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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Metamorphosis at the Dance Studio

I'm going to tell you something: I did not look pretty today. My hair is two weeks past the cut I'd promised it (I'm getting to it, I tell it). My clothes are the ones that aren't in the laundry room (sorry, but that means they are not my favorites). My mascara is tending toward globby.

I did not look pretty today, and yet I went dancing. Oh, poor Jean, I thought, as I went up those stairs. The things that man has to put up with. My chin too low on some rumba moves, my feet not yet always firmly planted, my New Yorker sneaking up on my ronde, and my hair. Never good, but even worse when it is two weeks past a hair cut.

Whatever. I'd worked through perhaps 100 emails, five drafts of different projects, and at least a dozen calls; there just wasn't time to deal with me. And I was about to apologize for it, about to make a bunch of lame excuses, but Jean is my good friend Jean. Jean, I realized today, is the kind of friend and dance instructor who can laugh with me despite how I look and not make me feel too flat-out unattractive to dance a cha-cha or a salsa.

That's friendship.

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House of Dance: A Paperback Contest

In a few short weeks, House of Dance, my second novel for young adults, will be out as a paperback with a slightly revamped cover.

Those of you who know me a little know this: I love the freedom that dance affords me—the freedom to be my somewhat zany self, the freedom from the mind-bend of at-the-desk problem solving, the freedom of movement. House of Dance, which received a number of starred reviews and has begun to show up on state lists, takes place in a version of Dancesport Academy of Ardmore, PA, where I continue to learn to dance with the likes of Scott Lazarov, Jean Paulovich, John Larson, Aideen O'Malley, Magda Piekarz, Tim Jones, Cristina Rodrighes, and Tirsa Rivas, and among so many friends. I made this "trailer" for the the book with footage that I shot at the studio and around town.

In any case, the point is: I'm having a paperback contest. Those of you interested in receiving a signed copy of the paperback should leave, in the comment box, your definition of what dance is. Two winners will be selected from among the participants, and the two winning definitions will be featured on my blog.

Please leave your comments by March 5th.

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Get your feet off the floor

I know that it doesn't make much sense to go ballroom dancing with a smashed-up toe, but I've skipped Zumba this week and taken funny, peg-legged walks, and I just couldn't help myself, so I went—climbed the stairs to DanceSport, opened the door, donned my un-girly shoes, and risked it.

I don't think there are enough words for dancing. The ones we use are too often used, and they are rather stultifying. Swirl and twirl—like two bad-hair day sisters. Sashay—if you are doing that, are you really dancing? Twist and roll—sounds painful. Gliding—a fine bit of self-puffery, me thinks.

Maybe all it is (for me) is that I'm being myself—that I'm being happy and not necessarily useful and nobody stops me. Yeah, sure, so maybe Jean rolls his eyes at my spastic reprieves, and maybe somewhere deep inside his elegant Belarussian self he's thinking, Lord, this is some way to make a living. But if this is the case, he doesn't let on—doesn't make me feel old, ugly shoed, sleep deprived, disappointing, academic, too intense, over-the-hill, or elsewise. For those 45 minutes, I'm dancing, and that's the only word there is.

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Curing the Blues

Here's what you do when you're feeling blue:

1) You buy the flowers for which you've been yearning (I could write a story with the tips of these irises, couldn't you?).

2) You dance salsa, samba, rumba, fox trot, jive, and waltz with the masterful Jean Paulovich (throwing "Pulp Fiction" moves at one another when something goes wrong and not complaining, not for one second, when he tosses you to the floor. "New move," he says. "Yeah, right," you answer.).

3) You pay attention to the friends you have—the love they yield, unasked for.

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In the end, what does it mean?

The thing about making yourself vulnerable in a discipline you'll never own is that you don't go out and do it alone. When you dance, for example, before a few hundred people on a Sunday afternoon on a stage, it's not the steps that matter in the end, not really. It's Annika and Monika, who arrive early, with all their enthusiasms, and love. It's those who stand on the margins of the stage, calling your name as you whisk by. It's your Broadway partner, Jean, who looks you in the eyes as you dance and laughs off a mistake and texts you later, "I enjoyed our show a lot. It was very alive." It's your husband, Bill, who worked so hard to make the tango right and who, at the end of the journey, said, "You did great." It's your father, who comes in his best suit; it's your friends, John and Andra, with whom you later share dinner; it's Mike, Aideen's Mike, who says, "I had no idea you had that jive thing in you;" it's Magda and her sweet Polish-flavored encouragements; it's Tim, who says, "Yes, you danced it well, and you danced it together;" it's Jim, the quiet choreographer of the very few words, who says, "Your dances were good."

I have no illusions. I don't pretend. I am not headed toward world championship titles, I am not the show-closing star, I am still (and will always be) fussing with the way I stand and move, I will never be "the one." I dance because I love to and I dance in shows like these because my friends are there. Because in the end what does it mean, save that we cheer each other on.

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Be Honest

The gold heart on her ear is tilted sideways. The gold hair around her face has fallen loose. She is at the age when what she is thinking is transparent on her face, when there is no reason, in her mind, to disguise her yearning.

Last night, doing that squirrely quickstep with Jean, my back was being wrenched and my shirt was quickly drenched and my lungs were raw and scraped and bleeding, and still he wanted more. Still he was standing there with his hands on his hips, telling me to give more, hop higher, land harder, thrust wider. "Can't you leave me alone?" I asked him, only half joking. "I mean, Come on. Look at this. I'm crazy even to try it."

And he said, "I am telling you what I see, and I am telling you what I want, and I am only ever honest."

"It's brutal," I said (I gasped), my body slammed against the bar for it could no longer stand up on its own. "Your honesty."

"Why would I waste my time," he said, "being anything but? Dishonesty is inefficient."

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State of Mind

So I said to Jean today, I said, "Jean." (We were about to step onto the dance floor to take on our Broadway/fox trot/Charleston/Quick Step/Lindy Hop/Jive. I was delaying the inevitable.)

"Yes?" Jean asked. (He raised one of this fantastically elastic eyebrows and gave me his best Belarussian stare.)

"Do you sometimes just feel like..." (I stopped inside my quandary, did a little run-around-my head in search of the right words.)

"Like escaping yourself?" he asked. (He lowered his one eyebrow then, in favor of his other, which did a little mathematical dance up high, right along his hair line.)

"Yes. That's it. Like escaping myself." (My eyebrows are not complicit with my moods. I would have raised one, if I could.)

"Yes," he said. "I have felt like that. Except that escaping yourself can't be done. You're always with you."

"I am always with me," I acquiesced. "Always." (For what he said was true.) I shrugged then, and then I stood. Sometimes it's just easier to dance.

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Webbed in with DanceSport

Dance studios bring together souls from the middle of this country and the middle of another, guys who aren't precisely big on books and guys who are, mambo kings and samba sensations. In other words, they bring together people like Scott Lazarov and Jean Paulovich, who are pictured here. Scott is the artistic force behind DanceSport PA and one of the best choreographers anywhere (on Tuesday afternoons my husband and I dance Scott's brilliant tango; when I wrote House of Dance, I used Scott as the model for Max). Jean is the champion ballroom dancer, dear friend, and teacher who thinks I can pull off a Broadway/foxtrot/quickstep/Charleston/lindy hop/jive routine in time for a late-October showcase.

I'm not quite sure whom Jean thinks he's kidding, but I will tell you this: Yesterday, when fellow-dancer Julia was watching Jean and me kick slam our way through the routine, she suggested (with that merry twinkle in her eye) that Jean turn me loose on the stage alone so that I can do what I was already apparently seeming to be doing, which is to say, making it all up as I went along.

In any case, we do spend a lot of time with the good people at DanceSport, and the photos I sometimes post from there were all taken as part of a big web project—photography, design, writing, programming—that we have undertaken here, at the company that I run with my husband. Late last night that DanceSport web went live.

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Asking for the Truth

Every once in a while, you just want the truth. You need it. So that today, which began with a pre-dawn, sleep-deprived Zumba at the gym, advanced into corporate work, fell toward housework, slipped into a panic, and somehow spun toward a dance lesson, honesty was required.

"I feel as if I'm doing something wrong, and that no one will tell me what that is," I told Jean, during a quickstep lesson. "It's like everybody knows, except for me."

"Well," he answered, looking me straight in the eyes, not pausing, not beating around the bush, not acting as if I hadn't stepped forward with the question. "It's about posture. It's about confidence. It's about the way you plant your feet on the floor. When you think about it, you get it right. But when you don't, you fall back into your old way of dancing. You look as if you are looking for something. You don't stand perfectly straight."

And of course I wish that I did it all better. Of course I wish that I had dancerly wings. But today, this day, I was glad most of all that someone had not pushed me off, had simply said: I will tell you the truth.

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Return

You return to the dance studio because you must, because quitting isn't really an option, not in this life. Because if, yesterday, you felt so cluttered and tangled with the smash stuff of yourself, today you could be calm, couldn't you? Be ordinary, self-contained.

You could also be happy, or I was, for there was Jean, being his funny-smart self, and there was this song, from the soundtrack of The Mask, that we've decided to dance at a September showcase, and there were those ridiculous words (at my age), "I'm just a baby in this business of love." When you can't dance like you always wished you could, you can at least act the part, and in a Kenneth Cole T-shirt and white capris, I made as if I'd been swined with pearls, as if I were standing on a street corner at midnight, a bunch of Dick Tracy characters hanging about. I write stories, why not act them? Why not be who I am not, and feel the glory pull of that?

So there I was, mixing the fox trot with quick step with high kicks and play, and there was hardly a soul about (just Nate and Cristina, who are forgiving, just gorgeous Tirsa, and, sometimes, Scott), and I didn't care what I looked like or what I got wrong. I didn't even count the wrongs. I just swirled my imaginary pearls and danced. I was a baby in the business of love.

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Jean, Scott, Magda, Cristina: Photos from the Dance Studio

They danced for us yesterday, for our cameras—Magda and Scott, Cristina and Jean, Tirsa. Against a canvas of white, beneath umbrellas of light, they became who they are when they are not teaching us: abetted by and glamorous with song.

To take a photograph is to be privileged by access.

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Jean and Iryna are Dancing: Beth Kephart Poem

And the music is.
And the music is
how Iryna hears it,
how she won’t let it down to the floor
on the power
of its own acquiesce.
How she says
the battering beat is my bones,
it is the affectation of want
over repose,
and by the way,
I will be late, and that will be song.
Take it apart.
Say it again.
The music is
how the one snow thread
of Iryna’s snow dress
snaps,
how it melts,
how it is always Jean’s,
alone.

(I did not take this photograph of this gorgeous and talented couple; it was taken of them at a recent competition in Boston, where they captured the attention of the judges and the fans in major fashion, as they always do. They are on their way. You can see why.)

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Let the Music Free You

And then Jean said, "Beth, you have become someone with whom I like to dance. You keep your own balance. You can turn. You can follow. You are gaining technique. Now I worry that the music holds you back. Let the music free you."

Why shouldn't the music free me, I wonder. It always has before.

I am afraid of...what?

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Poet at the Dance

Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.

So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.

Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and I will say, for myself, this: Last week, and the week before, something happened at the studio, a letting go (again, more) that enabled me, for the briefest moment, to skim the floor the way Dove describes such skimming. To trust so completely the dancers who kindly danced with me that I could also trust myself. I'd ruin things, of course. I'd break the spell. But for an instant I grasped what it must be to have the knowing of dance in one's bones. I grasped it. I wanted more.

From Rita Dove:

Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless.

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The House of Dance Trailer

House of Dance has a slightly modified cover in store for its release next March as a paperback; thank you, Carla Weise and Jill Santopolo.

In this trailer (the last of the three that I've been creating these past few weeks), we go through the streets of Ardmore and up into the Dancesport Academy studio, where it has taken an entire planet's worth of gifted dancers—Scott Lazarov, Jean Paulovich, John Villardo, John Larson, Jim Bunting, Cristina Rodrighes—and one very fine manager (the lovely Tirsa) to teach me a few things about the box step. This is the studio that inspired this novel, which was named one of the best of the year by Kirkus in 2008.

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For Whom Do We Write?

In my post yesterday, "Boy among Girls," I riffed a bit on a conversation I'd recently had with my always dashing, never boring ballroom dance instructor, Jean Paulovich. He'd made a claim a week ago that turned on this fortissimo: men and women are two separate species; hence, the stories women tell about men have always and will forever devolve into a frustrated yelp of incomprehensibility.

I should say here about Jean that he is a purebred Belarussian and yet, since coming to this country less than ten years ago, he has become fluent in English, knowing more about root terms and grammar than most native speakers. He reads widely and deeply, is astonishingly quick witted, and he's an amateur psychologist to boot, a skill that, it seems, any ballroom dance instructor with aspirations for success must acquire and daily hone.

So that his comment caused me to step back and think, and now Kelly, aka September Mom, has thoughtified me (shall we say?) once more, with her comment/question: Beth, when you write, do you prefer writing to a primarily female audience? Does it change how you approach a story? I love the question so much that I yield this blog to it, and hope, of course, for your thoughts on the matter.

For me, the answer is this: I write the truest story I can find (be that memoir, poetry, fable, history, fiction) with the most-right language I can muster. I am by nature and by turns contemplative, ornery, outspoken, muted, at peace, distressed, entirely set on establishing a rhythm, then full of schemes to shatter the lyric's spell. I don't write for women, per se, nor for men, but for any who are willing to enter into the worlds I create. Much of the time, it is true, the willing are women, though I have heard from male readers of all my books, and I have treasured their responses to, say, Into the Tangle of Friendship, my memoir about friendship, and Still Love in Strange Places, my memoir about marriage, and Ghosts in the Garden, my memoir about growing up and older at Chanticleer, and House of Dance, a novel whose narrator is a 15-year-old girl. Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill river, was written in a woman's voice, and yet so many of its readers were men—men with whom I have had long conversations about time and love and hope and survival.

I have four brand new books on my desk to read. Two are by men, two are by women (more on these soon). I need, in my world, both men and women. I need their thoughts, I need their stories, I need their friendship.

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Just Do It

You know you have those days—the wrong weather, the wrong answers, the wrong smudges on the soul, not to mention that dastardly, lingering migraine.

I woke to that at three a.m. and couldn't shrug it, and as I looked ahead to the day and my afternoon ballroom dance lesson with Jean Paulovich, I had one prevailing thought: Well, that will surely be rich.

Funny thing: It actually was. Because by the time I walked up that tall flight of steps, put on my sand-colored shoes, and slipped out onto the floor, I'd battled all the battles I could battle in one day and my mind was spectacularly clear. The first dance was a waltz, and I yielded. The mambo was next, suspiciously swooshed, and then the cha-cha didn't defeat me, and the rumba was slow where slow was right and contagiously fast at the quicks. Even the jive didn't thwart me as the jive often does—it was (and this is strange) more right than wrong.

Why is so much of life that much easier when you stop fighting with yourself? When you cast off your own self doubt, your disappointments, your melodramatic exasperations? When you just shrug your shoulders and do? When you stop thinking, and dance?

Oh, dance.

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New Life

At the dance studio today, it was all of us. It was, at the heart and pulse, Cristina, who brought her baby—six weeks old and already dreaming music. The baby's long and perfect fingers sculpted the air. Her soul absorbed our love. Her grace was our grace as Scott took her on and cradled her within his rise and fall.

You don't dance at my age to become a ballroom star. You don't dance with illusions, when you dance with Jean. You dance because you trust the others who gather with you there, because they have, in so many ways, become a family. I danced a lousy jive today, and I also held a baby. I hugged a radiant, brave, and dear new mother, and I looked around—at the good in us, the awe, the tender.

New life is new hope. The music plays beyond us. The music is dreamed by the young.

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This

There are days when I show up at the dance studio for a lesson certain that I'm headed for disaster. My brain is locked, my limbs are ice, I can't distinguish left from right, and honest to goodness, I think to myself, Jean (vested with the responsibility of teaching me, poor thing) is going to kill me. I apologize in advance for the coming catastrophics, and then I beg for mercy. I mean, the guy and his gorgeous wife, Iryna, are on the cusp of huge ballroom dance fame. Can you imagine how much it hurts his head to return, with me, to the basics?

Yesterday Jean took one look at me and said the following words: "Let's not worry about teaching today. Let's just listen to the music and dance." A waltz was on. Jean (the world's greatest mimic) pantomimed a bird. And then my head was arced back and we were dancing. Two false starts, but the third time there it was—the glide and air that I go to dance to find, the float that I'm perpetually seeking.

"What are your goals in dance?" Jean had asked me two weeks before, and I should have said, This. This ageless, timeless, everness. This gift of release from myself.

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