Beth Kephart's Blog, page 20

Juncture Notes and News

With our September memoir workshop (on a working farm) now just one person shy of full, we've set out to find a new location for those who have expressed interest in working with us.

(If you're interested in that one last September spot—the chance to work with what has turned out to be a most remarkable gathering of writers, please let us know.)

We're now a few days away from announcing the details of our second workshop, tentatively slated for early November, and if you're interested in writing, reading, and knowing at a place that may be sandy, say, and alive with sea air and wild birds, send us a note at Juncture .

In the meantime, we'll be releasing Juncture Notes 3, our free memoir newsletter, early next week. In this issue, we'll be talking about Diana Abu-Jaber's new memoir (and hearing directly from her), among other things. If you're not on our list but would like to be, please sign up through our Juncture Writing Workshops site.

looking ahead to the Radnor High Commencement Keynote (so blessed)

News that I can now share. I'll be giving the keynote address at the Radnor High Commencement on June 8.

The details are here . 

I have been at work on these words for a while now.

It matters to me—so deeply—that I get this right.

Blessed to be invited by the students and the administration.

Blessed beyond measure.

my deep thanks to Cleaver Magazine and Rachael Tague, for these words on STORY

Sometimes you are kindly, wholly received.

This just happened with This Is the Story of You.

Cleaver Magazine, the wildly popular on-line lit spot co-created by Karen Rile and featured here , in newest issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, made room for Story. Melissa Sarno, novelist, critic, and Cleaver YA book review editor, assigned Story. Rachael Tague, an incredibly generous reviewer, gave Story her heart.

You can read the full review here . Once you are inside Cleaver, take a look around. Click through to all the content that awaits you.

(You won't regret a single click.)

Manymanymanymany thanks.

In Gratitude: my review of Jenny Diski's final memoir

My thoughts on Jenny Diski's final memoir, In Gratitude, are here, in the New York Journal of Books.

these ideas, how they won't spare me

Heads down, tails flicking, sun on their backs, they come toward me.

These ideas of mine. These sudden revelations. These stories I seek to shape. Must shape. Now.

A mind in utter revolt, so much of the time.

Sleep, I urge myself.

Save the world from yourself.

And yet the heat is real. The need to move forward. Move again.

trusting your past to a book of life (and wisteria)

I'm not all that adept at social media. I notice things, but it takes me time. So that when Modern Heirloom Books began tweeting from and about my memoir book, Handling the Truth, I didn't quite understand, at first, from whence this kindness was coming.

I have since learned. Modern Heirloom Books, founded by a woman with a long (senior) history in magazines—Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Parenting—is an organization, an idea, that stands up to time.

Here's what they do:

Forget about stuffy family histories. No old-fashioned photo albums, either. We expertly curate your “stuff”—from boxes, phones, and hard drives; hone your memories; elicit stories that surprise and delight; and design a book that is graphically and narratively evocative.

We’ll take a journey of discovery together, and present you with a modern book of life that will resonate for generations to come—and that you will revisit again and again.

The more I've come to know Dawn M. Roode, the founder of this lovely organization, the more I see just how deeply she has come to think about this process, and just how perfectly right she is—a woman to whom you can trust your past.

Last week, on a blog that is genuinely and reliably thoughtful, Dawn wrote about how to use photographs as prompts for writing life stories. She may be quoting again from Handling the Truth, but she does far more than that.

She takes you somewhere.

Go with her.

The wisteria above, by the way—the gift of last evening's dinner party with friends. The earth is tangled, politics are cruel, there is far too much inequity.

But look at the wisteria and breathe.

on bringing literary thinking and heart to corporate leaders

Yesterday, on behalf of Leadership Philadelphia, I stood among 120 corporate and organizational leaders and talked about literature, language, and life. Our topic was home, but it might have been any number of things. Our process was embellished by words from James Agee, George Hodgman, Jacquelyn Woodson, and Katherine Boo, an excerpt from Love: A Philadelphia Affair, the thoughts of a West Philadelphia fifth grader, this Beltran recording on home (a composite reading from my Penn students and colleagues), readings about loss from This Is the Story of You and Flow , and conversations about gain.

We listened. We wrote. We shared. We talked to one another. We isolated telling details and pondered how the best of life can be transported into the best of work.

Having spent nearly three decades writing for corporate America, it was extraordinary to write, at last, with it. To reach toward the heart, and hearth, of lawyers, strategists, account managers, senior vice presidents, chief financial officers, portfolio managers, presidents, directors of communications, franchise managers, risk managers, school principals, art leaders, and civic leaders, to name just a few.

The lesson is this: literature—the act of naming the things we love and want, the act of putting want into words—is not an exclusive, excluding art. It is our art. Our shared humanity. Making as much difference in the workplace as it does on the family stoop.

I plan to bring these multi-media workshops to other organizational gatherings in the future, as part of the expanding realm of Juncture Workshops. Happy to talk, if the idea intrigues.

Finding books with friends, and Adam Haslett on fear (IMAGINE ME GONE)

It was meant to be. There Cyndi Reeves and I were, in the lobby of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, catching up with each other ahead of a Bryn Mawr College sponsored dinner with Phillip Lopate. That was all wonderful enough, but then there came Anmiryam Budner, of Main Point Books, with a box of Better Living Through Criticism, written by A.O. Scott, who was slated to speak at the theater later that night.

A. O. Scott, I said? Really? For I had, not long before, reviewed Better Living for the Chicago Tribune, and, before, that, simply loved reading Scott's movie reviews for the New York Times. A.O. Scott. A literary celebrity.

Two friends, a literary celebrity, dinner plans with the nation's great essayist, and then a conversation with Anmiryam in which she pronounced that the book Cyndi and I must read next (we always ask and she always tells) was Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone. Anmiryam is an impassioned book reader, which is what makes her such a stunning book seller. From her lips to our hearts, these books.

Cyndi and I were in. Soon our friend Kelly Simmons was in as well. We'd all buy Haslett's newest, and then we would discuss.

Books and friendship. Like coffee and cream.

Maybe you'll be in, too. Maybe we could all discuss? Because Haslett bears discussion. For now I would like to share with you the most exquisite passage in a book built of exquisite passages—a story about the long-lingering affects of a father's mental unwellness. Here is Michael, the oldest son, who has some of his father's imbalance. He's talking about fear. It's devastating because it's so true.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

oh such a (bad) writer I was: three talks this week

This week I'll be giving three different talks on three very different topics. I've been in the midst of preparations.

The first, this Tuesday evening, is a keynote on behalf of Historic RittenhouseTown , birthplace of paper in British North America and home to David Rittenhouse, a polymath of such considerable renown that Philadelphia's largest square bears his name. I'll be talking about my recent visit to this historic site (the topic of my Sunday Inquirer story, a link to which is here ). But I'll begin by reflecting on my own relationship to paper. Which necessarily involves my reflections on my life as a writer. Which means that I must confess what a poor writer I was.

Proof:

I may have been an angsty adolescent, but my darkest secret involved nothing more than this: a box of watercolors, a drugstore paintbrush, a Bic pen, and a series of blank books with Naugahyde covers. I painted the pages of those books to buckling saturation. I waited, impatiently, for them to dry. Afterward, alone on my roof or in the shade of a tree, I Bic-scratched into those multitonal hues such awe-invoking grandeur as this:

A daffodil dons her yellow skirt,
Smoothes out the ruffled pleats of the hem,
Places her fringed bonnet on her tiny head. . . and goes out for tea.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/...

On Thursday I'll be joining Leadership Philadelphia , an organization dedicated to mobilizing and connecting the talent of the private sector to serve the greater needs of the community. I'll be part of a much larger agenda, offering thoughts on home and a writing workshop to the 120 members of the current core class.
Over the weekend, I'm on a very secret mission. But I can't talk about that one yet.

my father's house: utterly renovated and ready for its next chapter

It's been an eleven-month process. The beautiful house where I grew up has been sorted through, sifted, packed up, remade, restored, stripped to its all virgin hardwood floors, repainted, polished to a glow. All systems are new. The windows charm. There's so much here. You just have to walk through it.

Five bedrooms. 3,600 square feet. Radnor Township schools. Marie Gordon, realtor. We're ready.

Caveat: That good-looking young man, my nephew, does not come with the house. Well, not unless we get an excellent offer.