Beth Kephart's Blog, page 130

still clique-less and in the margins I stand

Yesterday, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about my love for the Devon Horse Show, how this ten-day event resonated with me as a child and brought me here as a woman in search of a home some two decades ago.



It isn't surprising, therefore, that I spent much of yesterday on my own street corner, watching the carriages go by with my father, and, later, walking the fairgrounds with my husband. Going in and out of stables, sipping a smoothie, watching.



Watching.



It may just be that writer thing. Or maybe it's in my blood. But yesterday, like most days, the parties were going on without me—the annual, tented neighborhood gathering a half block away, the swirls of friends at the lemon-stick stand on the Midway, the backyard barbeques. I've always been the girl who stars in my quasi-autobiographical young adult novel, Undercover—behind the scenes and reliably helpful, called on in a crisis, quietly off the list most other times.



I am a person with so many, many friends—individual, one on one, personal, often invisible. I am also a person without an established community. I think about things like this on holidays. And I am grateful, always, for the horses, and for those who served our country, who stood behind the idea of community.

Asunder/Chloe Aridjis: Reflections (and a celebration of Lauren Wein)

Long-time readers of this blog may well remember the day I found and fell in love with Chloe Aridjis's first novel, Book of Clouds. It was a penetrable strange. It vibed mystique. It was Berlin wrapped in the gauze of supernatural weather and smoldering Hitler fumes.



Book of Clouds served as a reminder that novels don't need a category—or easy flap copy—to succeed. It also introduced me to the book's editor, Lauren Wein, whose books have consistently thrilled me and whose friendship is one those things I treasure most in my writing life. I profiled Lauren here, in Publishing Perspectives. She has a remarkable vision and a portfolio of edited books that is essentially unrivaled in the adult publishing world. She chooses, edits, fights for, and nurtures the unobvious—the sort of stories that many a mainstream editor overlooks, the sort of titles that go on to win prizes. (Book of Clouds won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France.) Lauren's titles are written by authors who take their time, who fold in and across multiple themes, who have something to say. Novels as saturations. Novels as spills of the imagination.



Last week, Lauren sent me two of her newest titles, one of which was Asunder, Aridjis's second book. Already released in the United Kingdom, boxed with a star from Publishers Weekly ("stunningly good novel," they called it, also "brilliant"), Asunder is even better than Clouds—more self assured, more seductively strange, more cohering. I read it in a day, my breath held, my thoughts streaming: Can she pull this off, she is pulling this off, she has pulled this off, until I closed the book and pumped my fist, victory style. Chloe Aridjis wields enormous intelligence and knowing in this story about an art museum guard named Marie. She folds history in—a 1914 attack on a Velazquez painting by an angry suffragette. She teaches craquelure—the slow decomposition of paintings over time. She studies the art one might make and hold and the art one must never touch. She creates distance and broaches it. She yields men and women together, and apart. She writes magnificently, like this:

After we'd made ourselves a quick cup of tea from a little tray, we set out. By then dusk had turned into an empty-handed magician who kept a few paces ahead of us, snuffing out the streets seconds before we reached them, robbing us of the sights we'd come to see. One by one, the lights in shop windows were switched off, cafe tables and chairs brought in, postcard racks folded up. 

Look, I loved this book. What more can I say?



Asunder is due out in September from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

White Elephants/Katie Haegele: Reflections

My Uncle Danny was a Cape May, NJ, antiques man—and the author of a book called Flea Market Finds. His eccentricity was a beautiful thing, and so was his love for us. I'll find his bazaar-bizarre gifts in this small house of mine. I'll find his loopy handwriting on a card, and it will take me back to his seaside taffy, his movie-star shades, his rolled trousers on the beach, his Victorian scrapbooks, his enchanted miniature easter eggs, his velvet scalloped Christmas balls. My uncle appears from time to time in the books I write—sometimes as who he is and sometimes as a close fiction. He never met my son, and my son never met him, and this is one of the great sadnesses in my life.


I was thinking a lot about my Uncle Danny as I read Katie Haegele's charming micro book this afternoon, White Elephants: On Yard Sales, Relationships, & Finding What Was Missing. I was thinking about the odd things my uncle had perched around his house, and the stories he told about his flea market finds, and how he always knew enviously more than anybody else because he had never busied himself with either envy or the ordinary. While much of the world was out there studying the news or world history, the quotable classics, the contemporary hooks, my uncle was sifting through other people's convertible stuff. Convertible to another desk, another library, another closet. Sacrificed, or relinquished.



Katie's smart like this, too—smart about the insides of people's lives and the retro-contemporary nostalgia of bygones and medleys I've never heard of. White Elephants is about the trips Katie takes with her widowed mom to yard sales and the things they buy—things like weird wicker belts, working typewriters, grandmother quality dresses, foldable purses, vintage stationery (the good, the bad, and the ugly), fashion plates. It's about how her own apartment absorbs the after stuff of others, and how it defines her, in many ways, and releases her from the thing she will never, through all the digging, find: her dad, who died of cancer when Katie was still a college student.



White Elephants is also about a boy named Joe, who loves what Katie loves, and about a power outage after a storm in Nova Scotia, and about swimming in your underwear, and about getting past the migraine. It's earthy and near in its language, a conversation Katie has, a book so small and lovingly made that you can hold it in the palm of your hand.



I quote from an early page, a paragraph nearing perfection. Katie Haegele. Retro wise. Adorable and generous, zine queen, good daughter:

Nostalgia is a kind of maligned concept, but when I talk about it I mean something existential—not a retro diner with doo-wop on the jukebox or old people talking about how much better things used to be, but the sad longing of hireath and saudade, the loneliness and melancholy that run underneath everything in life, the feelings that are always there, humming like power lines. I think it's something we all carry around with us, even if some of us seem to feel it more intensely than others. Maybe you deal with your saudade, when it rises up, by listening to a certain song or going for a long drive. I address mine in the basements of old churches, handling jewelry and dresses and little figurines that someone else once saw and bought, and used and loved. These things vibrate with the lives they've been a part of, and I fill my home with them because I like the company.

The Devon Carriages Roll Into Town (photographs from the horse show)

from earlier this afternoon

MUD: a movie so worth seeing

I've been so buried that when I asked my husband if we could go out last evening (please?), see a movie, perhaps, I had no idea that there was a feature film as exquisitely good as "Mud" waiting for us. "Find a movie and we'll go," my husband said, ruling out "Gatsby" and hoping for "Hangover 3." I took advantage, saw this listing called "Mud," watched the trailer, and we went.


Incredibly glad that we did (and so is my husband). Two boys, a fugitive, an inconstant girlfriend, life on a river, snakes, and two questions: Is love a possibility? Does everybody lie?


Matthew McConaughey, by the way, is phenomenal. I have loved watching her career evolve. And those two kids? Yeah. The real deal.



I share the trailer above and here, in this link, the New York Times Anatomy of a Scene feature, in which Jeff Nichols, the film's writer/director, talks about steady cams, constant motion, and interleaving of perspective. 



We learn from other people's art. Also: We sit back and enjoy it.

The Devon Horse Show returns, in this weekend's Inquirer

In which I write of my long love for this show, my gratitude for clop and bray.



I'll be posting photos of the show on this blog in the days to come.



I will also be posting news of an incredible new novel—Asunder, by Chloe Aridjis—due out this September and edited by the magical Lauren Wein. Look for my thoughts on this glorious work of art tomorrow.

Small Damages Named to the Bankstreet Best Children's Books of the Year List

I am so grateful to Bankstreet for this honor—for including Small Damages among a tremendous list of novels written for younger readers.



Small Damages was named in the "Today" list and cited along with David Levithan's Every Day, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, Tanita Davis's Happy Families, Aaron Karo's Lexapros and Cons, Martine Leavitt's My Book of Life by Angel, Deb Caletti's The Story of Us, and Kim Purcell's Trafficked, among other titles. It received a star for Outstanding Merit.



The entire list—of books for all ages, in all categories—can be found here.



Bankstreet does a lot of good in this world.

Small Damages, Flow, Handling the Truth, Dr. Radway: a few upcoming events

Today the horses are in town, those beautiful beasts that arrive each year and send my thoughts back to childhood days. You'll find me in the stables early, stroking those long, warm noses, breathing a little easier. And over the weekend, running in the Philadelphia Inquirer, you'll find a story about my love of that show and its long and storied history.



Over the course of the summer and into the fall, I'll be traveling a bit, to a number of events, beginning next Thursday when I head up to the BEA to celebrate the naming of Small Damages as the Armchair BEA young adult novel of 2012. A number of other events are brewing, but these are the events I can announce at this time.



Also, in the next few weeks you'll find a brief Kephart essay in Good Housekeeping and an excerpt of Handling the Truth in O Magazine. I'm grateful for the generosity of the editors.



So here I shall be. Perhaps I'll have the privilege of finding you in one of these cities, at one of these times.




May 30, 2013, 10 AMArmchair BEA Awards
(Yay, Small Damages!)
Shindig Booth # 2135
Javits Center
New York, NY

June 4, 2013Speaker,
Friends of the Wissahickon Annual Member Meeting
Philadelphia, PA

June 27, 2013, 10 AMProject Flow
Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center
Philadelphia, PA

July 2, 2013
Philadelphia Literary Legacy Unveiling
Philadelphia International Airport,
Philadelphia, PA
Details here

July 18, 2013, 9 AM to NoonCoffee Klatch Leader
Philadelphia Business Journal
Third Annual Women's Conference
Crystal Tea Room
Wanamaker Building
Philadelphia, PA
July 27, 2013, 3:30 - 5:00 PM
Launching Small Damages paperback/Memoir Workshop
with Debbie Levy
Hooray for Books
Old Town Alexandria, VA

August 6, 2013
Launching Handling the Truth
with a memoir workshop
Free Library of Philadelphia
(details to come)
Philadelphia, PA

August 13, 2013
Five Author Event
Details to come

September 7, 2013, 10 AM - noon
BookPassage Memoir Workshop
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925

September 7, 2013, 3 PMBooks Inc. Memoir Workshop
Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness
San Francisco, CA
September 8, 2013
Redwood Writers Workshop
Memoir Workshop
Flamingo Conference Resort & Spa
Santa Rosa, CA 95405

September 17, 2013, 7 PM
Dr. Radway Launch
Radnor Memorial Library
Radnor, PA

September 22, 2013
Chestnut Hill Book Festival
Chestnut Hill, PA
(details to come)

October 3, 2013, 6 PM
University of Pennsylvania Bookstore
Memoir Workshop/Handling the Truth
Philadelphia, PA
(details to come)

October 20, 2013
Talking Memoir with Linda Joy Myers @
Rosemont College
Rosemont, PA
(details to come)

March 12, 2014, 8 PM
Elizabeth Boatwright Coaker Visiting Writers Series
Converse College
Spartanburg, SC 

new hope: the baby bird learns how to fly

From the nest to the porch railing. A wild flutter of wings, and then up onto a thin branch of the Japanese maple. Five minutes later I found it out back.


The world now belongs to it, for a while.



New life. New hope.

remembering my mother on her birthday, with chimes

Today my mother would have been eighty years old. We would have had a party for her.



Instead we each remember her in our own ways. Last night, my father, who keeps her grave so beautifully pristine, stopped by to show me the calla lilies he will take her today. She would have liked that so much. She would have been deeply moved by my father's constancy—always there, even when the rain starts to fall.



I will think of her listening to the chimes that play every day, the songs that float above. The flicker of butterflies. The call of birds.



Happy birthday, Mom. We miss you.