the Us of Us at Writers Resist

"Friday the Thirteenth," was written in 1970 by Allen Ginsberg. Hillary Clinton made her remarks for the United Nations 4th World Conference on Women in 1995. Jameson Fitzpatrick wrote "I Woke Up" in 2016, and Toni Morrison published Beloved in 1987, and Octavius V. Catto and others prepared the Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of Pennsylvania in 1865, and James Baldwin released The Fire Next Time in 1963, and Che Guevera offered his thoughts in Socialism and Man in Cuba in 1963, and Mia Mingus wrote "Wherever You Are is Where I Want to Be: Crip Solidarity," and then there was Langston Hughes in 1936, with "Let America Be America Again."

You put your heart down on a page, the long excursion of your worries, your cracked skies of hope, your insistence, your chides, and then you put your name beneath those words, and finally you say: Here. This is for you. Take.

Yesterday at the National Museum of American Jewish History, in my city of often raucous love, as part of the worldwide #Writers Resist initiative, the words crafted by others became the words of Us, and by Us I mean the three dozen writers and producers and musicians and editors who took the stage. I mean the Us who crowded that standing-room-only auditorium, breathless and leaned into and moved. I mean the Us who came wrapped in the arms of parents and those who strolled or wheeled in and those who didn't know what they were getting into and those who had no idea who might come. Would anybody come? We were Us yesterday, and the words we shared belong to Us, and we claimed them, not for our own individual advancement, not to be a lit star, not to curry praise for our inspired performance, our own ingenious orchestrations of words, but because Us is the legacy we share, the legacy we must carry forward if we are to be decent and good and wide thinking and effective and, yes, that word again, inclined toward hope.

Forgive me, writers, but at times, is this not true?: We take the stage, we stand beneath the lights, and we want outcomes for ourselves. We want to be remembered for and as ourselves, taken seriously for and as ourselves, asked, for and as ourselves, to sign the books waiting in the lobby. Our books. With our names right there on the pretty covers. But that wasn't writers yesterday. Yesterday we remembered that our first job, always, is empathy. Our first responsibility is to slide inside the wrappings of others and imagine ourselves to be them, and so we did, and I will never forget the feeling that I had, the feeling that you gave me yesterday, of sitting there and briefly standing there, and transcending.

Thank you, all of you. Thank you, Nathaniel Popkin and Stephanie Feldman and Alicia Askenase, for bringing us together. Thank you, PEN America and Erin Belieu, for bringing the power of the word to the people.

Now we continue on.

Read more...

Writers Resist: To Speak for all Americans, with Compassion

Many of us are wondering how to speak. How to gracefully and meaningfully, with sincere compassion, express our concerns about rising hate crimes, disingenuous distortions, and threatened curtailments of First Amendment rights.

Recently, PEN America, under the leadership of Erin Belieu, crafted an initiative called Writers Resist, an event that will bring writers and artists from across the country together on a single Sunday afternoon in cities across America. In New York, American poets Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove will kick off an event featuring writers ranging from Colum McCann and Rick Moody to Jason Reynolds, Esmeralda Santiago, Andrew Solomon, Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Wolitzer, and many more. In Philadelphia, thanks to the leadership of Nathaniel Popkin, Stephanie Feldman, and Alicia Askenase, a group of remarkable writers will likewise lend their voices to this cause.

I am very honored to be among those writers. To share the literature of our beautifully diverse nation alongside Ron Silliman, Lauren Grodstein, Liz Moore, Thomas Devaney, Jon McGoran, Carmen Machado, Dan Biddle, Lorene Carey, Lise Funderburg, Nic Esposito, the three organizers, and so many others.

I know I will learn a lot that day. I plan to listen, closely. We hope that you will share word of this event, whatever city you are in, and join us, if you can.

Philadelphia Writers Resist

National Museum, American-Jewish History

5th and Market Streets

January 15, 2017

2:30 - 5:00 PM

Read more...

Nathaniel Popkin asks about LOVE (in Hidden City)

Philadelphia long ago discovered the gem who is Nathaniel Popkin. He shows up at Emmy Award celebrations, on the jackets of wonderful novels and nonfiction collections, in the pages of Philadelphia magazine, as book review editor at Cleaver. He is, as well, a force behind Hidden City, and what I say here is the truth: few people know more about this city, or think about it more deeply, than Nathaniel Popkin.

So it was a distinct pleasure to be interviewed by him for Hidden City. Our conversation about walking, seeing, thinking, and believing (and Philadelphia) can be found here. I always learn from the questions he asks.

Thank you, Nathaniel.

We're launching Love: A Philadelphia Affair at the Free Library tomorrow night on a stage that will sparkle with the warm wit and intelligence of broadcast pioneer Marciarose Shestack. We hope you'll join us.

Read more...

writerly responsibilities and rewards: words from the wise Dorothy Allison (yesterday, Kelly Writers House)

Dorothy Allison is one of three Kelly Writers House Fellows hosted this semester by Penn professor and poet Julia Bloch.

Yesterday she sat among us, in conversation with us. There, beside Julia, she is.

Oh, I liked her. So very much. She's everything you've been told she will be. Iconoclastic. Irreverent. Touching. A firebrand of deep opinion and great craft cares who may believe in the act of revenge on the page, but only when the author holds him- or herself equally accountable for the unforgivable past. We writers, we survivors, may not be the heroes we think we are, Allison reminds us. We have responsibilities. Work that lasts is work that is rich with a felt sense of responsibility.

Any writer who believes that writing is a mere game—a toss-off and toss-up of the randomly odd, the relentlessly clever, the tried and true brand—must spend a bracing hour and change in the company of Allison. Sitting beside my friend Nathaniel Popkin and just one row ahead of August Tarrier (Jamie-Lee Josselyn waving a hand from the near distance, one of my students a few rows back, Lily Applebaum at the mike ready), I filled my little notebook with Allison's words. I'm going to share a few of them here—transcribed as nearly as I could, but not always verbatim. Spread them, oh ye writers and readers who care.

In response to Julia's questions about craft (comments from across the conversation, gathered here): Craft sharpens the contradictions. It produces prose that takes the reader by the throat. Craft requires writers to read as writers, not as readers, and so we writing readers cannot merely wallow; we must assess. To make a reader care, the writer must keep paring the prose down, constructing the truth, acknowledging one's purpose. You are going for the long reach, not the quick tears. You want to haunt a reader six months on. The more talent you have, the more responsibility you have.

On writing with compassion: Recognize that you will never get it right. Recognize that those who survived, who got out of there alive, are in some ways the cowards, the ones who had to compromise. Hold yourself accountable for the choices you made. Recognize that you have a higher moral authority to tell the story right. This applies, by the way, to both writers of fiction and nonfiction.

On life's purpose: I don't want to be rich. I want a different world. I don't want the hatefulness of this world. I have a conviction about justice and social responsibility, a concept of citizenship at great variance with what I see in this world.

Paradise: is having an audience.

What the world is: We don't know what the world is until it is shown to us in story.

A story, much condensed (forgive me, Dorothy Allison, for this condensed version). In response to a question I asked about when Allison knew teaching was joyful, she first spoke of how she made sure to make teaching as hard for herself as it was for her students (amen to that, oh yes, amen to that), then told a story about one of the most talented students she ever had—a woman who didn't know where sentences began or ended, but knew vivid and had material. For nine weeks, Allison worked within a workshop and outside the workshop with this "baby" writer. That ninth week, they had a conversation about the writer's future. The student writer had a question: How much would she get paid for the stories she wrote? How much for a collection of stories? How much how much how much would she get paid—and how long would it take? Allison painted a picture of the future, spoke of the rewards that aren't numerical, finally confessed, when pushed, that her own most recent collection of words had received an advance of $12,500. "I earn that in tips a month," said this student writer. And that, pretty much, was it. The end of this genius writer's aspirations.

And so, Allison reminded us, one has to have more than a gift. One has to have desire. One has to cherish the audience, the chance to speak, the conversation—for that, in the end, is what matters most, that is the gifted writer's only sure provenance, that is where responsibility begins.

Let's get less caught up in the noise about books and more invested in making extremely fine ones.

Read more...

When the poem is the elegy and the elegy is the memoir: Gabriel: A Poem/Edward Hirsch

This morning, before the gears on the work-a-day-world began to turn in earnest, I read "Gabriel: A Poem," Edward Hirsch's book-length elegy for his departed son.

It is hallowed and hollowing, a work of pristine mourning. Memories seamed and broken. Threads that fall away until we see the soul of the boy himself— adopted, challenged by tics and relentless recklessness, the bright splash in a room. He is a child no one can keep safe from himself. A child who goes out during Storm Irene to a party he sees advertised on Craigslist. A child who does not return and cannot be found for four terrible days.

And then he must be buried.

It ransacks the soul, reading a book like this. We peel away as the lines peel away; no periods at the end of any line, no finished sentences. We look and we cannot stop looking until Gabriel, and his searching father, are a part of us.

It is a poem. It is also memoir. Like Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming it suggests, again, another form for the hardest and most important stories lived. The most important things lost and lifted to the page.

Words:

In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble

With thanks to Nathaniel Popkin, whose craft essay in Cleaver Magazine last week reminded me that I had meant to buy and read this.

Read more...

the summer of friendship

This is the summer, it seems, of friendship. Of deeply meaningful lunches with friends whose stories have evolved, so magnificently, through the years. Of an afternoon spent in the glorious Brooklyn home of a very dearest friend. Of long conversations with neighbors—conversations that began a long time ago and that pick up right where they ended, as if many seasons and much weather had not intervened. How have you been? How do your seeds grow? How is your daughter, your husband, your mom? Of reunions with high school friends. Of saving grace phone calls and long walks. Of conversations with poets. Of former students who write or who appear in bookstores; they are growing up, they are growing up so beautifully. Of new friends, too, who kiss me on the cheek as if I have known them forever, or present me with a beaded lei and an ALOHA. Of emails that make me laugh out loud or astonish me or leave me with that happy something that erupts, naturally, when another's dream has been fulfilled.

They have waited, it has happened, it is good—and I am soaring with them. I am glad to be their friend.

The summer of friendship.

I've been thinking about that. Grateful for that. And, today (and for a long time, for our friendship is a long one, too) I am also grateful to a certain Nathaniel Popkin, who writes more beautifully about this city and about books than anyone I know. The man knows things, and he is a poet. Last evening, driving home from a perfect New York City day, I found these Hidden City words that had been Tweeted out to the world, and to me. I don't know what to do about words like these but to say, again, thank you. Thank you, Nathaniel, for your generosity.

Read more...

Katie Hafner, Kate Christensen, Nathaniel Popkin: what I'm reading now

This past week I read Howard Norman's beautiful (and Michael Ondaatje endorsed!) I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place as well as Rebecca Solnit's fierce and bracing The Faraway Nearby.

Now on my desk sit Katie Hafner's Mother Daughter Me and Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special, along with my friend Nathaniel Popkin's first novel, Lion and Leopard, due out in October from the new Philadelphia publishing house, The Head and the Hand Press.

So much wrong can happen each day. But a good book close by is transformative.

I'll be sharing word about these books as soon as I can.

In the meantime, those looking for a good memoir to read (beyond the nearly 100 referenced in Handling the Truth) can find a few recommendations here.

Read more...

Handling the Truth in The Smart Set (and on Philly.com)

I know. The title of this post grabbed you. Indeed, you did a double take. A Beth book? In something called The Smart Set? What's the catch?

The catch is that the person who is actually writing for The Smart Set, a Drexel University publication, is super smart. His name is Nathaniel Popkin, and he reads all these books I didn't even know existed, and he has a knack for finding connections among and between things, and he's very nice to me.

He also claims I'm funny.

That got you, too, didn't it. Beth Kephart? Funny?

In any case, here's the link to Nathaniel's thoughtful piece. And here's a slice from it:

Kephart ... is assertive and defiant — and downright funny — about the literary value of memoir, a genre that some critics see as spent, imaginatively thin, and sentimental. So confident and playful, so taken is she with words, so willful is she about the transformative power of literature that at times in Handling the Truth she begins to sound like Rawi Hage’s Fly. “Call me sentimental; others have,” she writes. “Remind me that the world is dark and ugly, that people are cruel, that injustice reigns, that children suffer, that the wrong people win, the wrong people triumph. I know. I have been there. I have seen. I have lost to the infidels once or twice myself.”

Okay, whoops. A postscript. The unsinkable Nathaniel Popkin has just informed that a second piece, by his truly, is now up on Philly.com (here). Now he's calling me defiant. Me! Defiant! All right. I'll be defiant then. After all, yesterday a certain reporter from Montgomery News suggested that I might be a bird.

From Nathaniel Popkin's Philly.com review:

All this sage advice and the wide-ranging texts she employs to support it make this book useful for any writer, in just about any form (and all forms cross-pollinate and cross over anyway). Working on a novel? Well, you'd better have empathy. Consider yourself a poet: probably a good idea to listen equally well to yourself and the outside world. A journalist? Your stories will be all the more powerful if you can ascribe meaning to prosaic events.

Read more...

The Philly.com/Nathaniel Popkin review of Dr. Radway makes me weep (in good ways)

Yesterday I returned home to a a few first copies of Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. 

Today Nathaniel Popkin, who knows more about this city's hidden places than I ever will and who writes extraordinarily beautiful sentences about, well, anything, wrote about the book for Philly.com.

I had to wipe away the tears of gratitude before I could post of any those words here. I would include every single beautiful paragraph, just to showcase Nathaniel's talents. But that would be, well, that would be a whole lot of wrong things.

So I include the final paragraph only:

"One of Kephart’s gifts in her ongoing written exploration of Philadelphia is the capacity, and the willingness, to look on all that’s here with honesty, to allow for confusion and contradiction, for might and violence all at once. A writer does so by loving her characters, even the rotten ones, even the city so sour it might burn. And by bathing it, as only this one can, in fullness of breath." — Nathaniel Popkin, Philly.com

Read more...

City of Tall Grasses

Yesterday, late afternoon, talking books with Nathaniel Popkin on a sidewalk in East Falls, I thought again of how place defines us—the stories we find, the sounds we tunnel into. Our mandate, as writers, is to live first, to see deeply, to sit at the corner while people walk by or to find the two lost tulips in the city of tall grasses. Our privilege is to imagine well beyond the things that we see—to yield to the seduction of dreams.

Read more...