let's talk about LOVE: my video interview with Gary Kramer of Temple University Press

What a pleasant thing it was to travel to the city, to meet my friend and Temple Press publicist Gary Kramer for an extended stroll through favorite places, and to be introduced to Dan Marcel, a talented videographer, photographer, and filmmaker, who created two separate videos.

First is my interview with Gary, about the making of Love: A Philadelphia Affair

The second provides a partial city tour—particularly Locust Walk, 30th Street Station, and Schuylkill Banks—as well as brief readings from the book.

Love, which has been kindly endorsed by some of Philadelphia's great leaders, will launch in early September. On October 7, at 7:30, I'll be celebrating its release on the Free Library of Philadelphia stage with broadcast legend Marciarose Shestack. Please consider joining us there. 

Dan Marcel is a marvel—well-named, I've told him. You can find out more about his Marcelevision Media here; I highly recommend him. Please listen, too, to the original song, "Trailing Whispers," written and performed for the second production by Dan's mother, Susan.

Gary Kramer (who is not just Temple's publicist but a powerhouse film critic, a Salon.com writer, a Bryn Mawr Film Institute lecturer, among other things):. You made this happen and I could talk to you forever. Thank you.

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reflecting on Penn's Locust Walk, now and then, in this weekend's Inquirer, and thank you, Florinda

I am perpetually grateful for the care and artistry that Kevin Ferris and Amy Junod bring to the stories I write once each month for the Inquirer. This weekend's layout blows me away. In the story I'm reflecting on Locust Walk—that ribbon through the campus where I once meandered as a student and today teach as a spring-semester adjunct. So many, many thanks.

The story begins like this:

I acquire knowledge sideways and remember in shadowy bursts. University of Pennsylvania. 1978. Freshman year. White bowls of chunky granola in the dining hall. Apples the size of baby pumpkins sold from a cart. Poems in a cherry-colored box beneath my bed in a top-floor room in the Quad. The black curls on the head of a senator’s son. Classrooms like movie theaters. A calculus professor so far away on his foreign stage that I wondered if a pair of binoculars might help.

            (Nothing, when it came to calculus, would help.)

This was Penn to the gawky girl who dragged the aura of loneliness around her like a Casper BFF. This, and the Russian history class she loved, and the fifth-floor stacks at Van Pelt Library, and the bookstore down beside the bridge, and, always, the soundtrack of Locust Walk, where gossip simmered, students politicked, and music flumed through the raised windows of the Greek-lettered houses that dominated the 3600 through 3800 blocks.

This morning I also want to thank Florinda, now a long-time friend (not just of this blogosophere, but of the real, tangible world), who took the time to read Handling the Truth, and who had such kind things to say on her popular blog. Florinda has stood at my side through so many books now. I am grateful that we stand together, still.
 

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Scenes from the University of Pennsylvania, earlier today, spring rain

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Talking books online, with Penn alumni and parents of Penn students

The fearless and fabulous Al Filreis, who (with his finely chosen cohorts) makes the world of the Kelly Writers House (at the University of Pennsylvania) turn, has recently posted this year's roster of online book discussion groups, which are conducted for Penn alumni and the parents of Penn students.  Those of you who might fall into either category should take a look at what is being offered here, which, in Al's words, "include a month-long group led by English professor Jim English on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go; Emily Steiner, distinguished medievalist, leading a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; a 10-day group on Nabokov's Lolita; others on writing about food, Edward Albee's plays, on anonymity and the internet, and the literature of bearing witness led by an award-winning Penn alumna writer."

I happen to be the Penn alumna writer conducting the discussion group on the literature of bearing witness, a full description of which is here:

In "Accident and Its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner," (Writing into the World), the exquisite essayist Terrence Des Pres reconstructs the death of John Gardner—a motorcycle accident, or was it an accident?—along a lonesome road (or was it lonesome?). In "Memory and Imagination" (I Could Tell You Stories), Patricia Hampl tells a story, several times, about learning to play the piano. The facts keep changing because Hampl's memory does, because memory is a tortuous bend; it is never, in Hampl's words, "just memory."

The past is loaded. Memory shifts. Yet we live in a world in which honesty matters. We want to believe the stories we tell ourselves. We want to believe one another. In this on-line discussion, we'll be exploring the perils of bearing witness with Des Pres and Hampl as our guide.

 I hope those of you who may be Penn folk and interested in any of the groups will get involved.  We're going to have fun.

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English 145 (5):

I arrived at the Penn campus early yesterday, first to have tea with Gregory Djanikian, a poet, a mentor, and the director of the creative writing staff. We talked of students and what might be yielded to them, talked of what remains, or should. We walked, then, to the eastern wedge of the campus, where Greg has a standing Monday squash game, and where I, by virtue of proximity to a once-familiar structure, remembered my own days on the varsity team.

I said goodbye to Greg, then met Jay Kirk on the library steps. I had an elephant's eye for him—glass, a taxidermist's tool, an object found at Paxton Gate during a San Francisco trip. Up Locust Walk, then, Jay and I went, talking of books, rehearsing history, recalling the days, mine, when again and again my work was rejected for its lack of commercial viability. We talked about English 145, and about Jay's narrative nonfiction, and about what I hoped he might relate to the students of my class.

After lunch, Jay was there, in Room 209, engaging these young writers, as I knew he would, with stories about funeral home directors and brothels, a lesbian retirement community, Rwanda's post-genocide tourism business. In structure lies meaning, Jay told the class. Scene making is story making. Write your authentic self—your fears, your not knowing, your questions—directly onto the page.

They do. They have. For we critiqued the students' memoirs then—powerful, personal stories that demanded respect and received it. Talent matters in writing workshops, of course it does, but so do intellectual integrity and kindness. My students bring all three to class. They move me to tears. I can't help it.

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English 145 (4): Most Unlonely Teacher

I walk the campus every Monday before class—always a new direction, always some memory that I am stalking. Yesterday I went the length of Locust Walk and out toward West Philadelphia, where a mod-looking bowling alley has been slipped inside a residential street and the Dental School where I once worked has the face of new authority. At the corner of 42nd and Spruce I was besieged by memories of a friend with whom I shared a passion for Russian history. The room where he kept his books. The pea soup that he made from his mother's recipe. His fascination with Tolstoy.

By the time I reached the Writers House, I was feeling melancholy. J met me downstairs. S met me upstairs. K arrived with a tiny, days-old kitten tucked into the collar beneath her chin. "They call him Wild Bill," she told me, "and I think he likes my bling," for this found refugee from the streets of West Philly had dug his claw in deep to her necklace chain and was, it seemed, intent on staying.

The past is gone, except that it leans upon our present day, except that we write it into our stories, except that it tangles into our imaginations and hovers near. The past is a yearning, and now is the bowling alley, the cleaned-up Spruce, the Writers House, the stairs, the room, Wild Bill in K's collar, and the email that arrives from J, in the evening after class. It includes a bit of found memoir that, he says, he thinks I might like. It includes the line, "most unlonely teacher."

Yes. Certainly.

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My Dad, My Day, Our Alma Mater

My father was a University of Pennsylvania student long before I was, and yesterday, while sitting along Locust Walk watching the parade of life and learning go by, I picked up the phone to call him. "Hey, Dad," I said, "guess where I am?"

"On the train," he wagered.

"Nope," I told him. "I'm out here, on Locust Walk."

"I'll tell you a story about Locust Walk," my father said, and he went on to describe an apartment building that he had long ago shared with a roommate. "He got the bed," my father said. "I got the couch. It was a good-enough arrangement."

I told him how the old apartment building was gone, replaced by a glamorous cathedral to academia, and how the apple vendor from whom I had, as a sophomore, religiously bought my fat-apple lunch was gone, too, and how nothing, really, was the same as it had been; and yet everything was also deeply familiar. The way the kids sat in the sun to read. The way the music poured down from open windows. The way the stacks on the fourth floor of Van Pelt Library still reeked of the same variety of dust.

"I love it here, Dad," I said, something, I realized, I had never said as a student, when Penn seemed too big and I seemed too small and I could not get my footing. Or maybe I am less afraid of living now than I used to be. Maybe I've grown more capable of joy. I'm just glad that my dad is there, and that I can tell him that, at long last, his alma mater makes me happy.

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