on traveling west toward librarians, friends, and the Carolyn W. Field Honor Award

Only a week ago, my husband and I made the long drive out to Bradford, PA, on behalf of book we are creating for a client. I walked an oil refinery. I walked a town. I talked to a college president, a hospital leader, a man who stands at the heart of that community's cultural landscape. I saw things. I was reminded of the power of traveling far beyond myself.

In an hour, in this dark morning, I'll get into my car again, drive west again, stop an hour from here, and wait for a rented gray Impala. Behind the wheel will be my friend, A.S. King, who has been on the front end of a whirlwind tour for her new much-heralded book, Reality Boy. She'll drive the rest of the way, out west again, this time to Seven Springs Mountain Resort, where the librarians of Pennsylvania and other writers—K.M. Walton, Eugene Myers, Kit Hain Grindstaff, Philip Beard, and Kathleen George—have gathered.

Amy has a talk to give, for she is to receive the Carolyn W. Field Award in honor of the best children's book by a Pennsylvania author (for Ask the Passengers). I am blessed to be a Carolyn W. Field Honor winner (for Small Damages). We are mostly blessed, we Pennsylvania writers, that librarians are choosing to share this day with us.

Into the dark, then, I go. Grateful for friends, grateful for people who believe in books, and grateful for the chance, again, to travel far beyond myself.

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Reality Boy/A.S. King: Reflections

I didn't read A.S. King's Reality Boy on the day it arrived because I needed hunkering-down space. First, I've read all of King's books. Second, I'd heard King read the book's opening pages a few months before. I'd heard intense. I'd heard furiously fearless intense, King-quality fearless and King-quality intense, and there was no way I was going to read this book with interruption as a vague possibility.

I carried the book with me to New Orleans, but either the airplane was shaking or I was out walking NOLA or the TV was on in the recovering-from-the-heat-of-New-Orleans hotel room. Interruptions. No good. Have to read a King book straight through.

Just this morning I found my quiet hunkering-down hole and read straight through. And King, I gotta ask you something. I gotta know: How do you do this? How do you take a character straight out of reality TV—an angry kid, a messed-up kid, a kid with a messed-up family—and give him to us without any kind of buffers, without any kind of bowing to YA novelistic norms? How do you take a boy known as The Crapper for his childhood antics on Network Nanny and make him and his quest for normal, his quest to be released from the "viewers" who think they know who he, so incredibly real? How do you make his story so moving? His bedlam so believable? His awful world so finally transcended? How do you take so much anger and so much destruction and so much hopelessness and turn it on its head, King, without ever going to a soft place?

You are writing a story, and you are writing our TV-infected times. You are writing about not judging a person by the way the world has got him packaged. You are talking about mothers who are little bit cruel and sisters who definitely are, about dads who are trying to get out, about friends who are real, about arguments you can win, about a couple of adults who can see straight through to true, and about a girl in a wheelchair in the special ed class who has wisdom to share.

It's visceral, it's violent, it's fearless. And it says stuff like this:

This should be a reality TV show Except nobody would watch because it's no fun to watch normal people do normal things. Because happy stories aren't all that interesting. Because everyone wants to eat that shxt sandwich, or watch other people eat it, along with exotic bugs and rotten eggs and diesel fuel and everything else producers can think of to try to keep viewers' thumbs from the channel button on the remote control.

Last pages of the story had me crying, King.

And then I got to the acknowledgments and I cried some more. Thank you for that. Thank you for you and your books and our friendship.

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On finishing the first draft of a novel, and A.S. King, look what Kephart has

So about ten minutes ago, I finished the first full draft of a book that has been in my mind and heart for more than a year. A complex book that I had to fight to simplify. An unusual story that I had to make accessible. A tale involving massive research that I had to up the IQ to understand (I don't actually know how to up the old girl's IQ, but I tried). The book has to sit now, percolate, be still.

What does that mean for you, oh loyal and kind blog readers?

That means this very very very good news: I can return to my previously scheduled programming now and write more about the books I love to read. I've got a stack of books to read piled high. I've got A.S. King, Caroline Leavitt, Dani Shapiro, Patricia Engel, Alice McDermott, Jennie Nash, so many others looking at me. I'm going to get to work.

But first to a party in West Philadelphia to celebrate the release of Anna Badkhen's The World is a Carpet, which has been lavishly praised by William Langewiesche and Rory Stewart, among others.

I can't wait to be out in the world. To be. To learn from others.

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A.S. King comes to town; we celebrate her love

Last night, at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA, A.S. King blew in through the back door (or perhaps she bobbled slightly) and that was it:  we were already in stitches.  Kate Walton and I had already arrived, claiming first-in-line privileges at this Ask the Passengers signing.  We'd been hearing all the good things—the many starry, best of things—about this newest King novel, and we were eager.

A.S. had been warned not to make me laugh (think of the damage to my gum graft stitches, I implored her), but she's unstoppable.  She roved, incautiously, from venison to rad eyeball wear to root canals to Rohm and Haas photography (yes, A.S. and I were working for this chemical giant at the same time, bizarrely) to chocolate pretzels (they're part of the root canal story) to streetwalkers to Poe to roach motels to wrecking balls to her electrical engineering talents to unventilated dark rooms—and the night hadn't even started.  She broke her don't-be-funny promise several times.  She read from Ask the Passengers and her forthcoming Reality Boy, and it was good.

But what was also good, or riveted to the good, was the feeling at Children's Book World, one of the best stores anywhere.  Kelly Simmons and Jenn Hubbard were also in the house.  The tried and true CBW entourage.  We had plenty of time just to sit and appreciate a writer who writes (in her gnarly radiating, radioactive ways) about love.

Now to clear away the corporate maelstrom that has had me down and out for weeks and find some time to read.

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