book blast from the past: a special reference-librarian-made display at Converse College

(Thank you, Reference Librarian. Thank you, Susan Tekulve.)

For those of you who didn't know me when I was actually younger than I am today—that is my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, as well as my fourth, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, nested in with Handling the Truth.

I eagerly anticipate my time with Converse students and the Converse community—not to mention friends, old and new.

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my mother speaks to me, on my birthday week, about John Bartram High School

My husband, who has found extraordinary happiness working with clay, recently began to clear out our basement to give himself more room to work. Boxes of unnecessary things have been disappearing, leaving more mounds of molting cardboard to be considered or reviewed.

Today, while Bill was showing me his latest sculptural pieces, he pointed to a row of boxes and asked if they were for keeping. I slipped the lid off of one and found, in an instant, a file marked, in my mother's inimitable handwriting: To Betsy on her Birthday 4/1/01.

The file contained a story she'd written while planning her fiftieth high school reunion. Lore Kephart was a proud alum of John Bartram High School in Southwest Philadelphia. She made friendships there that lasted a lifetime. Indeed, my mother's friendships, as I wrote in Into the Tangle of Friendship, were legendary—for their diversity, their longevity, their inherent trustworthiness. My mother was loved.

Now, here today she is, in her own words, talking to me at the end of a long birthday week. Telling me about her born-and-bred Philadelphia self. I hear the cadence of her speech in these inkjet pages. I see her crossing one word out and substituting another in blue ink. She loved to write, my mother. And she loved our birthdays—made them entirely special.

Made this one special, too:

Bartram was notable because of its reputation as a premier school with the highest academic standards. Students allowed to come there from certain other designated neighborhoods always took advantage of it, even though many had to ride a bus or the old #36 trolley, as it was called, to reach the campus. Some even fudged their way in. I was lucky; I walked.

Bartram's teaching staff was an extraordinary source of pride to all of us. To a man and woman, they could have taught anywhere, but chose to travel to Bartram. I often marvel at the completeness of the education I received there. The ghost of Mr. Abner Miller, one of my English teachers, haunts me, lest I should ever end a sentence with a preposition! Teachers were not only entrenched in getting across their individual disciplines—Mr. Wapen's was English, better yet Shakespeare—but they were encouraging as well. One old friend with whom I just caught up told me that, despite the fact that he had gone into the service having attended college for only three semesters, he spent his career interviewing celebrities like Robert Mitchum and Barbra Streisand for the column he wrote for our town's largest newspaper. "It was Mr. Sonnenfeld," he told me. "He just kept on telling me I had this talent."

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it's all circling back: Dangerous Neighbors, Joe Polin, You Are My Only, Into the Tangle of Friendship

It's funny how things are circling back to me this week—Susan's review of You Are My Only, Bonnie Jacobs' discovery of my Into the Tangle of Friendship within the pages of Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God, and, early this morning, a note from the very brilliant young reader and critic, John Jacobson, who wrote to say that Emma, a reading/blogging friend of his (Booking Through 365), had read Dangerous Neighbors upon his recommendation and had had kind things to say. 

I was particularly moved by Emma's observations about the end of the novel, something about which very few have commented.  And so I share those words here, with the hope that you will visit Emma's blog and discover not just her review of Neighbors, but her fine mind in general. 

End: This book may have one of the very best YA plot climaxes I've experienced in recent history. While I knew instinctively how the climax would end, it still affected me. This is very, very powerful, and it might be the crowning glory of the novel. 5 flowers.

(Note to readers:  Emma talks about William in her review, a character that I, too, have not forgotten.  I hope I'll be able to share William's story, now completed as an 1871 prequel, with you in total soon.)

Finally, in this week (and it's only Tuesday!) of looking back, I am celebrating Joe Polin, a former student, whose beautiful essay was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette last year.  Joe is coming to class with editor Trey Popp to talk about how an assignment becomes a story becomes a submission becomes an edited final piece. 

Let's just say that I've been looking forward to this class for a long time.  I'm hoping Joe is still wearing his smiley-faced tie.

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You know a real friend when you have one: Girl Meets God and Into the Tangle of Friendship

Every now and then, someone will write to say that they have found my name in a book they're reading.  To be specific, they mention Lauren F. Winner's much-loved 2002 memoir, Girl Meets God.

Here is my confession.  I have read two of Lauren's books, one for review.  We exchanged emails for awhile, but long after 2002.  I really, genuinely like Lauren Winner.  But if I ever knew how my name floated through Lauren's book I don't remember.  I remember not wanting to hunt the passage down.  I remember that I worried about intruding. I remember feeling surprised and stunned that a writer of the stature and quality of Lauren had read one of my books, long ago.  Maybe I'd seen the passage at one point.  If I had, the memory is lost.

But this afternoon, Bonnie Jacobs took the time to type the passage out and to send it along.  The words, which I share here, fill me with new emotion at the end of a deep-dwelling day.  I had, it is true, written a book about friendship.  I'd called it Into the Tangle of Friendship (Houghton Mifflin).  It had been inspired by the return to my life of a lost high school friend, and by all the thinking I have done about how friends come and go, about how hard it is to know who a true friend is, about how devastating it can be when you learn that you weren't a real friend after all.  I have been, from time to time, and indeed far more than I wish, that person who proved useful.  Who could help escalate a career, perhaps, or see someone through to the other side of a dream, or listen for awhile, as trouble stirred. I have done my thing.  I have cheered others on.  I have been left for grander vistas, bigger prizes.

It's always stunning when you realize that the feeling of friendship wasn't mutual, that it was your utility, not your heart that mattered, but it's even more stunning when you know that in fact it is.  I am blessed today by having the right people in my life— solid people, constant people, we-know-we-are-there-for-each-other people.  Still, I think a lot about friendship.

The passage here, from Girl Meets God, with gratitude to Lauren and to Bonnie Jacobs:

The second bout was more recent.  I was lying on my couch one night, reading a book about friendship by Beth Kephart.  She writes about how friends are hard to make and hard to lose and how the only vocabulary we have for those losses is break-ups, romantic ones, but often the splitting apart of friends is harder, rarer, more long-lasting, grievous and generally devastating than any run-of-the-mill lovers' spat.  My body lay on the couch like a valley, my head propped up on four fluffy pillows and my legs folded in, sit-up style, my back flat against the sofa's blue-and-white stripes.  There I lay, listing all the friendships I had lost, all the people I'd betrayed or misled or just not kept up with, and then I felt gratitude again, felt it this time no less physically than hunger, felt the weight of it like a fog settling in over my stomach, felt it filling me heavy the way fruit fills a basket.  Lying on the couch, I could not believe God had given me all these people to love.  Even if I never had another friend ever, even if I spent the next seventy-five years rattling around lonely as a ghost of Christmas past, it would be too much ever to repay, all that love.  I slept on the couch, then, blanketed by the weight of my gratitude, Beth Kephart's book under my pillow.

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Four lines stolen from a poem

My friend (I call her Soup) is one fine writer.  She taught me tricks a few years ago.  Okay, so it was a few decades ago now, and she was my neighbor, and her real name is Andree, and if you want to know how much I just plain like this lady, then you can read all about it in a little book I wrote, a memoir called Into the Tangle of Friendship.

But that is beside the point right now, because Soup grew up and I moved away, and Soup's children—they grew up, too.  The last time I saw Soup's youngest, Aimee, she was young, very young.  She was carefree.

Today Aimee is a high school student and a poet, and Soup just sent two of her newest works on to me.  There is a line in one that strikes me as particularly alive and yearning and exquisite, and I hope Aimee won't mind if I share it here.  Look at this.  Say it out loud and listen.  The words of a young soul leaned forward:

How

can I say what I’ve lost

if you’re not

drowning yet.

— Aimee Seu

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Things don't always fall apart

As anyone who might have read my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth.  Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well).  And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately wrong (a shattered tooth, a pain killer to which I had a nightmarish reaction), I've had gum grafts that have made me feel and look like a flying UFO. 

It's just my mouth.  It is not life-threatening.  People face far far worse things every single day—many people.  But still.  I woke up this morning and didn't feel like going to the periodontist who is perfectly nice and tres talented (his nephew is also high up on Obama's team, so he tells good stories).  I didn't feel like it.

Here's what happened to make the day sweet anyway.  My son woke up and said the kindest thing.  My husband offered to make me a late-night brown cow (something to savor while watching So You Think You Can Dance).  Matthew Quick sent along these generous words about The Heart is not a Size.  I heard from friends (I love my friends).  And.... the yellow finch that banged on my office window for months following the passing of my mother, the finch that launched Nothing but Ghosts (or its near cousin), started banging again the very instant I arrived following this morning of surgery and stitches.  It had not banged for months and months and months.  But here it was again—another message, I suspect, from my mother.

Life is good.

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Into the Tangle of Friendship (at Zumba)

I returned to the gym today with a more functional toe and with the energy I always have when finding my way back to something that I love. My friends were there—yes, I will call them my friends—and we took that one side of the Zumba room that we've come to think of as ours, and we danced—Brenda leading the way. It doesn't matter what I look like when I dance Zumba. No one in that room stands as judge. No woman has to wait for a man to say, Will you dance with me?

When it was over, one of my Zumba friends mentioned that she'd been reading Into the Tangle of Friendship, my second book, a memoir, published what seems years ago. She spoke of the book as if it had just been written yesterday, as if it were brand new, and in that way she gave it back to me. Driving home, I felt enormous melancholy—for the books I've written, for the books I haven't written, for the words I haven't found yet.

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Life Saver

A long time ago, in a hospital room, a woman saved my life. I'd had extensive surgery on a jaw that had gone bad; I woke (as I knew I would) to a mouth wired shut. When, in the evening, all who knew me had gone home, when the nurses were on their quiet rounds, when there was no one looking, the machine that had been pumping my stomach failed. I could not scream. I could not speak. I was drowning in my own blood.

It is true what they say about the mind spinning back. Over time, over roads, over regrets.

It was my roommate who saved me. A woman I'd met just hours before. She heard me struggle and rose in the dark—sat at the edge of my bed and cleared the pump. And there she sat, through the rest of that night, warding off trouble, keeping me safe, urging me to look beyond the window toward snow.

The other day, while taking a train to the city, I saw a woman who might have been the woman who one day saved my life. She sat on this bench. She was reading this paper. We waited, both in peace, both of us breathing.

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For Whom Do We Write?

In my post yesterday, "Boy among Girls," I riffed a bit on a conversation I'd recently had with my always dashing, never boring ballroom dance instructor, Jean Paulovich. He'd made a claim a week ago that turned on this fortissimo: men and women are two separate species; hence, the stories women tell about men have always and will forever devolve into a frustrated yelp of incomprehensibility.

I should say here about Jean that he is a purebred Belarussian and yet, since coming to this country less than ten years ago, he has become fluent in English, knowing more about root terms and grammar than most native speakers. He reads widely and deeply, is astonishingly quick witted, and he's an amateur psychologist to boot, a skill that, it seems, any ballroom dance instructor with aspirations for success must acquire and daily hone.

So that his comment caused me to step back and think, and now Kelly, aka September Mom, has thoughtified me (shall we say?) once more, with her comment/question: Beth, when you write, do you prefer writing to a primarily female audience? Does it change how you approach a story? I love the question so much that I yield this blog to it, and hope, of course, for your thoughts on the matter.

For me, the answer is this: I write the truest story I can find (be that memoir, poetry, fable, history, fiction) with the most-right language I can muster. I am by nature and by turns contemplative, ornery, outspoken, muted, at peace, distressed, entirely set on establishing a rhythm, then full of schemes to shatter the lyric's spell. I don't write for women, per se, nor for men, but for any who are willing to enter into the worlds I create. Much of the time, it is true, the willing are women, though I have heard from male readers of all my books, and I have treasured their responses to, say, Into the Tangle of Friendship, my memoir about friendship, and Still Love in Strange Places, my memoir about marriage, and Ghosts in the Garden, my memoir about growing up and older at Chanticleer, and House of Dance, a novel whose narrator is a 15-year-old girl. Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill river, was written in a woman's voice, and yet so many of its readers were men—men with whom I have had long conversations about time and love and hope and survival.

I have four brand new books on my desk to read. Two are by men, two are by women (more on these soon). I need, in my world, both men and women. I need their thoughts, I need their stories, I need their friendship.

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In Thanks

Thank you, Miss Em, for naming House of Dance one of your top ten reads of the year. I know how much you read. I know how graced that recommendation feels.

Mari, thank you for naming House of Dance as one of your favorite books of the year. I am in such tremendous company in your list. I'm ... astonished!

To Becca, who writes one of the smartest book blogs in cyberspace—her idea of a review being my idea of a review, her tastes often mirroring mine—thank you for giving me a set of butterfly wings in your latest post. To Lilly for so sweetly acknowledging me in her own blog, and for entering this community so gracefully. To Tapestry100, for being such a kind supporter of Into the Tangle of Friendship, and for naming it one of his favorite books of the year.

To Sherry, who not only raised the remarkable Miss Erin we all love, but who also leaves exquisite comments on this blog—thoughtful comments.

And thank you, Lenore, for your rocking yesterday honor. You are your own tour de force in this wide web world. I'm honored to count you as a friend.

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Epistolary

Years ago I had a next-door neighbor named Andree with whom I exchanged, on an often-daily basis, letters. I'd write a poem about a missing tooth (her daughter's) or a bird's nest (high in my rafters); I'd write a short story; I'd rail at something; and then I'd tuck whatever it was into an envelope, walk it up onto Andree's porch and leave it in her box—being careful not to creak the hinged thing open, for it was important never to get caught. In time, Andree would write her response upon the thinnest paper imaginable with a loopy blue or black pen, and, at some never-once detected hour, return the favor.

Writing letters gave us room to say what we actually meant to say—between raising children (the thing we most loved) and scouring sinks and cooking dinners and bemoaning the hedge that grew too fast. It gave us a shot at intelligence, when what so much of what we had to do was a drumming, a mind knock, a scrape against the knuckles.

It's funny that we never caught each other in the act, but there it is: We didn't.

In any case, we wrote letters. We wrote our ideas down, our stories down, our critiques and encouragements and disagreements down, and when I moved, we wrote some more, but the almost everydayness of the correspondence was gone, and my world was smaller for it.

I have been remembering Andree these past few days while reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the beloved epistolary bestseller that has, in my opinion, earned its following, those four-one-star reviews on Amazon notwithstanding. The book charms, of course, but the word "charm" is like "precious," like "gem." It's like "cute," when applied offhandedly to women (believe me, I know; I've had my fair share of "cute"), and by all that I mean that the word "charm" diminishes. It doesn't go far enough toward the heart of this book, the research tucked within, the evocation of characters that—while certainly and deliberately contrived so as to steep Guernsey in Austen-ese—forced me at least to throw down my guard and get involved. Charm doesn't say enough about the power of letters, the back and forth, the honesty that rises up between the cracks. The mysterious marvel of questions asked, of answers eagerly awaited.

From Guernsey:

Do you live by the river? I hope so, because people who live near running water are much nicer than people who don't. I'd be mean as a scorpion if I lived inland. Do you have a serious suitor? I do not.

Is your flat cozy or grand? Be fulsome, as I want to be able to picture it in my mind. Do you think you would like to visit us on Guernsey? Do you have a pet? What kind?

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Angel Goodness

We sense the true in others—friendship that begins not as an exchange of services that might potentially be rendered, but in curiosity, optimism, and mutual respect. Friendship that promises and presages.

True is the reason why Miss Em and her Bookshelf are so widely loved—why so many readers of YA books consult eagerly with her site and have been inspired by her example to fashion book blogs of their own. Miss Em is in books for all the right reasons. She brings intelligence and heart to the conversation, an irreversible goodness.

Yesterday Miss Em sent me a mysterious email: I have left a gift for you on my blog. Bemused, I traveled her way only to be taken aback—not just by her words but by her photograph of a garden fairy. She'd taken the photo with her new cell phone, and I stared in disbelief. For the very same fairy that she'd discovered there in her vacation path sits here in my garden, looking up to the now-empty stalks of tiger lilies. My fairy is a little weather-beaten, a mite crushed-in about the feet. Still, she sits in the shade reading the one page of her book, patient as a muse.

http://emsbookshelf.blogspot.com/2008/07/vacation-thoughts-and-photo-shout-out.html

As if Miss Em were right here, among my favorite blooms.

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