on finding and keeping an agent: a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania

I had the great pleasure of moderating a panel about the art of finding an agent at the University of Pennsylvania/Kelly Writers House this past Tuesday. We had a packed house. We talked about agent origin stories, the evolving ways in which we package our work, the things we've learned from agents we've loved, and the importance of honesty, transparency, and abiding enthusiasm in those who represent us. Agents, the panelists said in many different ways, are those who are genuinely there for us.

The panelists were Carmen Machado, Stephanie Feldman, Josh Getzler, Sara Sligar, and Janet Benton. The idea for the panel began with Julia Bloch. The packed house was well-fed by Jessica Lowenthal and team.

You can watch a video recording here.

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in the language of reconciliation (and how to write a memoir): Paul Lisicky visits Penn

In the course of one week, I've been miraculously uplifted by two writers of annealing generosity and talent. There was Dana Spiotta at Bryn Mawr College last week. There was Paul Lisicky at my own University of Pennsylvania yesterday.

Glimmer. Gleam. Resurgence.

Paul came to speak with our students about his gorgeous memoir The Narrow Door. For more than two hours in the afternoon he stood at that lectern at the Kelly Writers House cafe and answered questions from those (Julia Bloch's students, my students) who had carefully read and wholly embraced his work. He spoke of emotional time, which trumps, in literature, chronology. He suggested the power of staring directly at that thing that you must see...and then turning away, to breathe. He spoke of writing until patterns reveal themselves, about inquiry nudging plot, about learning to work with uncertainty—about learning, indeed, that uncertainty does not necessarily diminish a coherent world view. He spoke of scenes bound together by images, of the responsibility not to replicate memories but to be active with them, to unspool the question; What does that memory have to teach me? Asked about the management and selection of detail, Paul spoke of reverberations, of the need for any chosen detail to deliver far more than the facts.

The Narrow Door, Paul said, is his archive of ongoingness. Writing the book forced him to be attentive at a time of dissolution and personal loss. It was, Paul said, a bit like falling in love again. "It kept me awake and alive at a time when I felt logy."

"You can't expose other people without opening up about yourself," Paul said. "You need self-implication, confrontation, inquiry. You need to ask questions about your own complicity in the story, in the scenes." Readers, Paul reminded us, can only participate in a story if there is no distance, if one has written toward the emotional heat of an experience.

Emotional heat.

Later, as a warm rain fell on a darkening campus, Paul returned to that lectern and read from The Narrow Door, and there it was again: his inarguable talent, his way of seeing, his ushering of us into his spell. Raw and real. That's what it was. That's where beauty and humanity live.

Greatness is community, it is a web. Julia Bloch, who directs our Creative Writing program at Penn so immaculately, said yes at once when I asked if Paul might come to visit us at Penn. Our students invested in his story. Our Penn people (and a dear friend of mine) made the evening come alive by what? By being there. The Kelly Writers House was, as it always is, a gracious host.

My students will soon be off for their spring break. They are driving across the country, singing in Florida, spending a few days in LA, going and being and doing—and thinking about, perhaps even writing some lines of, their own memoirs. Be safe, I say. Pay attention. Expectations and subversions. The world is open to you.

Paul's public reading was recorded. That link is live.

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David Marchino and Nina Friend read from their theses, with Julia Bloch

It was wall to wall. It was genuine heart. It was Kelly Writers House celebrating the Honors thesis writers. That's Julia Bloch, who directs us all (directing only me would be a full-time job) (oh, we love her). That is Nina Friend. That's David Marchino.

We had thirty seconds each to introduce these students with whom we have learned. My words were these, below.

Congratulations, Nina and David. And so much love.

Nina Friend observes. She listens. She cares. She has, for many years, wondered what “serving” really means, also “waiting.” To write this thoughtful and deeply engaging work of narrative nonfiction, Nina has read widely, spent countless hours in the company of leading restaurateurs, major novelists, and a wide variety of servers, even donned a waitress apron herself. You may think you know what a server does. But you won’t know the half of it until you read Nina’s explications of stigma and community, addiction and freedom. With fierce, often delicious language, Nina pulls the curtains way back on a world all of us would do well to ponder—and appreciate—more completely.

In hunting down his family mythology, David Marchino has traveled far—sitting again, after years of absence, with his own elusive father, sifting through the artifacts of an enflamed past, returning to neighborhood cemeteries and family homes in an effort both to remember and to understand. To all of this David has brought a giant heart, an eye for the telling detail, and a steadfast compassion for the people in his life. David may be the product of a home that will always throb with mysterious unknowns. But David is, first and foremost, his own person—a magnificent, blue-rose tattooed writer who teaches us, with this memoir, that love, in the end, wins hardest, fastest, most.

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Joan Wickersham in person, Kelly Writers House as refuge

I would have preferred a sharper photo. I could blame my fatigue at the near end of that day—my hands slipping, or my eyes watering, or something. Instead, I'll declare this photograph of Joan Wickersham reading at Penn's Kelly Writers House to be infused by the light Joan carries with her. As she works. As she reads. As she considers. As she listens.

Joan was at Penn to read from three works—nonfiction (The Suicide Index), fiction (The News from Spain), and poetry (Vasa Pieces, parts of which appear in Agni 82). Her coming was, for me, a highlight of this semester—a chance to hear from a writer whose work has long inspired and thrilled me. A chance, too, thanks to Joan's invitation, to spend an hour or so alone with her over steeping, seeping cups of berry tea. We talked advertising youths, Lab Girl, place in memoir, the confounding role of adjunct teachers, Philadelphia then and now. I discovered, in Joan, that rare, wonderful thing: a person as gloriously complex and broadly thinking in person as she is on the page.

And then there she was, reading. Words I'd read twice, sometimes three times before, but delivered newly. A culminating sequence from Vasa Pieces—new work inspired by the sinking and resurrection of the Swedish warship, Vasa. Beautiful pieces made thrilling by their emergence from history and their threads of urgent now. The first poem setting the tone, revealing the "must" of this work—the role the Vasa played in the imagination of Joan's husband:

... I imagine you down there,
reading and re-reading the story of Vasa,
memorizing every picture, puzzling over the order—
the heeling ship, the sinking ship, the risen ship,
the sunken ship, the battered risen ship again—
clinging to the table leg, pretending it was a mast.

Poems continuing on through ships (and lives) gone wrong, through autobiographies redesigned by survivors, through shipworms and felt absence.

Until Joan lifted her head. And even then, her spell was not broken. The light still broke behind and through her.

I want to thank my students who attended for allowing this moment into their lives. I want to thank Jamie-Lee Josselyn, that lovely vision in green pants, for her beautiful introduction. I want to thank the Kelly Writers House for being home and hearth to both talent and soul, for being that place that students can and do turn to when the world feels raw and bright minds are the cure.

I want to thank Joan for the afternoon, and for the inspiration of her commitment to the work itself. The work, above and beyond all else.

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the moving spectacle of nonfiction, in Phillip Lopate's words, as the semester nears its end

This past Wednesday afternoon and evening I had the distinct pleasure of spending time in the company of the great essayist and Columbia University professor (and head of the graduate nonfiction program), Phillip Lopate, his wife, his daughter, and members of the Bryn Mawr University creative writing program.

(Thank you, Cyndi Reeves and Daniel Torday, for allowing me to crash the party.)

Between the cracks of many deadlines here, I've been reading from the books I bought that evening. I have, of course, read Lopate through the years; who can teach nonfiction without owning Lopate volumes? But I did not own, until this Wednesday night, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, which is, in a word, a glory. Perhaps it is because I agree so steadily with Lopate's many helpful assertions, perhaps it is because I, in my own way, attempt to teach and, in books like Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, carry forward these ideals about the rounded I, the obligation to the universal, the curious mind, the trace-able pursuit of questions, that I sometimes read with tears in my eyes passages like this one, from "Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story:"

In attempting any autobiographical prose, the writer knows what has happened—that is the great relief, one is given the story to begin with—but not necessarily what to make of it. It is like being handed a text in cuneiform: you have to translate, at first awkwardly, inexpertly, slowly, and uncertainly. To think on the page, retrospectively or otherwise, is, in the last analysis, difficult. But the writer's struggle to master that which initially may appear too hard to do, that which only the dead and the great seem to have pulled off with ease, is a moving spectacle in itself, and well worth the undertaking. 

There are just two more weeks left in this semester at Penn. My beautiful honors thesis students are finalizing their work and, soon, will not just hold their glorious books in their hands, but have the time to reflect back on all the lessons learned. My Creative Nonfiction students are writing letters, Coates and Parker and Rilke style, to those they feel must hear them, while also working on 600-word portraits of one another. Joan Wickersham, the extraordinary writer of both nonfiction and fiction is headed to our campus, Tuesday evening, 6 PM, Kelly Writers House—and if you are anywhere near, I strongly suggest you make the time. She is a national treasure.

Teaching is exhausting, exhilarating, necessary, confounding, essential. I learn that again, year upon year. I stagger away—made smarter, in so many ways, by the students I teach.

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Fifteen minutes on home—a peace-yielding soundtrack for a raucous world

Last night, at the Kelly Writers House, we thought about home—a theme that has carried my current class of memoirists forward. We were graced by the presence of the exquisite memoirist/novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, the young adult novelist super star A.S. King, and the all-round talent (fiction, young adult fiction, New York Times/Slate style commentator) Margo Rabb. We were joined by Penn faculty, my current students, my previous students, and friends. Jessica Lowenthal facilitated every last detail. Jamie-Lee Josselyn brought her ineffable spirit. Al Filreis sat among us, in the home that he has built. Julia Bloch was the woman we all love, and, Julia, I'll be forever grateful for your words.

The evening was made possible by the generous gift of the Beltrans, whose endowment causes all of us who teach writing at Penn to think even harder about how we hope on behalf of our students.

We closed the evening by dimming the lights and listening to the voices of students and faculty as they answered the simple, confounding question, What is home? This is a gloriously produced soundtrack (thank you, Wexler Studio's Zach and Adelaide), made even more stunning by the guitar work of our own music man (and someday Grammy winner), Cole Bauer.

I encourage you to listen (here). In a fractured world, these words offer light.

For even more writing and thinking about home, I encourage you to stop by the Writers House and pick up your copy of our Beltran chapbook, Where You Live & What You Love.

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Home as Heart, and Hearth: Join my students and my writing friends for the Beltran evening, at Penn

I talk about my beloved Penn students. I boast about them, often. And sometimes I have the honor of introducing their work to to the world.

That's going to happen next week, March 1, 6 PM, at the Kelly Writers House, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, when we convene for the Beltran Family Teaching Award program. The event is free and open to the public, and we hope you'll join us.

The official blurb is below.

(Those of you who may be wondering about the provenance of the cover photo for the chapbook we've produced: that is a garden in Florence where my Nadia (of One Thing Stolen) slipped away to feel at peace.)

Join us for HOME AS HEART, AND HEARTH: STORIES AND IDEAS, a discussion on what exactly makes a home—how it’s built, how it’s found, and how it’s sustained. This year’s Beltran Teaching Award winner BETH KEPHART will lead a conversation featuring beloved Young Adult novelist A.S. KING, New York Times contributing writer and Young Adult novelist MARGO RABB, and National Book Circle Critics Finalist RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO. Following the event, “home”-inspired work made by guests and Penn students will be bound together in a commemorative volume.

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"Be messy." — George Hodgman

Earlier this week, George Hodgman of Bettyville fame joined us via Skype at Penn. I have been teaching the idea of home this semester—what it is, how writers frame it, how every book ultimately, somehow, departs from or returns to a centering place.

(Speaking of which, please join us for the Beltran event at Penn's Kelly Writers House, March 1, 6:00 PM, when I will be joined by Reiko Rizzuto, A.S. King, and Margo Rabb—along with students past and present—to discuss this idea of home in literature.)

The winds and the rains were fierce. I had my Skype-technology jitters. My students were ready, and so were the students of dear Julia Bloch, who were joining us for the session. And, oh—George Hodgman was brilliant. He was: Looking back over Bettyville—how it began, how it evolved. Circling then pinning the definition of memoir. Speaking of his mother's love and his enduring felt need to make her proud. Pondering the nature of, and the blasting off, of personal and writerly inhibitions. Recalling the sound of conversation above the slap of flip flops.

Next George spoke about his life as an editor. The importance of stories that don't wait to get started, the importance of writers who are willing to work, the decision an editor must make, early on, about if and when to get tangled up inside a draft's sentences. And then George said this simple but remarkably important thing: Be messy (at first). The worst books are the clean, perfect books, he told us. The ones that feel safe.

Be messy.

For the past many years I've been at work (intermittently) on a book I feel could define me. It's a novel. It is a structural storytelling risk. I thought last year that I could publish this book as novel for adults. After a great disappointment, I pulled it back. Let it sit. Returned to it just this week, fear in my heart. Was it any good? Had I pumped it up in my own estimation, without any actual basis for pride?

Open the document, Beth.

Find out.

I finally did. And what I discovered was a book that was, indeed, messy. Too pretentious on some pages. Unnecessarily fantastical in covert corners. Too wishfully literary.

But. The story, the characters, the scenes—strip away the mess of the book, and, I discovered, there was a beating pulse. Despite all the mud I had slung on top of my tale, there was a glorious gleam.

I am taking this mess. I am turning it into something. I am grateful, deeply grateful, that I made such a horror in the first place. Inside these pages are complexity and promise. Inside them is my world.

I am reminded, once again, that this writing thing is, above all else, process. Clean first drafts are a constricting bore.

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The Home Collection/Looking Ahead to the Beltran Family Teaching Award Evening

In the early hours of this morning, I've been reviewing the final submissions to the Beltran Family Teaching Award chapbook—a collection of reflections on home by Penn students past and present; featured guests A.S. King, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Margo Rabb; and the leaders of Penn's Kelly Writers House.

Trust me, please. The words (and images) are stellar and binding. No piece remotely resembles another. Each reveals and, in ways both quiet and surprising, sears.

I have crazy ideas, that is true.

But when those who join us that evening—March 1, 6 PM, Kelly Writers House, all are welcome—hold this chapbook in their hands and hear our guests and look out upon these faces, this particular craziness will not seem so very crazy at all.

Because it's them.

And they have spoken.

A huge thank you to my generous husband, who has spent untold hours by my side, laying out these pages.

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Home is where the art is: a new essay in Chicago Tribune

I've been working out ideas about home and literature, literature and home for awhile now, and on March 1, accompanied by friends A.S. King, Reiko Rizzuto, and Margo Rabb, my colleagues at Penn, and students past and present, I'll be doing even more thinking about the topic for the Beltran Family Teaching Award event at the Kelly Writers House at Penn.

My newest thinking is here, in this weekend's Chicago Tribune (Printers Row), with thanks to Jennifer Day, Joyce Hinnefeld, and Debbie Levy, upon whom I seem to first try out my ideas. (Oh, Debbie, you're a gift.)

To read the whole story, go here.

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my wide-ranging conversation with Buzz Bissinger, at Kelly Writers House

On Homecoming Saturday, in the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus, I spent 75 minutes in conversation with Buzz Bissinger. It was a dialogue of many dimensions and much quiet—and authentic—self reflection.

That conversation can now be watched in its entirety here.

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back to school night, at Penn, with Julia Bloch

I had a summer that didn't use much of my mind, so then I lost words. And my body, too, began to dwindle, only I gained weight in the process.

So when Jessica Lowenthal invited me to the reception honoring Julia Bloch, the new director of Creative Writing at Penn, I had many concerns. One: my wrong hair. Two: my wrong shoes. Also (like I told Jay Kirk and then Greg Djanikian and maybe even Tom Devaney and Avery Rome and Stephen Fried, but not my students Nina and David, or maybe I did, because I don't know, I was feeling irresponsible, and did I tell Al Filreis, too?, but I know I did not so burden Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Lorene Carey, Max or Sam Apple, at least I hope not), I had lost my personality. Left it somewhere. In the summer.

(Perhaps that's a good thing?)

But I went anyway, talking to my son by phone while in transit so that I would not turn back because, as I have noted, everything about me was not quite right, and if I'd not been talking with him, I'd have talked myself back onto the train and headed reverse west, for home.

Then I crossed the threshold at Kelly Writers House (there's always a little thrill involved) and everything changed. The place was just, well, filling up. With faculty members I respect and love, and students I adore. Soon (or, it actually happened first) Jessica herself was taking me on a tour of the new Wexler studio, and bam. I didn't look right, but something happened. I felt as if I belonged.

Then the star of our evening, the star of our program, stepped forward and faced a crowded, beaming room and began to read poems from Valley Fever (Sidebrow Books) and Hollywood Forever (Little Red Leaves Journal & Press, the Textile Series) and I, sitting there in the front row, began to feel a hot little prickle inside my head. Like the blank nothing of my thoughts was getting Braille-machine punched by all the delicious oddness of Julia's phrasing and syntax, occasionally repurposed lines, jokes I got and maybe didn't always entirely get (because, as I always say and forever mean, I am just not that smart). Julia was talking and then (I heard this) she was singing, but without any change in the pitch of her voice. Singing by exuding whole phrases in one long breath, then stopping (beat/beat) and starting again. It was like being driven in a car with the windows down, at night, when there is a lot of open road but also some bright red traffic lights.

Damn, I thought.

What do I mean, how can I explain this? These coupled and uncoupled ideas, the surreality of words you assume have been fashioned from parts, the winnowed down ideas that, when toppled and stacked, say something. Mean something. Even if you can't actually always articulate what you have been stung by, you know you have been stung.

Here is half of "Wolverine," from Valley Fever, a poem I instinctively love, also a poem I will ponder for quite some time.

Wolverine

I was only pretending
to be epiphanic

she said, tossing the whole
day over the embankment.

Is the heart collandered
or semiprecious

filled with holes
and therefore filled with light —

....

This afternoon, following a morning of work and a conversation with a friend, I read Julia's two books through, cover to cover. I hovered. I felt that warm thing happen again in my head, that invitation I will, as a writer and reader, always accept—to slam and scram the words around, to make the heart inside the brain beat again.

Thank you, Julia, for making my brain heart beat again.

And. You are going to be terrific. You already are.

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these things, this week

Thanks to the 2015 Beltran Family Teaching Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I'll be given an opportunity to create an event for faculty and students in the 2015/2016 academic year. I'm so grateful to my university, the KWH, and my dear students, who nominated me for the award.

Whatever Doesn't Kill You, the Shebooks anthology featuring Nest. Flight. Sky. along with five additional pieces by exquisite writers (and edited by Laura Fraser), won a Silver IPPY Award. We're so happy for Laura, especially, who has put so much of her soul into Shebooks.

The 2015 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English accepted a proposal on teaching creativity and responsibility through the arts that will bring together the amazing illustrator Melissa Sweet, two fantastic teachers (Glenda Cowen-Funk and Paul Hankins), and me. I can't wait for this. And: it will be my first time ever to Minneapolis.

I found One Thing Stolen in bookstores, when I wasn't even looking for it. Huge thanks to Forever Young Adult, for this generous review of the book.

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Jessica Hagedorn, and why I'm lucky to be at Penn

The last time Julia Bloch was on this blog she was hosting Dorothy Allison at Kelly Writers House—leading a conversation through the wickets of time.

Yesterday I was privileged to see Julia, the newly named director of Penn's Creative Writing program (replacing Greg Djanikian, about whom I wrote here), engage in conversation with KWH Fellow Jessica Hagedorn. Poet, playwright, novelist, teacher, creator of an MFA program, provocateur, sometimes-reluctant-and-sometimes-not-reluctant pundit, Hagedorn was as bright as the sun breaking in through the trees behind her. Funny, too. Easy to adore.

I listened with care, leaning in especially close when the talk turned to the Philippines, a land that lives in my husband's blood. I listened and thought of how privileged I am to work at Penn, within the KWH frame, where, thanks to this marvel that Al Filreis stirred into being (and Jessica Lowenthal so ably guides on a daily basis), so many remarkable voices, thinkers, makers arrive, suggest, and leave some shimmer dust behind. We are never done as teachers. We never know enough. We have something to gain by sitting and listening to those who have built great worlds with words.

I went off to be with My Spectaculars one final time (an image of them here; oh, my heart). I came home with a lump in my throat and a copy of Dogeaters, the first novel in a series of Hagedorn novels that I will read this summer.

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growing into happiness: the Guardian, Little Flower, the Penn community, Hodgman

The annual Little Flower Teen Writers Festival is a school-wide celebration of writing and reading—a marvel of an invention in which a school, on a sunny Saturday, opens its doors to story weavers and student hearts. The dynamic, unstoppable Sister Kimberly Miller leads the way. Her girls wouldn't be anywhere else. And yesterday all of us who were in attendance were given keynote words from A.S. King that leapt us to our feet (yes, that's a deliberate inversion of language logic, but that's so what happened). King is one of those writers who has earned her status as a star. Her stories are essential. Her sentences are prime. And when she gets up there behind a microphone she has something actual to say—words that belong to her, ideas unborrowed.

I left Little Flower, rushed home, put on a skirt, swapped out my graffiti boots for a pair of four-inch heels, picked up the cake I'd made the day before, and headed out again to celebrate the career of Greg Djanikian, the exquisite Armenian poet whose life and work I profiled in the Pennsylvania Gazette last year. Greg is stepping down from full-time administrative duties at Penn so that he might write more and live less bounded-ly. Saddened as we are by the thought of seeing him less, last night was anything but a sad event. It brought together (in true Greg fashion) the teachers, writers, and student advocates who give Penn's creative writing program and Kelly Writers House their aura. Oysters, sherbet-colored shirts, an undaunted cat. Talk about food carts, the meaning of words, 1960, serial memoirists (the third Fuller), astonishing turns in storied careers, the art of the frittata, and the costs and high rewards of loving students. Sun when we arrived and stars when we left.

In between the two events, Kit Hain Grindstaff sent word of something wholly unforeseen—a Guardian review of Going Over. It begins like this below and can be read in full here.

Lyrical prose, beautiful and sensual imagery, a dark setting; yet, hope: there is always hope – because for the stars to shine, there needs to be darkness. Going Over just shot to my 'favourites' of 2015 list and I regret nothing. This book is graffiti, and colour and play dough and bikes. It is love, it is death, it is life; it is astronomy, maps, escapes and archery. It is a wall, splitting the earth with dark and hateful ideologies, and it is a spring in your step on one side: pink hair and coloured moles with a quiet and thoughtful being on the other; scope in hand, love clenched in heart and freedom circling though mind. Going Over is Ada and Stefan, Savas and Meryem, Turks and Germans and kids and adults. It is a story of humans and their plight in this world, and it is a story of love.

As is perhaps clear in this recent Huffington interview, I've been thinking a lot of late about what happiness is. I wrote toward that in today's Philadelphia Inquirer story, which has Frenchtown, NJ, as its backdrop. (Thank you Kevin Ferris and your team for another beautiful presentation of my photographs and words.) I've been also thinking a lot about kindness (never simple, often rare), thanks in part to George Hodgman's glorious memoir, Bettyville, which I reviewed for the Chicago Tribune, here.

Today there is sun out there, flowering trees, wet-headed daffodils. I'm going to celebrate by finishing the fabulous Between You and Me (Mary Norris) and later checking into Chanticleer garden for the first time this year. I'm way overdue for a visit.

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writerly responsibilities and rewards: words from the wise Dorothy Allison (yesterday, Kelly Writers House)

Dorothy Allison is one of three Kelly Writers House Fellows hosted this semester by Penn professor and poet Julia Bloch.

Yesterday she sat among us, in conversation with us. There, beside Julia, she is.

Oh, I liked her. So very much. She's everything you've been told she will be. Iconoclastic. Irreverent. Touching. A firebrand of deep opinion and great craft cares who may believe in the act of revenge on the page, but only when the author holds him- or herself equally accountable for the unforgivable past. We writers, we survivors, may not be the heroes we think we are, Allison reminds us. We have responsibilities. Work that lasts is work that is rich with a felt sense of responsibility.

Any writer who believes that writing is a mere game—a toss-off and toss-up of the randomly odd, the relentlessly clever, the tried and true brand—must spend a bracing hour and change in the company of Allison. Sitting beside my friend Nathaniel Popkin and just one row ahead of August Tarrier (Jamie-Lee Josselyn waving a hand from the near distance, one of my students a few rows back, Lily Applebaum at the mike ready), I filled my little notebook with Allison's words. I'm going to share a few of them here—transcribed as nearly as I could, but not always verbatim. Spread them, oh ye writers and readers who care.

In response to Julia's questions about craft (comments from across the conversation, gathered here): Craft sharpens the contradictions. It produces prose that takes the reader by the throat. Craft requires writers to read as writers, not as readers, and so we writing readers cannot merely wallow; we must assess. To make a reader care, the writer must keep paring the prose down, constructing the truth, acknowledging one's purpose. You are going for the long reach, not the quick tears. You want to haunt a reader six months on. The more talent you have, the more responsibility you have.

On writing with compassion: Recognize that you will never get it right. Recognize that those who survived, who got out of there alive, are in some ways the cowards, the ones who had to compromise. Hold yourself accountable for the choices you made. Recognize that you have a higher moral authority to tell the story right. This applies, by the way, to both writers of fiction and nonfiction.

On life's purpose: I don't want to be rich. I want a different world. I don't want the hatefulness of this world. I have a conviction about justice and social responsibility, a concept of citizenship at great variance with what I see in this world.

Paradise: is having an audience.

What the world is: We don't know what the world is until it is shown to us in story.

A story, much condensed (forgive me, Dorothy Allison, for this condensed version). In response to a question I asked about when Allison knew teaching was joyful, she first spoke of how she made sure to make teaching as hard for herself as it was for her students (amen to that, oh yes, amen to that), then told a story about one of the most talented students she ever had—a woman who didn't know where sentences began or ended, but knew vivid and had material. For nine weeks, Allison worked within a workshop and outside the workshop with this "baby" writer. That ninth week, they had a conversation about the writer's future. The student writer had a question: How much would she get paid for the stories she wrote? How much for a collection of stories? How much how much how much would she get paid—and how long would it take? Allison painted a picture of the future, spoke of the rewards that aren't numerical, finally confessed, when pushed, that her own most recent collection of words had received an advance of $12,500. "I earn that in tips a month," said this student writer. And that, pretty much, was it. The end of this genius writer's aspirations.

And so, Allison reminded us, one has to have more than a gift. One has to have desire. One has to cherish the audience, the chance to speak, the conversation—for that, in the end, is what matters most, that is the gifted writer's only sure provenance, that is where responsibility begins.

Let's get less caught up in the noise about books and more invested in making extremely fine ones.

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please join us at Kelly Writers House as we host Editor/Writer Extraordinaire, Daniel Menaker

A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL MENAKER (TUE, 2/24 AT NOON)

Dear friends,

We hope you’ll join us next Tuesday, February 24th, for a noontime
conversation with DANIEL MENAKER. Over the course of his career, Daniel
has been the fiction editor of THE NEW YORKER and Executive
Editor-in-Chief at Random House. Now he works with Stonybrook
Southhampton’s MFA program and consults for Barnes & Noble—so rest
assured, this is a man who knows his books. The conversation will be
moderated by BETH KEPHART. RSVP now to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call us
at 215-476-POEM. We’d love to see you here, next Tuesday.

All the best,
The Kelly Writers House
______________________________

The Sylvia Kauders Lunch Series presents:
A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL MENAKER
Hosted by BETH KEPHART

Tuesday, Feb. 24th | 12:00pm | Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required - this event is free & open to the public
______________________________

DANIEL MENAKER is a fiction writer and editor, currently working with
the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and as a consultant for
Barnes & Noble Bookstores. Daniel was a fiction editor at THE NEW YORKER
for twenty years and had material published in the magazine frequently.
In 1995 he was hired by Random House as Senior Literary Editor and later
became Executive Editor-in-Chief.

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clipped by a van on a wintry day — and then

I left the house early yesterday morning with the hope of catching one of the trains that now run at random, unpredictable hours during this winter of snow and ice.

The poet Anne Waldman was at Kelly Writers House. I'd experience her, then meet with a student, then conduct my three-hour class.

The day didn't turn out quite as I had hoped it would. There is a four-lane road (Lancaster Avenue) that I must cross to get from my house to my train station. There were no cars coming from the west. There was one car coming from the east. He stopped. Waved me on. I waved back at him indicating I could wait. He insisted. And so I walked across the street, thanked the man in the waiting car with a wave, and was struck—such a noise it was—by an old van that had barreled in from a seeming nowhere. That fourth lane. In from the east.

I had not seen so much as a glint of it.

It was hard, at first, to make sense of who or where I was. Just a woman who had lost her hat, a woman whose iPad and iPhone in their bright red bag had taken a huge brunt of the hit. A woman with sudden, terrible pain, but I was standing, wasn't I? I was standing. It wasn't my head. It wasn't my legs. I was upright, talking, consoling the man and his wife who had hit me — Don't worry. Don't worry. Thanking the man who had waved me over for stopping. Thank you.

I need to take you to the hospital, he said. Let me take you to the hospital.

I can't, I said. I can't. I have to teach.

You need the hospital.

I can't. It's just my arm. I don't think it's broken.

I saw how hard you were hit. You need the hospital.

I'll go to the hospital down at Penn.

He agreed to let me go. He pointed to my hat, still on the road. To the van's side mirror, that had been clipped off by the impact with my arm. A second later, I thought. A second more. A nano more of anything, and— Don't think about it. Don't you dare what if this, Kephart.

The train finally came. I climbed on. Sunk into my seat. Held the flame of my triple-sized arm. I didn't realize how much I was trembling until a woman sat beside me and I turned and I said that I'd just been hit by a van. I don't know what impelled me, really, why I felt the need to share, but that is what I said.

Angels of mercy. That's what the day became.

To this woman, my seat mate, who arrived at 30th Street Station with me, who insisted on a taxi, who rode the taxi with me, who paid the cab driver to take me to the HUP emergency room against every single one of my protestations, who wrote afterward.

Thank you.

To the student who passed the news quickly on to all my other lovelies (Prof Kephart may be late).

Thank you.

To my students, my beautiful students, who sent their healing words.

Thank you.

To my friends at Temple University Press writing with kindness (and good news).

Thank you.

To my neighbor who heard the news from Temple and wrote with love.

Thank you.

To my husband and my father and my son on the phone, and, therefore, close.

Thank you.

To the x-rays that revealed no broken bones. To the doctor who provided the splint, the ice, the pain killers, and released me just in time to make it to class, to teach memoir.

Thank you.

To my students, again, for our wholly imperfect perfect day.

Thank you.

Do you know how lucky you are, Beth Kephart?

Yes, I do. Yes. I do.

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What we said about YA at Penn's Kelly Writers House

Yesterday's bleak rain had nothing on Kelly Writers House. Indeed, as it so often does, the old house on Locust Walk sheltered the alums and prospective students, the local community and faculty who braved the weather and found their way in. It sheltered and fed them.

We were there to talk about the making of books for younger readers. We were ably, intelligently led by Liz Van Doren, Editorial Director of Book Publishing for Highlights for Children and Boyds Mills Press. We—Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, Lorene Cary, Jordan Sonnenblick, and I—were, perhaps, as different as four writers could be.

Where do books begin?, we were asked, and one said with an image, and one said with tone and sound, and one said with a plot, and one said with an idea about the world, an idea about books as vehicles for getting something done.

What do we do about those adult figures who figure in books for the young? Make them real, one said. Don't let them overwhelm the story, one said. There's a reason why Harry Potter was an orphan, one said.

How do we make historical fiction pop?, we were asked. By making the characters gritty (a graffiti artist, a thief, an angry pregnant girl), one said. By not worrying about whether or not the story pops, but about whether or not it feels lived in and true, another said.

How do we maintain authenticity in the voices of our young characters?, we were asked. By hanging out with teens and listening to how they talk, we all said. By testing our work in laboratories made of child readers, one said. By not being afraid to write differently, one said, for not all teens sound the same, not all fit the currently popular formula of some parts ironic softened by some parts tender.

And so we went—building on each other, challenging each other, defending one's own cover art as being fully born of the book itself (okay, Jordan, that tag is for you). A rigorous conversation moderated by a woman with great knowledge. So many in the audience with leading questions of their own.

Respect for the form, for the art, for all the ways that we can write to the music in our heads—that was what was on display yesterday. Different instruments. Different beats.

With great thanks to Jessica Lowenthal, for making this event possible and for doing such consistently fine work at the Writers House (Jessica has made it possible for former New Yorker fiction editor/former Random House editor/author of the fine My Mistake Daniel Menaker to visit the House next February 24, but more on that soon). With thanks to Ilene Wong, for this photography, above. With thanks to all who came. (Kathye, Chelsea, so many — I'm looking at you.)

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Michael Sokolove, Avery Rome, Kelly Writers House, Students: what a day we had

Someday I will find a way to express the (what is the word?) (joy?) that I experienced yesterday as Michael Sokolove, the phenomenally gifted author of Drama High, among other books, and the equally gifted editor, Avery Rome, joined my class and Avery's class at Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus.

Michael read, we talked, we learned, we appreciated.

My students wrote and asked and listened.

It may have been raining like the world was ending yesterday.

But inside our room, we were all just getting a good, fresh start.

Thank you.

In a week or so, a video tape of our conversation and mini workshop will be available. I'll post that link when I have it. Then, at last, you can see for yourself how lucky I am to adjunct at Penn, to work with editors like Avery, and to invite a big-hearted, super writer like Michael into the midst.

Wait until you see.

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