Showing posts with label Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening. Show all posts

Living my World

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The truth is that most of the time I wander toward my readings and talks in undercover fashion—slipping in and out, not mentioning a word to friends. But a few weeks ago, as I began to prepare for the Tredyffrin Library talk, I began as well to tell my friends—to celebrate the idea in my own head. I'd be sharing my photographs. I'd be talking about the things I love and how they've shaped me. I'd be living out loud, and I wanted their blessed companionship.

Last night they came. My neighborhood friends and their friends—the ones with whom I watch the horse show carriages roll by, the ones who come singing Christmas songs in winter. The St. Johners from down the street (I adore them). Claire, the first baby I ever held (she's 20 now), and Soup (she knows who she is), and the Chanticleer gardeners, and the dancers who inspire me (Mike and Mercy, too), and Ann, and Heidi, and Jamie, and JC, and Libby, and Joe, and Kathy, and Simona, and Adam, and my father and husband, and also B&BM (you've met her here, you've read her blog), and Helen, who came by way of that gorgeous Southern California comedienne, Anna Lefler, and endearingly introduced herself.

I looked out, and I thought, Beth, this is it. This is the life you've built and the luck you have, and when things get dark, because they do, this is what you hold to.

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Writing My Life: Upcoming Talk

Monday, January 26, 2009

In a few weeks, on Tuesday, February 10, 7:30 PM, I'll be participating in the Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening Event with a talk called "Writing My Life." With my own photographs as my stage, I'll be musing about the ways my perspective and stories are shaped by the life I live (in a tiny house) on the storied Main Line. Ghosts in the Garden, a memoir, erupted from Chanticleer, of course, but so did Nothing but Ghosts, the young adult novel due out in June. Seeing Past Z, my memoir about teaching young souls the power of stories and words, is saturated with the regional and personal. Undercover was inspired in part by my years at Radnor High School, House of Dance takes place in a modified Ardmore, down the road, and the first long act of The Heart is Not a Size (due out next winter), is touched by the world in which I live. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River and Forgiveness, that much-discussed novel-in-progress, are both born of the tactile pulse and power of my city, Philadelphia.

I have always loved my home. I have always turned toward it. But this will be the first time that I will be thinking out loud about how my facts conspire with my fiction, or, simply, with language itself.

I hope you'll join me, if you can.

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