Beth Kephart's Blog, page 149

one last time, last night—the Kephart family says goodbye to Aronimink

Last evening, my husband, son, and I joined my father for a final meal at the club that has been part of the Kephart tradition for more than thirty years.  All three Kephart children celebrated their weddings at Aronimink; my mother, brother, and sister celebrated their graduations there; my mother held an annual party for those who participated in her Great Decisions club; my mother's memorial lunch was held here.  There were Easters and Fourth of Julys.  There was, years ago, tennis, and sometimes I, better at the backhand than the forehand, even won.



But all good things do finally come to an end, and last night we raised our glasses to years spent and memories made. 



Here is my father, standing by the fire.

finding a thousand words, in Florence

I return to Florence and find a thousand words.


















Florence
is a chessboard.  The Vespa is
speed.  We rev north so that we
can squeal back south on streets ignored by tourists.  We cross the Arno at the Santa Trinita bridge and head up
Via Maggio toward the east end of the Pitti Palace. 
The tips of my fingers throb with the far end of a heartbeat, and I
don’t ask questions, just watch the skies and also the kids in their red
and yellow puddle boots. 

Les Mis. Oh, yes.

My favorite musical of all time, beautifully staged, acted, sung.  My gift to me this Christmas week. 


See it if you haven't yet. 

A glimpse at my muses, and I'm not a whole human being if I can't (every now and then) get some writing done.

I can never quite shake the guilt when I write my own stories.  There are so many other things that I'm supposed to do, so many promises made, so many clients, asking.  But I also know that I can't go more than a few weeks at a time without at least checking in on my characters, their city, their story in progress.  I feel physically ill when too much not-writing has gone on.  I have a hard time with purpose.



Today, with the rain and the dark, with Christmas done and the next big cooking event a day or two off, I walked past the piles of others' books that have accumulated here the past few weeks, ignored client work, didn't dust, and slipped inside my office.  My muses live here—a fabric doll from Asheville, a mask from San Miguel, a collection of painted faces from Venice, an African giraffe, an old spinning wheel, my books of poems, a box from Tamra.  My Florence novel, half written in a fury since October, has been frozen on my desktop since early December. 



The moment I reentered that fictional space, my heart stopped doing that anxious amusement-park thing that it does.  I didn't write much; I couldn't.  I remembered, however.  That was enough.

Dangerous Neighbors (paperback) and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: two upcoming releases

In just a few days, Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial Philadelphia novel, will be released by Egmont USA as a paperback, with a bound-in teacher's guide.  A few weeks after that, in mid-February, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an 1871 Philadelphia novel that features Dangerous Neighbors' own best-loved boy, William, will be released by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.



Dr. Radway's introduces, among many other Philadelphia places, Eastern State Penitentiary.  In this scene (below) William and his best friend, Career, are making their way toward the old prison, which was known back then as Cherry Hill.  They're going to keep William's father company, in the only way they know how.



The image above was taken two years ago, when I was in the midst of my research for this book.


















Career pulls a
stone out of his trouser pocket, drops it to the street, and kicks it ahead to
William, who smacks it crosswise and up, stepping back to let two twin girls in
dresses like pink parasols pass, their mother stern in blue.  Career lopes and knocks the stone to where
William would be if he wasn’t still staring at the girls, both of them with the
identical ginger hair and jewel eyes, neither somehow like the other.  Neither, mostly, like the mother, who
casts her opinion on William and hurries her exotic procession along.  

William feels the
heat in his face and runs for the stone. 
He smacks it hard Career’s way. 
The game stays good between them now—past Spring Garden and Brandywine,
Green, Mt. Vernon, Wallace, all the way to Cherry Hill, where finally they stop
and stand in the long skirt of the prison’s shadows, its massive gothic
gloom.  Cherry Hill runs the full
block and back, two-hundred feet in the east-west direction, four crenellated
towers on its front face and a watchman high, looking for trouble. Career works
another match into the shallow bowl of his pipe, and it takes.  The tobacco flares sweet. 

“You going to call
to him, then?” Career asks, after a while.

“Walls too thick.”

“You going to try
it anyway?”

            “Your
whistling,” William says, “goes a longer way.”

Career blows the
smoke of his pipe through the spaces between his teeth.  He clears his throat and finds his
song, and it carries.  William
closes his eyes and imagines his Pa inside—past the vaulted doors and the iron
gates, beneath the eye of the warden, and of God.  People are puny at Cherry Hill.  People are locked away to consider what they’ve done.

“You think he can
hear that?” Career asks now, stopping his song.

“Keep on.”

Career picks the
song back up, and William stands there in the shadows, at his best friend’s
side, trying to see Pa in his mind’s eye.   “Don’t do it, Pa,” Francis had warned him, Ma,
mostly.  Don’t, don’t, don’t. 

Career whistles a
professional melody.  William hears
what he thinks is the wind, but it’s that bird winging in close, that dove
tucking its wings then letting them go, its rise and its angling in
effortless.  Career stops his song
and looks up.  The bird goes on,
north and west—a free line across the prison wall and out, toward the river.

Cherry Hill still
locked up tight as a vault. 

Invisibility: Andrea Cremer and David Levithan/Reflections

This is how it happens:  I write an adult book that Laura Geringer discovers and reads; she gets in touch.  For a year Laura and I talk about how ill-equipped I feel I am to write books for young adults.  A conversation in a Philadelphia restaurant changes everything; I am persuaded to try.  I write what will become several books for Laura, and in the midst of story development, copy editing, cover design, and publicity, I meet Jill Santopolo—utterly adorable, fashion savvy, super smart, wildly well-organized, and Laura's second in command at Laura Geringer Books/HarperTeen, where I will write four books, one of them (The Heart is Not a Size) being Jill's very own.  Then one day Jill calls to say that she is headed to Philomel to join a children's book empire carved out by a man named Michael Green.  I'd really like Michael, Jill says.  She hopes I'll eventually meet him.



(She is right.  And I do.  Facts made true in reverse order.)



A few years later, I see Jill again, this time at an ALA event, where she slips me a copy of Between Shades of Gray and whispers two words in my ear:  Tamra Tuller.  Jill and Tamra are, by now, colleagues at Philomel, and Tamra edits the kind of books I like to write.  Jill, looking trademark gorgeous, encourages me to read Ruta Sepetys' international bestseller of a debut novel as proof.  I do.  Again, I am persuaded.  Not long afterwards, I have the great privilege of joining the Philomel family when Tamra reads a book I've been working on for ten years and believes that it has merit. Jill has opened her new home to me, and I am grateful.



What happens next is that Tamra moves to Chronicle and I, with a book dedicated to her because I do love her that much, move to Chronicle, too.  What happens next is Jill and I remain friends (Jill and I and Michael and Jessica, too (not to mention Laura)).  Which is all a very long way of saying how happy I was to receive two of Jill's newest creations just a few weeks ago.  Last night and early this morning I read the first of them.  It's called Invisibility, it's due out in May, and it is co-authored by Jill's fabulously successful Philomel author, Andrea Cremer (The Nightshade Series) and the big-hearted author/editor/sensation/Lover's Dictionary Guru David Levithan.



I hear David Levithan—his soulfulness, his tenderness, his yearning, his love—when I read this book. I hear Andrea Cremer—her careful and credible world building, her necessary specificity, her other-worldly imagination.  It's a potent combination in a story about a Manhattan boy whom no one in the world can see.  No one, that is, except for the girl who has moved in down the hall—a girl who has escaped Minnesota with a brother she deeply loves and a mother who cares for them both, but must work long hours to keep her transplanted family afloat.  Cremer and Levithan's Manhattan is tactile, navigable, stewing with smells and scenes.  Their fantasy world—spellcraft, curses, witches, magic—is equally cinematic and engaging.  The love between the invisible boy and the seeing (and, as it turns out, magically gifted) girl feels enduring, and then there's that other kind of love—between Elizabeth and her brother—that gives this story even greater depth and meaning.  The parents aren't nearly bad either (not at all).



What it is to be invisible.  What it is to see and be seen.  What it is to know there is evil in the world and that any strike against it will scar and (indeed) age those who take a stand.  Invisibility is a fantasy story, but it is more than that, too.  It's a growing-up story in which courage, truth-telling, sacrifice, and vulnerability figure large, and in which love of every kind makes a difference. 

the Christmas Eve meal (a middle of the day feast)

(dessert, and church, and gifts are later.  perhaps I'll go take an elf-like nap.)

Christmas at two years old, with my grandmother and brother

She was born Margaret D'Imperio, but was known as Peggy to her friends.  I called her Grandmom, and I knew that she, like her son, my Uncle Danny, loved me through and through.  I never doubted that.  They never gave me cause.  In their presence we were happy.



Here I am with Grandmom and my brother.  I'm two years old, standing proudly on my new stool, a Christmas gift.  I scanned this photo this morning from the wooden album my father gave me to after my own mother passed away.



We have a certain understanding of the holidays, shaped by the people we have loved.  When they are gone, nothing ever seems quite right again.  I have a small family myself now—a beautiful husband and son.  Today I'll cook for them as if I'm cooking for a gathering of many.  I'll light the house with candles, fill the house with song.  But all along I will be remembering those more joyfully crowded Christmases, and the people I have lost over the course of a long and ever-rich life.

Hyde Park on Hudson

Critics have liked and not liked "Hyde Park on Hudson."  Yesterday, at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute (where, just the day before, I'd seen "The Silver Linings Playbook") I leaned more toward the like—not caring if Bill Murray looked or talked precisely like FDR, not worrying about shifts in point of view, not needing (as much as many have needed) a definitive, end-of-tale summation of characters' real feelings.  There's this funny thing about feelings.  They change.  They're rarely definitive.



"Hyde Park on Hudson" is about a weekend during which the king and queen of England visited FDR at his mother's home while his mistresses, wife, and indomitable mother looked on.  It's about how hot dogs humanized a stuttering king.  It's about how humor saved two afflicted leaders.  It's about loving someone who cannot be owned. 



There are considered lines in this film, a few excellent scenes, some gorgeous landscapes.  I was glad I had chosen to take my husband on this late-afternoon movie date in the midst of Christmas madness.


Watch the trailer.  See what you think.

our homemade holiday wishes—for all of you