Beth Kephart's Blog, page 215

The way dancers tell stories

We escaped the snow and headed for the city, where our friends Julia and Gene were celebrating their 70th birthdays in classic (elegant) Julia and Gene style.  She hails from the United Kingdom, he from the midwest.  She's a sprite of a thing; he tips his head, ever so slightly, to pass through doorways.  She's a sociologist and he's a statistician.  Together they remind those of us lucky enough to know them that love is not a formula.  It is what happens in the blink of an eye (they knew at once, they say of each other).  It is what endures.



At this party of friends, family, colleagues, we sat among dancers.  Jan, Lana, Scott, Tirsa, John, Inna, and Julia herself (Miss Cristina was also among us, looking lovely), to be precise.  We were privileged amateurs among impeccably attired super stars (and I do not exaggerate; Jan and Lana will soon be appearing in a major movie alongside actors such as Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper; Scott was once the nation's mambo champion).  We were also quite simply friends among friends.



What perpetually interests me about dancers is how smart they are, how diversified their interests, how capable of telling stories with far more than words. That angling of a shoulder speaks volumes, for example, as does the slight, purposeful turn of the head.  Jan raises his eyebrow, and his opinion is known.  Lana reports on science with the blue light of her eyes.  John brings mischief to his laugh; there is an emphatic grace in Inna's hands; Tirsa moves her wrist and her whole arm sparkles; Cristina is perpetually, stunningly alive; and there's that thing Scott does when he's telling a story, which is to lean in and then lean back, wait for the pulse.  Dancers hardly need words at all when they are telling their stories. 



When it was time to dance, we danced, easy with the songs that Julia and Gene had chosen on a ballroom floor laid for our feet. The rumba, the cha-cha, the salsa, the foxtrot, the bolero, the waltz, back to the foxtrot.  Those dancers know how to move, and they swept us into their graces, and later, around midnight, when we walked the streets of Philadelphia at their side (among Halloween ghouls and ghosts and vampires), I thought of how it must be to move through the world like that—so full of sway and suggestible spine. 



My husband and I woke in a room downtown this morning, headed to the Reading Market for breakfast, went up to the Art Museum and walked our favorite wing. I took a photograph, then, of this Renoir painting, because this gorgeous child is not speaking, not a word, and yet she's full of story.  Julia and Gene, thank you for giving us such a rich and memorable evening on a weekend of historic weather.  We will remember it always with fondness.

In the stillness of now

I try not to let things get beyond me in this life, but the last few weeks were dense with work and pressure.  I paid no attention to clocks, working as much as I could to complete a corporate project that has meant a lot to me.  I wrote a few talks, prepared a workshop session, took care of some magazine work for clients.



In between was a certain book stock crisis,  Google's announcement that my account (translation: my blog) had been violated and was no longer accessible, a lost camera, and lost glasses.  Piles grew tidal around me (which is not a happy thing for a neat freak).  The refrigerator emptied (save for a bottle of milk and a quarter stick of butter, perhaps a square of cheese, jello made in a moment of hunger).  Bills sat unpaid. I wore clothes from another era because the right-era clothes were, shall we say, indisposed.  I answered emails many days late, with what, I am sure, was an humiliating array of mistakes.  There should be a book:  Beth's Email Mistakes.  The sequel:  Beth's Blog Mistakes. 



And books—at least a dozen books—came into the house and were placed in a growing teeter on the living room table.  Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Diana Abu-Jaber's Birds of Paradise.  A.S. King's Everybody Sees the Ants.  Peter Spiegelman's Thick as Thieves.  Philip Schultz's My Dyslexia.  Benjamin Markovits's Childish Loves.  Marc Schuster's The Grievers.  Ann Hite's Ghost on Black Mountain.  Anna Lefler's Chicktionary.  Roy Jacobsen's Child Wonder.  Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones.  Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document.  Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding.  More.



Can I just tell you how much I have missed reading books? Finding my way into the thick of a story?  Decoding the music others make?



Today, on this freakishly autumnal snowy day, I will join my family of dance friends in the city to celebrate the joint 70 year old birthdays of a still-swinging couple.  We'll stay overnight and brunch the next day with beloved friends in a white city, then head to a museum.  I'm going to take one of these books with me.  And then, come Sunday night, leaning into Monday morning, I am going to lie on a couch and do nothing but turn pages and return to the reader I am.



Thank you for putting up with all the recent launch news of You Are My Only.  I'm eager to once again spend my time here talking about the books of others.  That is why I created this space.  That is what makes me happy.

Unlucky? I don't think so.

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[image error] You Are My Only is my thirteenth book.  In the early days, when that fact would surface, I was given all kinds of advice about how to go straight from 12 to 14 and thereby skip the unluckiness in between.  I shrugged it off.  A number is just a number, not a superstition.  Right?



But in the 24 hours leading up to the long-awaited book launch party at Radnor Memorial Library last evening, I began to rethink my no superstition policy.  I lost my glasses.  I lost my camera.  It rained most fierce just ahead of the party hour.  Most concerning was that mid-day hour, when it was discovered that the copies of the books that were to be sold that night had not yet made their way to Children's Book World, which had so kindly offered to join us at the event.  I admit it:  A few tears were shed.



And yet, I will look back on last night as one of the luckiest nights of my life.  Let's talk about what happened at six o'clock, at Elizabeth Mosier's incredibly beautiful and hospitable home, where writers  feasted on Elizabeth's amazing Mexican meal.  Libby is always there—a hugely talented writer and reader with a generous heart—and everyone in my neck of the woods (me perhaps above all) is grateful.  Let's talk about Pam Sedor, a dear friend, who has given me a home for years at her luxurious Winsor Room.  Let's talk about John, one of the most intelligent young readers I know (in fact, I refuse to believe that he is anything other than a New York Times Book Review writer), who sent me an email at this book's very start and who, late yesterday afternoon, sent me a link to his most stunning Dear Author review.  Let's talk about Ellen Trachtenberg, a friend who has stood by me throughout the publication of this book, lending me her perspective, know-how, and smarts.  Let's talk about Amy Rennert, my agent, who was on the phone with me several times during the course of yesterday, and who sent a beautiful email last evening.  Let's talk about those dancers, St. Johner's, writers, Zumbaists, long-time friends, neighbors, teachers, book clubbers, colleagues who worked their way in from the storm.  I wondered, to tell you the truth, if anyone would.  They did.  They were there.  Each one a treasure.



I hope that they know they are treasured.



In my opening remarks last evening I talked a little about what it takes to be a writer.  I share the final words of that talk here:

But just because I had to write this story doesn't mean that I had an easy time of it.  I never do.  It's not a straight-line process for me.  It's not—find the plot, dance to the crescendo, put a little lute to the denouement.  It's a devastatingly inefficient process, my writing of novels, and there are, I will admit it, tears.  Long, self-dramatizing monologues are involved.  Bad posture.  Tingling arms.  Broken fingernails.

I can be heard to say, I cannot do it.

I have sworn, Never again.

And then I'm right back at it the next day.  I'm pushing until I write one sentence that works.  And another sentence that works.  Because yes:  Ideas are essential.  And yes:  Stories need their characters.  And sure, it's absolutely true that no publisher is going to look twice at you if you don't have a plot.  

But I can't  write forward if I don't have a sentence that, to my ear, works.  If the preposition is wrong.  If there's an extra syllabic beat.  If something cranks the wrong way or falls flat —when this happens, and it happens all the time, I cannot tick a chapter toward its end.  Several times I nearly lost You Are My Only.  Too many nights to count, I went to bed with an ache in my heart.

If you think you are a writer, if you want to be a writer, you need to read.  You need to be capable of hurting.  You need to imagine.  You need time, you need silence, you need space.  You need these things.  But if you do not also have a persevering spirit, you cannot be a writer.  If you do not, daily, choose to start at the base of the mountain and climb, with all ferocity, up, you aren't going anywhere. 

You lose faith in yourself when you write—that's part of the process.  You fight the lost faith of others.  You fight your way out of the margins.  You hold onto the people you trust.  Perseverance is the final hallmark of a writer.

Or, at least, it is what has brought me here, all these quiet books later, these books about heart.  You Are My Only is, in some ways, a different kind of book for me.  There is more plot.  There is more tension.  There is suspense.  But it is not, in fact, a departure.  My Emmy and my Sophie see, face, live terrible things.  They are placed into raw circumstances.  But what saves my Emmy and my Sophie is their ceaseless search for goodness.  What saves them is their special gift for believing that goodness wins.

On Parties, Wings, and Book Supply

When I was little I had a doll that looked just like this fabulous child.  I named her Maria.  She had lovely smooth bangs.  I remain in love with her lovely, smooth bangs.



I discovered this gem of a little girl a few weeks ago, during my travels to Jim Thorpe.  It wasn't Halloween yet, but she was dressed to fly.



Later this evening, I'll be celebrating the debut of You Are My Only at the Radnor Memorial Library with friends from most corners of my life. Writers, dancers, neighbors, friends, St. John's-ers, Zumba-ists, goddesses and gods of goodness, Pam Sedor, Elizabeth Mosier.  It's a bit cloudy out there, but I'm feeling sunny inside.  That's what gatherings of friends—for any occasion—do.



Today dear Florinda, who stood at my side at the BEA as my own personal and quite talented publicist, stands beside me again, with her words about You Are My Only, which she recently read.  What an amazing support she has been through all of this.  Thank you, Miss Florinda.  I don't know what I'd do without you.



Today, too, I want to thank The Eclectic Reader for luring me to her site with the promise that she did indeed like the book.  (I smiled.)  I love the details she has called out.  I am so grateful for her words. 



Finally, today, I want to thank all of you who have reached out to me about the unfortunate situation regarding the actual supply of You Are My Only books.  I wish that Amazon's temporarily out of stock signal early Tuesday morning had indeed been but truly temporary, and I am sorry, too—so sorry—to hear of delays at independent bookstores.  I am so grateful to all of you who had faith in this book from the very first, and who rallied so magnificently behind it.  I can only assure you that everything that can be done to remedy the situation is now being done. 



But today is what counts.  This very moment.  I'm going to go find myself a purple and green winged dress.  I am going to bake some cookies.  I will make no promises about my bangs.

I believe in the beauty of this photograph

The birth of seeds in the burst of a pod.  Autumn already leaning toward spring.

Small Damages: The Cover Reveal

When you work on a book for close to a decade—when you refuse to give up, when you endless redefine the narrative's shape, when you push away and return and push back and realize you will ache until you return again—when you work like that, the book becomes a part of you.  The book tells you secrets about yourself, about what you are willing to believe in.  It becomes a marker in a questing life.



When the book finds itself at a most extraordinary home with a dear editor who shares your passion for foreign places and exotic foods, for history and gypsy song, who writes you the kind of notes that make you cry (for the right reasons), who takes the time to share your work with authors you can't quite believe you are actually being read by, who oversees the creation of a cover that takes your breath away, you are just plain lucky.  I—I know this—am lucky.



Today a box arrived at my home.  It contained the galleys for Small Damages, a book that will be published on my son's birthday next July.  It contained a note from the glorious Tamra Tuller, my editor at Philomel whose stable of writers includes both Ruta Sepetys and Kathryn Erskine. 



Tamra Tuller has been working with me on Small Damages for more than a year.  She has quietly demonstrated, to this sometimes impatient soul, the power of waiting, of right timing.  Michael Green, the president of Philomel, has sent notes all along the way—funny notes, endearing ones, words I will, when I'm even older than right now, always remember.



Can I share the cover?, I asked Tamra today.  She said that it was time.  She has done miraculous work, this Tamra Tuller, and I will be forever grateful.  Small Damages, then.

It's senior year, and the future should be right within reach. But for Kenzie—bright, ambitious, in love with Yale-bound Kevin—the future has been rearranged. She's pregnant, and she's determined not to end her pregnancy. Her mother and Kevin refuse to understand. Sent off to an old cortijo in Spain, Kenzie must find a way to endure until her baby is safe in an adoptive couple's hands. What will she make of the stubborn old cook who plagues Kenzie with demands? How will she ever understand the mysterious young man Esteban—his way with horses, and birds, his way of watching her? And what can the eccentric gypsies teach Kenzie about love? There are choices to make. There are questions about home. Small Damages is Spain alive. It is hearts broken and healed. It is heat and color and soul.   

A day in autumn, with sun

Today corporate work kept me pinned to this desk.  Every now and then I would look up, see those blue skies pressing, a cloud passing, and think:  This is a day that is alive.  Go out there.  Seize it.



I thought of the herd of black cows I'd photographed late Sunday afternoon.  I thought of this one, mud on her nose, a bit of a smile behind those whiskers.



When I am at my smartest, my most wise, I understand this:  Nothing is richer or more complete than a day in autumn, with sun.

You Are My Only. Today is the Day.

I didn't actually sleep last night, and if this blog post is riddled with errors, forgive me.  I'm a little blind, a little dizzy, and a whole lot grateful.



You Are My Only makes its way into the world today.  It has, in so many of you, glorious handmaidens.  Super glorious. Thank you—again—does not suffice.  You have given this book life.



Today I want to thank the wise and talented Melissa Middleman Firman of The Betty and Boo Chronicles for this breathtaking review, and for somehow locating and sharing one of my favorite passages in the book.  It was after I wrote this scene, Melissa, that I knew I had to keep writing this story.



I want to thank Caroline Leavitt, novelist and novelist advocate supreme, for giving me room to tell the story behind the book trailer (the thoughts that went into this underfunded gal's head) on her always outerdirected, fascinating blog, CarolineLeavittville. 



I want to thank Katie Halata for sending me the YALSA review of 15-year-old Riley Brannian, who is calling for a sequel.



I want to thank all of you who sent this book into an early second printing and contributed to the message I received when I went on the YAMO Amazon site this morning to make sure the book is actually available (though goodness knows I am extremely hopeful that this is but a very temporary (perhaps it will be rectified by dawn?) state of affairs).



Temporarily out of stock. 

And I want to thank all of you, again, for keeping the momentum building by blogging (thank you today, Anna Lefler!), Facebooking, Tweeting, talking, and both supporting and participating in the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt (and, in some cases, taking that Hunt to exponential places).  I had, as you know, written five guest posts about the making of this book.  Mundie Moms, My Friend Amy,  The Story Siren, Chick Loves Lit, and Bookalic.ious gave me room in their immaculate nests to share those posts, and many of you went off searching for them.  Those posts were made possible, to begin with, thanks to the outreach of the young women behind There's a Book and My Friend Amy, who provided enormous support of this book (and others!) from the very start. 



The posts themselves are here:



1.  The (furious) metamorphosis of Sophie

2.  Opening the Doors to Clois and Helen by Beth Kephart 

3.  When Emmy called I listened 

4.  I was obsessed with an asylum 

5.  What name should we give this book?





I had said that there would be two winners of this treasure hunt.  But today (is it the hour?  is it my half-blindness? is it that fingers are sticky when I reach into the hat?) I find that we have three.  Those winners (of a signed copy of YAMO and of my critique of 2,000 words in progress) are listed below.  Please send me an email about how I can reach you. 



Serena Agusto-Cox of Savvy Verse & Wit, an extraordinary Treasure Hunter if ever there was one.  (I think she found some of the posts before they were even up.)



Bonnie Jacobs of Bonnie's Books, who sent me her links at a very early hour.



Wendy of Caribou's Mom, who read the book itself early and whose blog I have followed ever since we both fell in love with The Elegance of the Hedgehog.



Oh.  Wait.  I forgot.  There's a fourth winner.  She's Vivian Lee Mahoney, who I met early on in this blogosphere, and who has been a dear and glorious friend. 



Oh.  And Florinda of 3rsblog— I know you have a signed copy of this book already.  But if you have something in progress that you would like me to critique....... (she winks)



Ladies:  Game on.



Thank you all—a million times over.

Teaching (and knowing) the best of the best

This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.



(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)



Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 



He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House



Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Elizabeth Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This



Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup



Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing



When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" — Jessica Francis Kane, The Report



Tapping a cigarette on the dashboard, Eric lights it and sucks, the smoke hits the back of his throat like a branding iron.  He holds his breath, then blows the smoke in a disappearing draft.  He wants to pop his chin, blow a smoke ring, but he's never learned how.  He isn't sure, either, if it's cool.  — Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Why She Left Us



I judge their hands.  I say to myself, yes, that guy fights fires in the mountains.  Or no, that guy's not a roofer, no matter what he claims.  Armand has spadelike hands, troweling hands, and they convince me he speaks a certain kind of truth.  He woos me with the fused joint of his ring finger, the corrugated grasp of his palms.  —Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming



In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain. — Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You



For a single moment she accepted the situation and had the kind of prosaic thought that gains weight in the timing of its application—that her time had come, as it had come to many before her and would to many again.  Then she felt a split second of peace, during which she continued to make sense of what was happening in the odd, lofty way that came upon her every once in a while and made her wonder about herself. She thought with an amused clarity that her ingrained sense of her own insignificance was finally coming in handy, enabling her to accept being blown where the wind took her, like a piece of dandelion fluff. — Alice Elliott Dark, "Home"



She would waken and find herself trussed and pinned to the earth with violin strings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. — Karen Rile, "No Ear for Languages"



Before dawn, when the souls of the dead hovered in the greying sky, the women gathered in the synagogue courtyard.  Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight



This final excerpt is from Kathryn Davis's miraculous The Thin Place.  She is not a friend, but we're going to be talking a little about magic realism in the class (thanks to one of the submitted workshop pieces), and so she is necessary:



There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake.  One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall.  This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do.  The dead souls no longer wore gowns.  They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.  — Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

early morning reader thank you's

Because of my strict No Google Beth policy, I have failed, over the last few weeks to thank some extraordinarily kind people.  I would like to do that now.



Lizzy Burns, the New Jersey librarian who writes the wickedly intelligent A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy, for her tremendous empathy toward in the character Emmy, in this review. 



Sixteen year-old Brianna M., of the School Library Journal Sneak Peak Review team, for giving me a first sense for how a teen reader might feel about You Are My Only, here.



Nicole B., for her continuing kindness toward me and my books, with this review at Linus's Blanket.



Valerie B., of Woven Myst, who sent a Facebook message to me so early on and gave me hope at a time when I had not yet heard from other readers, here.