Beth Kephart's Blog, page 180
June 16, 2012
celebrating Alyson Hagy, a writer we can all root for
For the past many weeks, Alyson Hagy has been touring the country with her fine third novel Boleto, a book that has been celebrated in media ranging from The New Yorker and the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune and Star Tribune. Ron Hogan, writing for USA Character Approved, concluded his thoughts about the book with the words, "If there's a better novel published this year, it's going to have to be pretty spectacular." And of course I've been singing about Boleto ever since I sat down at Christmas to read the ARC.
This weekend, Boleto is the lead novel reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review—an achievement for Alyson that makes me, her friend, incredibly proud. Bruce Machart was given the responsibility. He writes, among other things, "Hagy often dazzles with her descriptions of the Wyoming landscape and
wildlife. Whether it’s the corral of the Testerman ranch, the rugged
passes of the Black Bell Ranch or the depressed outskirts of Anaheim,
the settings glimmer with well-chosen metaphors." He also uses the words entertaining and entrancing to describe her opening pages.
Yes, in fact, that's true. I've known Alyson for a long time now. I've read nearly every published word she's written, and I continue to be mystified by her continuing, and continually strengthening, powers. I'm mystified, too, by the way she finds time to report back about her life amidst her travels, teaching, adventures, her raising of a remarkable, words-bound son. Alyson has friends all across this country. She somehow makes time for us all. And never once—in all that she has achieved, in all that she can do—does she so much as lean toward attitude. Never once does she fail to ask, "And how are you?" She's just doing her thing, living her life, finding her stories, and thank goodness the world has noticed, because heaven knows, Alyson Hagy does not trumpet herself, does not ask for that kind of attention.
Alyson Hagy is that quality of person—and writer—we can all root for.
June 15, 2012
PW coverage of What Makes a Children's Book Great
Many thanks to a new Goodreads friend, Danielle, for letting me know about this PW coverage of the Publishing Perspectives What Makes a Children's Book Great? conference. I had the privilege of participating is this truly memorable half-day event not long ago.
Matia Burnett's coverage is wonderful, and I'm grateful to be included in it.
Thank you, Danielle.
every now and then I remember the novel I left, midstream
The
day was breaking. There was still
the tooth of the moon in the sky and that black fringe of storm, and she could
hear the high slosh in the creek, the endless running forward to the sea. When she reached the footbridge,
she stood for a moment and looked back toward the house—the big rectangle and
the small one, the brave bulge, the twin chimneys, the unsunk roof sloping
forthright in two directions, the garden like a moat. Slick and stone and root.
Steam
had come in, a funnel of gnats and mosquitoes, the sudden gray heart of a
squirrel on a limb above her head.
Becca imagined the boy fishing for marlin in the stream, or sleeping on
a bed of hawk-tail feathers. She
imagined him alone in that room, that empty mirror, that barrette balanced on
the apple’s glass stem, that jar of honey. The trees unfurled, a belligerent green. The crows were thick as thieves. On the prickle of the forest floor,
Becca saw the wet back of a single beetle catching a nick of sun.
June 14, 2012
so unexpected, so beautiful
It would be difficult to overstate just how this gift affected me today. Thank you to some very special people at my own extremely special St. John's Presbyterian Church.
let the young woman into your heart—bell hooks
bells hooks calls her own memoir Bone Black a crazy quilt. It's true, except for this—this book is far from crazy. It's sixty-one chapters of pure prose poetry.
A passage for us all, stolen from the book's near end:
For the first time in my life I hear someone say that there is nothing wrong with feeling alone, that he, too, has been at the edge, has felt the fear of drowning, of being moved toward death without consciously contemplating suicide. I do not ask him how he knows, how he feels with me this pain in my heart. When the talk ends, when we are alone, he repeats again and again the words that are a net catching the body falling from a tall place. When I weep and sob all over the slate gray clothing he tells me that the young woman standing on the cliff, alone and afraid to live, is only suspended in a moment of hesitation, that she will overcome her fear and leap into life—that she will bring with her the treasures that are her being: the beauty, the courage, the wisdom. He tells me to let that young woman into my heart, to begin to love her so that she can live and live and go on living.
June 13, 2012
I didn't have to do it alone.
There is, in fact, a connection between this image and the few words that I will here say.
I won't hold you accountable for figuring it out.
What I want to say is this: I am not heroic when it comes to needles and procedures and today I had, again, to face that fact. I shake more than I should. I go a little pale. I need and am grateful for the advice of my friend Kelly (who told me to think about the coolest, clearest water I've ever seen). I need and am grateful for Melissa, who is always sure of the best possible outcomes. I need and am grateful for Wendy, who quilts me with her love and knowledge. I need and am grateful for Tamra and Amy and Alyson and Charlene and Ruta and Jean and Mario. I need and am grateful for the chance to laugh along with my husband who, while waiting with me at the outpatient surgical center, found a 2008 Real Simple magazine and earnestly proceeded to report on what I could wear to an upcoming wedding. If that wedding somehow takes place in 2008.
(I think this is the only time in my married life that my husband has read aloud to me. I took note of that. I stopped shaking.)
But I also want to say that I need and am so grateful for the quality medical team that dispatched with their work so capably and kindly. These were nurses in whom I confided, with whom I laughed, and who I'd actually like to see again someday. This is a doctor who quickly made room for me, and who I trust. This is an anesthesiologist who showed up for the job today despite having 13 stitches in his thumb, thanks to a late-night run-in with a table saw.
We live in a country where too many people do not have the luxury that I had today of being cared for by the best. I am lucky in many ways, and I know that. I would do anything to give my experience to any who are out there in discomfort, wondering.[image error]
June 12, 2012
my mother's recipe book (I missed you today, Mom)
Today I wrote about my mother's meals, her great talent in the kitchen. I spent time poring over her original recipe book—all these newspaper clippings, hundreds of them. She was an artist. I have never, in all my life, tasted better food than hers. I missed her very much today, for I could not ask her any questions.
Alison Bechdel's Genius
This morning, at last, I read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir.
Two words:
Blown away.
By the complexity and vulnerability of this story. By Bechdel's literate and fascinating mind. By the structure of this book. By the many shadings within the illustrations. How in the world did Bechdel make this book, I wondered. I am, no doubt, the last to wonder.
Fortunately, she's out there on YouTube, answering the question.
Perhaps because I am married to a man whose drawings I love, but whose cautions are endless—I am not an illustrator, he will say, repeatedly that dark look he gets in his eyes—I am fascinated by Bechdel's description of the work that she does—layer by layer by layer by layer. Hundreds of images are required to tell her story. Look at how she approaches a single one.
June 11, 2012
Memoir Instructives: Joyce Carol Oates and Dorothy Allison
Now in the throes of finalizing Handling the Truth, I read or re-read memoir upon memoir—checking myself and my assertions against examples both global and timeless. It has been interesting, then, to read Joyce Carol Oates' newish A Widow's Story alongside Dorothy Allison's classic Two or Three Things I Know For Sure—one very thick and one very thin, both embroidered with italicized epiphanies, things learned. Perhaps it is the brevity of Allison's work (words first written to be performed) that makes her learning so riveting. Perhaps it is the lyric return, those two or three things, the manner in which Allison speaks to herself and (in sideways fashion) speaks to us:
Two of three things I know for sure, and one of them is just this—if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seeds in a wind.
And
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is how long it takes to learn to love yourself, how long it took me, how much love I need now.
Oates's voice, on the other hand, is more external, more deliberately instructive. It is harder around the edges, tensile with new grief:
Advice to the Widow: Do not think that grief is pure, solemn, austere and "elevated"—this is not Mozart's Requiem Mass. Think instead Spike Jones, those unfunny "classical" musical jokes involving tubas and bassoons.
And
How many widows have made this futile call—dialed numbers which are their own numbers; how many widows have listened to their dead husband's voices again, again—again...
As you will too, one day. If you are the survivor.
