reflections as the end of this teaching semester nears

Maybe it's because I lead but one class during the one semester at Penn that teaching carries, for me, such weight. I begin planning for January in August, often earlier. Choosing the books we'll read, plotting our course, interacting with potential students. I pack as much into every class as our allotted hours allow. Pressing in with ideas, exhortations, readings. Bringing guests like George Hodgman (via Skype), Reiko Rizzuto, Margo Rabb, A.S. King, and Trey Popp into the fold. (Next year we'll be hosting Paul Lisicky, and focused on the art of time in memoir.) Using multiple media, stretching the idea of memoir, expecting much. Finding the good while searching, too, for all that is still possible.

And, this semester, leading two remarkable thesis candidates—Nina Friend and David Marchino—toward work so extraordinary that, I believe, it will represent their calling cards for years and years to come.

Teaching is standing before a class, then stepping aside. It's managing the ripples and waves while keeping the craft on course.

Three more weeks. And then these students will be off on their own, carrying our lessons forward, glancing back, I hope, not just as writers, but as people who value truth, empathy, conversation, and a greater knowing of themselves.

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Jeff Hobbs + My Spectaculars + Two Possible Quakers = Perfection

Here am I, sitting at this very desk this very morning, smiling still. My muse, She, standing tall back there in the light. The Easter orchids blooming. The books falling off their shelves. My boundary marker protecting my Qi. And a beautiful new swirl of bamboo, a gift, a remembrance, a dancer's pose.

Jeff Hobbs (The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace) visited with our Spectaculars yesterday, via Skype (with help, thank you, from Christopher Martin). So did two prospective Penn students, Jane and Josh (with help from the heart and soul of our operation, Jamie-Lee Josselyn, and my friend Cynthia Kaplan).

We sat in our old Victorian room, beguiled by and grateful for Jeff's authenticity, grace, talent, and emphasis on empathy. Can we ever really know another? No. Does it matter that we try? Yes. Are some conversations uncomfortable? Absolutely. Are we better people when we ask questions, remain humble, try for better every time? Am I growing rhetorical? Perhaps and indeed. It's my blog. I can.

We learn how to make great narrative nonfiction reading Jeff Hobbs. We learn the value of humility in speaking to him. Too many authors pose. Too many demand the central planks in the room. But greater is the impact, more true is the exchange, when someone who wrote something beautiful sits down with those who found the beauty, listens to the questions asked, asks questions, too. Simple as that. Profound as that. And lasting.

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prof pride in my student, Nabil Mehta

I do go on about these young people in my life, but they've more than earned me the right.  They are my students, after all, and they are as talented and hope-affirming as they come.  You'll get to read some of their best lines, in a year, in Handling the Truth.  But between now and then, please join me in celebrating this full-length essay by my student, Nabil Mehta, published in the current issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette.  Nabil is my second student to have his work featured in this beautiful magazine—the second to work with the tremendously thoughtful and talented Trey Popp, the magazine's associate editor.  (To see Joe Polin's essay, go here.)  Both Nabil and Joe are engineering students, by the way.  Which just goes to show that no one—and no major—owns literary talent.

I share the beginning of Nabil's essay.  The rest can be found here. This is work that began life in my classroom before being transformed for publication throughout the summer.

Though I enjoyed, as every proud Canadian must, the silent cold of winter during my childhood in Toronto, it was the summer afternoons that I secretly liked best. Maybe it was the nest of cardinals outside my bedroom, singing a song that to this day puts me back in the same bed. Or maybe it was the sun pouring through the second-floor skylight and lighting up every carpet dust particle just so, or the afternoons playing catch with my brother in the cul-de-sac, disrupted occasionally to assure my mother that I hadn’t broken my arm in the last 15 minutes.

This day, though, was different. The mid-August sun had nothing to illuminate but some carpet under-pad and a few boxes left in the hallway. The bed in which I’d been serenaded had been removed, and the cardinals’ chirps bounced around bare walls. We were moving, I had been told a few months ago, to a place called Connecticut, in the United States.

Isn’t that in Pittsburgh? I had asked.

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A BBAW Long-List Nomination, a Return to Teaching, and WriteOnCon

Today I drove through what might have been the hardest sustained rainfall I've ever seen.  It had lessened somewhat by the time I got home and (drenched through) took this photograph.  But even as I write this post, the weather remains wild, tumultous, otherworldy.

Also otherworldly is the news today that this very blog, Beth Kephart Books, has been nominated for the long list in the Best Published Author Blog category for the 2011 BBAW Awards.  The complete long lists will be published next week and short lists and winners announced thereafter.  Truly, I am honored.

The BBAW news arrived with the news that I will be teaching Creative Nonfiction 135 once again at the University of Pennsylvania during the 2012 spring semester.  Anyone who reads this blog knows just how much I love the teaching privilege.  I hope to finish work on three books in progress (one of which is about the teaching of memoir) before the semester begins.

Finally, I wanted to share with my blog readers this treasure trove of YA stuff that I discovered only today. If I am late to the WriteOnCon scene, I am sincere in my appreciation for this wealth of insight and experience sharing from such YA writers, agents, and editors as Sara Zarr, Jay Asher, Josh Berk, Steve Malk, and the one and only Book Babe.  I encourage you to take a look.

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