Beth Kephart's Blog, page 134

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: Introducing William and Career (an excerpt)

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There was no
arguing with her. There was nothing. He’d carried her back up those steps, like
an empty dress in his arms. Had taken his place in the chair beside the bed and
was half asleep when he heard the knock on the front door.</div>
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“Coming!” he’d
called out.</div>
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Then, to his Ma,
he’d whispered, “That’ll be Career.”</div>
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He’d pulled on a
pair of Francis’s trousers, belted up, checked the pockets, and found a chip of
coal that Francis must have tucked away after a day of hunting the line; he’d
slipped it under the bed for later. He’d taken the stairs quick, grabbed his
cap. He’d opened the door to his best friend, who leaned hard into the brick
and held a match to the end of a pipe, his head cocked toward the dying sounds
of the power looms being tooled across the street. Career wore his
charcoal-colored sack jacket and his one too-big-for-him vest. The dust had
been rubbed from the crease in his boots.</div>
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The two set off
down Carleton, stepping through the pool of the hydrant’s wasted water and
giving a nod to Mrs. May, leaning out her window—nosy as always and putting a
gloss on the hairs of her chin.</div>
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“Your Ma all
right?” Mrs. May calls.</div>
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“Had some rye,”
William says. “Some tea.” </div>
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“It’s something,”
Mrs. May says.</div>
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“Not enough.”</div>
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“You keep at it
boy, you hear me?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Her voice sounding
like bad news, always, no matter how nice she tries to be.</div>
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Career wears his
black hair long, past his ears. William wears his tucked inside his cap. Career
walks straight, to make himself taller. William, tall, walks a crouch. More
hydrants have gone off up and down—the spurt and the fizzle of water, free. The
flangers, the fitters, the chippers, and caulkers are home. The patternmakers
and carpenters. The iron molders and turners. The ones who make the boilers go.
The casting cleaners and assistants. Not Pa. It’s visiting hours up at the
penitentiary. Career always comes along. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
— excerpt, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, illustrated by William Sulit</div>
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(New City Community Press/Temple University Press, April 30, 2013) </div>
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featuring my Fulbright-winning student and CityStep in today's Inquirer

Leah Apple once sat in my
memoir classroom at Penn beguiling us (beguiling me) with beloved New Yorker excerpts and her own languid,
slyly self-revealing sentences: But a
childhood of moving across the country from day school to day school had
disillusioned me: the concept of a best girl friend was something that
transcended my realm of possibility, and that I feared would always elude me. She was a world traveler, a hip hop dancer, a young woman who, in so many ways, transcended, a sophomore who that summer would go to teach in Santa Fe, and when Leah won the Fulbright earlier this year I got that happy feeling teachers get when one of their own is recognized for who they are.

In addition to all Leah has achieved academically, she co-executive directs CityStep, a student-run program designed to bring dance, mentorship, and opportunity to the young of West Philadelphia. Recently, over Kiwi yogurt, I had a chance to talk to Leah and her co executive director, Philene, about this program that has, in Leah's words, "saved her life at Penn." A few days later, after my own memoir class had ended for the year, I joined some of the students as they rehearsed for this weekend's show. 

These are the photographs.

This is the story. 

This is my privilege at Penn.

"CityStep Presents: Intramural" performs Sunday at 3 PM at the Iron Gate Theater, 3700 Chestnut Street. If you see Leah while you are there, give her a hug for me. Tell her how proud I am.

Telling the Truth (apparently I've been obsessed with this for awhile)

Our heating system broke—kaput. We had nothing, nada. And so an odyssey began to weave an entirely new air-handling system into a nearly 100-year-old house. I was grateful for all those corporate jobs as I wrote the checks. I was also grateful that the men who came (at 7 AM each day) were quiet, careful, and knowledgeable. Also, most of them wore those sterile booties.



But I was also grateful (in retrospect) for the way the little house crisis forced me to do what I'd not done for too many years—attack the closets, sort the wheat from the chaff. You know how it is—the old journal shows up, the twenty year old story, the photograph of your son on Santa's lap, a pair of mittens someone sent you, a gift still in its box—the one you meant to give to Jean. Also, some very ancient corporate work, which proved to me that I am utterly one beat and narrowly dimensioned.


For example: Asked some fifteen years ago to help lead the Novartis communications team toward more meaningful outputs, I prepared a presentation. This, above, is page 1, illustrated by my husband.



Finding a Voice.

Avoiding Distancing Mechanisms.
Telling the Truth.



Telling the truth? Apparently, this has been my life-long obsession. Maybe because I'm still learning how it's handled.



Tell no one.

We Could Be Heroes—the interior pages arrive

How rewarding it is to begin to see We Could Be Heroes take such glorious shape in the hands of Chronicle Books, page designer Jennifer Tolo Pierce, and my editor Tamra Tuller. This book will be out next spring.

The Philly.com/Nathaniel Popkin review of Dr. Radway makes me weep (in good ways)

Yesterday I returned home to a a few first copies of Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. 



Today Nathaniel Popkin, who knows more about this city's hidden places than I ever will and who writes extraordinarily beautiful sentences about, well, anything, wrote about the book for Philly.com.



I had to wipe away the tears of gratitude before I could post of any those words here. I would include every single beautiful paragraph, just to showcase Nathaniel's talents. But that would be, well, that would be a whole lot of wrong things.



So I include the final paragraph only:

"One of Kephart’s gifts in her ongoing written exploration of
Philadelphia is the capacity, and the willingness, to look on all that’s
here with honesty, to allow for confusion and contradiction, for might
and violence all at once. A writer does so by loving her characters,
even the rotten ones, even the city so sour it might burn. And by
bathing it, as only this one can, in fullness of breath." — Nathaniel Popkin, Philly.com

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. It exists.

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent arrived last evening—greeting me as I made my way home from my last day at Penn. Just one week or so after the great and beautiful surprise of its starred Kirkus review.



I am grateful to have this collaborative effort in hand. It goes on sale next Tuesday.

saying goodbye and joy, in all its ephemera

I said goodbye to English 135.302 yesterday—over baklava, hummus, and grape leaves from Manakeesh, over books I'd made for the students, through stories told about summer plans, futures. Don't go far. I said it. Again and again.



And then I raced across campus with my big-snouted camera to spend time with a former student and to take photographs of kids on the eight count. I'll have more about that afternoon, soon.



But for now, let's give it up for joy and friendship and community, in all its wonder and ephemeral bittersweetness.

Fusion Communications: one example of what we do

Most of you know me as a blogger, a critic, a teacher, a sometimes author, a grateful mother and wife. A smaller subsection of the world knows me as the strategic writing partner of Fusion Communications, a job that consumes a substantial fraction of my days (and nights). I interview and write about business people, patients, dreamers, visionaries. I work on news magazines, annual reports, commemorative books, employee communications, histories. I spend a lot of time trying to understand those very technical things that so many successful people do, so that I can somehow make that work accessible to many, many readers.



The best projects are those that afford me the chance to collaborate with my artist husband, William Sulit (who also illustrated Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, which will launch next Tuesday). Over the last several years, our biggest collaboration has come on behalf of AmTrust Financial Services, Inc., a hugely successful niche insurance company operating in countries all around the world. I travel to Wall Street, spend time with the company's leaders, suggest themes, interview, write. My husband turns the written stories into visual ones. This year, he used his 3-D illustration talents to produce a beautiful, several-page series.


This, then, is me. Often. This is us.

The Laws of Gravity/Liz Rosenberg: announcing a new book by a good friend

Liz Rosenberg has been on a truly remarkable roll—publishing award-winning children's books, book-club-worthy adult novels, a weekly letter to the president (in the Boston Globe), and thoughtful reviews—all while writing two novels for young adults, midnight poetry, and a brand new adult novel—The Laws of Gravity—which I was given the privilege of reading early, a few months ago.



Gravity is book about life and blood—about two best-friend cousins whose love is tested when one of them, Nicole, is diagnosed with a form of cancer that only cord blood from a placenta can possibly cure. The other cousin, Ari, has access to just what Nicole needs (thanks to his decision to freeze the umbilical cords of his children). On the surface, then, it seems obvious: Won't Ari make this sacrifice on behalf of a gravely ill cousin who has always been like a sister to him, a best friend? Wouldn't you? But Ari, weighing his options, begins to wonder whether the future health of his own children (for whom the cords have been frozen) is more important than the pressing present health of his cousin.



What does one sacrifice, and for whom? What does love require of us? These are among the questions that Liz works through so compellingly in Gravity—a book that Ann Hood called "a real page turner" and Chris Bohjalian called "an unflinching portrayal of that place where fear and family collide."



Here, below, are my own words, rendered with great respect for my friend, Liz. Gravity will be released on May 7, just ahead of Mother's Day. I encourage you to find a copy for yourself, and a friend.

"Clear-eyed and compassionate, The Laws of Gravity wrangles with the complexity of choice…What do we owe one another? How can we forgive? How do we live with ourselves? Liz Rosenberg's details are riveting; they pierce. Her ideas about friendship triumph."

tomorrow at Penn: don't go too far

Tomorrow, I'll meet with my Penn students as the united English 135.302 for the last time. We'll review the literary profiles they have written about fathers and grandfathers, teachers and best friends, uncles and role models, tattooed coffee house guys. I will try to tell them how much they have meant to me, how much they have grown, how much their compassion for one another has meant to me, how restorative their souls are, but words will fail me. They will just have to know. They will have to promise not to go far.



Don't go too far.



When we are done I will cut through campus and join a student from a few years ago as she gets a troupe of West Philly kids ready for a show. I will take photographs. I will freeze her, too, in time.



Don't go too far. 



I don't remember four months like these past four months. I don't remember how I got from a slushy January to a cold, bright spring. I know I lost conversations along the way, the trail of things with friends, a little hope. I know I threw away a novel and swore I'd start again, and did. I know a book I didn't think a soul would notice was, in fact, by one very special reader, noticed, and that things began to break, one after the other, in this old house. I know some very good things have happened for friends, and that there have been losses, too—personal ones, global ones, losses of faith. I know my son moved to a new city that he has already made his own, that he texts me every day: Great time at work. Friends are coming. Just met the cutest girl. Nothing like a run beside the Hudson. You should see Manhattan lights at night.



I know that tomorrow is coming and that I will have to say goodbye.



And that I don't want to say goodbye.



Not to them.



Don't go too far.