Beth Kephart's Blog, page 156

Small Damages: The Bookslut Review

Colleen Mondor, author of the Alaskan wilds, fearless reviewer, and famed blogger, has been a constant source of kindness to my books, and on this November morning I am so happy to wake up to her beautiful thoughts on Small Damages, which appear in an article called "A Dose of Reality" in the November issue of Bookslut.



Her final paragraph on the book is this, below.  But I encourage you to read the entire column, which also features Dream School, Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality, Dora: A Headcase, Happy Families, and Baby's in Black.  Colleen, thank you.

Gracefully Kephart steers her protagonist through every emotion, every
question and answer, and the conversations she has with her growing
group of Spanish friends (notable for their wide range of age and
circumstance) only make her journey that much more interesting. The
Spanish setting, beautifully described throughout, adds an air of
gentleness to the book's passages and makes this elegant title a novel
of singular power. There are many books that treat teen pregnancy as a
plot point, but Small Damages gives it the attention it deserves, and a character whose happily-ever-after is wonderful to watch unfold.

Returning to New York City for the Publishing Perspectives YA: What's Next Conference

We have felt—we still feel—paralyzed by the storm.  Those of us who love New York City and the Jersey Shore, those with friends in Connecticut and south, have watched the news and wondered about how those affected will survive the immediate flood waters and losses, and about how we, entrusted with this world, will somehow correct the devastating weather course we are on.  We have thought about those who died in the terror of the moment.



Shortly before the storm hit, I was invited by Dennis Abrams to return to New York City on November 28th for the second Publishing Perspectives conference, this one titled:  "YA: What's Next."  I said yes in a second (ask Dennis).  The first Publishing Perspectives conference was so well conducted, so informative and classy, that it is a thrill to return, this time as a panel moderator, to that Scholastic stage, where Taylor Swift sat in her signature red not so long ago.



I am always grateful on those days when I travel to New York City.  I know I will feel especially grateful for the ground beneath my feet as I make my way to the Scholastic headquarters on Wednesday, November 28, for the half-day event (9 AM to 1 PM).



I'll be moderating the panel, "YA: What's Next," where I'll be joined by David Levithan (author and VP and Publisher at Scholastic Trade), Francine Lucidon (owner of The Voracious Reader Bookstore), and Eliot Schrefer (2012 National Book Award finalist).



The full slate of speakers can be found at the link here. 



Finally, thank you to Ed Nawotka, the editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives, who has published so many of my stories on people who matter in publishing—Ruta Sepetys, Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Lauren Wein, Pamela Paul, Jennifer Brown, Vaddey Ratner, Alane Salierno Mason, Eric Hellman, among them.  Click here to read my most recent story, an interview with 2012 National Book Award finalist Patricia McCormick.

on reading Small Damages through the eyes of an emerging critic

Earlier this afternoon I had the opportunity to sit and read an academic paper written by Jess Ferro, a young woman studying children's literature at the University of Florida who is also the voice behind Alice in Baker Street, a blog focused on books and art for the young.  Jess's paper—beautifully crafted and surprising at so many turns—took, as its central focus, voice, agency, and the use of the pronoun "I" in two young adult books.  One of those books was Judy Blume's Forever.  The other was my own Small Damages.



It is not my place here to share Jess's conclusions; they belong to her.  I would, however, like to take a moment on what is a gray and cold day in these parts to thank Jess for such a close and generous reading of Small Damages.  Teen years are complex; they are hard.  They are shaped by lonely convictions and accidental conversations, by fathers and friends.  I have made it my business, in the stories I write, to represent all the influences, good fortunes, mishaps, and genetic codes that generate character and precipitate both action.  Some novels move quickly.  Some take a little time—make room for back story, strip black and white to grey.  I'll err on the side of time taking each novel out.  It feels far more true to the life that I know.

Envisioning the Future: The Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center Looks Forward

Next Friday evening, I'll be taking part in an event that thrills me—the jurying of a charrette designed to help shape the future of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center.  Some nineteen storytellers—fine artists, museum designers, theatrical performers, lighting, media, and sound experts—are gathering from across the nation to participate in a conversation about this 200-year-old gem's future.  What are the continuing possibilities for a building through which the river literally runs?  How might new space be adapted to teach the thousands of people who tour the Water Works each year about where water goes, how watersheds work, and what happens when the built environment foils Nature's plans?  Who are the constituents for a treasure like this, and how might those numbers be expanded?



I've known Karen Young, the executive director of the Water Works, ever since my story of the Schuylkill, Flow, was published by Temple University Press.  I've heard, from her, about how her unique institution has gathered momentum, reaching out to more than 2,000 school children this past summer alone, and 40,000 visitors annually.  I know how dedicated she is to the life of this city, and how much vision lives within her two very lovely eyes.  This will be, in short, a terrific event.



Among those who have been invited to the charrette are designers and thinkers who have participated in the shaping of the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Franklin Institute, the Mutter Museum, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, Monticello, the University of Pennsylvania, Longwood Gardens, the Smithsonian African American Museum of History and Culture, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Canadian Children's Museum, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and Hidden City Philadelphia. 



I'm lucky to be joining the grand jury that will meet at the day's end.



Look for more on this event—here and elsewhere—soon.

a first raw scene from the Florence novel, for Alice

Next semester at Penn I'll be teaching my memoir class and at the same time working with Alice Ma, whom I selected from a slate of talented students as my Bassini Writing Apprentice, a program hosted by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.  Alice will be working with me on the research of my next novel.  We'll be talking about how fact becomes fiction.



Now nearly 50 pages into the writing of this book, a novel mostly about Florence, I stop to post these few words for Alice.  There are scenes in this novel that flash back to the University of Pennsylvania campus, where my heroine grew up with her professor dad.  We're at the Frank Furness-designed Fisher Fine Arts Library with this small, raw, very new (written an hour ago) scene:

... I remember being five or six or seven.  I remember Mom saying, "Let's go surprise your father."  I remember her taking Jack in one hand and me in the other and walking us down the wide wood steps of our Spruce Street twin and through the leafy corridors of West Philadelphia until we reached the edge of the sleeping giant campus.  We were a parade of three.  We were young and smart, and the campus was silver and brick, moss and ivy, castles and courtyards, and at the far end of our forever journey sat the fine arts library, red and round and tall and chimneyed, fantastic as something from the Brothers Grimm.  That's where Dad would be—through the heavy notched doors and past the turnstile, in the massive reading room.  It was a courtyard space with a roof four stories high.  It was arches and arched southern sun.  It was big books with thin pages and the smell of old things, cracked pencils, eraser nubs.

    "Oh, my loves," Dad would say, "here you are."  As if we'd wakened him from something.  As if history were now.  And my mom would lean toward him and let her long hair fall, like a screen between their love and ours.

  My mother loves my father.  She's just forgotten why.

celebrating Patricia Hampl and other fine memoirists in HANDLING THE TRUTH

In returning the proof pages of Handling the Truth to Gotham yesterday, I relinquished all further control over the story.  No more changes.  No allowable regrets.  The book will soon be set in stone and released next August.



One of my greatest joys, in writing Handling the Truth, was the chance it gave me to celebrate the many memoirs—true memoirs, not autobiographies—that have inspired me throughout the years.  Natalie Kusz is there—the author of the first memoir I ever read.  C.K. Williams.  Marie Arana.  Mary Karr.  Anthony Shadid.  bell hooks.  Katrina Kenison.  Darin Strauss.  Dani Shapiro.  Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  Buzz Bissinger.  Colleen Mondor.  Sy Montgomery.  Chris Offutt.  Elizabeth McCracken.  Lucy Grealy.  So many others. 



But no book about the making of memoir would ever be complete without a celebration of Patricia Hampl, who has done so much to shape the form.  Here, above, is a glimpsed moment.

in the aftermath of Sandy, thoughts on a quiet three-book day

In the stunning aftermath of Sandy, my heart is with those who have
lost so much, my wonder is at the power of sea and storm.  I hear the buzz
of saws teething into the trees that have fallen nearby, the generator
down the street, the school buses returning to duty.



But I feel silent inside.



Today I felt the pressing need to get things done.  To finally read through Handling the Truth one last time and to return it to Gotham.  This, now, is it.  No more changes.  No more second guessing myself.





I wanted, too, to finalize Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent—to
knock away the unpoetic repetitions I'd somehow managed to introduce in
early pages, to erase still-extant grammatical mistakes, to fix things I should have
seen before.   I have no idea how much I'm still not seeing. I've no idea why I'm not smarter, sooner.  But that
book, too, is now done.  Many thanks to Elizabeth Parks for her book design, and to my husband, for his illustrations.



In the midst of this, Monica Kulling sent me word of this beautiful review of Small Damages over on Sal's Fiction Addiction.
A reminder, among other things, that we do finally "finish" books, or,
at least, we grow capable of living with them in bound form.



I still find that hard to do, after all these years, but there are more important things in this terrifying, wonderful world.  

My City, My River, early afternoon, after the worst was behind us

We returned our son to the city in the early afternoon.  His apartment had power.  Our house did not.  On the way back, I snapped these photos of the river that I love—high and deep grey blue.



I am in awe of nature.  I am grateful that when the sky lit up last night and the winds howled heinously the three ancient trees that fell in these parts hurt no one.  I am grateful for the men in bright orange jackets who stood in ladder buckets minutes ago and got us back to heat and light.



I am thinking of those who are not as fortunate. I thinking of our Jersey Shore.

My interview with Patricia McCormick, in Publishing Perspectives

On this dark and windy (and quite wet) day, I'm so proud to have my interview with Patricia McCormick featured in Publishing Perspectives.  Patty, newly and justly nominated for the National Book Award for Never Fall Down, talks here about the making of this incredibly important book.  The interview begins like this, below, and can be read in its entirety here.  I interviewed Patty long before her book was nominated, by the way.  I just had a feeling.



Anyone who confuses young adult literature with simple kids’ stuff
has not read Patricia McCormick. A former journalist with an
investigator’s eye and an astute sense of social justice, McCormick’s
novels for younger readers have taken her into a residential treatment
center (Cut), the harrowing world of sexual slavery in India (Sold), the Iraq War (Purple Heart), and the killing fields of Cambodia (Never Fall Down). 
McCormick wants us to know; she wants us to see.  She wants to teach us
something about this world, but she is no sermonizer.  She’s a poet, in
fact, this Patricia McCormick, writing of split worlds with lacerating
precision, daring prose, and devastating beauty.



McCormick’s most recent book, the National Book Award finalist Never Fall Down (Balzer
+ Bray/HarperCollins), is a collaboration — a novel inspired by the
real life of Arn Chorn-Pond. Swept into the Khmer Rouge’s brutal
reeducation program, separated from his family in a series of labor
camps, and bullied into being someone he might have never imagined could
exist, Arn nonetheless survives, thanks in part to his talent for music
and his refusal to lay down and die. Arn does not emerge from the book
as an innocent. His shame is palpable, his losses many. As his
interviewer, friend, and fellow traveler, McCormick’s greatest gift to
Arn is the gift she has always brought her readers—her faith in the
truth.

The winds howl here, the rain slams down,

and I am infinitely grateful that my beautiful son has come home for the storm—that he has made it safely here following a get-away weekend with friends a few hours west.  He'll leave his city apartment and his city while the rains fall. 



I have danced the tango/rumba with my husband, vaguely impersonating Cher, for the DanceSport showcase.  I didn't fall down.



I have seen my students at Penn and read from Handling the Truth.  I was so grateful.



I have spent an evening with the beloved Bellseseses, as we like to call them.  And oh, how we laugh.



I have talked to friends and family.



It is time to hunker down.


Safety to you all.



And love.