these things are happening (and the countless countless)

Look. We come around to this. Again and again, we do. We are living with a book newly launched (though perhaps we wrote pieces of it years ago). We are grateful for the invitations extended, grateful for a chance to sing the book's song, eager not to fail those who have been kind enough to open their doors to us—and also aware that every time we mention our own book we are not talking about the countless million million things that matter much more deeply than ever our own books could.

(Refuges. Candidates. Hunger. Homelessness. Heartbreak. Danger. Unexpected and unimaginable losses. Aging. Love suspended.)

It has always been important to me to use this blog to celebrate the world and the work of others. To raise questions. To be honest. To admit: I'm failing right now. I'm not writing right now. I'm stuck right now. I screwed that up. I should have— Also to admit: I have been graced. I have been blessed. I know luck when I see luck.

That's what I'm here to talk about and I am (believe me) aware when I lose the hoped-for balance.

This, however, is also true. Book stores make room. Festivals provide opportunities to think out loud with people I respect. The ladies of Laurel Hill are throwing a fundraiser and I've promised to help them tell that story.

Forgive the apparent self indulgence.

I promise that it is almost over. That I am stockpiling books to read with an eye toward the future of this blog when, in just a few weeks, I won't be talking about me.

But for now, this weekend: I am blessed beyond measure to be included in the BookFest@Bank Street, on Saturday. I'll be talking about narrative risk in young adult literature with three people I hugely respect, and I'm going to learn so much (not just from that panel but from every single other person who is attending—what a list).

Sunday, October 25, I'll be talking with the wonderful voice of KYW, Brad Segall, about Philadelphia and some of the Philadelphians I love (go Sister Kim and her girls!) on WOGL 98.1 FM and WZMP 96.5 FM at 6:30 AM and on WXTU at 92.5 FM at 7:30 AM. Later that afternoon, at 4 PM, I'll be at Main Point Books, a glorious Indie on Lancaster Avenue in Bryn Mawr, signing One Thing Stolen and Love. And next Sunday I will be at the Women for Greater Philadelphia annual fundraiser, there at Laurel Hill Mansion, a public event. We'll be celebrating the Schuylkill River by reading from Flow and two novels—Dangerous Neighbors and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent—where the river features boldly.

Where I live, on this morning, the sky is breaking blue.

It is another day.

That is the greatest miracle of all.

Read more...

Tomorrow, at Ryerss Museum and Library

I'll be talking about that river of ours—the great She, the Schuylkill—and selling copies of Flow. The facts are here, should you be in the neighborhood. I would love to see you.

 

May 3, 2015

1 PM
Schuylkill River/FLOW presentation
Ryerss Museum
7370 Central Avenue
Philadelphia, PA

(free and open to the public)

Read more...

River Dreams: tonight is the night (and so is Thursday)

We invite you to our celebration of the Schuylkill River, 2014 Pennsylvania River of the Year. This evening I'll be at Montgomery County Community College West Campus, in the Community Room in South Hall at 7 p.m. A second presentation will be held on Thursday Oct. 16 at 7 p.m. at the Trinity Center for Urban Life in Philadelphia. Both events are free.

I'm deeply grateful to the good people at Schuylkill River Heritage Area, Fairmount Water Waters, Schuylkill Banks, and Temple University Press, who have so generously spread the word. My talk, titled "River Dreams: History, Hope, and the Imagination," begins like this:

-->

Neither oil nor borders. Not religion. Not historical hurts or misremembered sleights. None of these. The next world wars, the experts say, will be fought over water. Over the three percent of the earth’s liquid total that pools in ponds and lakes, careens down channels, overruns crevasses, oozes from retreating glaciers, is barricaded up inside man-made reservoirs, is yanked up from the bottom of the well, is carried, jug to jug and bottle to hand toward cupped palms. Seeds, omnivores, carnivores, herbivores, feathered things—they need it. So do the pink dolphins and the mighty mollusks and the bulge-eyed toads and the little girl with the cascade of curls who has come to the banks with her heart set on adventure.

More can be found here.

Read more...

Inviting you to two Schuylkill River talks, on behalf of the River of the Year honor

-->

(I will be giving this talk on Tuesday October 14 at Montgomery County Community College and on October 16 at Trinity Urban Life Center, Philadelphia, PA. Both talks are free and open to the public. We would love to see you.)

Schuylkill River Heritage Area

140 College Drive

Pottstown, PA  19464

www.schuylkillriver.org

For Immediate Release

September 29, 2014

                                                                                    Contact:

                                                                                    Laura Catalano

                                                                                                      lcatalano@schuylkillriver.org                 

                                                                                                  (484) 945-0200

 Author to Speak about Schuylkill River and the Imagination

POTTSTOWN–“That’s the thing about this river: you have to imagine it to see it.” That line was written by award-winning author Beth Kephart in the prelude to her book Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River.

On Tuesday, October 14 Kephart will talk about the place the Schuylkill River has forged in her own imagination. Her talk will take place at Montgomery County Community College West Campus, in the Community Room in South Hall at 7 p.m. A second presentation will be held on Thursday Oct. 16 at 7 p.m. at the Trinity Center for Urban Life in Philadelphia.

Both talks are free, but attendees are asked to register at riverdreams.eventbrite.com or by calling the Schuylkill River Heritage Area at 484-945-0200.

In addition to speaking about the place the Schuylkill River has in her own imagination and teaching, she will also look at the impact rivers have on all our lives, and the legacy of those who have worked to restore Philadelphia’s essential waterways.

Kephart is a National Book Award finalist and an acclaimed author and educator. Her book, Flow, is an imaginative telling of the life of the Schuylkill River written in short, thought-provoking, impressionistic chapters. The book was published in 2007 by Temple University Press, and was reprinted in paperback earlier this year.

The Schuylkill was named Pennsylvania’s 2014 River of the Year. Kephart’s talk, entitled RIVER DREAMS: History, Hope and the Imagination, will serve as the keynote address for the Schuylkill River Heritage Area’s River of the Year Speaker Series. Kephart developed the presentation specifically for that purpose. 

“At a time of global uncertainty, the restoration of our rivers—and of our Schuylkill in particular—is a kind of poetry, proof of what remains possible," says Kephart. "I’m interested in the possible. I’m leavened by it.” 

“Our goal in hosting a River of the Year speaker series has been to introduce people to various aspects of the Schuylkill River,” said Schuylkill River Heritage Area Executive Director Kurt Zwikl. “We are pleased to be able to offer two presentations by a very talented author that focus on how the river has affected her as a writer and a teacher.”

Earlier presentations in the series included a talk by author Chari Towne about the environmental cleanup of the river, and a campfire presentation at Valley Forge about the role the Schuylkill River played during the Revolutionary War. The final installment in the series will be a screening of the film DamNation, about the environmental impact of dams. That will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. at Alvernia University’s Francis Hall, in Reading.

The Schuylkill River National and State Heritage Area, managed by the  non-profit Schuylkill River Greenway Association, uses conservation, education, recreation, historic preservation and tourism as tools for community revitalization and economic development. Visit www.schuylkillriver.org to learn more.

Read more...

honoring the river, at the Flow Festival

We let the flowers fall gently down (bless our Schuylkill River). We watched the children chase the bubbles, sparkle their fish, play the music of the drip drum, watch the mechanical flotilla, choose a history question to answer: Do you remember a flood? Do you have an umbrella story? We watched them build a sculpture out of water drops and silkscreen a poster. And that was beautiful.

But this was beautiful, too: the way we adults quietly took it in—the thrumming of the river, the pavilion of flowers, the old-world mechanics of water power, the simple rising of the tide against a fiber texture. There we were, in a city, and what we felt was a quieting down, a simplifying, a moment for prayer.

Congratulations to Fairmount Water Works, Karen Young, Victoria Prizzia, all the artists, and the many people who came to the Flow Festival. The city at its finest. I'm stepping back from the words right now. The pictures tell the story.

Read more...

images from a perfect day: Julie Diana Hench, a bunny in a stroller, moon over City Hall

Julie Diana Hench takes a final bow following a most glorious last Pennsylvania Ballet dance with her husband, Zachary. Their beautiful-beyond-description children join them on stage moments after this (illegal, blurry) shot is taken. You know who Julie and Zak are even if you've never met them. They are looking into each other's eyes. They are genuinely in love.

A bunny takes a stroller ride through Old City, Philadelphia. Moments after this I find a vintage men's shop where a Centennial Philadelphia era jacket is hung on the back wall. I buy gifts for my father and husband dating to World War I.

My husband and I, following an early dinner at the fabulous Fork Restaurant, miss our train by 10 seconds and walk the length of the city to consume the following hour. We see the moon rising over City Hall. Boarders take over Love Park. The lights go on above my river.

A perfect day.

Read more...

Raw to the Bone: On Springsteen, Rivers, and the Arc of Creativity in Poets' Quarterly

April Lindner had the idea to gather us (Jane Satterfield, Ned Balbo, Ann Michael, me—her Springsteen loving friends) at the Glory Days Symposium at Monmouth University more than a year ago. We each gave papers, each talked about the influence that Bruce Springsteen has had on us.

I spoke about the arc of creativity under the influence of Bruce Springsteen's river songs, and I'm so happy to be able to share a link to that full essay here today, for the piece now stands among works by Donald Hall, Daisy Fried, Barbara Crooker, and Caroline Maun (among others) in the current issue of Poets' Quarterly.

It begins like this, below, and carries forward here:

Might as well start with “Shenandoah,” the old pioneer song that Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band transformed into sweet bitters in the living room of Springsteen’s fabled New Jersey farmhouse.  “Shenandoah,” the tenth song on the We Shall Overcome/Seeger Sessions album, is music being made, as Springsteen himself has said. Music created in the moment, held between teeth, conducted with the frayed bracelet strings of an uplifted hand. It’s music hummed, hymned, and high in the shoulder blades, deep in the blue pulse of a straining vein. Patti’s lighting candles in the darkening farmhouse, as the band tunes in. The antique clock ticks. The thickly framed mirror doubles the volumes of sound and space. And now the Sessions Band is elaborating, confabulating, and the Shenandoah roves.

 Many thanks to Leslie Nielsen, and Ann Michael.

Read more...

my river a finalist as the PA River of the Year

Well, no.  Yet again I can't refer to a river as my one and very own.  But I have loved the Schuylkill River for a long time now.  I have written about her, both in a book called Flow and in a recent Inquirer story.  So when I saw Joe Syrnick, Schuylkill Banks CEO, on the news just now at the gym, I had to smile.  He was talking about her.

The Schuylkill, Joe was saying, is a finalist in the 2013 Pennsylvania River of the Year contest. 

You can vote to turn her into a winner.  I hope you do.

Read more...

The river runs through us: the Schuylkill in today's Inquirer

Yesterday I promised a link to my Inquirer story about the Schuylkill River, Karen Young, and the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center.  This morning I'm happy to share that link, along with three additional Water Works photographs, here.

A happy Sunday to you all.

Read more...

Loving my river (a Philadelphia Inquirer story)

I have loved the Schuylkill River ever since I was a student at Penn with a bad case of wanderlust—walking the campus, walking beyond it, leaving and returning.  Several years ago I wrote one of my favorite books, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (Temple University Press), as both a prayer and a poem.  I wrote it to honor the countless many who have come together in recent years to make the river more whole. 

Among the river-loving friends I have made along the way is Karen Young. The story that appears in this weekend's Philadelphia Inquirer celebrates her achievements at the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center (FWWIC) and the future of Philadelphia, a city finally going green.

I'll post the link tomorrow (today is now tomorrow; here is the link).  I share the first two paragraphs below.  Great thanks to Avery Rome, the Inquirer Features editor who invited me and others (Karen Rile, Elizabeth Mosier, Lise Funderburg, Kelly McQuain) to think out loud in the Inquirer Currents section a few months ago.  We have loved every second of working with Avery and cheer her forward as she now moves on to new realms and dreams.

-->

Of the two rivers that carry Philadelphia’s dreams toward the sea, it is the Schuylkill that has always snagged a good chunk of my heart.  It feels personal to me—the Schuylkill’s roving through time, her baptisms and floods, her primeval sheen, her helpless submission to toxins and sludge, her muddy regrets and redemption.  The river rises and falls.  She floats us on her back and steeps.  She comes at us from the hills and carries on beyond us.  We know her, and we need her, and she is a mystery.

            When we ruin the Schuylkill we ruin ourselves.  We become, as we once were, a city with a stench, a city that festers.  We forfeit all three faces of time—the past, the present, the future.

Read more...

My City, My River, early afternoon, after the worst was behind us

We returned our son to the city in the early afternoon.  His apartment had power.  Our house did not.  On the way back, I snapped these photos of the river that I love—high and deep grey blue.

I am in awe of nature.  I am grateful that when the sky lit up last night and the winds howled heinously the three ancient trees that fell in these parts hurt no one.  I am grateful for the men in bright orange jackets who stood in ladder buckets minutes ago and got us back to heat and light.

I am thinking of those who are not as fortunate. I am thinking of our Jersey Shore.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

Talking about William from Dangerous Neighbors

For much of last year I worked on a book that took me deep inside the world of 1871 Philadelphia—the clank of Baldwin machines, the boats on the Schuylkill, the innards of Eastern State Penitentiary, the rattle of a newsroom, the world of William, first introduced in Dangerous Neighbors.

I wrote a book.  My husband made drawings.  And then I stood back and thought.  What next?

Today I am having a preliminary meeting about this book of mine, this character I love, this Philadelphia to which I will always be true.  I don't know what will happen, but I do know this:  Sometimes we have to step away to know what it is we should be stepping toward.

Read more...

Philly Girl

Though I moved a lot when I was a kid, I always came home to my mother's Philadelphia—its suburbs on the fringe, the University of Pennsylvania campus (as a student), tiny apartments on Camac Street and Gaskill Street, back out to the fringe as a new mother, then in and out, these days, to visit clients or to teach at my alma mater (recently tied for fifth on the U.S. News and World Report university ranking, I was proud and pleased to read the other day). 

I consider myself, in other words, a Philly girl, and so when Jenny Girl took the time to put together this remarkable look back at Philadelphia's Centennial, I felt immediate kinship with her.  I may not like a lot about growing older.  But I do like knowing where home is (and who my neighbors are). 

Thank you, too, to Readergirlz this morning. Their friendship represents another home.

Read more...

Leave the Book Be; Return to it in a New Season

The best thing that we can do for our books-in-progress is to let them be for a long while—to return to them in a new season, with a fresh eye. This is what I will now be doing with Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial novel due out from Egmont next fall. The book has been in the hands of my trusted editor, Laura Geringer, for a spell. It's been safe with her. Percolating. Late last night she sent along her thoroughly well-considered notes. Think about this, she says. Consider that.

It is time now to collect my courage and to look back on that story—time to wrestle with myself. It's the final leg of story making, my last chance, the time to put it all on the line. To make the hard decisions. To throw away the pretty sentence, the hard-won research, the tangent that takes the reader nowhere. To throw away, and then go deeper.

A passage from the many that I'll be mulling:

Katherine turns her head east and looks out upon the spires, rooftops, bridges, and factories of Philadelphia, her city. The red brick and white lintel and brownstones and green swaths and temples of home, work, religion, pause. It is flat-roofed and hunkered. It is peaked and pompous. It is congested and incomplete, and Katherine’s eyes cannot possibly hold it all, until finally they settle on the dark bracelet of the Schuylkill River, which arrives from the north, pools and calms, before hurrying away with itself. Cure yourself, she thinks. Look away. But she cannot. Winter returns. February 6th. The day that she lost Anna.

Read more...