Beth Kephart's Blog, page 211

When the Christmas cactus blooms again, I know

that I have lived another year, that I have gained a new newness of knowing, that my good fortune is absolute.  And so, two weeks ago, the first of those pink buds, and, today, this full outcropping of a bloom.



Someday soon I will write about what I have learned this year—about people, about passion, about what can be trusted, what must be.  For now, on this day, I simply give you this flowering of hope, this nearly fluorescent gratitude.



Happy Thanksgiving.

It's just that it was there

so I took it.

My mother's brownies (in her handwriting)

We will spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his family, my father, my sister, and her eldest.  I wanted to bring some of my mother along, and so I am making her brownies.  Here she is, on the page as it appears in her book of handwritten, hand-clipped recipes.  Many of them stained.  Some of them missing temperature instructions (she had everything in her head).  Everything delicious.



Wishing you all a beautiful time of family, friends, reflections.



I have so much to be grateful for.

scene from a novel in progress, a novel two long chapters from done

 

            The
day was breaking.  There was still
the tooth of the moon in the sky and that black fringe of storm, and she could
hear the high slosh in the creek, the endless running forward to the sea.   When she reached the footbridge,
she stood for a moment and looked back toward the house—the big rectangle and
the small one, the twin chimneys, the unsunk roof sloping forthright in two
directions, the garden like a moat. 
Slick and stone and root.

            Steam
had come in, a funnel of gnats and mosquitoes, the sudden gray heart of a squirrel
on a limb above her head.  Becca
imagined the boy fishing for marlin in the stream, or sleeping on a bed of
hawk-tail feathers.  She imagined
him alone in that room, that empty mirror, that barrette balanced on the
apple's glass stem, that jar of honey.  The trees unfurled, a belligerent green.  The crows were thick as thieves.  On the prickle of the forest floor, Becca
saw the wet back of a single beetle catching a nick of sun.   

 



 

Invited to her Thanksgiving table

Best of the year, best of the genre, best of right now lists proliferate at this time of year.  I love seeing what others have loved, what they will not forget but carry forward.  I myself am rather incapable of such sorting.  So much moves me.  So much matters.  So much registers within me as special.



But today a different kind of list made its way to me, thanks to the keen eye of the ever-dear Serena Agusto-Cox.  It's a list that was fashioned by the one and only Danielle of There's a Book.  It's an invitation I would most definitely accept, if I only lived 3,000 miles closer.  It is, indeed, a most gracious tendering.



Thanksgiving, indeed.

Juno meets Under the Tuscan Sun: The Small Damages Catalog Page

This has been a day full, gigantically full, and only just now did I realize that mail had come in.  The Penguin Young Readers Group May - August 2012 Catalog was among the packages that found their way to my desk.



On page 188, I discovered this.  A full and glorious page devoted to Small Damages, and a headline that put a big smile on my face.



Thank you, Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, and Philomel. What is the quality of publishing house beyond first-class, top-rate, dear?  If there is one, that is what you are.

Life in a Day: Watch the Movie

I had written about this remarkable project when it was first reported in The New York Times Magazine.  Last night, my husband and I watched the entire film.  Today I realize that it is available here, on You Tube.



It is brilliant and haunting.

Shards/Ismet Prcic: Early Reflections

Ever since Dana Spiotta reviewed Shards in the The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago, I have been eager to get a copy for myself. Consider, here, what Dana says:

The novel is constructed of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the "meat grinder" of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind. The novel comprises mostly segments from his therapist- ordered memoir (or memoirs) and excerpts from his diary. These shards employ several narrative strategies. There are asterisked footnotes, italicized interruptions and self-reflexive comments about unreliability. There are first-, second- and third-person narrations, sometimes switching back and forth within a paragraph. This is a novel about struggling to find form for a chaotic experience. It pushes against convention, logic, chronology. But its disruptions are necessary. How do you write about war and the complications of memory? How do you write about dislocation, profound loneliness, terror? How does a human persevere?

Truth is, I'd been eager to read Ismet Prcic's debut novel ever since I sat in the office of Lauren Wein, the book's editor, and listened to her read aloud from the opening passage.  The book had only recently been released as advance reading copies and, judging from the number of brilliantly hued sticky notes attached to many of the pages, Lauren was still giving this book her extraordinary editorial attentions.  I loved the sound of what she had read to me.  I could not wait to read more.  And then, caught up in the crazy swirl of my own life, I did wait, not buying the book until just recently.



I am only into the early pages at this point. I am not, as I thought I might be, intimidated by the hybrid of forms, techniques, approaches.  The word "propulsive" has been attached to this book, and that it is, but the book is remarkably resonant, too, often funny, surprisingly accessible, despite all that is original and new.  Here is an early-in example:

I love a girl, Melissa.  Her hair oozes like honey.  It's orange in the sun.  She loves me, mati.  She's American.  She goes to church.  She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage.  She volunteers.  She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they're done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme.  She's sharp.  She drives like a lunatic.  She's capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.

Nichts als Liebe

When Nothing but Ghosts appears as the lead summer title from Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag next June, it will be called Nichts als Liebe and translated by what the German agent calls "one of the very best."




I like the sound of that.

There are, for me, just two ways to write:

1) within a fever fury



2) within the long, tidal pull of the story that takes years to find itself, wants to find itself, will.



All this past week, this morning, today, I am grateful for the story that found itself over the course of so many years—that did not give up on itself, or on me.