Beth Kephart's Blog, page 136

I could use a banana, a cap, and some fish (also, some words on false advertising)

Happy birthday to Bill Thomas, who leads us into spring and away from fall as the executive director of Chanticleer Garden, a place that brings us breezes, blooms, and birds and is featured in my two ghost books: Ghosts in the Garden (a memoir) and Nothing but Ghosts (a young adult novel).



Of course, there are no actual ghosts in either book, which is to say that Casper does not make an appearance. Once a reviewer took me to task for putting the word "ghost" into my novel's title (about a daughter missing her mother).



False advertising, wrote the critic.



Angrily.



Like Truman Capote, I did not respond.



I prefer to wish Bill a happy birthday.

On Harleysville Books, Broken Heaters, and Hair Like Tumbleweed

Yesterday, 3:30 AM. Left the sofa, where I had gone briefly to rest, to begin (again) client work, which became student work, which became the business of writing work, until I looked up at 10:15 or so and screamed. A brown cloud of termites had rushed through my office door and window—escapees from the new construction hole down the street. It happened in an instant, an actual instant. A storm of wings. Beth's cries for help. Clients calling in the midst. Beth pretending to be calm while the critters crawled along her computer screen.



2:30 PM. Settled in with Mr. Heater Man, who, like a physician, was delivering the final news about the new system now required for my old house. Ralph, Mr. Heater Man, is a very nice guy. Still, might as well be sending my son off to another semester of school. I, by now termite proof, smiled (more like grimaced). Wrote the check for the first third payment. Went back to work.



3:00 PM. Received news of an incredible pre-pub review that I will soon be able to share. See how nicely I am behaving? How properly? Not sharing? Yes. I am capable of the incomplete non-share. Even in my current state of sleep-deprived delirium.



5:25 PM. My friend Judy of the cabernet hair meets me for a walk around a Holiday Inn parking lot, just off the Lansdale exit. This is Judy's neighborhood. It is also partway between my home and Harleysville, where Shelly Plumb, the generous owner of Harleysville Books, has invited me to an evening of dinner and conversation regarding Small Damages. So Judy and I walk and talk and walk and talk, six laps or so around the ol' Inn. I love friends who do not mind the craziness of me, or the sweatiness of a walk on asphalt during a 90-degree day.



7:00 PM. In Harleysville with the aforementioned Shelly—I met her, felt like I'd always known her, perhaps I have always known her?—and some twenty others, who had kindly read Small Damages. Outside, there was lightning and downpour. Inside, wine, pasta, dessert, books. Any writer who is ever invited to Harleysville must go. It's a bastion of independent goodness. Also? For the record? Small Damages appears (see photo above) to be a crossover book.



10:00 PM. Home (through rain and a little hail) to more work.



2:30 AM. The aforementioned existing heater (which needs to hold on for just two more weeks) goes off on an all-cymbals clash-o-rama that probably woke President Obama. Did it wake you? It certainly woke me. Well, who goes to sleep after that?



7:00 AM. Hair like tumbleweed.

if you walk through life looking for the good—at Penn, yesterday

I had all sorts of prospects for my class at Penn yesterday. Just two classes to go, and I had a plan in place, some thoughts about teaching the art of putting another's gestures, postures, cheekbones, eyes on the page. I had things to read, photographs to study, Annie Dillard, Anton Chekhov, Francine Prose, and Cynthia Kaplan in my back pocket. But before we would get to that, we would hear from the students themselves, who had been interviewing each other and writing "practice" profiles.



Except. These were no practice profiles. These were fully developed, deeply moving, vastly important gifts crafted scrupulously for one another. It became important to simply dwell with these pieces, to slow things down, to take note of all the progress my students have made this semester, to honor the insights and the care embedded in their most recent work. There were students who had entered my classroom in winter proclaiming that they couldn't write; how wrong they were. There have been those who have worried about getting things wrong; time and again they got so much right. There were those who cautioned that they might not come to every class, and would probably be late with the assignments. Okay, so. There was only one of those, and he lied. He came. He wrote. Not just extremely well, but also (he amazed us) on time (give or take three minutes).



Soon I'll be able to share one of my student's works, for it will be published in an esteemed magazine. Someday I'll be able to tell you about the others—their gains, their triumphs, their stories.



But for now, in the midst of what has become the busiest season in my life, I want to take a minute and thank my institution, the University of Pennsylvania, for giving me the chance, again, to fall in love (thank you, Greg Djanikian, and thank you, Al Filreis). This is a great privilege, spending time with these students, watching them grow. And it is a great privilege to work at my alma mater. The final project my students will produce is a profile of an individual who inspires. Many of my students have chosen a university professor, and in reading through the profile proposals this morning, I am awed by the many professors I've never met who are radically changing student lives.



If you walk through life looking for the good, you find students like my students. You find an institution like my own.

Philadelphia in the gloaming; two empty nesters

I can never use the term "in the gloaming" without thinking of my friend Alice Elliott Dark's perfect and classic short story by that same name. And so, last night, leaving the city at the gloaming hour, I thought of Alice. I thought of Joan Didion, too, and Rebecca Solnit, and all those writers who have captured this shade of sun-glinted blue with words.



The city was eager for spring, and full of its promise. Rittenhouse Square and its horn player, a little spontaneous drumming on the side. Restaurants and their outdoor seats. People reading on benches with their coat collars high.



My husband and I were there at the end of a long moving week—cleaning our son's now vacated city apartment at Spruce and 16th, and imagining him at the park in his new near-Manhattan 'hood. Sharing a meal at Serafina. Going home in the old Wrangler, two for-sure empty nesters now.



Meanwhile our son texts me this morning, his first day of his first full-time job. Up at 5:30, he confides. At Starbucks. Excited.


There's dusk. And then there's dawn.

Horton Foote, River North Dance Chicago, Chanticleer Garden: one April weekend 2013

If you came here just for the pictures, here they are—Chanticleer Garden, April 7, 2013, a brand new season of color and verve. The secret garden elves have spent the winter widening paths, planting pots, putting the start of lettuce into rows. They have had a ball with succulents. And the big bright fish are alive.



If you wondered how I'd felt about seeing "The Trip to Bountiful" at People's Light and Theatre Company on Friday evening with my father, wonder no more. It was a full-throttle production, emotionally speaking, and elegant in all other ways. I believed in these characters and their stories, the two side-by-side chairs that constituted a bus, the painted mural that was the landscape of memory. I believed in the anger and in the momentary resolve.



And finally, River North Dance Chicago, presented last evening at Annenberg Center. There are, apparently, young men and women whose bodies are only muscle and air, not bone. There are choreographers who can bring Eva Cassidy back to life. There is a dancer named Jessica Wolfrum who can make a dress breathe and a dancer named Ahmad Simmons whose muscular nomenclature is like nothing I've ever seen, and who danced within the quick strobe of light, his arms like wings. Then there were those who danced in and out of elastic shirts without ever losing track of time.



Or perhaps they lost all track of time, and that is why I was so mesmerized.

my mother speaks to me, on my birthday week, about John Bartram High School

My husband, who has found extraordinary happiness working with clay, recently began to clear out our basement to give himself more room to work. Boxes of unnecessary things have been disappearing, leaving more mounds of molting cardboard to be considered or reviewed.



Today, while Bill was showing me his latest sculptural pieces, he pointed to a row of boxes and asked if they were for keeping. I slipped the lid off of one and found, in an instant, a file marked, in my mother's inimitable handwriting: To Betsy on her Birthday 4/1/01.



The file contained a story she'd written while planning her fiftieth high school reunion. Lore Kephart was a proud alum of John Bartram High School in Southwest Philadelphia. She made friendships there that lasted a lifetime. Indeed, my mother's friendships, as I wrote in Into the Tangle of Friendship, were legendary—for their diversity, their longevity, their inherent trustworthiness. My mother was loved.



Now, here today she is, in her own words, talking to me at the end of a long birthday week. Telling me about her born-and-bred Philadelphia self. I hear the cadence of her speech in these inkjet pages. I see her crossing one word out and substituting another in blue ink. She loved to write, my mother. And she loved our birthdays—made them entirely special.



Made this one special, too:

Bartram was notable because of its reputation as a premier school with the highest academic standards. Students allowed to come there from certain other designated neighborhoods always took advantage of it, even though many had to ride a bus or the old #36 trolley, as it was called, to reach the campus. Some even fudged their way in. I was lucky; I walked.



Bartram's teaching staff was an extraordinary source of pride to all of us. To a man and woman, they could have taught anywhere, but chose to travel to Bartram. I often marvel at the completeness of the education I received there. The ghost of Mr. Abner Miller, one of my English teachers, haunts me, lest I should ever end a sentence with a preposition! Teachers were not only entrenched in getting across their individual disciplines—Mr. Wapen's was English, better yet Shakespeare—but they were encouraging as well. One old friend with whom I just caught up told me that, despite the fact that he had gone into the service having attended college for only three semesters, he spent his career interviewing celebrities like Robert Mitchum and Barbra Streisand for the column he wrote for our town's largest newspaper. "It was Mr. Sonnenfeld," he told me. "He just kept on telling me I had this talent."

at the end of this week...

I'm a year older, my students threw me a surprise party, my son has left Philadelphia, another student got good publishing news and another won a Fulbright, my son has moved across the river from New York City (those bruises you see? that's me, after lugging many boxes many many blocks in a lovely town that has no parking and very narrow streets; that smile? my son is so happy), three client projects are done, one book proposal has been submitted, one 800-word piece for the Inquirer took fourteen hours (yep, I'm slowing down, folks), Tamra sent me a card that I love, love, love, and Kelly and I took a beautiful walk.



Now off to see "The Trip to Bountiful" with my father.



We do what we do.

To Hoboken we go, as our son steps into the next chapter

Granted the gift of a beautiful day, we are Hoboken, New Jersey, bound in an oversized white van that I'm sure as heck happy not to be driving. (Here's where my husband's Salvadoran born-and-bred unflappability comes in especially handy. I bore witness to it on the tight streets of Philadelphia yesterday. I closed my eyes when necessary.)



Our son, like us, lives a minimal life, and it's times like these that I'm especially glad for that. I'm also especially glad that he has found a room that he loves in a town he's been talking about for years. I'm even more glad that he has landed a job that thrills him, in his media analysis field.



(Just wait until they find out how great a writer this analytical guy also is.)



Client work done, student letters written, taxes in the envelopes, six pairs of trousers cleaned and ironed (also that suit), and additional laundry spinning, we soon go. Melissa Sarno says that I need to get myself a Frank Sinatra fedora.



Sarno, I'm on the case.



Jennifer Hubbard says I do not write as badly as I think I do.



I'm going with that as well.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness/Susannah Cahalan: Reflections

Susannah Cahalan tells a terrifying true story in Brain on Fire about losing control, slipping away from a "true" (happy, ambitious, newly in love, well-employed) self, and coming far too close to forfeiting everything she was to a mysterious affliction. It all happened quickly. It all seemed, at first, to be viral or perhaps anxiety induced. Crowds overwhelmed her. Work (her life as a journalist) made no sense. She grew paranoid and raging, impossible to calm, numb or tingling, migraine prone, on the verge, always of running away, dangerous to herself, "barbaric." Soon she would find herself labeled a flight risk in the epilepsy ward of a New York City hospital—her father and mother vigilant at her side, her new boyfriend determined to find the Susannah he sensed was still inside. One doctor after another misread the scant clues. The electrodes glued to Susannah's head would not reveal the secret.



It took a neurologist named Souhel Najjar, a simple test (draw a clock, he said), and the quick cooperation of a University of Pennsylvania physician, Dr. Josep Dalmau, to finally discover what had happened to Susannah's brain—and to treat the rare autoimmune disorder that had attacked her so virulently. Many months would go by before Susannah would recover. This book, her first, maps that journey.



It is a memoir of sorts—an investigation into the author's own life assisted by medical records and the observations of those who were near through the ordeal. It's a generous book—and story—that has already helped others, and it is important for that reason. As literature, as memoir, I worried about the liberal use of dialogue that had been clearly recreated by those whom Susannah interviewed. I wished, as well, for something less strictly documentary and more (in places) transcendent.



But I honor the achievement of this narrative, the intelligence of the doctors, the kindness of Susannah's family and boyfriend, and the marvel of the brain itself. I am proud, as well, to be a University of Pennsylvania alum and adjunct. It's a school where important work gets done.



For more on the memoirs I read (and sometimes teach), please visit the Handling the Truth  page.

I can't show you my students, but I can show you/tell you this

They have huge hearts and great talent. They make me laugh and they work hard. They pay attention to one another. They let the learning in.



Today they surprised me with a birthday celebration and magnificent card (you guys!) and made me cry (again). Forever and ever, 135.302. Forever and ever and ever.



Thank you, my students, and thank you dear provocateuring friends Karen Rile and Jamie-Lee Josselyn. And thank you Trey Popp and Maggie Ercolani and Nabil Mehta, who joined us in our final hour and made the party finer.



I will sleep well tonight.