Beth Kephart's Blog, page 143
February 11, 2013
On the eve of the Out of the Easy launch, with Ruta Sepetys
Tomorrow my friend Ruta Sepetys will launch her second novel, a book rich with landscape, intrigue, color, and snap called Out of the Easy (Philomel). It's a book that transported me to steamy 1950s New Orleans during a steamy 2012 Philadelphia day. It's a book that people have been talking about for a year, a book that, in recent days, has been featured prominently in every major news journal (with a full-page Entertainment Weekly interview, to boot!). Set to embark on a ten-week tour, Ruta is also launching some pretty cool initiatives, one of which should be of great interest to my young writing friends.
This initiative is nationwide, a Philomel-sponsored scholarship contest that will award one high-school student with $5,000 toward the college of their choice; the participating school will also receive 25 Penguin books. Those interested will want to read Ruta's book and reflect as well on a certain Charles Dickens quote. For details, go here.
In the meantime, I encourage you to embrace Ruta, her stories, and her great big soul as she travels somewhere near you. Her extensive tour dates (which actually extend through the entire year and will take her around the world) can be found here.
Finally, here is Ruta herself, on the making of Out of the Easy.
February 10, 2013
The Snow Child: when the book you were writing has already been written
I had been encouraged by many to read Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, a book that has (in that glorious way that books sometimes are) been carried forward by a force that will always be greater than decreed advertising and oily PR machines—readerly love. I had been encouraged. It is your kind of book, your kind of premise. But I had also been warned by a friend who knows me well. I'm not sure but it might have a lot in common with the adult novel you'd been working on.
The adult novel that I had been working on, then put aside, for when the time was right. For when all the other work got done. It was always out there—a complete fifth draft that needed a substantial overhaul. It was near. It lived in a bright corner of my mind.
We tell ourselves that our stories can wait, and most of the time they can. But yesterday as I sat and read the first 100 pages of The Snow Child I realized that my own novel had waited too long. For while the book I was writing is far less direct than Ivey's tale, more saturated with language, less tied to a specific fairytale, I, like Ivey, am obsessed with the woods, with children lost and possibly found, with barren couples and what they see, what they want, what they wish their way toward. I am obsessed with trees in snow. I am obsessed with bird call and fox print. I was writing those obsessions down. I was writing about a boy who had entered my life, then was gone. I wasn't writing The Snow Child, but who would believe, if ever I now were to finish and publish this book of mine, that I had not somehow been influenced by it.
I will, I'm sure, read on. But not right now. Right now I need a little time to let go of a dream I once had.
February 9, 2013
in gratitude to Kerry Winfrey, for these words on Small Damages
So indebted on this white Saturday to Kerry Winfrey, who wrote of Small Damages on Hello Giggles, and heartened me with her words.
Thank you. You return summer and the smell of oranges to me. I have missed both.
Chris Offutt instructs us in time, from The Same River Twice
Earlier today I finished reading The Same River Twice, the magnificent, wild, violent, terrifying, sometimes vulgar, sometimes gentle memoir (about the author's hobo years, about his impending fatherhood) by Chris Offutt. I sat on a panel with Chris once, years ago. I celebrate his No Heroes in Handling the Truth. I've watched him go on and write for Hollywood (True Blood, Weeds, Treme) and I've been glad when I've heard him (recently) speak of his return to literature.
You'll be glad, too, once you read this River excerpt, below:
I have never worn a watch. Time is a Rorschach folded into a Mobius strip turned inside out, upside down. Time is the name we give to the living. Modern science presents us with kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—designating every organism on the planet. Once identified, it is ours, as with a nickname known only to a private few. Quantum physics has taken to naming the theoretical, much like concocting a name for an unborn infant. Nothing exists that is not labeled; like killing, it is our assertion over the world.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
February 8, 2013
2013 NYC Teen Author Festival
A few days before I left for a research trip to Florence, Italy, I spent this Friday evening at Children's Book World with David Levithan. Of course he is a legend. Of course I'd read many of his books. Of course I'd seen him charm and challenge at a Publishing Perspectives conference. But I hadn't met him in person until that evening, hadn't seen his fabled generosity at work until, at this group session with my friend Jennifer Hubbard, Ellen Hopkins, and Eliot Schrefer, I watched as he put others on his stage.
Because, in addition to writing bestselling, critically acclaimed books alone and with others, in addition to finding, editing, and believing in some of the most popular young adult books of our time, in addition to being a spokesperson for the possible in literature, David Levithan time and again puts others on his stage. Inviting rising young adult authors to appear with him when he is launching his own books. Serving as a moderator while established young adult authors speak. And spending who knows how many hours putting together what has become a phenomenon: the NYC Teen Author Festival.
He might have written an entirely new book, I imagine. But he spent time doing this. Over ninety authors from over a dozen publishers, over seven days, to quote David. And we're all hoping that you will both attend and help spread word.
I'll be whisking away from my Penn teaching/corporate world for the "mega signing" at Books of Wonder on March 24, when I'll remember what it is to be an author again. I've got my fingers crossed that you'll be there.
And while you are waiting for this fab event, pre-order David's upcoming book, coauthored with Andrea Creamer and edited by my friend Jill Santopolo for that wonderful house, Philomel. It's a really, truly excellent book. How excellent? Read here.
2013 NYC Teen Author Festival
http://www.facebook.com/NYCTeenAuthorFestival < http://www.facebook.com/NYCTeenAuthorFestival >
Monday, March 18 (Mulberry Street Branch of the NYPL, 10 Jersey Street b/w Mulberry and Lafayette, 6-8):
I’ll Take You There: A Change of Scenery, A Change of Self
Description: In their recent books, each of these authors have plunged their teen characters into new places as a way of revealing their true selves. We’ll talk about this YA journey narrative – where it comes from, and what it can lead to.
Gayle Forman
Kristen-Paige Madonia
Bennett Madison
Jennifer E. Smith
Melissa Walker
moderator: David Levithan
Tuesday, March 19 (WORD Bookstore, 7-8:30, 126 Franklin St, Greenpoint):
The Only Way Out is Through: Engaging Truth through YA
Description: Pain. Confusion. Loss. Mistakes. Revelation. More mistakes. Recovery. One of the things that makes YA work is its desire to engage the messy truths of both adolescence and life in general. Here we talk about what it’s like to engage this messy truth, and how to craft it into a story with some kind of form.
Crissa Chappell
Tim Decker
Ellen Hopkins
Amy McNamara
Jessica Verdi
moderator: David Levithan
Wednesday. March 20 (42nd St NYPL, South Court room, 6-8):
Imagination: A Conversation
Description: It’s a given that authors’ minds are very strange, wonderful, twisted, illogical, inventive places. Here we talk to five rather imaginative authors about how they conjure the worlds in their books and the stories that they tell, along with glimpses of the strange and wonderful worlds they are creating at the present.
Holly Black
Lev Grossman
Michelle Hodkin
Alaya Johnson
Robin Wasserman
moderators: David Levithan and Chris Shoemaker
Thursday, March 21:
SOHO Teen night, 6-9pm (Books of Wonder, 18 W18th St)
Celebrate the launch of SOHO Teen, featuring readings by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Joy Preble, Margaux Froley, Elizabeth Kiem, Heather Terrell & Ricardo Cortés, and Lisa & Laura Roecker.
Friday March 22, Symposium (42nd Street NYPL, Berger Forum, 2nd floor, 2-6)
2:00 – Introduction
2:10-3:00: He Said, She Said
Description: Not to be too mysterious, but I will email these authors separately about what I’m thinking for this.
He:
Ted Goeglein
Gordon Korman
Lucas Klauss
Michael Northrop
She:
Susane Colasanti
E. Lockhart
Carolyn Mackler
Sarah Mlynowski
Leila Sales
moderator: David Levithan
3:00-4:00: Taking a Turn: YA Characters Dealing with Bad and Unexpected Choices
Description: In each of these authors’ novels, the main character’s life takes an unexpected twist. Sometimes this is because of a bad choice. Sometimes this is because of a secret revealed. And sometimes it doesn’t feel like a choice at all, but rather a reaction. We’ll talk about following these characters as they make these choices – both good and bad. Will include brief readings illuminating these choices.
Caela Carter
Eireann Corrigan
Alissa Grosso
Terra Elan McVoy
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Elizabeth Scott
K. M. Walton
moderator: Aaron Hartzler
4:00-4:10: Break
4:10-4:40: That’s So Nineteenth Century
Description: A Conversation About Playing with 19th Century Archetypes in the 21st Century
Sharon Cameron
Leanna Renee Hieber
Stephanie Strohm
Suzanne Weyn
Moderator: Sarah Beth Durst
4:40-5:30: Alternate World vs. Imaginary World
Description: Of these authors, some have written stories involving alternate or parallel versions of our world, some have made up imaginary worlds for their characters, and still others have written books that do each. We’ll discuss the decision to either connect the world of a book to our world, or to take it out of the historical context of our world. How do each strategies help in telling story and developing character? Is one easier than the other? Is the stepping off point always reality, or can it sometimes be another fictional world?
Sarah Beth Durst
Jeff Hirsch
Emmy Laybourne
Lauren Miller
E. C. Myers
Diana Peterfreund
Mary Thompson
Moderator: Chris Shoemaker
Friday March 22, Barnes & Noble Reader’s Theater/Signing (Union Square B&N, 33 E 17th St, 7-8:30)
Eireann Corrigan
Elizabeth Eulberg
Jeff Hirsch
David Levithan
Rainbow Rowell
Nova Ren Suma
Saturday March 23, Symposium (42nd Street NYPL, Bergen Forum, 2nd Floor, 1-5)
1:00 – Introduction
1:10-2:10 – Defying Description: Tackling the Many Facets of Identity in YA
Description: As YA literature evolves, there is more of an acknowledgment of the many facets that go into a teenager’s identity, and even categories that once seemed absolute now have more nuance. Focusing particularly, but not exclusively, on LGBTQ characters and their depiction, we’ll discuss the complexities about writing about such a complex experience.
Marissa Calin
Emily Danforth
Aaron Hartzler
A.S. King
Jacqueline Woodson
moderator: David Levithan
2:10-2:40 -- New Voices Spotlight
Description: Each debut author will share a five-minute reading from her or his work
J. J. Howard
Kimberly Sabatini
Tiffany Schmidt
Greg Takoudes
2:40-3:30 – Under Many Influences: Shaping Identity When You’re a Teen Girl
Description: Being a teen girl is to be under many influences – friends, parents, siblings, teachers, favorite bands, favorite boys, favorite web sites. These authors will talk about the influences that each of their main characters tap into – and then talk about what influences them as writers when they shape these characters.
Jen Calonita
Deborah Heiligman
Hilary Weisman Graham
Kody Keplinger
Amy Spalding
Katie Sise
Kathryn Williams
moderator: Terra Elan McVoy
3:30-3:40 – Break
3:40-4:20 – Born This Way: Nature, Nurture, and Paranormalcy
Description: Paranormal and supernatural fiction for teens constantly wrestles with issues of identity and the origin of identity. Whether their characters are born “different” or come into their powers over time, each of these authors uses the supernatural as a way to explore the nature of self.
Jessica Brody
Gina Damico
Maya Gold
Alexandra Monir
Lindsay Ribar
Jeri Smith-Ready
Jessica Spotswood
moderator: Adrienne Maria Vrettos
4:20-5:00 – The Next Big Thing
Description: Again, not to be too mysterious, but I will email these authors separately about what I’m thinking for this.
Jocelyn Davies
Leanna Renee Hieber
Barry Lyga
Maryrose Wood
Saturday March 23: Mutual Admiration Society reading at McNally Jackson (McNally Jackson, Prince Street, 7-8:30):
Sharon Cameron
A.S. King
Michael Northrop
Diana Peterfreund
Victoria Schwab
Nova Ren Suma
hosted by David Levithan
Sunday March 24: Our No-Foolin’ Mega-Signing at Books of Wonder (Books of Wonder, 1-4):
1-1:45:
Jessica Brody (Unremembered, Macmillan)
Marisa Calin (Between You and Me, Bloomsbury)
Jen Calonita (The Grass is Always Greener, LB)
Sharon Cameron (The Dark Unwinding, Scholastic)
Caela Carter (Me, Him, Them, and It, Bloomsbury)
Crissa Chappell (Narc, Flux)
Susane Colasanti (Keep Holding On, Penguin)
Zoraida Cordova (The Vicious Deep, Sourcebooks)
Gina Damico (Scorch, HMH)
Jocelyn Davies (A Fractured Light, HC)
Sarah Beth Durst (Vessel, S&S)
Gayle Forman (Just One Day, Penguin)
Elizabeth Scott (Miracle, S&S)
1:45-2:30
T. M. Goeglein (Cold Fury, Penguin)
Hilary Weisman Graham (Reunited, S&S)
Alissa Grosso (Ferocity Summer, Flux)
Aaron Hartzler (Rapture Practice, LB)
Deborah Heiligman (Intentions, RH)
Leanna Renee Hieber (The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart, Sourcebooks)
Jeff Hirsch (Magisterium, Scholastic)
J. J. Howard (That Time I Joined the Circus, Scholastic)
Alaya Johnson (The Summer Prince, Scholastic)
Beth Kephart (Small Damages, Penguin)
Kody Keplinger (A Midsummer’s Nightmare, LB)
2:30-3:15
A.S. King (Ask the Passengers, LB)
Emmy Laybourne (Monument 14, Macmillan)
David Levithan (Every Day, RH)
Barry Lyga (Yesterday Again, Scholastic)
Brian Meehl (Suck it Up and Die, RH)
Alexandra Monir (Timekeeper, RH)
Michael Northrop (Rotten, Scholastic)
Diana Peterfreund (For Darkness Shows the Stars, HC)
Lindsay Ribar (The Art of Wishing, Penguin)
Rainbow Rowell (Eleanor & Park, St. Martin’s)
Kimberly Sabatini (Touching the Surface, S&S)
Tiffany Schmidt (Send Me a Sign, Bloomsbury)
3:15-4:00
Victoria Schwab (The Archived, Hyperion)
Jeri Smith-Ready (Shine, S&S)
Amy Spalding (The Reece Malcolm List, Entangled)
Stephanie Strohm (Pilgrims Don’t Wear Pink, HMH)
Nova Ren Suma (17 & Gone, Penguin)
Greg Takoudes (When We Wuz Famous, Macmillan)
Mary Thompson (Wuftoom, HMH)
Jess Verdi (My Life After Now, Sourcebooks)
K.M. Walton (Empty, S&S)
Suzanne Weyn (Dr. Frankenstein’s Daughters, Scholastic)
Kathryn Williams (Pizza, Love, and Other Stuff That Made Me Famous, Macmillan)
on meeting Patti Smith, ever so briefly, at Bryn Mawr College
Last evening, at Bryn Mawr College, the multi-media legend Patti Smith was given the 2013 Katharine Hepburn Medal at an absolutely beautifully orchestrated event.
And oh, did she make us cry. From her heart, without prepared words, she spoke directly to us from the stage above about Little Women, Jo March, and a certain season when Patti was twenty-two years old and Katharine Hepburn herself came shopping at Scribner's, where Patti was working. Ms. Hepburn had tied an overlarge man's hat to her head with a green ribbon. She asked for help in locating books. While Patti escorted her down the aisles, Ms. Hepburn would note that Spencer (Tracy) would have loved this book or that, giving Patti (she said, so eloquently, so flawlessly) permission years later to shop for her own husband, even after he had passed on.
Sometimes people really are who they are on the page, and I have never doubted that Patti Smith is the Patti Smith of Just Kids, a book I loved so much (for its integrity, its soulfulness, its ungreen love, its sentences) that I forfeited meetings with writers at a certain Orlando, FL, event so that I could stay in my hotel room and read it. Woolgathering , too, reveals the Patti Smith we met last night.
Patti Smith has, she herself has said, always sought to lessen the distance between herself and her audience. She does. She did. Taking on the obvious questions from passersby during the cocktail and dessert hours, allowing us to exclaim over her, noticing us.
"I like your dress," she said, as I stood near, photographing my friend, Elizabeth Mosier, second photo down, above.
I very rarely like my own clothes. I will always love this dress.
Oh, and in case you are wondering? That bit of graffiti up there does in fact belong to me. I try to stay in the background, whenever I can. But sometimes you just have to tell someone how much you love them.
February 7, 2013
stopping to remark on the slender novels I've loved
Of course I teach, write, and write about memoir. Of course I write, and write about, young adult literature. Of course I take my stab at poems.
But don't think I'm not also in love with, perhaps most deeply admiring of, novels written for adults. Because I have not found a way to do this work myself. Because I don't know how.
Yesterday I raved about Swimming Home . This past weekend, in the Chicago Tribune, Reply to a Letter from Helga. A few weeks ago, The Colour of Milk , and before that You Remind Me of Me, The Orchardist , Boleto , Book of Clouds, Out Stealing Horses, The Disappeared, American Music , The Sense of an Ending , the Alice McDermott novels, the books featured in this yellowing snapshot above (and others). These slender books that devastate with their shimmering, dangerous sentence, structure, form. These books that have left me staggered on the couch.
I don't know what I would do without them, truly. I don't know that I'd have the same faith in humankind if these books were not now in my blood, if they were not (fractionally) mine.
There is still room to do what no one has ever done before. There are still stories untold. I may be getting older, but: there are more stories to be found. Genius abounds.
February 6, 2013
Swimming Home/Deborah Levy: Reflections
I consider it a triumph every time I snare a sensational book and actually read it.
So consider me triumphed again—discovering Swimming Home by Deborah Levy in Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station bookstore (a tiny clutch of a space that has yet to fail my good-book greed) and reading it on the way to Penn and back, then in a fold of early morning hours.
This is the kind of book my friend Karen Rile will be able to explain to me, in full, when she reads it (she has ordered herself a copy). This is the kind of book I love—dangerously intelligent, smashed and dared, big themes on a small stage, more revealed by the brave elisions and planted repetitions, the near repetitions, than most authors can disclose declaratively. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker last year, but that's not why I bought it. I bought it because I stood in that bookstore at just past six in the morning, flipped through, and found lines like this:
Every moment with her was a kind of emergency, her words always too direct, too raw, too truthful.
And:
She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.
And:
Her long thighs were joined to the jutting hinges of her hips like the legs of the dolls she used to bend and twist as a child.
The story is strange and seductive, its images bright. There's the desire to read fast, to know how it all ends (for won't it end calamitously?), but you know you have to read it slow; you know you'll miss everything if you don't. It concerns two vacationing couples, an old villa in Nice, and a young woman named Kitty Finch, a naked anorectic with green painted fingernails and a hunch about nature who is desperate to have Joe, the philandering poet half of one of the couples, read a poem she wrote just for him. There is also a girl named Nina in the mix—Joe's daughter—who is trying (as the reader is trying) to make sense of the rich senselessness.
There is a mediation on the idea of et cetera. Et cetera!
All right. I'm done. Buy it.
February 5, 2013
at Penn today: do you strive against loneliness? words from Beryl Markham
Before my students set out across the campus with camera in hand today, they reflected, among other things, on these words from Beryl Markham, quoted in Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.
I know that I have a good class when the students are willing to disagree, are eager to look at shades and nuances, work their own experience into the equation. I have a very good class.
But what do you think? Does Beryl Markham, in this passage from West with the Night, speak for you? Or is loneliness not quite as abhorrent as she makes it out to be?
You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents—each man to see what the other looked like.
I had a dream; I am a liar
A flight of unexpected corporate work came in, and I was awake most of the night getting it done. At 5:30 AM I thought it might be best to close my eyes for an hour or so, today being a teaching day at Penn. I pulled two blankets to my chin on the downstairs couch and didn't sleep until, suddenly, I was trapped in the net of a flash dream. It went something like this:
I was at a crowded bookstore, doing a Handling the Truth event, which is to say teaching a memoir workshop. A pretty young writer approached, clutching Jane Mendelsohn's magnificent American Music to her breast.
"I so loved this book, thank you for writing it," she said.
"Oh," I said. "It's a lovely book, a beautiful book. But I didn't...."
Interrupting me, the young writer began to speak, in detail, of her book love. I nodded—of course, of course; I had raved about it endlessly myself. "But," I kept saying. "But...." Thwarted time and again in my desire to disclose as she went on and on. Then, interrupting herself, she said, "I guess some author is here for the Handling the Truth event."
I nodded.
Leaning close, she confided, "I'm not staying for that. The book seems a tad overdone."
I never got to say what was true—about American Music, about Truth.
I hate that.
