Contemplating Iran: Announcing the 2013 Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series Speaker

Readers of this blog know of the generosity of my father, and many of you know about the Distinguished Historians Lecture Series that he founded in my mother's name at Villanova University.

James McPherson gave the inaugural lecture in 2009, and two years ago Jill Lepore honored us with an early glimpse of her new book on Jane Franklin—a book that now sits on the long list of the National Book Awards.

This year, on October 8, starting at 7 PM, in the Villanova Room/Connelly Center (Villanova University), the series is hosting yet another extremely timely presentation: "Iran in Transition: US-Iran Relations in the Nuclear Age." Ray Takeyh, (Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations Professor, Center for Strategic Studies, Georgetown University) will be the speaker, and the presentation is free and open to the public.

Interested? You can register here.

Our family looks forward to hosting you for this conversation.

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Jill Lepore, Ben Franklin and his Sister, and an Invitation to an Evening at Villanova University

On December 6, 2011, starting at 7 PM, Jill Lepore will join hundreds of students, faculty members, and university neighbors in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. I'm extremely proud that Dr. Lepore represents the third speaker in The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series, an annual event that my father created in memory of my mother, who graduated in the top of her Villanova University class following a college career that was not initiated until she had raised her three children.

Dr. Lepore's talk is titled "Poor Jane's Almanac: The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin's Sister," with the further subtitle: "an 18th century tale of two Americas."  We get some hint of the fascinating content to come in this New York Times op-ed piece, which appeared on April 23, 2011.  I am excerpting at length, and I hope to be forgiven:

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

At 17, he ran away from home. At 15, she married: she was probably pregnant, as were, at the time, a third of all brides. She and her brother wrote to each other all their lives: they were each other’s dearest friends. (He wrote more letters to her than to anyone.) His letters are learned, warm, funny, delightful; hers are misspelled, fretful and full of sorrow. “Nothing but troble can you her from me,” she warned. It’s extraordinary that she could write at all.

“I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed.

He would have none of it. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.” He was, sadly, right.

She had one child after another; her husband, a saddler named Edward Mecom, grew ill, and may have lost his mind, as, most certainly, did two of her sons. She struggled, and failed, to keep them out of debtors’ prison, the almshouse, asylums. She took in boarders; she sewed bonnets. She had not a moment’s rest.

And still, she thirsted for knowledge. “I Read as much as I Dare,” she confided to her brother. She once asked him for a copy of “all the Political pieces” he had ever written. “I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails,” he joked. He sent her what he could; she read it all. But there was no way out. 

Dr. Lepore, whose work in The New Yorker always thrills me and whose mind seems to track one curiosity after the other—Charles Dickens, Planned Parenthood, the Tea Party, Stuart Little, (she's even got a co-authored novel to her name)—is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American history at Harvard University.  She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engaging Andrew Bacevich as a Distinguished speaker in the series.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is recommended, given the large turnout we are blessed with each year.  Here, again, are the facts:

Jill Lepore, PhD

Poor Jane's Almanac: The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin's Sister

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

7 PM

Villanova Room, Connelly Center

http://www.villanova.edu/events/lectures/kephartseries/

I hope to see you there.  I'll be in the front along with family and friends.

(The photo, by the way, is in honor of the fact that Benjamin Franklin was key among those early environmentalists who fought to preserve the Schuylkill and her drinking water.)

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Career Night, Soul Shifts, Small Triumphs

I'll be speaking tonight at the Presbyterian Children's Village about the writer's life, and as I've been finalizing the talk this morning, I've been remembering a moment in Prague, 1995, when the poet Carolyn Forche shifted the tone and urgency of my writerly desires. I thought I'd share the opening paragraphs of the talk here today as well as the poem (previously published in the early days of this blog) that emerged in the wake of that experience.

Before I get to that, though, a few seemingly unrelated things. Last night's lectureship in honor of my mother was, in a word, extraordinary. As a family we had dinner with Dr. James McPherson; we learned and we laughed. Afterward we joined as many as 600 others to hear Dr. McPherson speak of Lincoln's emergence as a military strategist and leader. The night was rich; my father was happy. When we returned from the event, we caught the final moments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea," that featured my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart—the touching, panning image of the 6,000-plus-foot Great Smoky Mountains peak named in his honor. I am amazed by and grateful to all those who have visited this blog in the aftermath of the segment's screening.

Finally, the image featured in this post today is of my classroom, for English 145 at Penn. I found the students' most recent work in my in-box last evening after all the other glories. They continue to make the teaching exhilarating.

I’ve been writing for most of my life at this point — something I seem not to be able to stop myself from doing (though I’ve tried, believe me, I have). I passionately believe in the promise of stories, I am endlessly seduced by the choreography of language, I don’t go a day without trying to discover or de-puzzle a metaphor. Writing is not just about making a record, or making a claim, or leaving a mark. It is, to begin with, about seeing. It is what forces me to stop and wait, to look and speculate, to inquire and to propose. Writing makes time liquid. It makes of the vague dream a pulsed-through what if?

In the mid-1990s, after I’d published three dozen or so short stories and essays, but before I’d ever published a book, I had the privilege of traveling to Prague and seeing the poet Carolyn Forche read from her work in the dim light of a smoky bar. She was reading, among other things, about Terrence Des Pres, the great essayist and holocaust scholar who had recently died quiet tragically. She was reading, above all else, with conviction, and looking back, I recognize that it was her reading that night that most firmly settled in me the desire to craft work of enduring strength and meaning. This poem captures that shift in my own soul:

On Listening to Carolyn Forche Read Poetry in a Bar in Prague, 1995

Because in Prague I was nothing but wanting

with words and still recovering from new sin,

and because the bar was also dark and lamped

by the yellow of your hair, you made me believe

in the running for the heart of a poem,

the superceded shush between memory and maw.

It was how you read, how you resurrected

Terrence, how the sand in the wind of your words

caught knots into my hair and chafed my skin.

It was how you riddled me almost

clean with possibility.

I was sitting with my son.

I was sitting beside my husband.

You were — may I use the word? — explicit.

In the same way that a stone wall falls

more sensationally than it stands,

in the same way that a rescued love

is made more tender by its damage,

in the same way that women understand beauty

only in its passing, you in the bar in Prague

blew smoke up through the crevices of language.

Smoke the color of angel wings.

Poetry as salvation.

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The Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series

My mother went to college after she had raised the three of us—choosing Villanova as her academic home and remaining an essential fixture on the campus long after she had graduated in the top of her class. She and my father sponsored aspiring historians and contributed to funds. They befriended Villanova scholars and dreams.

Shortly after my mother passed away, my father decided to make her presence at Villanova a permanent one by creating and endowing The Lore Kephart, '86, Distinguished Historians Lecture Series. Working with a team of historians and administrators (including my own dear friend Paul Steege), he has, in her honor, launched what will be an extraordinary yearly lecture, open to the entire community.

Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson, Ph.D. will give the inaugural lecture—"Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief"—on September 30, 7 PM, in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. The George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Princeton, Dr. McPherson won his Pulitzer for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, a book that went on to sell some 600,000 copies and precipitated a renewed interest in the Civil War. In 1998, Dr. McPherson won the Lincoln Prize for his book, For Cause and Comrades: When Men Fought in the Civil War.

My father, I, and all of the Kepharts hope those of you who live near enough will join us for this evening of celebration and learning. Registration for the free event happens here.

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