Beth Kephart's Blog, page 170

My husband's art (3)

Scott



For more on what this image is, how it was made, and why I love it, go here. 

Click on the image to see it in bright detail. 

My husband's art (2)

Jan

Lana and Tirsa


You know how it is when you wait and wait and wait to share a (good) secret?  That's how I always feel when I'm waiting to showcase my husband's art on my humble blog. 


This work is months in the making.  It all began with a photo shoot at DanceSport Academy and features our talented, beautiful friends—Jan, Lana, Scott, Tirsa—whom Bill photographed against a green background.  Everything else in these images—the furniture, the hats, the mannequins, the cloth, that pair of legs—was fashioned with a variety of 3D software tools, about which I know nothing.



I just know that I'm amazed, all the time, by what Bill does.

Zenobia, the Dutch version.

When your heart has been pounding, like my heart has been pounding, when you're averaging five corporate stories a day and still behind, when the Zumba ladies ask you if you are a size bigger than you thought you were (could this be from sitting on your bum all day?), you see the mail truck drive up and you run.  First, to get that dress size down.  Second, for some relief.



Today, my running relief revealed a package that contained the Dutch edition (Sdu Uitgevers) of ZENOBIA, the corporate fable I penned with Matt Emmens, a good friend through all these years and now the chairman of the board of Shire, the international bio-pharma company.  The illustrations (my husband's work) look exactly the same as they do in the English-language version.



The words?  Not so much.



Matt, did you ever think we'd be so multiply translated?  I hope this makes you happy today.

Appleton and Tasha, BookBrowse and Tamara, Serena and Small Damages

Two years ago, in Appleton, WI, I had what will always remain one of the happiest few days in my writing life.  I'd been invited to the Appleton Book Festival, and I had nine official events in two-and-half days—teaching memoir in libraries, talking about the future with high school students, standing on big stages in middle school auditoriums to address entire student bodies, taking over a lovely green-rugged library, working one-on-one with rising poets, talking to the darling editors of school newspapers, consulting with a boy who wanted me to write his personal story.  Everywhere I went I was received with such open-hearted goodness, and one morning, in the elevator, I met Ted Kooser, that laureate poet, and told him how I had read his poems to my mother during her final days.  I loved Appleton with a passion. I walked her river in the few hours when I wasn't teaching and ate alone at night in a restaurant that soon felt like my own.  These were, in so many ways, perfect days.



Yesterday, my friend Serena Agusto-Cox wrote to tell me that an Appleton librarian named Tasha (of Waking Brain Cells) had read Small Damages and had very kind things to say.  (Serena sends word of kind reviews from time to time, and because of her, I get to thank the reviewers.)  Tasha's beautiful words are deeply moving; they epitomize the graciousness of her city.



Late last night, meanwhile, I received an email from Tamara Smith, who had interviewed me so graciously about the role of landscape in my work (and mind) a few weeks ago.  Tamara's BookBrowse review of Small Damages had gone live, and she was writing to let me know.  The review is breathtaking—and it, too, says as much about the person behind the review as it does about the story I tried to tell.  Perhaps even more.



A morning hug, to you all.

Raw to the Bone: Putting the Springsteen Paper to Rest

Yes, it has obsessed me, but it is done.  "Raw to the Bone:  Transported to Truth and Memory by Springsteen's River Songs" is written at last, and it will slumber now, until September, when I will have the great pleasure of joining April Lindner, Jane Satterfield, Ned Balbo, and Ann Michael at the Glory Days Symposium at Monmouth University.  This blog will now return to its regularly scheduled (ha, I never schedule anything) program.



From the paper:

The music will rise through the
soles of my feet.  It will scour,
channel, silt, and further rise.  
In the dark cavern of my hips it will catch and swish.  Outside, perhaps, the stars have come
up, and probably the deer have vanished, and maybe the cicadas are rumbling
around in their own mangled souls. 
But inside, a river churns, widens, roars, and steeps, and I am dancing
Springsteen.    

A conversation with Lynn Rosen/Publishing Business Today

Speedy does not begin to define Lynn Rosen, the content director of Publishing Business Today, an industry newsletter that reaches 30,000 subscribers.



In fact, I don't know the word, so I'll tell you a story.



Lynn emailed me this afternoon around 2:45, say.  By 3:15, we were on the phone, chatting.  Shortly after that I chased after some corporate work, got into the car, sped off to Ardmore, learned a new dance step with John Larson, and got back into the car. My phone was blinking.  It was Lynn.  The interview is up, she said.


I don't even know how she did that, but there it is.  Lynn has always had many talents.  I'm grateful that she has shared hers with me today. 


The interview—which talks about Small Damages, the power of trusting your publishing house, "instant" success, and (I blush) sleep—can be found here.

Small Damages Nominated for YALSA's 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults

Small Damages has been nominated for YALSA's 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults, and this makes me so happy.  I wish I knew who to thank for this.  Someone, out there, has made this happen, and I would thank you, if I could.


So, gracias, whomever you are, and congratulations to my friends who are also on this list.  I love being in your community. 

Bruce Springsteen on Flannery O'Connor and inner meanness

"The really important reading that I did began in my late twenties, with authors like Flannery O'Connor.  There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about.  They were a big, big revelation.  She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn't be getting it.  It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she'd left the hole there, that hole that's inside of everybody.  There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own.  She knew original sin—knew how to give it the pesh (sic) of a story.  She had talent and she had ideas, and the one served the other."



Bruce Springsteen in conversation with Will Percy, for DoubleTake Magazine (Spring 1998)



(Do you remember DoubleTake?  How I loved that magazine.  The photograph above is of Asbury Park, taken in winter, a few years back.)

shattering the old writer's block: just do it

To hell with the self-imposed fear.  To hell with worrying that the next thing you write won't be the last thing you wrote.  To hell with wondering if you know enough (again), if your soul can shine up new, if you have the surge of words fast churning within.



You grab an EnerGel 0.5 mm ball Needle Point and that book of empty pages a printer friend once gave to you.  You tip the blades of the window fan.  You lie or you slouch or you dream and you wait. 



And you wait.



And something you think you might like (thank you, Bruce) at last comes streaming in.



Walk away before you're even close to done.  Leave it be, let it stew.  Go to sleep that night with a little faith, just a little.  Let the faith wake up with you.

Join us at the 2012 PAYA Festival: the full author list

Skyanne Fisher has been doing her usual top-notch, heroic-caliber organization of the Pennsylvania Young Adult Book Festival (we call it PAYA), and this year, the third of this now-annual event, brings together dozens of uber-cool YA practitioners on Saturday, August 25, from noon to 4 PM, at the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, located at 1585 Paoli Pike, West Chester, PA. 



You want to know who is coming, right?  Can't stand the suspense?  Here's who we are, as of now, in an approximate signing order (things could change, so check the web site closer to the date).  We'll be signing books (courtesy of Children's Book World).  There will be raffles.  There will be workshops, too. I may even wear my electric blue pants.  Heck, I may even dance flamenco and ride home on a handsome horse.  Though I'd first have to learn flamenco and then have to persuade a horse.  (There's time.  I'm working on it.)



You want to be there.  I know you do.



Signing from 12-1



Susan Shaw

Victoria Schwab

K.M. Walton

Margie Gelbwasser

Charlotte Bennardo

Jackie Kessler

Amalie Howard

Ellen Jensen Abbott



Signing from 1-2



Jennifer Hubbard

Jennifer Murgia

J.R. Wagner

Shannon Delany

Beth Kephart

Brigid Kemmerer

Jaclyn Dolamore

A.S. King

Jessica Spotswood



Signing from 2-3

Jeri Smith-Ready

Maria V. Snyder

Cyn Balog

Josh Berk

Cesya MaRae Cuono

Gwendolyn Heasley

Dianne Salerni

Rebecca Serle



Signing from 3-4

Jennifer Armentrout

Christine Norris

Sarah Darer Littman

Alissa Grosso

Wendy Higgins

Amy Holder

Elisa Ludwig

Tiffany Schmidt

Jessica Burkhart