Beth Kephart's Blog, page 206

Caribousmom, You Are My Only, and two very special citations

Readers of this blog may know this story:  A few years ago, I read and loved a book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  I said as much here.  Not long afterward that post became a particularly popular post of mine, and when I tried to discover just what had brought my few thoughts this blessed attention I discovered a blog called Caribousmom.  The creator of this blog had shared my passion for this story; she had also—thoughtfully—shared my own post with her enthusiastic readers.



What else did this blogger like to read, I wondered?  What else did she have to say?  It didn't take me long to understand that Caribousmom is a sacred book haven—an intelligent blog by a most discerning reader.  We tend to love the same books.  We look forward to the same releases.  Many of the volumes I own are directly related to reflections that Caribousmom has shared.  Her reviews are long and detailed.  They provide hints of the authors' own styles, own ways of speaking.  They are independently produced, in no way tied to any fiscal reward, which is to say that Caribousmom writes about books because she loves them.  Caribousmom is often one of the very first to speak out on behalf of books that will go on to win the year's big prizes.  Consider, for example, Salvage the Bones. 



Over the course of this year, if I am not mistaken, Caribousmom read nearly 100 books.  Yesterday she unveiled her favorite reads of 2011—long lists, short lists, winners, books that elevated the form, that stayed with her.  I am enormously blessed to discover You Are My Only on the short fiction list—the only young adult novel in that grouping.  You Are My Only also appears on her list of Buzz Books Which Did Not Disappoint, an honor equal to the first. 



Today is the first day of a new year.  My son is on a train at this early hour, returning from an evening in New York City.  I have printed out the first 30 pages of the new novel that I'm writing and will curl up beneath a quilt on the couch reading through and writing forward, while I await the sound of his footsteps at the door.  I plan to spend this day peacefully, in other words.  Caribousmom, thank you so very much for your generosity, intelligence, and heart on this new day.  You make the world a better place.[image error]

a video message on the eve of a new year

so he likes to dance, so it runs in the family

Getting ready for New Year's Eve.



A very happy and safe day to you all.



And to peace in 2012.

The Solder of Limb Shade, remembering my mother, five years on

My mother is five years gone this day.  

Two years ago, I wrote this poem for her.  

It still belongs to her.


























The Solder of Limb Shade




Where you are is not

where you are,

beneath the granite bench

and the heart-footed deer,

under cover, under the solder

of limb shade.




You are not sunk you are not skidded past

by wind.

You are not level, rise, diaspora, root,

nor the chime, pretty as it is,

above the stone field and its tulips.

But once, in a restaurant,

they played your song,

and the house that I have built from
almost nothing

is hung about with birds.




You gave your final word

to me.

You said.

You are.[image error]

Hope is personal. Thoughts at year's end.

I've been wanting to say something for a while, haven't known where to begin.  I'll start like this:  It was quite a year.



Amidst other things, I released a book called You Are My Only, a book I'd spent a long time writing.  I had, perhaps, too much hope for it, or that's what I thought at first.  As it turns out, I had the wrong idea about what hope is, and where its embers live.



Hope, I learned over the course of this year, is answered in the middle of night and in the heat of the day by kindness you don't see coming.  It is given wings by extra-ordinary readers who take time from their real lives to read your book, to think about it, to tell you and others how the story lives in them.  There was no official blog tour for You Are My Only, no physical tour, nor radio, nor TV (though I will always be grateful to my friend Darcy Jacobs, for her kindness to the book in Family Circle).  I had a book launch party but there were few books to be had.  And nonetheless—nonetheless—You Are My Only found its right homes.



If I tried to thank all of you who taught me what hope is and what it looks like this year I would not succeed.  There were so many moments, so many gifts, so many gestures, so many wild acts of compassion, so much unfathomable generosity.  Hope was born.  Hope was launched. 



At the end of this year, I want to stop and thank all of you.  I also want to stop—just plain stop—and thank the young woman who started so much of this for me:  Amy Riley.  It was Amy who discovered my blog a few years ago, when Nothing but Ghosts was set to come out.  It was Amy who threw a surprise launch blog party that year that left me in trembles.  Amy has been there ever since.  She has rallied her enormous community of friends around me—opened doors, built bridges, quietly insisted.



And there she is, at the end of this year, naming You Are My Only as one of her top books.



There are official lists.  There are personal lists.  Hope is entirely personal.



Thank you, Amy.[image error]

by my mother's stone, by my son's side

This is the last Christmas that we'll call our son a student, or that he'll think of himself that way.  I am aware of the passing of each day.  I gladly accept every hug.



I gladly accept, too, his heart.  His willingness to rearrange this very afternoon so that he could join me in a winter trip out to my mother's grave.  In two days she will be five years gone.



"But you're so busy," I said, when he offered to come.



"No, no, Mom.  I'm not too busy.  Not too busy for that."



We stood before her stone, a polished red granite.  We placed a basket of greens by the stone.  We remembered her out loud, one to the other, and then we walked this path to the car.



He understands honor, this beautiful, grown-up kid of mine.


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Enchanted (utterly) by The Artist

We escaped a day of rain and headed for the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, where "The Artist," a film I'd been eager to see, was playing. 



If you watch this trailer you won't benefit from any explanation I might offer.  It's all there—the silent film star's liquid eyes, the irradiated charisma of up-and-comer, the end of one era, the beginning of another, the wordlessness, the story.  It's a beguiling film, a French play on Hollywood traditions. [image error]

The articulate travail of existence: from the adult novel in progress

When you write as I do—in surges, in stolen time—it is easy to lose sight of your own projects, to tuck them away and out of the aim of hopefulness while you wait for others to read them.


This morning I remember the adult novel-in-progress.

If thirty acres is thirty acres,
land never ends.  The stream winds
and spills, the rocks break and fracture, the moss grows green between trees,
and the squirrels go off on their mad, fugitive runs; these squirrels did.  In the thrill, expectant burst of May,
in the hours after Vin drove off, Becca went deeper into the woods.  Across the sodden polish of the stream,
over the flat back of stones, toward the rim of pine and in through the grove
of tulip, white birch, oak.  Beneath
her boots, the carapaces of dead bugs crunched—beetles, she guessed, centipede
specters, the lovely, unlucky ladybirds. Into her hair floated cast-off things,
dander, twig debris.  Glorious,
primeval things, she thought, a huntress by then, a seeker, for she had the
Leica with her, and the idea of that boy, and the words from the paperback he'd
left behind:  the articulate travail
of existence.

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This is where I want to be.

This is where (in my imagination) I am.



Happy Boxing Day to all of you![image error]

Reading Boleto for Christmas

This afternoon, once the final big meal is cooked for our small but happy family of three, this will be me on the couch, the sun floating in, Alyson Hagy's Boleto on my quilted lap.  I started reading this gorgeous novel the day it arrived.  Irrefutable deadlines and pressures took the pleasure from me.  But just this morning—one boy upstairs still asleep (we passed in the night at 4 AM; he was just finishing a scene he had been writing and I was getting up to finish a client project), one outside in his workshop, making art—I began to read again. 



I have not yet been able to put words to just how much I love this book of Alyson's.  I cannot describe her talent, the deep and never show-boating knowing that fills her every page.  I cannot say what an honor it is to have an early copy of this novel in my home, or how lucky I am to have Alyson as an ever-enduring friend.  But I began to tell you something of Boleto here, when I quoted from the very first page, and in a moment I will quote to you from a page deeper in.



Somewhere in Wyoming, Alyson's preparing a dinner for six.  She's been out snowshoe-ing this morning with her son.  She's been looking for, in her email words, "deer trails, moose tracks, pine cones recently flaked by squirrels, chickadees, ravens." 



But before all that, she wrote this:

... He could always recall the peculiar stink of his mother's lilac blossoms when they thawed out in the spring.  He could practically write lyrics to the music the field mice made in his bedroom walls, or the midnight bawling of cows and calves.  These were the truths that were fixed inside him.  They hung like well-used tools on a workshop wall.  People were not fixed.  People slipped away like weather over a horizon.  You could love a person all you wanted, all that you were capable of, but a person would not settle once you left them behind.

If there is justice in this literary world, Alyson Hagy will become a household name in the year about to dawn.










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