Beth Kephart's Blog, page 2

Winter/Karl Ove Knausgaard, my Chicago Tribune review

I had the great pleasure of reviewing Winter, the second in a seasonal quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in the Chicago Tribune. The full review is here.

One image. Many stories. Early words from my MG/YA class at Penn.

This Penn semester I'm teaching something new—wading into the land of middle grade and young adult writing with fifteen spectacular students. We're learning about character and voice from verse novels, in-the-round perspective from multiple-voice novels, dialogue and pacing from graphic novels. We're inviting Sara Novic into our fold. We're building personalities, landscapes, tensions, plots—and friendships.

Around a crowded table, we warm up with a five-minute-five-sentence exercise. An image is presented. A question is asked: What is the story?

The image above was created by my artist-husband. The words below come from a sampling of my students. They're pretty great, right? Teaching all of us how one frozen moment in time can mean many things to many people.

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WILD BLUES: the cover (and story) reveal

A new middle-grade book is due out this year. A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book (Antheneum Books for Young Readers, Simon & Schuster). A book that has been in the making for many years. It brings together so much that I love (memories of my antiques-loving uncle, my Salvadoran husband's stories, the camping guide penned by my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart) and so much that I fear (dark caves and penetrating storms, random violence and untruths).

I can't wait to share the book with you, when it appears in June 2018. But in the meantime, I have this jacket, so gorgeously illustrated by John Jay Cabuay and so magnificently—would the word be nurtured?—by Caitlyn and her team.

So many thanks, too, to Karen Grencik and Amy Rennert, for loving me through my books.

Finally, thanks to my husband, for the stories, the trust, and the illustrations that he contributed to the pages of this book. They are special, recalling the watercolors he sent to me, years ago, when he was at Yale and I was in Philadelphia, waiting and waiting.

The jacket copy:

Choose.

That's what thirteen-year-old Lizzie's mom asks her to do as summer begins.

Lizzie chooses to stay with her uncle Davy and his cabin in the Adirondack wilds.

She chooses Matias Bondanza—Uncle Davy's neighbor, and her forever friend.

She chooses her survival guide, The Art of Keppy; scrambled eggs and pupusas; a big whale of a rock; the cool beneath trees.

But soon things happen that are beyond Lizzie's control. Things she could never have imagined.

A prison break.

A kidnapping.

A blinding storm.

There are new choices to make, and Lizzie must make them.

Because the fate of everything she loves hangs in the balance.

Juncture Notes 22: Bunk, Graphic Memoirs, Landscape Writing

In the latest edition of Juncture Notes we're talking about Kevin Young's Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, graphic memoirs (Eleanor Davis's You & A Bike & A Road, David Small's Stitches, and Tom Hart's Rosalie Lightning), Helen Epstein's The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma, and landscape writing.

It's all right here. Sign up for future editions here.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a Final Fridays celebration of truth and language

Last evening Bill and I met some 80 truth-seekers at the Johnson exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We'd built custom workbooks inspired by ten of the works on display. We'd invited participants to connect the paintings (or, in one case, the Rodin sculpture) with specific (and personal) aspects of the year past—and the year to come.

There were to have been two sessions. Thirty people were expected for each. But by the time the first session was under way, we were nearly out of our 80 workbooks and deep into conversation with a four-year-old memoirist, a priest, a high-school teacher, a fitness instructor, a young woman who went back to school to face her nemesis (math) and discovered that she's actually quite mathematical, an English teacher, a music teacher, a recent high-school grad, and so many more. We were blessed by the enthusiasm for the program and the care that so many took to write, and I will never forget walking around that exhibit space watching perfect strangers connecting with themselves.

A good way to end this year, with thanks to Cat Ricketts, who makes everything so very grand.

Holy Night: A (Beth Kephart) Christmas Poem

Holy Night   I thought that I was capable:A girl with a songOn a night bright with the wide-open eyes of the stars.My father at the piano,My brother with the sweet reed of the oboe squeezedBetween his lips,The crisped-skin fry of the Christmas Eve smelts         Still in the air,The stockings hung,My mother and sister on the couch,One beside the other.And I was the one,I was the one who would sing.
My father, as I have mentioned, was at the keys,My brother was leaning toward his own notes,In the house that isn’t ours anymore,In the room where my mother used to be,By the tree,In the hours before what we’d thought we’d wantedWould be received,At a time when the eyes of the stars were on us,And it was my turn to sing.

my Chicago Tribune review of a twisty Christmas story

So what was Dickens thinking when he set out to write his A Christmas Carol? The screenwriter Samantha Silva has spent a long time imagining just this.

I reviewed her book, Mr. Dickens and His Carol, for the Chicago Tribune.

The full link is here.

a filmic peek inside William Sulit's clay world—and a trunk show

Meet Bill in person this Saturday, at 36 Craven, Old City, Philadelphia. Bill will be sharing a number of brand new pieces in a trunk show—pieces that come to life in the video above.

I've written about this glorious new store (and its owners) previously, here.

I'll be with Bill this Saturday and look forward to seeing you there.

138 N. 3rd StreetPhiladelphia, PASaturday, December 16th1 - 5 PM

Previewing The Art of Remembering, our Final Fridays event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

We invite you to join us on December 29, 2017 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Final Fridays event, starting at 5:00 PM. We'll be using the Johnson exhibition as a way back to our own memories of the year that was, and those who join us will receive this workbook. Admission to the event is free after entry.

More details here.

Join us for Final Friday (December) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (we're excited; we made a special workbook for the event)

Among the beautiful people we've lately come to know is one Cat Ricketts, who coordinates the evening programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She'll hold ugly sweater parties. She'll host jazz musicians. She'll rock a room with a bossa nova quintet.

She'll also come up with some very spectacular ideas (with equally beautiful colleagues like Claire Oosterhoudt) for PMA's Final Friday events. I didn't know what Cat might have in mind when she got in touch with us several weeks ago. But when she invited us to be part of the line up for Get Your Om On (December 29, 2017), I said yes at once.

We've spent time with Cat and Claire in the meantime—developing a keepsake, memoir-twinged notebook inspired by the Johnson exhibit now on display in the Dorrance Galleries. I've done the writing. Bill's done the designing. Cat and Claire have done the fabulous hosting of our (eternally funky) ideas. Bill and I will both be there for the entire evening, giving out the notebooks, talking remembering and memoir, and listening to the stories those who come have to tell.

And so this is an invitation—a hope that you'll join us and the other artists on December 29, 2017 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The fun begins at 5:00 PM and ends a little before 9:00 PM. Admission is free after entry. For the entire line-up, check out this link.