Exupery story that has never lost its magical glean. (We also brought Felix The Man in the Moon, the gorgeous new book by William Joyce.)

Pamela Paul, who was named the fifth children's book editor at the The New York Times earlier this year, has an innate understanding of the importance of books made for children and has radically transformed their coverage since taking on the role.  I began to notice the changes some time around April.  The conversation was deepening.  The reportage was growing broader.  There was more children's book talk, not just on the weekend, but during the week.  Melissa Walker was having her New York Times Book Review moment.  We were being treated to behind-the-scenes conversations that I found frankly thrilling. There were more back-page essays exploring the influence of early books on readers.  Who, I wondered, was behind all this? What magic was she working behind the scenes?  What else could the rest of us expect to see as the weeks and months went on?

A few weeks ago, Pamela Paul graciously agreed to a conversation about this and more for Publishing Perspectives.  I'm honored today to share that conversation with you and to suggest that our future is in extraordinary hands.

To read my other pieces for Publishing Perspectives, please click on these links:

Success is when the world returns your faith:  My conversation with editor Lauren Wein

Between Shades of Gray:  The Making of an International Bestseller

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the two-book deal with Philomel

 

It is with tremendous happiness—and a sense of terrific good fortune— that I share the news that I will again be working with Philomel on two new books, a deal that was announced earlier today in both Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch.  My experience throughout the editing and pre-launch of Small Damages (due out July 19, 2012) has been unparalleled.  My respect for Tamra Tuller (my editor), Michael Green (Philomel president), and indeed the entire Philomel team—and author list—cannot be quantified.  My appreciation for their kindness and care, their intelligence and wisdom, and their faith in me is unspeakable.

It is a remarkable thing to be believed in by people this smart and this good. 

Here is the deal as Publishers Lunch noted it earlier today.  My thanks to my agent Amy Rennert for helping to make this happen, and for being there through all the years.

National Book Award finalist and author of more than a dozen books including the new YOU ARE MY ONLY and the forthcoming SMALL DAMAGES, Beth Kephart's two untitled novels, the first of which introduces a teenage graffiti artist living in Berlin in the early 1980s on the eve of a daring escape, to Tamra Tuller at Philomel, by Amy Rennert at the Amy Rennert Agency (World).

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Buying picture books—a most happy thing.

I want simply to say how happy it made me to push away from the desk and go to a bookstore just now, to spend time in the picture book section, to see what is new in paperback, to discover that there were but two parking places because everyone cool was shopping for books.

Two books were purchased, gifts for a little boy.  Many books were desired.

December is here.

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The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Ruta Sepetys

I have written here of the extraordinary kindness and straight-through goodness of the people of Philomel—Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jill Santopolo, and, last night, the dearest note from Colleen Conway.  I have written of how lucky I am to find myself in their company with the forthcoming release of Small Damages.  I have written, too, about the important and hugely acclaimed novels that Tamra has edited, and of the writers she has brought into her fold.

But have I told you how kind those writers are?  How generous both Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) and Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird) have been with me?  Perhaps I simply haven't had the words.

I still don't have the words. But this morning I invite you to visit with Ruta Sepetys by way of her remarkable, whimsical, internationally seasoned web world.  It's like being in Manhattan in the snow, Christmas season.  Like finding yourself inside a kaleidoscope.  Like talking to a friend.

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