Seville, Berlin, Philomel: At long last, I am meeting Tamra Tuller

In the summer of 2010, I was at the American Library Association meeting in Washington, DC, when the ever-fashionable Jill Santopolo (who had worked with me on several Laura Geringer/Harper Collins books and had herself edited The Heart Is Not a Size) slipped a copy of Ruta Sepetys's novel to me and said, "I read this on the train and cried.  I think it's the kind of book you'd love."

I did.  So did the world.

Reading Between Shades of Gray made me wonder about the editor of that book, Jill's Philomel colleague Tamra Tuller, who had taken on Ruta's literary exploration of another time, another place.  I had been working on a Seville novel for years at that point.  I had come close—very close—to selling it more than one time.  My heart had been broken, but I hadn't given up; if I believed in anything I believed in that cortijo, that cook, those gypsies, those Spanish songs.  I wrote a note to Tamra—brazen slush pile person that I have often been—and asked if she might take a look.

She did.  The rest is history.  Two years to the month after my first reaching out to Tamra, Small Damages—far the better book for the conversations Tamra and I had—will be released, on my son's birthday, to be exact.  A year or so from now (the timing isn't fixed) my Berlin novel, a book born out of a phone conversation Tamra and I had one afternoon, a book that reflects both our love for that city (Tamra having gone there first, Tamra having sent me thoughts about where I might go, what I might see), will find its way into the world.

And today, for the first time, I meet Tamra, a young woman who has changed my writing life immeasurably in ways both big and small.  Two trains, a long walk, a conversation—in person.  If I'm lucky, Jill herself will be in sight (and the very dear Jessica).

It feels like going home.

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Small Damages: the first interview (conducted by the remarkable Kathryn Erskine)

I talk a lot about how much I love Philomel, Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jill Santopolo, and Jessica Shoffel, not to mention the amazing sales and marketing team—but hey, it's not without good reason.  Among the many gifts of working with this house is the sense that I have joined an active, loving, functional family.  These are people who care.  These are people who read your books when they arrive and who send you notes throughout the process—notes that you cling to in the midst of hair-tossing winds.

Among the many gifts that Tamra has given is introductions to two of her own writers—both of whom were heroines of mine long before I ever thought I'd meet them.  One is Ruta Sepetys, whose Between Shades of Gray is a towering international success; Ruta and Tamra were just in Lithuania, for example, meeting with the prime minister about that very book.  The other is Kathryn Erskine, who isn't just the National Book Award winner for Mockingbird, but a woman of such abiding curiosity and abundant imagination that when you ask, What are you working on these days, Kathy?, you get a series of gorgeous history lessons and a few foreign phrases thrown in to boot.

Both Ruta and Kathryn kindly read Small Damages and contributed their words to the back cover.  A few months later, Ruta wrote to say it would be fun to find a way to do an event together (imagine!) and Kathryn asked if I'd be interested in doing an interview for Book Hook, an email newsletter written for parents, homeschoolers, teachers, librarians, and grandparents.  The answer to Kathy's question was pretty easy (yes), and today I share the link to our conversation.  This was the first interview I'd done for Small Damages, and it was an honor to have had the conversation with Kathy.

I share a snippet below. You can find the whole by going to this link and then downloading the February/March 2012 edition. Between now and then, I share the photo up above from one of my many trips to Seville.  That gorgeous kid is the boy I love.  In a few months' time, he'll be a college grad.  I dedicated Small Damages to him, because it was this young man who, at so many junctures in his life, would sit and let me read aloud from a book that challenged me greatly; he was the one who listened.  Write about the living, not the dead, he said one day after I had read a funeral scene.  With his words, my story turned.  So did my future.

Kathy: You really captured the mood of sultry, sun-drenched Spain. Can you tell us about your Spanish travels?

My husband, who was born and raised in El Salvador, has a far-flung family. His youngest brother lived in the south of Spain for years, and so we visited a number of times. Seville became a city that I could walk alone, discover on my own, a city I loved and love still. We would also drive out to the countryside. During one excursion, I met one of the best known breeders of the fighting bulls of Spain. I set SMALL DAMAGES in a cortijo very much like the one we visited. Miguel is in some ways patterned after that heroic breeder.

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This is Seville, the setting of Small Damages

This is Seville.  This is the city that inspired Small Damages, the book that I wrote and wrote and wrote until it was right.  The book that Tamra Tuller of Philomel will bring out this July.  Watching this film is like being in that gorgeous, inspirational city all over again.  So many of my scenes happen in places made gloriously visible here.

Thank you, Victoria, for spreading word of these breathtaking five minutes.  We had many fine meals there together.

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Small Damages, the opening lines

In honor of this new year, in honor of this generous post, the opening lines of Small Damages, due out from Philomel on July 19th.

The streets of Seville are the size of sidewalks, and there are alleys leaking off from the streets. In the back of the cab, where I sit by myself, I watch the past rushing by. I roll the smeary window down, stick out my arm. I run one finger against the crumble-down of walls. Touch them for you: Hello, Seville.

At the Hotel de Plaza de Santa Isabel, the old lady in the vestibule is half my height, not even. She has thick elephant legs and opaque stockings, and maybe the sun banged her awake when I opened the door, or maybe the look of me disturbs her, but whatever it is, she’s bothered. She puts her hand out for my deposit, finds a key, and knocks it down on the table between us. She thrusts her chin sky high, and I turn and take the marble stairs, where there are so many smashed-in footsteps before mine. Smashed in and empty and hollow.

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Small Damages: The Cover Reveal

When you work on a book for close to a decade—when you refuse to give up, when you endlessly redefine the narrative's shape, when you push away and return and push back and realize you will ache until you return again—when you work like that, the book becomes a part of you.  The book tells you secrets about yourself, about what you are willing to believe in.  It becomes a marker in a questing life.

When the book finds itself at a most extraordinary home with a dear editor who shares your passion for foreign places and exotic foods, for history and gypsy song, who writes you the kind of notes that make you cry (for the right reasons), who takes the time to share your work with authors you can't quite believe you are actually being read by, who oversees the creation of a cover that takes your breath away, you are just plain lucky.  I—I know this—am lucky.

Today a box arrived at my home.  It contained the galleys for Small Damages, a book that will be published on my son's birthday next July.  It contained a note from the glorious Tamra Tuller, my editor at Philomel, whose stable of writers includes both Ruta Sepetys and Kathryn Erskine.

Tamra Tuller has been working with me on Small Damages for more than a year.  She has quietly demonstrated, to this sometimes impatient soul, the power of waiting, of right timing.  Michael Green, the president of Philomel, has sent notes all along the way—funny notes, endearing ones, words I will, when I'm even older than right now, always remember.

Can I share the cover?, I asked Tamra today.  She said that it was time.  She has done miraculous work, this Tamra Tuller, and I will be forever grateful.  Small Damages, then.

It’s senior year, and the future should be right within reach. But for Kenzie—bright, ambitious, in love with Yale-bound Kevin—the future has been rearranged. She’s pregnant, and she’s determined not to end her pregnancy. Her mother and Kevin refuse to understand. Sent off to an old cortijo in Spain, Kenzie must find a way to endure until her baby is safe in an adoptive couple’s hands. What will she make of the stubborn old cook who plagues Kenzie with demands? How will she ever understand the mysterious young man Esteban—his way with horses and birds, his way of watching her? And what can the eccentric gypsies teach Kenzie about love? There are choices to make. There are questions about home. Small Damages is Spain alive. It is hearts broken and healed. It is heat and color and soul.

Small Damages is a wrenching celebration of choice.  To read Kephart is to splendidly dream with both eyes open. — Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

As this delicate and luscious novel unfolds, the lines are blurred between love and loss, past and present, real and magical, and even life and death. — Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird

Stunning.  Kephart's lyrical prose lingers with you long after the final page.  I simply didn't want it to end.  — Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

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Small Damages: my novel of southern Spain

There are books that one works on for years, then sets aside, then works again for years.  Small Damages, my young adult novel of southern Spain, has been that book for me, and when I finished it at last, six weeks or so ago, I felt reprieved.  Now I miss writing this book.  I suppose that happens.

We drive past groves of olive trees and vineyards, one road, then another to Seville.  The landscape grows used up and the air reeks with gasoline, and Miguel and I hardly talk, and when we do, he’s not letting me in on any secrets.  When the thick walls of the city are finally in view, Miguel slows down and sits forward and messes with the clutch.  He parks Gloria on one of those sidewalky streets, and I open my door and get out. 

Above us are balconies and orange-yellow building slopes, the slick of tiles, those lizards.  Nothing is tall but still and everywhere the buildings ribbon the sky into blue.  We walk along beside the fortress walls, letting the women with the strollers pass, turning our faces from car smoke, stepping out of the way of the streams of dog pee that trickle away from the walls.  Everything is different and everything’s the same, and I don’t talk, and Miguel doesn’t talk, and finally he stops and rings a bell.  I hear keys in the doors beyond the wall and then one iron grate door opens, and then another one does, and now I’m staring at some old lady in the courtyard of a house.  It’s like standing inside another doughnut, this one made of stone. 

The air is greenhouse air, hot and muggy.  The tiles on the floor are cracked.  A miniature fountain is filled up with oranges, half of them rotten, half green. There are white birds like small moths, swooping and perching.  A skylight overhead lets in the sun, and the stairs circle around, off to one side; they are iron and thin and they look creaky.  Whomever she is kisses Miguel on the cheek and tells him to go skyward, then tells me too, in Spanish.  She has been told about me, I can tell.  She is glad that my linen dress is ironed.  I feel her eyes on me as I climb the winding stairs up high, and now there are steps that twist the other way, and suddenly I’m on a rooftop standing not underneath but inside the sky.

I feel you turn inside me, swim toward the edge of us.

I feel dizzy but there is no wall to hold me.

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Excerpt from that novel still in progress (but getting there, at last)

She names a year:  1939.  She names a city:  Triana.  She tells me about a basement bar thick with people hiding from the bad news of the day.  Old corrida posters on the wall, she says.  The smoke of bad cigars.  Short women with big necks talking crazy with their hands, and men thumbing a short deck of cards.  A little stage, up in front, with a stool, and two long tables that you couldn’t walk between at midnight when everyone was sitting three-deep in.  The bar was the thing, then.  The only thing they had.  The best Stella’s parents could make of the city they’d escaped to after they had escaped from Madrid. 

“They only knew taverns,” Stella says.  “They only knew food.”

The nights in Triana were blue, Stella says.  The milk was thinned to blue.   The mussels had a blue attitude and were lazy.  The bread was sometimes all there was—bad bread and cheap rojo, cracked from barrels.  There were already so many dead and those who weren’t dead were like nothing people, dead in the eyes, loose around their bones.  It was October 1939, and the war had been over since April, but Spain wasn’t the Spain any of them had known for it now belonged to Franco.  It was the church against the people, the anarchists against the nuns, the Civil Guard against civilians, the extremists forcing politics onto farmers and working stiffs.  It was dead people hanging from chopo trees. Doctors who weren’t allowed to practice.  Teachers selling charcoal in the street.  Lawyers sleeping in cemeteries.  Priests without churches.  Spain was the Moors of Maria Luisa Park who said they’d been tied to the wings of the German planes.

“Tied to the wings?”

“Imagine.”

There were not enough bars, Stella says.  There was nothing for anyone to do, nowhere to go, it was nothing hoping for nothing.  Stella was eighteen, the cook.  At night the people came for what they could find, which was wine and poor tapas and flamenco.  “Hating Franco,” Stella says, “made us one people.”

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Words from a novel long in progress

When I open my eyes she’s at the edge of my bed, a bowl in her hands, and a spoon.

“You didn’t eat,” she says.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sit up.”

Outside my window, in a puddle of moon, the gypsies are singing some song. “Gazpacho,” Stella tells me, fixing the pillow behind me and fitting the bowl in my lap until she turns, too, to watch Arcadio on the love seat, his guitar on his knee, his fingers running hard against the strings. Angelita pulls at her dress like it’s an animal she can’t trust; she works a pair of castanets. Joselita bangs at the half-barrel and whatever Bruno sings Rafael chases with some turned-inside-out note of his own. The song is a black thing with wings.

“Eat,” Stella says.

I take a spoonful.

“What did the boy want?”

I shake my head.

“Que?”

“Twenty-one words,” I tell her.

“Phhaaa,” she says. “Numbers don’t count.”

She smells like soap suds and orange juice, like dill, sweat, and mint, like jam and like butter that has melted. I take another spoonful of gazpacho.

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Moving Past Self-Doubt, Toward Final

I have spoken, often, of this book that I have carried with me through a decade of rework, reconfiguration, enough half faith not to give up on it entirely, but still. Tears have been shed. Papers tossed across the room. Favorite sections and characters hacked out all to preserve: What?

The mood and the flavors and the dust and the flamenco and the carnations thrown from the rooftops of Seville.

I have spoken of this book, and oh, I have fought with it. You want to know where self-doubt lives, in a writer like me? It lives in the books I don't know how to finish, in the sentences that seem marred, in the static of first-person present, in the over-stress of conjunctions.

A few weeks ago, close to what seemed done to me, a very special reader read the book. She encouraged. She had questions. Ever since—through the throes of snow, client work, and a fever—I've been working to find answers, to move through the text one more time, to move through it newly.

I was struggling with rhythms as I made plot changes. I was mourning yet more favorite passages lost. I was intrigued by the introduction of two new characters—brand new and ultimately welcome. Finally, I thought, I was getting somewhere, and this morning, I rose again at that strange, sacred hour, to read the whole book through.

I think I've gotten somewhere.

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Writing What I Know and Where I've Been

"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."

— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter

Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet blue, toward black.

This is my home, my view, my slice of somewhere, and again and again, it appears in my books.

I write about suburban Philadelphia because as a teen I lived here and as an adult I returned here. I write about Juarez because once, in 2005, I took a trip across the El Paso border that changed my life. I write about a cortijo in southern Spain because I've been there, because once a man tall as royalty took me out into his dusty hectares in an open-to-the-sky jeep and said, Might I introduce you to my fighting bulls? I conjure a secret poet at Radnor High School because I once was one of those, and I story ghosts through a garden much like Chanticleer, down the road, because I spent two years walking through, week after week, and because a stone I had made for my mother rests there, beneath the katsura trees, and because I don't know where I'd be without seeds and all they beget.

I write where I've been, who I've been, what feels like mine. I have this place that I love. I begin here.

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Sometimes it takes ten years to write a novel

... and this morning I wrote the final words of the novel I've always called Small Damages, save for that two-year period when I knew it as The Last Threads of Saffron.

These words as prologue:

Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.

— Federico Garcia Lorca

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Memory Failures

There's a funny thing about memory: It never gets things just right. My version is not your version, and it is certainly not his.

I was reminded of this the other day, as I began to revisit the hundreds of photographs I've taken of Seville and this specific cortijo outside Seville, where the bulk of the action in the novel I'm now revising takes place. Having worked on this novel for the past ten years, my creating mind has altered my recollecting mind, so that I had begun to remember this place with all the (crafted, fabricated) color and detail that I have ascribed to it in the novel. By now, of course, the real cortijo has little to do with the novel's cortijo. I had, frankly, forgotten that.

Here, for example, is an early scene, in which Jessa, a Philadelphia teen, is seeing the place photographed above for the first time.

Finally Miguel steers left, and the skinny line of road goes lumpy. There are olive trees on the one side, sunflowers on the other, some horses and a lonely mule, a patch of blooming cacti, lizards, and at the road’s end, a wide white stucco wall punched through with a center arch whose stucco rim is painted peach. Above the archway, Los Nietos is spelled out with blue tile, and beyond the archway is a courtyard, and in the windows of the house blue curtains hang, their bottom's brushing the begonias in the peeling window boxes. Everyone I know is at the Jersey shore—Kevin, Ellie, Robb, and Tim—thinking that the sea goes on forever.

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Returning to Seville

(on the page)

For many years I've been at work on a novel that takes place in Seville. Last April, finding myself one draft away from sharing the book with editors, I put it aside, again, to focus on other things.

But it's now the new year, and the book beckons—perhaps a dozen small scenes to work in. Printing it out, settling in, is like returning to an old and trusted friend.

Here, below, are the opening lines. But before I get too nested in Seville, I'm headed to the Big Apple today to see West Side Story, a gift from my brother who remembers my ice skating days and my final choreographed performance to "Somewhere," my favorite song from that brilliant show. I love "Somewhere" so much that I scened it into Undercover, my quasi-autobiographical novel about a Radnor High School poet who finds her voice (and one idea of beauty) when she learns to skate.

The streets of Seville are the size of sidewalks, and there are alleys that leak off from the street, and in the back of the cab, where I sit alone, I watch the past rushing by. I roll the smeary window down, stick out my arm. I run one finger against the crumble-down walls. Touch them for you: Hello, Seville.

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