Beth Kephart's Blog, page 200

stillness

It's possible that we don't know how tired we are until we stop.  I have needed to keep going. Today, after fighting a week's war with a wicked allergic reaction, I couldn't.  For a few hours I did nothing at all.  Then I picked up Lilian Nattel's new novel, Web of Angels, which I have been stealing my way into every chance I could get.  It's such a compelling book, such an important one, and the deeper I read into this novel the more convinced I am that Lilian has, with Web, the book of a lifetime.



My mind has to be clearer before I put my reflections here, on the blog.  But Lilian, between now and then, thank you for persevering with Web, a book that took you many years and multiple drafts.  The best books often do.

THE HEART IS NOT A SIZE is headed to Germany

I made oblique reference the other day to an unexpected gift from the land of publishing.  My agent now says that I can now specifically share the news:  THE HEART IS NOT A SIZE has been sold to Hanser, the German publishing house that also kindly acquired NOTHING BUT GHOSTS (due out this summer) and YOU ARE MY ONLY.



To say that I'm thrilled would be a giant understatement.  HEART was, for me, a very special book, given that it was based on experiences I actually had in a squatter's village in Juarez (the little girl above, for example, is a character in the book) and that it explores as well both anorexia and panic disorder, conditions with which I have had more than a passing acquaintance.



Many thanks to the Harper Collins team, to Jill Santopolo who edited the book, and to Amy Rennert.  And many, many thanks to Hanser for having such faith in my work.  I spend many hours of my days researching Germany as I write my Berlin novel for Philomel.  Hanser's kindness makes Germany feel even more like home.



Nothing substitutes for faith in the life of a writer.

views of and from the University of Pennsylvania campus

Every Tuesday I arrive an hour early and walk in a different direction at Penn, settling my mind for the teaching ahead.  This is what I saw this past Tuesday, when I walked first to the most eastern end of the campus, and then west.  That's my city, shining, from the newly renovated South Street Bridge.[image error]

Predicting the Near Future of YA in Shelf Awareness

Last summer I began to forge a theory about the what-next in young adult books.  In time the 2011 National Book Award finalists were named, the 2011 Best Of lists were put forward, and the 2011 Printz and Newbery slates were unveiled.  Throughout it all, the theory held.  Today I am grateful to Shelf Awareness for sharing my thoughts in a story that begins like this:

For reasons both maddeningly obvious and impossibly elusive, young adult literature is particularly prone to categorization and trends--fenced in by labels, discriminated for or against, sold according to headline. Teeth sink. Wings ascend. Murderous games hold court. Landscapes are annihilated, and then annihilated again. It's a package deal.

Please read the whole here.  I'm interested in your thoughts, of course.  Where do you think the future lies?[image error]

what makes a book matter right now?

Bestseller alchemy is a mystery.  Publishing houses spend millions of dollars on books that go nowhere.  They reject, repeatedly until a final sighing yes, the books that go onto become book-club institutions and household names.  J.K. Rowling, Rebecca Skloot, and Kathryn Stockett know a little something about this.  Jaimy Gordon (National Book Award winner for Lord of Misrule) and Paul Harding (Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers) would likely confess to not having seen their own fame coming.



My students are reading Vivian Gornick this week, whose The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is a must-read for memoir writers.  In her concluding pages she offers up an idea about what shapes the future for books.  She offers no formula, of course—that isn't possible.  But I like what she has to say about intersections. 

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading.  How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all. When a book of merit is trashed upon publication, or one of passing value praised to the skies, it is not that the book, in either case, is being read by the wrong or the right people, it is that the wrong or the right moment is being intersected with.  This book, good or great thought it may be, sinks like a stone because what it has to say cannot be taken in at the moment; while that book, transparently ephemeral, is well received because what it is addressing is alive—now, right now—in the shared psyche.  

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beauty hurts now: it's all in the details

"On the way home I went behind the black ruins where Professor K. used to live, and broke into his abandoned garden, where I picked several crocuses and tore off a few lilac branches.  Took some to Frau Golz, who used to live in my old apartment building. We sat across from each other at the copper table and talked. Or rather, we shouted above the gunfire that had just resumed.  Frau Golz, her voice breaking:  'What flowers, what lovely flowers.'  The tears were running down her face.  I felt terrible as well. Beauty hurts now. We're so full of death."



— A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City/A Diary, by Anonymous

surprising my father with a birthday afternoon

You can plan a party all you want, but it's nothing without the guests.  This afternoon I am so enormously grateful to my father's friends, who joined us in our humble home to celebrate another good year.  Kim White, a Radnor High Famer If Ever There Should Be One, read his homemade tribute while his dear wife Janet listened (a spark in those bright eyes of hers).  Louisa and Will and Scott brought their great humor and good hearts.  (We missed you, Joanne.)



My father has found himself surrounded by very good people.  He deserves that much and more.


Happy Birthday, Dad![image error]

prison talk, continued

Last week I commented on Adam Gopnik's compelling New Yorker piece on prison life and silence.  In the wake of that post I received several notes, many off-line, regarding the state of justice or injustice in our country.  


Christopher Glazek, senior editor of n+1 magazine, was among those whose notes entered my e-bin.  He had just posted his own story on prison life—or, I should say, prison terror—and wanted to share it with me—a different perspective, he said in his e-mail, but one I might find intriguing.  Well-researched and deeply tragic, "Raise the Crime Rate" makes a radical suggestion, one that I can't imagine this country ever ultimately adopting.  But it often takes an extreme suggestion for us to reconsider the known facts, and Glazek's piece isolates some very real stories and statistics that should make us think harder about how we care for those behind bars.



Before I posted a link to Glazek's piece, I wanted to watch "Mario's Story," an artistically hailed documentary that turns the lens on Mario Rocha, a young man imprisoned for ten years for a crime all evidence suggests he did not commit.  He was sixteen when he attended a party at which another was shot.  He was a man—stabbed multiple times while he waited for justice—by the time he was released.  This cannot be the United States, I kept thinking, as I watched the film.  This is utter outrage.  And yet.  For ten years Rocha remained in jail and at great personal risk until someone in the judicial system actually listened.



Rocha's story is rare.  His release was predicated on the ceaseless dedication of a nun, on a team of pro bono workers, on a large family of supporters, on a church, and on all the people who knew he was innocent and spoke out on his behalf to investigators who sought to bend their words.  It was also predicated on his own character and talents; while incarcerated Rocha became and is a very capable writer. 


There are no easy solutions when it comes to crime and punishment.  My mother's life was radically redefined by a cruel and senseless violence.  As a young person in a far-away place, I was a victim myself.  Just yesterday a gang of kids broke into both our cars and stole what they could take—quarters, dollar bills, nothing much.  Still, it left me shaken.




I don't have answers.  But I am grateful to those who do not forget those made invisible in a system now gone awry.  A system that often hurts the prisoners more than they ever hurt another in the first place.  Watch "Mario's Story" or read Glazek.  You'll see what I mean.









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writing on and through; a scene from Berlin

The only cure, for writers, is writing on.  You will hear what you don't want to hear.  You will ponder it in your heart.  You will call a friend (no, be honest, the friend called you), and she will listen, and then you will carry on.  You know what you can do, and  you will do it.



Yesterday, while contemplating the fate of a book I have been writing for a very long time, I returned to Berlin, a story that challenges me deeply and, at the same time, brings me great joy.  It's the story I'm supposed to be writing right now, for many, many reasons.  It's a book I daily thank Tamra Tuller for.  Yesterday I reached the halfway mark. It is with this scene that the story turns:

            "What
are you going to do?" Mutti asks.

            "About
what?"

            "I
know you, Ada.  You're scheming."

            There
are hard lines beneath my mother's eyes and shadows caught between them.  Her hair is thistles.  The light from the window glows through
it, then storms her face with a sea-colored green.  Sometimes when I look at my mother's face I see every man
she ever loved and how much loving bruised her.

            "I
think it's pretty obvious."

            "What
is?"

            "That
there's nothing I can do."

            "Nothing?" 

            "It's
impossible, Mutti.  You know how it
is.  The Turks are their own
country.  I can't save Savas."

            She
straightens suddenly then shivers with the cold, unsatisfied.  She pulls her thin sweater across her
chest and buttons it up to her chin, knows that I'm lying, because if I knew
how to rescue Savas I would.  If I
knew where to find him, that's where I'd be. The truth doesn't sit well with
Mutti.

            She
stares at me for a long time. 
Draws her index finger across the bridge of my
nose.  "Impossible has never
stopped you," she says, and I wonder how much she knows about everything I will always want, everything I'm planning.  I wonder whether, in
my dreams, I called out for Stefan.

            "You
can't save the world, Ada.  You
know that, don't you?"

            "Somebody
has to try," I say, and I see the hurt go through her.

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favorite things

Today I celebrate my father's birthday (though on Sunday his surprise adventure kicks in).  I call my father Forever Young because he is—still out there sharing his business expertise, still hopping on planes to visit places as distant as Peru and (soon) Israel, still driving around rural Kentucky with his church friends, still wielding his (shall we say) particular sense of humor.



I celebrate Little Miss Eva and her beautiful family—Cristina, Jeremy, Sophie—who have received the sort of good news (a big promotion) that also results in sad goodbyes.  How I will miss watching those two little girls grow up and dancing around the floor with their mother. 



Finally, I celebrate The Year of Living Dangerously, a fabulous blog, and its artful puppeteer, Michael G-G, who is today celebrating his own favorite things—and graciously included my blog among them.  Michael would never know (indeed, who could?) that I've been feeling very blue.  His gesture of warmth in winter is so appreciated.[image error]