Craft Forms 2016: celebrating artists among friends

We seek community. We find our way toward those who share our passions. Last evening I had the pleasure of joining my husband, William Sulit, at the opening reception for Craft Forms 2016, an international juried exhibit featuring textiles, metal work, ceramics, jewelry, wood, furniture, and basketry held at the magnificent Wayne Art Center. This year's exhibit was curated by Stefano Catalani, Executive Director of the Gage Academy of Art, and what a show it is. One could spend a lot of time appreciating the materials, hand work, stories.

And one could bask, as I now am at this early morning hour, in the friendships strengthened or rediscovered last evening. Many of our clay friends were there—all dressed up and mud free. But so were friends from other spheres of my life—Bill Thomas, the Executive Director of Chanticleer, with whom I worked on the book, Ghosts in the Garden; Peter Archer of Archer and Buchanan, an architect of great talent whom I first met so many years ago when we both worked for the same firm; Susan, a former family neighbor. The Wayne Art Center is a world of windows and light, ideas and the people who have them. It is led by Nancy Campbell, who achieves much and dreams forward. It is a welcoming place at a time when we could all use a little more welcome.

Today, from 1 to 2:30, Stefano will discuss his selection process and some of the artists—my husband among them—will talk about the pieces that were selected for the show. The event is free and open to the public.

Bill's selected piece is right there in the middle of the room, by the way. A close-up image can be found here.

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living the hybrid life

At Chanticleer not long ago I photographed this winged thing. Like a hummingbird, but with antennae. Like a fattened frog, but it could fly.

I do not know the name of this hybrid creature, but I feel as if it is living my life. I'm glad that it, like me, has paused for a spell upon a bright pink flower.

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remembering my mother

Five years ago, I posted this tribute to my mother, who we lost on December 30, 2006. Thinking of her now (as I often do) and looking back, it seemed most right to share something I have shared before.

There are many memories. But, sometimes, few words.

Today is the anniversary of my mother's passing, and in remembering her, I have gone back to old photographs, to this one, in particular, of my mother, father, older brother, younger sister, and me; that is my mother's white pencil caption, below.  I return to the words I shared during her memorial service.  Lore Kephart passed away four years ago, but she is present, still.

On the morning after the evening that my mother passed away, the sky was sherbet colored—bold and also delicate pinks, upward-rising tangerines, traces of lemon.  It was the sort of sky one only rarely sees in winter—complex and unforgettable and outrageously beautiful—and it was, of course, my mother, at peace at last.

         She had brushed by me, on her way to heaven, the night before—the gentlest knock on my right shoulder.  She had gathered around her, in her final days, so many varieties of kindness in the doctors and the nurses who had come to care for her, so many reminders that goodness, after such sadness, reigns.  She had left behind parts of her to discover still—a note stuck in a bible, a photograph no one remembered taking, the namesake song “Dolores” playing in a nearly empty restaurant.  On the day of my mother’s funeral, a warm breeze blew.  It was her; there is no question.  She wouldn’t leave us lonely.

         Beauty is the art my mother mastered.  For her, orchids kept their angel wings for surpassing months on end.  For her, the mashed potatoes always whipped up right, the gravy thickened, the turkey cut tender to the bone, and anyone who ever had my mother’s chocolate-chip cheesecake was never, in some way, the same.  She made the dresses my sister and I wore as little girls.  She embroidered flowers into our collars.  She filled her house with color, fabric, texture, and light.  With conversation and surprise.  With gifts—abundant, always.

         In the weeks since my mother’s passing, I have been pondering the many measures of a life—that which dissipates, that which remains.  I have been looking up, studying the skies.  I have been watching the greening of the stalk of curly willow that sits in a vase in my most sun-filled room.  I have considered spring’s rumbling things, impatient, even in winter, to rise.  I have been blessed—immeasurably blessed—by the outreach and wisdom of souls like you, and I have made my decision:  Beauty remains. 

In the words she put down on a page, in the friends she gathered around her, in the gifts only she had the talent to give, in the orchids that yet bloom in her deep-silled windows, and in the man who was her husband and is my father, my mother, always a beauty, remains.  Winter will soon cede to spring, and she’ll be here.  The moon will blaze bright through an afternoon haze, the stars won’t leave the sky at dawn, a fox won’t run when you walk by, and in all of this, you’ll find my mother.  And in a garden called Chanticleer, between the risen roots of that most magnificent Katsura tree, there will, come summer, be a stone that reads The Wedge of Sun Between Us.  That stone will be my mother’s stone.  Perhaps she’ll find you there. 

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The Art of Gardening/by R. William Thomas, Rob Cardillo, and the Chanticleer Gardeners

Yesterday was moving day at my father's house. After so many months of packing and renovation, the big truck came. I snuck away from the activities for two beautiful hours in the afternoon to celebrate the release of The Art of Gardening (Timber Press) by the gardeners of Chanticleer. (And then rushed home, changed back into grunge wear, and began again the unpacking of boxes.)

Readers of my blog and books know that Chanticleer has served as backdrop for many of my musings, both nonfiction (Ghosts in the Garden) and fiction (Nothing but Ghosts). (Indeed, my Inky story about this fabled landscape is featured in Love: A Philadelphia Affair.) But as a writer I merely bear witness. I do not know the names of most things, do not capitalize upon the folds in the earth, do not walk the garden every day looking for the ebbing away and the new opportunity.

Bill Thomas and his gardeners do. They make these now 48 acres (the garden is growing) glow, season after season, with their plants, their sense of purpose, their artistry. You'll find their winter projects—clay pots, wood furniture, metal work, hand rails, sculptures—in among the blooms. You'll hear them talking about ways to preserve the biodiversity of soil and to optimize microclimates, not to mention the secrets still stashed in the greenhouse.

The Art of Gardening, featuring photographs by Rob Cardillo (who once took this photo of me on a rainy Chanticleer day for what has become an award-winning magazine), is subtitled "Design, Inspiration, and Innovative Planting Techniques from Chanticleer." Its authors are the gardeners themselves, with Bill Thomas editing the overall narrative and Eric Hsu providing the captions. The history and vision of Chanticleer is represented here, as are design strategies, reports on experiments, and a planting list.

It's a lovely compilation, celebrated on a gorgeous day that also marked the unveiling of the grand new path that winds up toward the Chanticleer house and (at this particular moment in time) makes the hover above the ground feel airbrushed with a color that is not quite pink and not quite purple.

Huge congratulations to the Chanticleer gardeners (and Rob) whose artistic spirits are so well captured here.

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I'm starting from scratch, I said. Isn't that wonderful, she answered

I'm starting from scratch, I told a friend the other day. She on her phone, me on mine. I had walked a few miles during our conversation. We'd traveled to Montana and back in time, through clay work and literature, through architecture and family woe, and now I was still walking and we were still talking, and I said, J: I'm starting from scratch.

I meant that I had been sent back to very birth of things in my art and my career. That everything was a very brand new. That nothing was sure, nothing was predestined, I had no sure writing home, no sure writing brand, nothing sure at all, except the stories in my head.

It's like I never published before, I said.

Isn't that wonderful, she answered.

Isn't that wonderful. Starting over, starting fresh, taking nothing for granted, asking questions I haven't asked for twenty years. Twenty-one books are twenty-one books, but I dwell in the here and now. I make for the sake of making. I push (can push) too far. And where I am, and how it's been—I'm starting all over again.

Isn't that wonderful.

Yes, J. It is. I am afraid, I am raw, I don't know, I'm on my own, and it is wonderful. It is brave and uneasy and I'm alive with it, alert to it, figuring it out. Again.

Yes, J. It is.

But so are you, for saying so. And so all the many friends who have accompanied me in this summer of questions, of starting over again. I stepped back and took it slow. You've been there. I thank you.

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what makes a book small?

It's been some time since I wrote that fifth memoir, Ghosts in the Garden—a meditation on the two years I spent walking Chanticleer (in Wayne, PA). I was at a crossroads. Middle aged. Not sure. Pondering my purpose.

Published by New World Library, this slender book, about a well-loved but entirely local garden (every garden is an entirely local garden), went on to be reviewed in papers across the country (I could not have guessed that) and to be translated (this was an even bigger surprise) in South Korea. It sold out of its original modest printing of 5,000 copies and was never reprinted.

Done. Gone. Another Kephartian exercise, by most standards, in the small.

And yet. Every now and then the book returns to my life. This past week it did, in the form of this photograph—a South Korean garden lover who had read the translation in her country (she holds it in her left hand) and come here, to Wayne, PA, to find the garden with her husband.

A book brought a reader across the ocean to a garden.

What makes a book small? What makes a book big? I wish we never had to ask that question. I wish that we'd stop quantifying authors by sales or prizes and take solace in stories about individual readers who allowed a book to prompt a journey.

One book. One reader. One garden. One sunny day. One surprising photograph. Two smiles on two faces.

Thank you, BJ, for sending that smile my way.

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the great magnificence of the flowering trees (at Chanticleer garden)

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just ahead of winter, at Chanticleer, with Rob Cardillo

The rain was just beginning to fall as Rob Cardillo and I set off down the hill of Chanticleer. The glorious garden is closed now for the winter, but Rob, a tremendous photographer (see his images here), was taking portraits for a new project now under way with our mutual friend, Adam Levine.

I've contributed in a small way to the project and agreed to an accompanying portrait if (and only if) Rob kept me in the far distance of his images.

He kept that promise.

I snapped these two photographs in between takes.

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Garden Ghosts and River Voices, this evening at Radnor Library

One of my incurable obsessions is imagining Then. The yesterday years. The years before those. The land before it was cultivated. The earth before the glaciers peeled off. The mountains before they were sprung loose from the seas. The birds when they were the size of dinosaurs.

Give me an afternoon off, keep me on hold for a conference call, put me in the car alone for a long drive, and I’m thinking about Then. We live in a transitory and transitional time. We have entered, say some, the Epoch of the Anthropocene. We have reconstructed and redirected our planet to suit our own needs. Nothing that is here right now was here eons ago. And none of it will be here in the long future.

— excerpted from "Garden Ghosts and River Voices," the talk I'll be giving this evening as the Community Garden Club at Wayne kicks off its season. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (the affordable paperback edition), my Chanticleer memoir Ghosts in the Garden (some of the final copies in existence), and my Chanticleer young adult novel Nothing but Ghosts will be available.

The details:

September 4, 2014, 6:30 PM
 Community Garden Club at Wayne
"Garden Ghosts and River Voices"
Nothing but Ghosts/Ghosts in the Garden/Flow
Open to the public
Winsor Room
Radnor Memorial Library
Radnor, PA

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the very height of things, the end of summer

You know summer is ending when the flowers at Chanticleer are taller than you, when the pods are mostly empty, when the petals have mostly blown away, when the cardinal flowers light the bendy paths.

You stand at the crest of the hill. You consider the months that are now tucked inside your history.

There's a breeze out there. A stirring.

Next week, or the week after, I will drive to the beach and stand on the shore and talk to the sea. Because the end of summer also means a little reckoning with the salt and the churn of the sea.

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River Dreams: History, Hope, and the Imagination: Two Upcoming Keynotes

A few days ago, I wrote of an upcoming September 4 talk at Radnor Memorial Library, open to the public, about my ghosts (which is to say my two Chanticleer inspired books) and my river (Flow).

Today I'm posting information for two keynote addresses I'll be giving in honor of the Schuylkill River Heritage Area's 2014 River of the Year Lecture series, on October 14 and 16. Details and registration for these free events are here.

I hope you'll join us.

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Let us be honest: A New Directions in Writing Workshop, Pentagon City, VA

Because the program intrigues me, because I believe good things can happen when like-minded people gather around a table to think about the past and what it means, I said yes to Kerry Malawista when she kindly invited me to conduct a full-day workshop on behalf of New Directions next spring.

We'll focus on senses—not just what we see, taste hear, smell, touch, but the power of heat and its absence, the causeways of pain, the prerequisites of balance and bodily awareness. I'll share the works of favorite poets and memoirists, launch small exercises, listen carefully to the emergent memories, help shape them.

Each participant will move, throughout the day, toward a single, honest, well-rendered moment—a memory that lives rightly on the page. We will, together, build a community. We'll reflect on some of the memoirs I discuss in Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, and why they are essential to a writing life; we'll reflect on some brand-new titles, too.

A handful of personal critique sessions on manuscripts-in-progress will be offered during breaks. 

If any of you are interested in participating, please leave a comment or send a note. I'll have more information shortly. For now:

Let us be honest: A Memoir Workshop
New Directions in Writing
http://newdirectionsinwriting.com
Residence Inn, Pentagon City, VA
April 23, 2014
9:00-5:00

 More on New Directions in Writing:

 . . . an innovative three-year postgraduate training program for writers, clinicians, and academics who want to develop their skill in writing with a psychological perspective.  We have been of help to  students who were novice writers and to others who were well-published authors, and to all those in-between.  While most of our students have been psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, our student bodies have also included journalists, authors, and university faculty, among others.

In seasonal weekend conferences and optional summer and winter retreats, our community of students, alumni, teachers, and guest faculty come together to explore topics of psychological interest which stimulate our minds and enrich our writing.  Each weekend has a specific topic focus, such as memory, play, trauma, gender, writers block, mourning, revenge and forgiveness, religion, boundary, children’s literature, evil, the body, music, neuroscience, projection, and imagining a life.

Writing helps us to think. Thinking helps us to write. But writing is the focus of the program.

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wishing you the bright joy and hope of Easter

(at Chanticleer Garden, with the men in my life)

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talking with Kate Hopper about teaching, and a HANDLING gift.

This was me, years ago, teaching children at Chanticleer Garden. They'd come from all over the city and from around the near suburbs. It was our first day. We were working with panoramas. I was already in love—with the kids and with teaching.

Kate Hopper, who has been a dear presence in my life for many years, is a beautiful writer (you'll be reading about her brand-new memoir, Ready for Air, here on October 8), a teacher (she has an entire book her own teaching, Use Your Words), and a mother. We long for the day when we can sit with a bottle of wine and talk in person. For now, we have this conversation, posted today on Kate's magnificent blog, "Motherhood & Words." Kate and I talk about the teacherly life. She asks me questions no one has asked me. And she writes an introduction that made me cry.

Finally, courtesy of Gotham, there is an opportunity to win a free copy of Handling the Truth for those living in the lower 48 states.

Here, then. It all happens here.

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I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place/Howard Norman: Reflections

Today I went to a garden searching for an image worthy of Howard Norman's new memoir, I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place.

There was this, above, a suggestion of the many vivid parts that constitute this surprising memoir's whole—Norman's summer as a fifteen-year-old employee of the local bookmobile (not to mention lover-in-training, thanks to his brother's girlfriend, Paris, and amateur outsdoorsman, with terrible unintended consequences, and son of a mostly missing father), Norman as a young man trying to find his way in a cold and bitter Canadian city (to pay off an auction debt, to be worthy of a woman he might have loved, to keep company with an older, regretful man), Norman among the Intuits (their folklore, their landscapes, their whale-spume horizons, their birds), Norman in Vermont (it was the summer of Ken Burns' Civil War documentary; it was the summer of wells and hallucinations and fevers), and Norman as the man who tries to reclaim the home that he lent to a poetess and her young son—the home in which she committed a ghastly and famous murder-suicide.

So the parts. The vivid parts of Beautiful Place.

But also the alighted nature of the memoir's structure, the intricate workings among and between things. The time shifts, the slight but never precious self-effacements, the humor within the melancholy within the humor, and his overt address to each. The way art—Norman's art—comes into this, but only slightly and only sometimes. Beautiful Place is not a "how I became a writer" memoir—not in the least. It's a book of true, landscape-framed stories—five chapters circling five discoveries in five eras of Norman's life. Norman twice recalls the Robert Frost line about the best way out being through. He shows himself circling, regretting, freezing, succumbing, lying, and being a better man. He shows himself in the company of birds, and in the company of dying things, and in the light of the moon by the shore.

It's gorgeous writing, every sentence calm and clear and (again) vivid: "The novels I was reading at the time deftly orchestrated implausibilities along a clear narrative line, but I could not locate such a line in my own life." "As he dusted each globe with a moistened cloth and inspected it for hairline cracks, Michael also turned it upside down and them right side up so that the fabricated snowflakes inside fell like confetti on interior tableau." "In 1990, the second full summer in our 1850s farmhouse in Vermont, everything I loved most happened most every day, with exceptions."

I read many books that I love and many I want to share, and then there are those books that I read and think: This is a book that I must teach.

I will teach Howard Norman to my students at Penn next spring.

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Still Writing/Dani Shapiro: Reflections

When I set out to write Handling the Truth, I burrowed in with the books that I have always loved—built a minor cathedral with printed paper, stiff spines, glue. Memoirs, specifically. Books that had taught me something or reinforced something, that exemplified, were exemplary.

One of those loved books was Dani Shapiro's Devotion, a memoir that, as I wrote here years ago, felt pure to me, spun from a sacred, silent place. Dani's book became one of the nearly 100 books I celebrate in the pages of Handling. Her prose offering an essential lesson in quiet generosity.

When I learned that Dani was publishing a book called Still Writing, I knew that something significant was about to make its way into the hands of writers all around the world. I trusted that she would write with both clarity and beauty, that she would open her heart, that she would not hide, that she would elevate writing advice to profoundly intelligent writing insight. All this she does, seamlessly, in a book that is destined to be a classic.

Reading Still Writing is like sitting with a best friend who gets you—really gets you. Someone in whom you might confide, someone with whom you might look out upon a garden space, silently. Yes, you hear yourself saying, I have been there. Yes, I've felt lost, too, uncertain, crushed, but also moved, privileged, calmed, finally certain in the midst of making a book. Wisdom, honesty, and reach abide in Still Writing. But so does companionship.

As one who teaches as well, who writes about words, who sometimes writes her own stories, I felt so aligned with Dani as I read that I'm afraid I sometimes spoke out loud while reading. I loved many passages. Let me share just one. It's the sort of advice I've tried to share with many writers throughout the years. But Dani says it better:

There's nothing wrong with ambition. We all want to win Guggenheims and live and write in the south of France, or some version thereof—don't we? But this can't be the goal. If we are thinking of our work as a ticket to a life of literary glamour, we really ought to consider doing something else.

Still Writing will be published in October by Grove Atlantic.

Dani and I will appear together on stage, for a conversation about the writing life—Still Writing/Handling the Truth—at the First Person Arts Festival in November in Philadelphia. Details here. 

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Horton Foote, River North Dance Chicago, Chanticleer Garden: one April weekend 2013

If you came here just for the pictures, here they are—Chanticleer Garden, April 7, 2013, a brand new season of color and verve. The secret garden elves have spent the winter widening paths, planting pots, putting the start of lettuce into rows. They have had a ball with succulents. And the big bright fish are alive.

If you wondered how I'd felt about seeing "The Trip to Bountiful" at People's Light and Theatre Company on Friday evening with my father, wonder no more. It was a full-throttle production, emotionally speaking, and elegant in all other ways. I believed in these characters and their stories, the two side-by-side chairs that constituted a bus, the painted mural that was the landscape of memory. I believed in the anger and in the momentary resolve.

And finally, River North Dance Chicago, presented last evening at Annenberg Center. There are, apparently, young men and women whose bodies are only muscle and air, not bone. There are choreographers who can bring Eva Cassidy back to life. There is a dancer named Jessica Wolfrum who can make a dress breathe and a dancer named Ahmad Simmons whose muscular nomenclature is like nothing I've ever seen, and who danced within the quick strobe of light, his arms like wings. Then there were those who danced in and out of elastic shirts without ever losing track of time.

Or perhaps they lost all track of time, and that is why I was so mesmerized.

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Remembering Ghosts in the Garden (with a huge thank you to Ed Goldberg) and Small Damages

I had only just returned from Florence and was still adjusting to the hours and the lack of pasta when Ed Goldberg, now a long-time friend, read my fifth book, Ghosts in the Garden, and shared his thoughts on his blog, Two Heads Together.  Ed is the kind of guy who never shouts and will not boast and does not stomp his feet or pop his bubble gum to get attention.  Only yesterday did he whisper in my ear:  Beth, I read that book.

And so he did, reinvigorating for me, in his thoughtful, surprising way, a book I wrote when I fully believed I was writing my last.  Writing is hard on the psyche—not making the books (I am dangerously addicted to the making of books), but living with them when they are out in the world.  They're not going to please everyone, nor should they.  Some will say that kindly, some will say it cruelly, some may veer from the truth, some may hurt people you love. You have to live with that, when you write books, and in writing Ghosts, I felt myself fading, vanishing toward another life, searching for another art to believe in. 

That was too many books ago, but it was a time I remember well and a feeling to which I often return. Ghosts in the Garden is a wandering, wondering book. I remain a wanderer and a wonderer, never precisely sure.

Just as Ed whispered in my ear yesterday, Jessica Shoffel, my beloved Philomel publicist, wrote to share the news that The Repository, a newspaper out of Canton, OH, had celebrated Small Damages as a novel "Worth Your Time."  Michael Green, Philomel's head honcho, wrote something Michael-ishly funny, after that.  But we're not telling.  Not a chance.   

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Inside the happy sink of book making

Chanticleer Garden often appears on this blog–in photographs, in stories, in reminisces.  Today it is here thanks to the imagination of my husband, who took a photograph of the garden years ago then invented his own version.  It's an old image, a sketch image, something I found in my files just today, when I was looking for a quote I've tucked away somewhere—words I find I need about ruins.

My head is full of a book I'm writing.  I feel all verve-y and alive, terribly attached to the notion of putting all these thoughts about memoir making down.  I stand on one rung of a ladder, pulling myself up.  I peer over the hedge of what I've written already and think, But, oh.  There is so much more.

I dangle.  I stretch.

Meanwhile, I read the work of the extraordinary Patricia McCormick.  I will have something to say about her supreme talents tomorrow. 

Until tomorrow, then.

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a single orange eye

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