Introducing a Gorgeous New Magazine Called GROW

I have spoken here of Adam Levine, a Philadelphia writer, historian, gardener, and friend who was so instrumental in my search for Schuylkill River images during the creation of Flow. I have referenced a certain Rob Cardillo, an exquisite photographer (he and Adam together created the definitive guide to the great gardens of Philadelphia), who recently asked me to join him at Chanticleer in something other than a black coat. (I took my own small camera along and snapped these photos.) Let me here introduce Scott Meyer and Kim Brubaker, former editor and art director for Organic Gardening, respectively.

Together these four have concocted a most gorgeous magazine called Grow, for the 25,000 or more members of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. It has launched this week. It is worthy of a celebration.

I was honored to contribute this back-page essay to Grow. Rob Cardillo took this photograph just before the rains unleashed at Chanticleer. I share just one column of the text. The rest lives for the Growers of PHS.

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upcoming, open, and free: September 4/rivers, gardens, ghosts/Radnor Memorial Library

The talk is written.

The doors will be open.

Rivers. Gardens. Ghosts.

Radnor Memorial Library

September 4, 2014

 

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I could use a banana, a cap, and some fish (also, some words on false advertising)

Happy birthday to Bill Thomas, who leads us into spring and away from fall as the executive director of Chanticleer Garden, a place that brings us breezes, blooms, and birds and is featured in my two ghost books: Ghosts in the Garden (a memoir) and Nothing but Ghosts (a young adult novel).

Of course, there are no actual ghosts in either book, which is to say that Casper does not make an appearance. Once a reviewer took me to task for putting the word "ghost" into my novel's title (about a daughter missing her mother).

False advertising, wrote the critic.

Angrily.

Like Truman Capote, I did not respond.

I prefer to wish Bill a happy birthday.

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where things begin: the Inquirer essay on Chanticleer

Several weeks ago, Avery Rome of the Philadelphia Inquirer got in touch with a question.  Would I be interested in writing in occasional pieces for the paper's Currents section?  Pieces about my intersection with my city and its fringes, perhaps.  Pieces about the people I meet or the questions I have.  Avery has been at work at the Inquirer through many seasons—vital and invigorating, disciplined and rigorous, enriching the pages with literature and poetics, even, with different and differing points of view.  If the Inquirer has gone through many phases, it has always been clear on one thing: Avery Rome is indispensable. 

Would I be interested? she'd asked.


Well, who would not be?  I'd have reason to sit and talk with Avery, for one thing, which is a pleasure every time.  And I would be joined in these pages by two incredibly special women, Karen Rile and Elizabeth Mosier.  Both are first-rate teachers and mentors—Karen at Penn and Elizabeth at Bryn Mawr College.  Both write sentences that thrill me, stories that impress. Both are mothers of children I love, children whose plays I have gone to, whose art I have worn, whose questions have made me think, whose inner beauty is as transparent as their outer gorgeousness.  And both are very essential friends.

Karen and Elizabeth's zinging essays have already appeared in the Inquirer and can be found here and here.  My piece appears today.  It was commissioned and written during the high heat of last week, before the gentling rains of this weekend.  It takes me back to Chanticleer, a garden that inspired two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden, Nothing but Ghosts) and is a source of escape, still.  The essay ends with these words and includes two of my photographs of small, sacred places at this gorgeous pleasure garden:

In the high heat of this summer I find myself again returning to Chanticleer — walking the garden alone or with friends. The sunflowers, gladiola, and hollyhocks are tall in the cutting garden. The water cascades (a clean sheet of cool) over the stone faces of the ruins and sits in a black hush in the sarcophagus. Bursts of color illuminate the dark shade of the Asian Woods. The creek runs thin but determined.

I don't know why I am forever surprised by all this. I don't know how it is that a garden I know so well — its hills, its people, its tendencies, its blocks of shade — continues to startle me, to teach me, to remind me about the sweet, cheap thrill of unbusyness, say, or the impossibility of perfect control. We do not commandeer nature — gardeners know this best of all. We are born of it, live with it, are destined for return.

Dust to dust, yes. But why not shade and blooms in between? Why not gardens in this summer of infernal, angry heat?

Wishing us all more rain, less heat, and the goodness of editors who love words, gardens that still grow, friendships that nurture, and children who move us on this Sunday morning.

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The So-Generous BookPage Interview

Not long ago I sat in a local coffee shop with a young woman who dazzled.  Yes, that's the word.  She'd found her way to the very beating heart of the publishing world as a young Vanderbilt graduate, moved from the Big Apple to the south to work as the BookPage fiction editor, and today works as a content manager for a suburban Philadelphia brand consulting firm, writing features and reviews for BookPage on the side.  Beyond us, the little town of Wayne was having an outdoor festival.  Between us, the talk was books and work.  I adored her within seconds.  She asked smart questions.  She listened.

Abby Plesser (for that is this wunderkind's name) had been asked to interview me for a BookPage feature.  I could not have been a luckier soul.  The conversation alone would have been enough.  The consequent story is more capacious, more generous than anything I could ever deserve.  The piece ends with these words, below.  The whole can found here.

Abby and BookPage, thank you.  Jessica Shoffel, thank you (for everything).

No matter the audience, there is
one thing Kephart hopes readers
take away from her novel: not to
judge others. Of her protagonist, she
says, “Kenzie is very loving, intelligent,
moral. She is in a situation. I
think no less of her and I don’t want
my readers to think any less of her.”
Kephart speaks with such compassion
for her characters and such
passion for her work that it’s hard
not to be inspired by such an unassuming,
accomplished woman. Of
her career, she reflects, “I never want
to look back and say, ‘Well, my best
book was my first one or my fifth or
my seventh,’ so I’m highly motivated
to not just slide. I try to break form
or go to a new place in the world
or tell a story that hasn’t been told
before. I’m invested in challenging
myself and going to the verge or taking
the risk.”

Small Damages is a book well
worth the risk. Kephart has created a
lyrical, beautiful story about a young
woman at a turning point, struggling
to reconcile her choices, find
her place in the world and discover
the true meaning of family.

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She escapes to a garden, she returns to a beautiful SMALL DAMAGES blog review

Let's just say that it's been quite a time in these parts.  I leave the house for teaching and other appointments at 10 AM, say, return at 11 PM, say, and have 20 hours of client work due by 10:30 the next morning.  I'm lousy at math, but even I know that the numbers aren't properly crunching.

But we keep on keeping on (do we have a choice?).  Today I chose to wash my exhausted face, peel my eyes open with fresh mascara, and meet a new client at an utterly atypical client-esque location, Chanticleer—that glorious garden tended by glorious gardeners.  I had my little camera with me.  I took a few furtive shots.  I was made (miraculously) alive again.

When I returned to my desk later this evening, I had an email from Philomel's Jessica Shoffel, who was forwarding a most beautiful blog review of SMALL DAMAGES.  The blog is called Book Loving Mommy. The five-star review touches my heart.  It closes with these words:

This book was written beautifully and I really didn't want it to end.  You will pick it up and become so involved and wrapped up in Kenzie's life and her relationships with Estela and Esteban.  You will feel what Kenzie feels and understand her confusion about the choice she must make.  This is definitely a book I am going to buy when it comes out in stores!

Huge thanks, then, to Jessica and Book Loving Mommy for brightening my day.

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I like this photograph

I share it.

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A thank you to my students, a report on the coming days

It is a pleasure peculiar to the teacher that, even after classes end and the students go on their way, so many find their way back to your own soul-er home.  They report on their journeys.  They change the tenor of the conversation you were having with yourself. They make you believe, above all else, that the intensity of what was then matters still, right now.

You students know who you are, and you know that I am grateful.

In other news, I prepare today to meet with the 14-year-old San Francisco-based book club that travels once each year to meet an author who has written of his/her city.  We'll be gathering at Chanticleer garden on Saturday, where two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden and Nothing but Ghosts) take place; we'll talk as well about Dangerous Neighbors. My thanks to Kathye Fetsko Petrie, a writer and writer advocate, who suggested my name to the group, and a warm welcome to Kyle Taylor and her band of reader/travelers.

I prepare as well to meet, on Monday, with the students of the 25th Annual Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference, which Lisa Zeidner so brilliantly concocts each year.  I'm joining (quite late in the game) a cast that includes the likes of Jane Bernstein, Ken Kalfus, Lise Funderburg, J.T. Barbarese, and Peter Trachtenberg.  I'm offering my thoughts on creative nonfiction.  I'm banking on some time alone with Lisa, whose friendship I have grown to cherish.

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On earning out with Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River

A few posts back, I showcased my $6.88 royalty check—a check received for my fifth memoiristic volume, Ghosts in the Garden.  Ghosts went out of print shortly before that check made its way to me, but it earned out anyway, thanks to a small sale in South Korea and the many fans of Chanticleer garden, where that book takes place.

Today I learned that Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill River, has also earned out its small advance in an equally small, but meaningful way, and I'm taking this moment to honor that—to honor these books of ours that don't slot easily into any proven category, that don't have a logical spot on Barnes & Noble shelves, that don't scream Bestseller to those who dare to take them on, and that find their right readers nonetheless.  Flow is the book that most people laughed at before it was published, and Flow is also the book that changed my place in Philadelphia, this city I love.

I hear more about Flow than nearly any other book I've published.  Not because it sold hugely—it didn't (though this one is still in print)—but because readers are smarter and more willing to stretch than many give them credit for.  "I have no idea what this book is," Micah Kleit, Temple University Press editor, said to me, early on. "But we want to take the risk."

Thank you, Micah, Ann Marie Anderson, and Publicist Supreme Gary Kramer, for taking that risk with me, for giving me a book that I remain most proud of.

(And thanks, Karen Baker, for taking my call.)

 

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Elizabeth Hand is Coming to Town

and that means I'll actually get to meet—live and in person—this writer with whom I've had such a wonderful, honest, intelligent virtual conversation since I first read Illyria last August.  My thanks to Colleen Mondor, who raved about Liz's immaculate sentences to begin with and opened Liz's world to mine.

Liz travels far and wide, both physically and in her own imagination, and she's coming to Philadelphia as a keynoter.  I'm thinking I'll take this colorful lady to Chanticleer, pictured above, if she'll let me.

How colorful is Liz Hand, you wonder? Well, consider this.  She's giving her talk for the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Her topic? Norwegian Black Metal music. With brilliant friends like this, I defy anyone to call me boring or, say, stuffy.

(smiles)

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Take it for what it is

 

yellow and untethered

alive in this instant

for this instant.

Nonetheless and still:

I am a flat line.

Losing the sound of the pause in the music.

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Upcoming: The Mt. Airy Kids' Literary Festival at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore

Spring is here, the blues are bluing at Chanticleer, and this coming weekend I'll be joining a cast of very special writers—Wendy Mass, Audrey Vernick, Stevie French, Jennifer Hubbard, Ellen Jensen Abbot, Nancy Viau, and Amy Holder among them—for the Mt. Airy Kids' Literary Festival at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore.  My event takes place on Saturday, April 9, at 3 PM, and I'll be sharing the mike and hour with the talented Kate Milford (The Boneshaker).  More information can be found here.

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stepping out (a few upcoming events)

I am notoriously bad at looking too far ahead, but there are times when, well, I must.  And so, just now, my son tucked into a nearby room reading up on the six-day war, I survey the days ahead.

A few places I intend to be:

Thursday, March 31, 2011/The Willows/7 PM
Radnor High School Scholarship Fund 4th Annual Girls' Night Out (a talk, with photographs)

Saturday, April 9, 2011/Mt. Airy Kids' Literary Festival/Big Blue Marble Bookstore/3 PM
Reading/Talk with Kate Milford

Thursday, April 28, 2011/Conestoga High School/AM
Talk with Teachers/Talk with Students
Central League Writing Contest (closed to school participants and teachers)

Wednesday, May 25, 2011/Javitz Center/BEA/afternoon
Assorted Events

Friday, May 27, 2011
Agnes Irwin Writing Workshop

Saturday, June 25, 2011/Chanticleer Garden
A talk and luncheon with San Francisco's Fabulous (I call them that) Traveling Book Club
(with thanks to Kathye)

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Kit Armstrong, the original prodigy

I have taught in many places, and been educated by many children.  Chanticleer garden has been the backdrop of some of my most treasured teaching memories.  If we lose some of the children we meet along the way, we never forget them.

Tonight, at dinner, apropos of nothing, my son asked whatever happened to Kit Armstrong, one of the students I had the privilege of getting to know six summers ago.  He'd come to us (via Betty Jean) as a young composer—a 12-year-old (at the time) who already had seven years of composition and piano studies under his belt, who had enrolled as a full-time undergraduate student in music and science by the age of nine, and who was known for his bowtie stints on the David Letterman Show.  He'd not had the chance to explore creative writing when I first met him, but he emerged at once as a talent.  More than that, always more importantly than that, he was this kid that we all quickly grew to love.  No snobbery in him.  No better-than-ism.  Just this kid who loved music and science and language, and whose laugh made us laugh, whenever we heard it in the garden.

"I don't know what happened to Kit," I told my son, who sensed my sadness at once.  "Google him," my son said.  And, of course, I just did.

How happy does it make me to find Kit here, on his web site, as beautiful as he was six years ago.  How delighted am I to learn that just this summer he was awarded the "Leonard Bernstein Award" and that his piano repertoire (and I quote) "includes the 48 Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, all Mozart Piano Sonatas, 15 Beethoven Piano Sonatas, as well as works by Haydn, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, and Ligeti. His concerto repertoire comprises works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Bartok."  If that doesn't impress you, then how about this:  He was awarded the Morton Gould Young Composer Award for five consecutive years, and he now performs all over the world with major orchestras.

People like Kit don't come around too often.  I am waving to him now, across the internet.

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Things don't always fall apart

As anyone who might have read my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth.  Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well).  And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately wrong (a shattered tooth, a pain killer to which I had a nightmarish reaction), I've had gum grafts that have made me feel and look like a flying UFO. 

It's just my mouth.  It is not life-threatening.  People face far far worse things every single day—many people.  But still.  I woke up this morning and didn't feel like going to the periodontist who is perfectly nice and tres talented (his nephew is also high up on Obama's team, so he tells good stories).  I didn't feel like it.

Here's what happened to make the day sweet anyway.  My son woke up and said the kindest thing.  My husband offered to make me a late-night brown cow (something to savor while watching So You Think You Can Dance).  Matthew Quick sent along these generous words about The Heart is not a Size.  I heard from friends (I love my friends).  And.... the yellow finch that banged on my office window for months following the passing of my mother, the finch that launched Nothing but Ghosts (or its near cousin), started banging again the very instant I arrived following this morning of surgery and stitches.  It had not banged for months and months and months.  But here it was again—another message, I suspect, from my mother.

Life is good.

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Not just a new banner, but a new blog

Well, you know I could not have come up with this one on my own.  I needed a trip to Chanticleer's lotus pond, so that I might find the photo.  I needed my husband to make that photo art.  But most of all, I needed Amy Riley and Nicole Bonia of Winsome Media Communications to patiently wade through my design hopes (can it be simple? can it be easy for me to maintain? can it be basically like it was but a million times better?), to kindly walk me through Feedburner and the Site Meter, and to be there, pretty much around the clock, to answer my profoundly unintelligent technology questions and to be their dear, helpful, knowing, calm selves.

Amy and Nicole, you are the best, you really are.

So what do we have here?  We have, at long last, an uncluttered sidebar.  We have my biography—the books, the awards, the teaching, the anthologies, the judging—all housed on one page.  We have review excerpts of books past and present; an interview revealing a little why, a little how; a YouTube channel that collects my various adventures on film (not all of them, indeed, I tossed many of them out; call it summer cleaning).

We have the blog, still—the photos and musings on the writer's life, the heat of summer (or the chill of winter, if we ever get there), and, mostly, books I've loved and other writers who have taught me.

The door is open.  Please stop by.  Please stick around.

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A student of teaching

It was hot, it was humid, it was teaching at Chanticleer in an unpredictable spring, but those 15 Agnes Irwin girls were willing and far more than able—reeling themselves backward and forward in time, willing themselves to remember. 

The thing about teaching is you never know.  You prepare your prompts, you know your own heart, you know what you want to leave behind, but you do not know what will make a student vulnerable to the process.  I never teach the same thing twice.  I have become a student of teaching. 

It is 4:22 AM, dark.  I'm about to set off for the Big Apple where I will, at too long last, meet so many of you who have sustained me here.  Until then.

b

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The week ahead

I'm headed into the Big Apple today (though not by way of clydesdales, sadly) to talk about the power of the Kelly Writers House program at Penn, to read with Kimberly Eisler, one of my truly talented students, and to witness the indomitable Al Filreis teach a poem (that should be something; hope he doesn't call on me).  Two days later, I'll head back down into Philadelphia to see my first Penn student, Moira Moody, say I do to the man she loves.  I'm banking on Dr. Filreis showing off some highly ecclesiastical moves at Moira's wedding. I'll take hip hop, too. Or even the cha cha.

By mid-week next week, I'll be spending the day at Chanticleer (the site of Ghosts in the Garden and Nothing but Ghosts)—teaching memoir to the aspiring writers of Agnes Irwin, thanks to the invitation of Julie Diana, who is not just the head librarian at Agnes Irwin, but the wife of the fabulous writer, Jay Kirk.  Thursday and Friday, back in New York, I'll spend some time with editor Laura Geringer and the glorious Egmont team; the book bloggers I have come to love; Amanda King, Gussie Lewis, and Jennifer Laughran, booksellers extraordinaires; and maybe even grab a few moments with Amy Rennert, my west-coast based agent with whom I often speak but whom I rarely see.

I am not, by nature, a sustainably social person, and so, when I return home next Friday evening, I'll be grateful that one of my very favorite events of the entire year—the Devon Horse Show—will have rolled into town.  We moved here in large part because the fairgrounds are just down the road, because these horses do trot by just after dawn, because I like few things more than walking through the shadows of stables, fitting my hand to a sweet mare's nose.  I like the sound of clop and whinny, the tinny music that accompanies balloon dart games and Ferris wheels.

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Rocking the Zumba with Sarah, Brenda, and Peggy

Sarah started it in Zumba today. It was her fault, I know that it was. Walking in late looking like a movie star, then saying her honey southern hello, then collecting her rivers of hair, then smiling with her eyes, both so blue. She's just too cute, and what could I do, there beside her, and there behind Brenda, and there, nearby, Peggy, newly home from Guatemala.

So we kicked the samba merry. So we went full pivot with our hips. So I bounced my head and Sarah bounced hers harder, and when the cha cha came on we were all knees and angles, and when Bollywood blared we knocked the air off of our thighs. When Sarah went big, I went bigger, and when we both went big, Brenda noticed and Peggy laughed. "You two are rocking and rolling, aren't you?" Brenda said forgivingly, and I wanted to behave, but I couldn't.

I've had a hard couple of weeks, and for many days there I could barely breathe, and you know how it is when things seem hopeful once again, when the knots loosen, when you can see past and maybe push through. Zumba might be exercise most days of the week. Today it was an hallelujiah.

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Love Her

I found her at Chanticleer, and of course I fell in love (yes, yes, it's true: on a daily basis I fall harmlessly in love). She was afraid of nothing (you see that in her eyes, and in the cock of her inventive hat). She was willing to trust the warming weather. She opened her hand as if to say, Let me show you the way, and when I saw her next, down by the big pond, she was delineating the orange-backed koi from the blue. Knowledgeably, with stylish forewarning.

Last night, a young friend wrote to ask if I am sometimes afraid for the young women in this world. Perhaps you are, perhaps you should be, my friend wrote, but then she went on to tell a late-night story, offering it as a salve, "in case you were worrying."

I worry. All the time, I worry. And I am redeemed, every day, by brave young souls.

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