Beth Kephart's Blog, page 195

Who doesn't love Penguin?

My life is not the sort of life that allows for a day off.  We work seven days a week in these parts, and we never get "it" done.



But every now and then I decide to step away from responsibilities and do precisely what I want, and today (the middle part of the day, between the early morning client work, and the evening, now, when the client work continues), was one of those days.



Everybody who reads this blog knows that I hopped two trains then walked two miles south to see Tamra Tuller at Philomel.



I'm not even going to try to put into words just how special that was.



Just, yeah.  It was.  Specialer than special.  



So that's me, waiting, in my chained-out skirt.  And that's Penguin Group USA/Young Readers.



Is there anyone in the world who doesn't love penguins?

Seville, Berlin, Philomel: At long last, I am meeting Tamra Tuller

In the summer of 2010, I was at the American Library Association meeting in Washington, DC, when the ever-fashionable Jill Santopolo (who had worked with me on several Laura Geringer/Harper Collins books and had herself edited The Heart Is Not a Size) slipped a copy of Ruta Sepetys's novel to me and said, "I read this on the train and cried.  I think it's the kind of book you'd love."



I did.  So did the world.



Reading Between Shades of Gray made me wonder about the editor of that book, Jill's Philomel colleague Tamra Tuller, who had taken on Ruta's literary exploration of another time, another place.  I had been working on a Seville novel for years at that point.  I had come close—very close—to selling it more than one time.  My heart had been broken, but I hadn't given up; if I believed in anything I believed in that cortijo, that cook, those gypsies, those Spanish songs.  I wrote a note to Tamra—brazen slush pile person that I have often been—and asked if she might take a look.



She did.  The rest is history.  Two years to the month after my first reaching out to Tamra, Small Damages—far the better book for the conversations Tamra and I had—will be released, on my son's birthday, to be exact.  A year or so from now (the timing isn't fixed) my Berlin novel, a book born out of a phone conversation Tamra and I had one afternoon, a book that reflects both our love for that city (Tamra having gone there first, Tamra having sent me thoughts about where I might go, what I might see), will find its way into the world.



And today, for the first time, I meet Tamra, a young woman who has changed my writing life immeasurably in ways both big and small.  Two trains, a long walk, a conversation—in person.  If I'm lucky, Jill herself will be in sight (and the very dear Jessica).



It feels like going home.[image error]

Expanding my memoir collection by one essential title (and Penn today, in pictures)

I found myself with fifteen spare minutes today and spent the whole lot of them here, at The Last Word Bookshop on the edge of the Penn campus.  I wasn't going to leave without a purchase.  I came home with the University of Nebraska edition of All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life, the Loren Eiseley memoir.



I will never complete my memoir library.  But having this Eiseley (among my many other Eiseleys) puts me at a bit more ease.



In other news, spring has sprung and my young memoirists are not just fine memoirists.  They are thoughtful critics and compassionate souls.



But you knew that.


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Do we seek mastery over things?

"If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace." — Basho, quoted in The Heart of Haiku, by Jane Hirshfield, and essential to me today, who sets back out into the world to teach—not perfection, not mastery, but greater (not absolute) knowing.

the week(s) ahead (please join me at .... )

I have a big week on tap, and if I am less the blogger than usual, I ask for your forgiveness in advance. 



First, my students are back from their spring break, and I'll be in my city reviewing their first three memoirs tomorrow.  They have written spectacularly.  They have gone deep. I need to give them everything I've got.



On Wednesday another beautiful thing is going to happen—I'll hop a train and head to New York City, where I'll be meeting Tamra Tuller, my Philomel editor, for the very first time.  Tamra read my Berlin book this weekend (the first two-thirds, all that I've written).  With her kind early thoughts she returned the essence of the book to me, in the way that only the most generous of editors do.



On Thursday I head back to Philadelphia to spend the morning at the Public Library Association conference, to be held at the Civic Center.  Please let me know if you'll be there.  By noon I'll be back on a train and headed to Chesterbrook, where one of my favorite clients is located.  You know who you are, Charlene and Mike.



Late Thursday night we'll pick our son up from the airport (he's in Las Vegas as of this hour).  I hope to spend a lazy Friday with him.





Saturday, I'll be at the Musehouse with April Lindner at a special event hosted by Doug Gordon.  I'm so excited about this and I hope that those of you who live in the Germantown/Philadelphia area will consider joining us.  Find out more by double clicking the poster.


Sunday we'll sadly be saying goodbye to our son as he heads back up to college to finish off his final semester.  I'll cry a little, eat chocolate, no doubt, then start getting ready for the week ahead, which will include, among other things, Teen Day in Manayunk, which is shaping up to be a super event.


I hope your weeks ahead are full and rich.

outtakes from the Dancesport photo shoot

Still pale faced, dull eyed, and wobbly on too-tall shoes, I accompanied my husband to the dance studio this afternoon, where he assembled the green curtain, put together the lights, linked his laptop to his camera, and began shooting a series of images he'll be using for an upcoming project.  (Stay tuned for more; it's exciting.)



With my camera tethered to nothing and with the available light not so much (given that we'd blackened the key windows), I took a few shots as the action got under way.  I was the old, flu-inflicted woman surrounded by so much youth and beauty.


But look at this youth and beauty.



Here, then, some moments from the day:  Introducing (again) the magnificent Tirsa Rivas, Scott Lazarov, Jan Paulovich and Lana Roosiparg.

the return of the lush, full-scale, read-it-with-your-Sunday-coffee book review section at Chicago Tribune

On this Spring forward day, the moon still in the sky and the birds nest-building outside my window, I'd like to celebrate the return of a full-scale book review section to Chicago Tribune, a paper I have written for, freelance style, for years.  The section is called Printers Row, and it's deep and wide ranging—traditional book reviews mixed with essays by readers and writers and booksellers, some celebrity talk, a crossword puzzle, Sudoku.  It's the kind of thing that makes me wish that I lived in the Windy City, but fortunately those of us who don't can download the weekly publication and scroll through pages that look like actual newsprint.  (Imagine.)



Here's this Sunday's edition, with one of my reviews of a new Mei-Ling Hopgood parenting book (How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm & Other Adventures in Parenting) appearing on page 19.  Huge congratulations to Elizabeth Taylor, for making this important thing happen.  Printers Row, like the new Slate Book Review, introduced by Dan Kois in early March, signal, I think, the dawning of a new era, in which books again are given the space they deserve by "traditional" media.

my students are here with their words

When I told my son that my Penn students were completing their memoirs during this spring break and had until last night at midnight to turn them in, he cocked his head and gave me one of those looks.  "Why would you do that," he asked, "to students you love?"



I tried to explain that the spring break due date was a way of giving my students more time—that they had been free to turn their pieces in earlier, if that's what they'd preferred, that we had been working toward this memoir all semester long, that more time outside the press of other school projects could be considered kind and beneficial.  Still, my son perpetuated his incredulous (but still quite handsome) stare.  "Friday night," he repeated.  "Midnight.  Had you considered, say, Wednesday instead?  Or Friday around dinner time?" 



Were I a real professor and not someone who teaches one course one semester each year, I might be attuned to all the nuances of academic life.  But I am, alas, merely and only me—this reader/writer/memoir evangelist who wants to give her students everything she's got...and who wants them to discover and apply every ounce of their own who-ness to the page.  I've got a kid who thinks I'm a little crazy.  I've got students who—by and large—don't resist.  And I have, this Saturday morning, some truly extraordinary work by young people who have put their hearts and very brilliant minds on the page.



At the end of a week of great exhaustion and sickness, my son is home cracking his sunny smile, and my students are here, with their words.

the week that was; my son is coming home; and the last chance to sign up for Teen Day!

Only lately (it feels like months ago) I was rambling on, on this very blog, about the importance I have given over to sleep.  My desire to be healthier.  My wish for less freighted, angsted days.



Well, there's only so much one can do when a flu takes over, and by Wednesday afternoon I was under the Mean Bug's spell.  You know how it is—you can't breathe, you can't talk, and you can't go to Zumba.  You can't even learn the jive kick with Jan.  Strangely (a sure sign of grave illness) you don't want chocolate.  (What?  No chocolate?, all right, all right, I'll have a piece of chocolate.)  You just sit, and as you sit, things pile up.



Creakily, barely, things still got done—a 1,000-word review of a complex book, the final touches to an annual report, the glassy-eyed acknowledgment of three of the Project Runways All Stars editions I'd lately missed (that was high on the list; go Mondo), correspondence with my memoir-writing students, and all the behind-the-scenes-work that goes on as we prepare for Teen Day in Manayunk.  It looks like we'll have quite a crowd of young writers and readers on hand that March 24th at The Spiral Bookcase, and we're getting excited.  Please do get in touch with me or the store if you are interested in this chance to meet great YA writers and to show us, too, what your own words are made of.



(And to get published!!)



But in the meantime, I have not prepared for the most important thing—the arrival home, late tonight, of our dear son.  He'll spend the weekend with us before heading out to Vegas with friends.  I want to be my whole self for the few hours we'll have together.



Time for a little Zen.

to go beyond the limits of ourselves: the job of the novelist

To go beyond the limits of our selves, to perceive everyone and everything as a great whole, to identify with as many people as possible, to see as much as possible: in this way, the novelist comes to resemble those ancient Chinese painters who climbed mountain peaks in order to capture the poetry of vast landscapes.  — Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist