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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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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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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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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my ghosts, my river—all together now (upcoming talk at the Community Garden Club of Wayne)

A few weeks ago, Peter Murphy, who presides over the Community Garden Club at Wayne, invited me to come and speak about those ghosts of mine—the Chanticleer memoir (Ghosts in the Garden) and the Chanticleer young adult novel (Nothing but Ghosts). After a brief flurry of emails we settled on the topic above—Garden Ghosts and River Voices—a talk I'm writing now and am eager to give.

This first-of-the-year program (September 4, 2014) is open to both the Garden Club and to anyone who wants to come. Copies of books will be on hand. For more on the Community Garden Club at Wayne, go here.

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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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My husband's art goes 3D

From time to time I energize this little lit blog with images crafted by my husband.  It makes me happy.  His work is good.

I have, for example, provided a reveal of Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 Philadelphia book (forthcoming in March) for which my husband both provided a dozen interior illustrations and the wonderful cover art.

I have showcased sample spreads from Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business, the corporate fable on which we collaborated with Matthew Emmens; this Alice in Wonderlandish exercise in strangeness and delight sold to a dozen countries worldwide.

I have offered my thoughts on Ghosts in the Garden, the coming-into-middle-age Chanticleer garden book my husband brought to life with black-and-white photographs. 

I have shared those stunning photographs of ballroom friends, transported into and transfigured by imaginary spaces (fun fact:  two of those stunning dancers are now appearing in the new Bradley Cooper movie, "The Silver Lining Handbook," based on the novel by Matthew Quick).

Then there was the fabulous William Sulit art that accompanied my review of Tina Fey's Bossypants. 

Today I'm posting new work by Bill—a three-dimensional model that he created with ZBrush modeling software (the first image above is the illustration) before sending that art to Shapeways, a manufacturer capable of converting illustrations into three-D sculpture in a variety of materials (the second and third images depict the cute and surprisingly weighty sculpture that arrived by post yesterday—it's a few inches high by a few inches wide; it feels like pottery in your hand; the egg is pure photo prop and will be my breakfast tomorrow).  For reasons known only to him, Bill decided to produce a chicken; I hope he wasn't inspired by my reaction to recent gum graft surgery.  We're thinking these sculptures—which can be erupt from anything Bill decides to draw and 3-dimensionalize—are potential rich.

If you want to know more, just ask me (and then I'll ask him).  In the meantime, he's back in that studio fortress of his, developing images for my upcoming keynote address at the Publishing Perspectives conference.  I am hoping there will be no chickens. 

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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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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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Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: A Partial Cover Reveal

I've worked with my artist husband on two previous books—Ghosts in the Garden (New World Library) and Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business (Berrett-Koehler).  This past year, we've been collaborating on a third—Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an illustrated teen novel that features Philadelphia's own Baldwin Locomotive Works, Eastern State Penitentiary, the great Schuylkill River, a blowzy named Pearl, and my hero George Childs, among other places and souls.  It features, as well, the odd tonics and medicines of the time—the strange promises and possible powers of herbal concoctions and flowering vines.  William of Dangerous Neighbors fame stands at the center of this novel.  Two twins waft through.

This morning, my husband has completed the design of the book's cover (he has also created nearly a dozen interior illustrations), and while I cannot unveil the whole, I am happy to share this small corner of an image that perfectly captures 1871 and, at the same time, suggests the story's very modern spirit. 

I am ridiculously happy about all of this.  Not just that the book will exist (spring 2013).  But that my fictional William was rendered by my real-life William, and that a very kind press is giving both a home.

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Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: a fragment of an early sketch

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 prequel to Dangerous Neighbors, will (I'm happy to report) be illustrated by my husband. That makes this book our third collaboration.  Bill illustrated my co-authored corporate fairytale Zenobia and took the majority of the photographs that appeared in my fifth memoir, Ghosts in the Garden. He began early sketches for this project more than a year ago, with this image. 

I am especially happy about this collaboration, for I have long been mapping the rise of illustrated middle grade/YA books. 

This is a fragment of the image that will most likely grace the cover of the book.  William, who was introduced in Dangerous Neighbors as a boy who rescues lost animals for a living, is the star of this tale.  Early on in the story he decides to keep this unclaimed goat, whom he names Daisy and who travels with him on his varied adventures.

I can't wait to see this book come to life. I am especially eager to share it with Philadelphians who today walk the (much transformed) streets that William claims as his own. 

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Escape to Chanticleer

We waited for rain a long time in these parts, and when it came, Chanticleer, the garden that has formed the backdrop of two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden and Nothing But Ghosts) was glorified.

These shots were stolen on Wednesday afternoon.

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Opening day at Chanticleer garden

It's been many years now since I first stumbled onto Chanticleer, a pleasure garden ten minutes from my home.  In the epics and eras since, Chanticleer has served as a retreat of sorts, become a place of friendship, and crept its way into two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden (a memoir) and Nothing but Ghosts (a YA novel)).  It has also become a birthday tradition.  The garden opens on April 1st of each year.  I go to bear witness and to reflect on my own life.

Profoundly exhausted, I wasn't sure that I'd make it this year.  I was glad I found a way.  The skies were gray but not storming when I arrived.  The daffodils and cherry trees had bloomed out early, as was this eager season's way.  Still, purple and blue electrified the landscape.  The neon koi were in their pond.  The pots were brimming.

"Now I'm going to show you my favorite part," a little girl told her mother as she ran by.  And then:  "Oh, look!  It's changed.  It's even better!"

Change. Yes. It just keeps coming. That's the way it is, the way it will be. But I am grateful for the familiar rolling hills of Chanticleer, the familiar faces.  I am grateful for the reflecting ponds that restore me, for the quiet that I find, because I'm searching.

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The Dangerous Neighbors Prequel: Let the illustration journey begin

My husband, a visual artist, has never been a reader of my books.  That is just how it is.

But every once in a while, I'll create a story or a project that reels him in.  There was, for example, my co-authored (with Vertex CEO Matt Emmens) corporate fable, Zenobia, which William illustrated with whimsical black-and-white line drawings and which was beautifully reviewed, I just this moment discovered, here.  There was also Ghosts in the Garden, my collection of mid-life musings, which William supplemented with gorgeous black and white photos (though they morphed into pinkish and grayish images once the book was translated in South Korea).

Lately, as many of you know, I have been at work on a new book, a prequel to my Centennial Philadelphia novel, Dangerous Neighbors (Egmont USA).  If this sudden split of quiet time holds, I'll be two-thirds or so through the first draft by weekend's end.  Enough story, in other words, for William to get working on what will be (thanks to the recent purchase of some very intriguing animation software and flash lighting systems) some extraordinary 3-D illustration work. 

This means that William will have to read at least some of this tale which stars (no accident there) a young man named William.  This means as well that I'm writing my heart out.  Because if I only get my husband's literary attention every once in a blue book, I sure as heck want to make it worth his while.

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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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"Can you make a lot of money as a writer?"

the young man in the fifth row asked. I'm always asked.

They want to know, these aspiring writers, if they can make a living at this crazy word stuff, and so we talk about what "living" is, about commercial books and literary ones, about big advances and zero advances, about being one's own best advocate and looking ahead to new books. "You write your book, you advocate for your book, and then you keep creating," I tell them. "A writer's primary job," I reiterate, "is to keep dreaming and creating."

But what's a royalty check? they want to know. And when you get them, do you celebrate?

This, my dear readers, is one literary writer's royalty check.  Not a whole lot, you say? But consider this: The book was written and the book was made. It contains a part of me, a stretch of days, that might otherwise have been forgotten.

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Ghosts in the Garden, an excerpt

One day I took my mother to the garden. It was a warmish day, just us. She made her way slowly down the gentlest decline (holding my arm, sometimes touching tree branches), then chose a bench beneath a tree inside the woods. I sat beside her, and between us fell a triangle of sun. A gardener was at work across the path; people walked by. We sat there peacefully, my mother and I, a wedge of yellow sun between us, but otherwise in shadow. We talked of nothing much, and it was good. We said, every once in a while, Remember this? Remember that? We talked about how the branches of one tree reached toward another and formed an arch. We talked about how high vines will climb if they’re rooted in good soil.

Things were blooming in the Asian Woods.

There was so much color in the shadows.

In the wake of my mother's passing, Chanticleer allowed me to place this stone beneath the great katsura trees, in her memory. Doug was the one who fit the stone to the earth, making sure the sun had room.

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Sam Strike of Main Line Media News Catches Up with Me at Chanticleer

Sam Strike, one of my very favorite local reporters, caught up with me and Magdalena Piekarz during our walk through Chanticleer last Thursday. Here's what I had to say.

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Researching Creative Nonfiction: A passage from an upcoming talk

I'll be speaking at Rosemont College this coming Thursday evening on a topic I've often thought about but never spoken on—the art of researching creative nonfiction. I'll be talking about three books—Flow, Still Love in Strange Places, and Ghosts in the Garden. I'll be inspired, in part, by this photograph, found for me by my friend Adam Levine in the city archives. This from the talk, just written:

Whether I’m writing memoir or novels, fables or poems, young adult novels, adult novels, or fantasies, I am, at one point, reaching far beyond myself, to bring the greater world in. I am following the always persistent, hardly consistent, rarely well-tiled path of my insatiable curiosity. True, research is often either a surfeit of overwhelm, or a tease. Still, and nevertheless, I don’t believe in bringing presumption to the page—in writing simply and only what I already know. I don’t believe in closing doors before I’ve opened windows. I want to be alive when I am writing—engaged, in suspense, full of the unprotected what ifs? I want to convey my own surprise, dismay, or basic indignity right there, on the page. Formulae don’t cut it for me; formulae have been done. Research scrambles the math.

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Shelf Elf reviews Nothing but Ghosts

As those who read this blog know well, Nothing but Ghosts was written in the wake of my own mother's passing—inspired by the finch, the fox, and the songs that edged near to assure me that her spirit was yet within reach. Much of the book takes place in a fictionalized version of Chanticleer, the pleasure garden. In this photograph, the great katsura tree rises over a bench a gardener made, and those who sit there can look out over Doug's cutting garden and the wild profusion of asparagus. Beneath the shade of that katsura is a stone I asked an artist to create for me, a stone that Doug placed, just right, between the shade of limbs. The stone reads "the wedge of sun between us." It's a line from my memoir, Ghosts in the Garden, a line that memorializes my mother.

This morning, Shelf Elf let me know that she had posted a review of Ghosts. Her extraordinary words touched me deeply, for she had seen what it is that I try to do with books, writing in part, "Beth writes about the quiet miracles of real life. She helps readers to see that ordinary experience, all of it – the trouble and sadness and simple day-to-day joy of it – is worth noticing." I know this isn't always an approach that resonates with readers; it is, however, what I have chosen to do in this book life of mine, and I am so grateful, always, when touched by the grace of readers who wait, who read, who imagine themselves inside these worlds.

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