Beth Kephart's Blog, page 147

the YoungArts writers and me, after our morning in the garden

I have ignored many things this week, but that has to be okay.  I'll get caught up.  I always do.



My heart and mind and thoughts were here, with the fabulous YoungArts writing finalists of 2013.



While away, Serena Agusto-Cox whispered word of this goodness into my virtual ear.  I can't tell you how much it means to me to know that Small Damages continues to find its generous readership.

The YoungArts Writers Read

Last evening, the 24 young writers selected to participate in the National YoungArts Foundation's week-long celebration of emerging talent read from their work to an audience of young dancers, film makers, photographers, musicians, singers, visual artists, actors. Also parents. Also teachers. Also YoungArts panelists. Also me.

I had arrived by bus. I had sat alone and waited, eager for the room to hush so that the writers might have their moment. I'd been enjoying these kids since I'd arrived to Miami a few days before. Escorted them to a photo shoot in the warm Miami breeze (aquamarine and pearl sea at their backs, the hairy fringe of a nearby palm tree). Stood among them beneath a shifting sun on a skirt of green in a garden. Joined their sprawl in this Deauville hotel lobby (the Beatles sang here once, Frank Sinatra, too) as they waited throughout the week for buses to take them to the shows orchestrated on behalf of other talent. I had come as a so-called "master writer." So called, I say. Because the second we seriously think of ourselves as a master is the second we become lost. I'm a person who happens to love language and stories, and so these 23 girls and one tall boy are my kin. They are fellow travelers, and I was in Miami, traveling with them.

I was talking about their show. I was saying that I sat there alone, waiting. That in time the parents of one of these exceptional souls came and sat beside me, having traveled all the way from Alabama for the privilege. I was saying that these writers finally made their way into the crowded room and promenaded up the side aisles and chatter-clucked some kind of spoken-word song. And then they all sat down until one of them rose (that sparkle-lidded blonde with the snakes in her hair) and began, without a tremor, to read. Or maybe she was tremor-ing inside, maybe, as she told me later, she had folded herself into yoga holds to give her words traction over nerves. Or maybe the tremors, the reverbs, the afraid to be heard and wanting to be heard, the pausing and speaking because they all must be heard, was what this show was for.

Do I need to say it? Will you believe me? They were brilliant. Oh, yes. They were.

Afterward, I found them outside the performance center—bright jewels perched on a half band of stone. Afterward, I hugged them, embraced them, said, again, yes. And again, yes. And again: You were.

They were.

I'm telling you this—one thing more. They, forever, will be.

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YoungArts Miami

I'm working on five hours' sleep in the last three days. I don't trust myself with words. But can I just say how beautiful these young artists of the National YoungArts Foundation program are? How happy they've made me?

I believed that I would meet exceptional young people in Miami. I have.

That's all I can say at the moment.

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pondering a new art (pottery)

Yesterday I wrote here about not writing—how there will now be a long stretch of time when my in-progress novel slumbers.  Things are what things must be.  The real world calls.



Thanks to a gift from my husband, however, I will still make time, a few hours each week, to make something new.  I won't be using words.  I'll be using my hands.  Think of me (beside my husband) at a pottery wheel.  I'm thinking of this as a necessary relief valve in a life that will have me working through many a night. 



I'll share what I learn about hands and craft here.  As I (hopefully) learn it.

the answer to the question: which two teen books were named by teens as influential?

A few days ago I made reference here to books that appeared on lists prepared for me by the twenty-four uber-talented teen writers selected for the National YoungArts program, being held this week in Miami.  I'd asked the young writers for the names of books that had changed their idea of story, on the one hand, and their idea of language, on the other.  Only two had been published for teens. 



I then asked you, my faithful blog readers, what you thought those two titles might be. 


The first, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, was guessed by many of you.  The book that did not appear in your comments was the second—Maggie Stiefvater's Scorpio Races.  I'm spending some time thinking about all this—and I'll be reporting back on my thoughts as they come into clearer focus.



Thanks to all of you for playing along with me.  I'll post another contest soon, so that that promised copy of Small Damages finds its proper home.

I'm headed to YoungArts in Miami. Take a look at some of what has happened already!

writing, now, will wait for me

It will be a long time now—months—before I am able to return to my own work, my Florence novel.  This is the height of my busy season—the teaching at Penn, the annual reports and magazines for clients, the taxes that I must sort through and pay.



I have learned to live with stepping away from the writing for awhile.  I have come to believe that it makes the work better.  At the very least, not being able to write for such a long stretch renders me incredibly grateful when the writing window opens.  Perhaps because I must fight so hard for personal time, writing never feels like work to me.  It always feels like privilege.



Every day now, on the way to my client work, I will walk past this windowsill.  To the left, the leather book I made in a workshop in Florence; the leather master is a character in my book.  Just past the Santa Fe skull, the gift my son gave me for Christmas—his favorite view of Philadelphia, our shared city, set down by a local artist.  Beside that, a glorious etching bought for me by my friend Alyson Hagy. Complexity, she says, she favors, she sees.  Which is never the same as complication. 



I will not be writing, not for a while now.  But I will remember, thanks to these artifacts, this art, these people in my life, that writing is still possible.  That it waits for me.

Small Damages is kindly included in Florinda's end-of-year list

Between the cracks of time, between the race down aisles, between the morning hours and the evening hours, Florinda and I find time for books; we find time for each other.  Coasts apart, we coax our curly hair.  Time zones separated, we nonetheless are friends.



And once she was my own personal BEA publicist.  Seriously.  She saw an opportunity.  She took it on.  It was a shining moment.



Today I am especially grateful to be included in her masterful list of year-end books read and loved over at her blog The 3Rs.  I won't spoil any of it for you.  Go take a look, see what she read and what she thought.  You'll be glad you did.

Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me, and the teen selects contest

Yesterday morning, as I finished preparing for my YoungArts master class, I asked readers of this blog to imagine which two teen books these hyper-talented young writers had named as being influential; all other books on their shared lists had been written and published for adults.



Many of you properly guessed The Book Thief, which was not, of course, originally written for teens but was marketed in this country to that age group.  None of you have guessed the second.  Since there is a prize associated with that post, I'm going to wait until I return from Miami to see if any of you might make a right second guess.



Keep thinking.



In the meantime, I have been trying to catch up on some of the adult books the teens referenced.  I'd read many of them previously, but not all. Two days ago, I purchased four and gave myself permission to sit down and read.



First read is a book so long on my list that I am embarrassed that it took a teen to finally nudge me across the threshold.  You Remind Me of Me, a novel told in the cracks between non-chronological time, through the perspective of multiple characters, with language palpable and thrilling, is Dan Chaon's gift to the world—one of many.  It made me wish that I taught fiction at Penn, in addition to memoir, so that I could insist my students read it.  This is the story of two brothers and their search for one another.  This is the story of lonesomeness and homelessness—empty conditions, poor places.  And while there is a sadness in what happens here, there is a greatness, too, and Lord, you know that I love music that sings.  You Remind Me of Me is, from lush end to lush end, a song.

It was like a game of solitaire.  What is a relationship between two people? he thought.  How is it accomplished?  The sun came in through slats on the blinds.  The trailer was full of small thick-bodied gray moths, Millers, they were called, clustered on the windowsills, beating their wings lethargically.  He scooped them up by the handful and put them outside, where they fluttered in the dusty gravel that was his lawn.

Brendan James sings The New Plan, in memory of Sandy Hook

Three winters ago, during a little girl's birthday party, I met Brendan James, an extraordinary singer/songwriter.  If you don't know his work, take the time.


Friday a friend wrote, out of the proverbial blue, to say that he loved a particular Brendan James song.  Brendan James? I wrote back.  Yes.  Michael's note prompted me to write to the little girl's mother, and in return, that mother sent me this—a brand-new song from this talented artist, written in the wake of Sandy Hook.



Listen.