Beth Kephart's Blog, page 155

a few words from my Berlin novel

Today, I'm thinking about my Berlin novel (Berlin, circa 1983) even as I write corporate story upon story and sneak in the daily 200 words on Florence.  Berlin is the book I wrote for Tamra Tuller, the book, indeed, that I've dedicated to her and that remains with her as she begins what I know will be a storied career at Chronicle Books.  Sometimes we miss our characters.  Today I'm missing my Ada and her best friend, Arabelle.  I'm missing the conversations Tamra and I had about this city we both love.



And so I return them to myself:




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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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The
snow that melted during the day has slicked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The piles of snow that Timur shoveled to each side are dirty
white walls, zigging and crusted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> 
</span>I ride a crooked path across the cobblestones and out of the gates onto
the street and turn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>St. Thomas
Church shines in the distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> 
</span>There’s mush and ice and cars and music coming from the bar down the
alley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Beneath the wide wheels of
Arabelle’s bike the ice snaps and the mush goes squish and when a gray cat
scampers out from behind a parked truck and I swerve, the belt of Arabelle’s
arms around me tightens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>I’m
yanked back and my boot slips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>The
front wheel wobbles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>I get us
going again and look up and back at our complex, and there she is, Mutti in the
window, her face in a halo of frosted glass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></div>
</blockquote>
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Frank Gehry: YoungArts Master Class

I'm addicted to watching these YoungArts master class films (first aired on HBO).  See what happens when Frank Gehry invites five young visual artists to design a city for a million people, and then five individual buildings.  He makes things impossible for them.  That's part of the plan.

Edward Albee teaches aspiring authors at YoungArts

Those who love the arts and love to watch young talent absorbing the making of art really must watch the YoungArts series that celebrates the idea and act of mentorship.  This is a link to Edward Albee teaching four YoungArts writers.  Other programs in this series feature Bill T. Jones, Julian Schnabel, Frank Gehry, Liv Ullmann, and Renee Fleming teaching what they know to those who yearn to know it.



Watching these segments this evening I feel even more honored that I will be joining the YoungArts program in Miami this coming January as a writing instructor. 



Oh, the things I will learn.

the Philadelphia Inquirer review of Small Damages

When the Philadelphia Inquirer contacted me earlier in the week seeking a photograph for a planned review of Small Damages, I tried very hard not to panic.  I have been so extraordinarily blessed with this book—that it found the right home, that it introduced me to people I will always love, that it was sent out into the world with such care.  I'd felt lucky enough, felt as if I could, indeed, not hope for any more luck.



I thought I'd be brave enough not to look for the review.  But this morning, unable to work, my thoughts in knots, I (my heart pounding in my throat as it does) did.



And I have been graced with extraordinary goodness. Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans read and thought deeply.  She understood what it was that I'd hoped to achieve.  She wrote beautifully.



I am so grateful.  The review can be found here.




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the sun was just right: last evening at the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center

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Remembering Ghosts in the Garden (with a huge thank you to Ed Goldberg) and Small Damages

I had only just returned from Florence and was still adjusting to the hours and the lack of pasta when Ed Goldberg, now a long-time friend, read my fifth book, Ghosts in the Garden , and shared his thoughts on his blog, Two Heads Together.  Ed is the kind of guy who never shouts and will not boast and does not stomp his feet or pop his bubble gum to get attention.  Only yesterday did he whisper in my ear:  Beth, I read that book.



And so he did, reinvigorating for me, in his thoughtful, surprising way, a book I wrote when I fully believed I was writing my last.  Writing is hard on the psyche—not making the books (I am dangerously addicted to the making of books), but living with them when they are out in the world.  They're not going to please everyone, nor should they.  Some will say that kindly, some will say it cruelly, some may veer from the truth, some may hurt people you love. You have to live with that, when you write books, and in writing Ghosts, I felt myself fading, vanishing toward another life, searching for another art to believe in. 



That was too many books ago, but it was a time I remember well and a feeling to which I often return. Ghosts in the Garden is a wandering, wondering book. I remain a wanderer and a wonderer, never precisely sure.



Just as Ed whispered in my ear yesterday, Jessica Shoffel, my beloved Philomel publicist, wrote to share the news that The Repository, a newspaper out of Canton, OH, had celebrated Small Damages as a novel "Worth Your Time."  Michael Green, Philomel's head honcho, wrote something Michael-ishly funny, after that.  But we're not telling.  Not a chance.    [image error]

celebrating one of the great independent bookstores of Italy (in Florence)

Just before I left for Florence, Ed Nawotka, editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives and bold instigator of the upcoming YA: What's Next conference (mark your calenders for November 28; I'll be there moderating), asked if I might stop by a Florentine bookstore and find out what is happening among Italian and expat readers, and the brave proprietors who cater to them.  "Sure," I said, not at all certain that I'd find the proper spot or willing participants.  But that's just the kind of fearless reporter I am.



From the moment we deboarded at Santa Maria Novella, I was on the hunt.  Three days into my trip I'd chosen my store—the Paperback Exchange, located in the shadows of the Duomo.  Here was a store owned by an American-born woman and her Italian husband that catered to a special kind of readership and bowed to no one's dictates.  I spent parts of two mornings in the store interviewing and taking photographs and continued the conversation online.



My story, which runs today and can be found here, begins like this:

FLORENCE: I wanted to walk where Dante might have walked, wanted to
stand where Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Uccello,
and Ghiberti might have stood, wanted to make a visit to Galileo’s tomb,
and so I went to Florence. I found the rare alleys the tour guides
neglected, the time-burnished side-street churches, the sun-wedged
cloisters that are, miraculously, silent. I ate where the real
Florentines eat and photographed the city at dawn and then again at
midnight, when it was most like itself, or, at least, most like I had
imagined it would be. Fewer umbrella-led tours. More room to breathe.



And then I set out for one of the best-loved Anglo-American bookstores in all of Italy — Paperback Exchange,
just off the Piazza del Duomo — to find out what people like me read
when visiting or living in a city like Florence. There I found owners,
Emily Rosner (of New York) and her husband Maurizio Panichi (a
Florentine), who have been trading in books and real conversation since
1979.

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the breath of fresh air that is Herman Wouk's new book, The Lawgiver

Today (and I report this breathlessly) I fell in love with Herman Wouk.  Sure, he's well into his nineties now, and yes, the world already claims him for his many masterpieces:  The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. I'm absolutely unoriginal with my little reader crush, but guess what?  I recently received an early copy of Wouk's latest, The Lawgiver, courtesy of his publisher, and let me get right to this:



It sings.



It sings not just once or twice, but on every page.  It is buoyant, and it is new.  It's the story of a man (Herman Wouk) who wants to write the Moses novel.  It's also the story of the mega-billionaire and the writer-director and the lawyer and the wife and the everybody else who gets in Wouk's way, pulling him into and out of some kind of grand movie scheme, wrapping him into their madness.  We get Wouk's notes on Wouk, Skype transcripts, file memos, text messages, newspaper blips, and gloriously clever notes on what a Moses movie might be.  We get confidential imaginings marched out for the world to see and promises made to be broken and little cracks about ninety-ish men, who may not do too well with curry and beer but are still as clever as any Gangnam dancing teen.



If The Lawgiver sounds, from my description, scattered, it is in fact anything but.  It is the finest epistolary novel I've read—suspenseful, human, hysterical, tender, a dose of something lively for an era gone glass-eyed with Twitter and TV.  I have been sitting here reading with a smile on my face.  The handwritten marginalia are fine.  The savvy Moses history zings.  The little loving that goes on between young people and the much less young is both old- and new-fashioned.  I don't think this book should be explained.  I'm not going to excerpt it.  And so it must be read. 

Small Damages sells to France, is buoyed by friends

The inimitable Michael Green sent word earlier today that Small Damages has been bought by the French publishing house La Martiniere Group, for a paperback release.  This makes me very happy—and warrants a snowflake dance.  (The snow had already started its rumba-tango outside my window when Michael's note pinged in.)


At nearly the same time I learned that author (!) and blogger Danielle Smith, pictured here to my far left, had nominated Small Damages for a Cybils Award in Young Adult Fiction.  Moments later, Florinda Pendley Vasquez, whom Danielle and I are flanking in this BEA photo, wrote to let me know that she cast a write-in vote for Small Damages in the YA Fiction category of the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards.



I feel enormously blessed by all of this, but mostly I feel blessed by such friendships.  Those are what carry us through, on the good days and the lesser ones. I never lose sight of my fine friendship luck. 


Thank you.

we are Americans today

At the gym, over email, on Facebook, in the streets, they're asking:  Have you voted?



I love the shape of the question, and its urgency.  I love how, today, we are given the right to choose.  I have not always (or, indeed, often) loved this political season—the sponsored attacks and the sly ones, the certain swagger in uncertain times.  It seems to me that, no matter where we stand or how we were raised, we must be united in three things:  compassion for others, concern for our planet, a favoring of peace over war.  We want no one standing in the cold without shelter.  We want a future for our children.  We want an intelligent discourse about resources.  We want to be honorable in a roiling world.



Let us vote our hearts and minds and then, come tomorrow, work together.