what happens when you open your heart to students: in this issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette

Last evening, a long and beautiful conversation over dinner with dear friends; the gift of a hummingbird's nest; the blue-green globe of a harvested watermelon. Through the night, work on a single Florence scene (woodpeckers with green heads; uncertain love). Then, this morning, the discovery that an essay I had written for The Pennsylvania Gazette—a magazine more handsome (in my humble opinion) than The New Yorker (and you know how I love The New Yorker) and just as smart—is live. This is the story I wrote about the students I love, and it begins in New Orleans, with my Katie, who met me there one morning for beignets.

The opening paragraphs are here, below. The story can be read in its entirety, here. And can I just say how much I love the illustration, which was built from a photograph that I had sent? Someone has tamed my hair and given me some charm. No one will ever quite capture the beauty of Katie.

John Prendergast and Trey Popp, thank you for saying yes—for letting me tell this story to Penn parents, Penn alum, my own students. Thank you, too, for putting so many of my students in your pages through the years. Those interested in reading some of those student essays should click here and here. And also here. You'll be wowed. I still am.

By Beth Kephart | It had to be beignets. It had to be early on a steamy day beneath the green-and-white striped awnings of Café Du Monde, on the edge of the French Quarter.

“Meet you there,” Katie said. I said.

You buy the beignets three at a time. You dig for them beneath considerable dustings of soft-as-silk white sugar. You look up and across the table, and there she is—your former student, laughing at your incompetence with doughnuts.

This is the way an adjunct teacher’s family grows: one student at a time. One story you can’t shake. One question asked, one something confided, one breakthrough sentence, one email sent at midnight, one handwritten thank-you note for a recommendation gladly offered, one warm plate of a Creole specialty.

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Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann: the words between them

At Herbsaint Restaurant, on St. Charles, in New Orleans, I turned to look at the wall to my left, and there these musicians were. "That's Buddy Bolden," I said to my husband. And because Coming Through Slaughter is one of those rare books that I've convinced my husband to read, he knew what I was talking about. He knew that Buddy, the horn player, stood at the center of Michael Ondaatje's first novel. He knew that Ondaatje had captured the sound of the man's New Orleans crack up, during a parade down Canal. He knew that few writers thrill me the way Ondaatje does, that I've studied Ondaatje, that once Ondaatje wrote me a postcard in response to a long letter I'd written, and that once my agent, Amy Rennert, gave me a signed copy of Ondaatje's brilliant memoir, Running in the Family, a book I teach at Penn.

Ondaatje's postcard and that signed book two prized possessions.

Meet Buddy Bolden, in the early pages of Coming Through Slaughter:

He puts the towel of steam over a face. Leaving holes for the mouth and the nose. Bolden walks off and talks with someone. A minute of hot meditation for the customer. After school, the kids come and watch the men being shaved. Applaud and whistle when each cut is finished. Place bets on whose face might be under the soap.

Now meet Emily, a character in Colum McCann's expansive and predictably wonderful new novel, Transatlantic. McCann, another of my very favorite writers, a man I once met at the Philadelphia Free Library, my friend Aideen at my side. A man whose friendship with Ondaatje is legendary; acknowledged in the back of McCann's books, Ondaatje is also here, on McCann's website, in conversation.

In this scene from Transatlantic, it's just ahead of the stock market crash. Emily is an American writer born of an Irish mother who is taking a trip with her photographer daughter. She's one of several characters from several time periods who cross back and forth, across the ocean, between Europe and the United States, on the high wire of hope and time, in pursuit of freedom, a word with two syllables and many meanings.

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

Michael Ondaatje and Colum McCann hear the word—and scribe the world—with the same meter. I can't read one without thinking of, or hearing, the other. Those spliced sentences. Those hushed sounds. Those surprising images. Ondaatje and McCann are come-closer writers. Come closer and pause. They are two men whose books are risks ribbed together by pierce and poem. Their sentences smoosh, then stand erect. They whisper, then they startle. They cut each other off and the joinery shocks us, as much as the flow of syllables.

What wouldn't you give to learn from either one? And then to forge your own sound, your own meter.

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The faces of New Orleans

Back at my desk, with my actual photos in hand, I share some of the faces of New Orleans, the city where I've spent the last few days. Most of the faces are self-explanatory. The two World War II vets were found at the massive and moving World War II museum, in the city's warehouse district. The final picture was taken by my husband in the final hour—Katie Goldrath, my former student, and me, saying goodbye (but hopefully not for long).

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Grace Before Dying/Lori Waselchuck: Reflections

By tomorrow afternoon I'll be walking the streets of New Orleans, a city I've long yearned to see. My dear friend Ruta Sepetys set her second novel, Out of the Easy, there. Katie, my student, has been living there this past year—absorbing the culture, bringing her compassionate heart to triage work, and lending her name to a leading character in the novel I finished first-drafting last week. And for a few important years, New Orleans was home to my new friend Lori Waselchuk, the award-winning documentary photographer and fellow Pew Fellow of whom I have written here and (in conjunction with the launch of Anna Badkhen's The World is a Carpet) here.

Today I dedicate this blog to Lori's deeply moving book, Grace Before Dying, a photographic essay inspired by the three years Lori spent documenting the hospice program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Lori was invited to do this work by the magazine Imagine Louisiana. She could not, after the assignment was done, imagine walking away. For within the walls of what was once the most notorious prison system in the world—cruel, overcrowded, filthy, murderous—Lori had met men caring for men in their final months. She had met double murderers with a gentle touch, coffin builders with loving hands, laborers waking early to sit in vigilance for their dying best friends, prisoners who had become expert quilters. The hospice program at this prison, also known as Angola, had gentled, and lifted, spirits. It had eased men—some of them locked up for life on drug possession charges—out of bitterness and toward love.

Lori documents the day to day in the hospice program with black and white photographs that are wide angled and intimate and exceptionally personal and true. She shows us the needle in the hands of the quilter, the name on the foot of a sock, a man's last moments, a procession of mourners. She shows us Lloyd Bone, "incarcerated at Angola in 1971 for murder" as he "guides the horse-drawn hearse carrying the body of George Alexander to Point Lookout II, Angola's cemetery" and the "procession of hospice volunteers and friends" as they "walk and sing behind the hearse."

I had looked through Lori's photographs the very day she gave me this book. Today I sat and read her moving introduction, Lawrence N. Powell's essay on the prison's history, and every single caption. I read, too, Lori's acknowledgments in the back, where she writes, in part, "My words of appreciation come up short, so I will express my gratitude through living a life and producing work that emulates the humanity they show for each other."

I haven't known Lori Waselchuk long. But I've seen her throw a party for a friend, lift a friend's child to her hips, talk about the neighbors she loves in West Philadelphia. I've heard Lori talk, and I've seen Lori carry the good flame forward.

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