Beth Kephart's Blog, page 220

You Are My Only: The Bookslut Review

I am deeply privileged to have You Are My Only included in Colleen Mondor's October Bookslut column, which she has titled "Bradbury Season."  In a fascinating column that touches as well on White Crow (Marcus Sedgwick), All about Emily (Connie Willis), and Anna Dressed in Blood (Kendare Blake), among other titles, Colleen writes about You Are My Only with tremendous understanding and generosity.  She concludes with the words below.  Please read the entire column here .

In the end both Sophie and Emmy are young women who live in fear through no fault of their own and must struggle against great odds to find the truth without losing their minds in the process. In this very intense psychological thriller they take chances and most importantly do not give up. I like that in any novel and find a lot to admire in a book that gives me not just one but two young women to admire. The fact that Kephart accomplishes this in the midst of writing about a cute boy, a dog, some kite flying and classic literature is all par for the course for her fans but will impress many new readers who show up for the thrills this time. (And do read about Byberry if you get a chance -- it's about as scary as it gets.) 

weekend self-portrait

We spent sixteen hours driving this weekend, as we picked our son up from college, brought him home, chilled for a together day, then returned him to the world of media campaigns, student-run TV, international politics, Middle Eastern studies; we staggered up our steps around 1 PM. 



For the record, my husband was driving when I took this shot.  I'm not that kind of camera crazy.  For the record, too, just after I snapped this shot, we entered a downpour of end-of-the-world proportions. We have driven these roads now, countless times.  Entered into these endless mountains, and accepted the fate of their weather.



I am grateful for every hour that I am honored to spend with my son.

the first writer's workshop: words from a memoir in progress

In their faces I see the person I once was, though I was nearly twice their age, married, and a mother when I enrolled in my first writer's workshop.  We'd flown to Spoleto, Italy, for a family vacation, and we'd climbed hills and slipped inside churches and sat beneath rooms where pianos were playing.  There were nuns on the hills, ropes at their waists.  There were market flowers wilted by sun.  We'd arrived late at night and settled into a stranger's flat (the plates still draining by the kitchen sink, a cloud of smoky moon in the front window), and the next day I'd hauled myself up the stairs of a round-cornered building and sat in the back of the class.  I'd brought a blank book with gray pages, its cover hieroglyphically embossed.  I'd read the works of our teachers, Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown, and beyond the window, deep in the hills, was the Roman theater and the turreted castle, the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, the shop of silver trinkets and cards from which my toddler son would soon (almost) catastrophically run as a Fiat hurtled by.  The poisonous wasp that would balloon my husband's hand was out there.  The pizza shop with the festoon of paper flowers at the base of the hill.  The slinking arm of the aqueduct.  The basilica in pale light, its beauty explained by my husband with two words:  forced perspective.  The cemetery where soon the class would go to imagine the lives of those whose names we'd find scratched out of headstones and buffed by a woman bearing (in broad daylight) a candle flame and white handkerchief. But at that moment there was only the classroom, the squeak-footed chairs, my blank book, the other students, Rosellen, and Reginald, and it was Reginald who began:  "Every difference makes a difference."  Word for word, I transcribed him.  "The craft of writing is to describe something so that someone else can see it."  Soon Reginald was quoting Henry James—"Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost"—and then Rosellen was speaking: "I like the sentence that begins romantically, then de-romanticizes itself."The sentence that de-romanticizes itself.I had been a closet writer nearly all my life—my poems stuffed in boxes, my short stories boomeranged back to me via return-envelope mail.  I was taking my first lesson in craft, and what I learned in Spoleto, what I chose to value or come to believe about myself, would shape the way I thought about stories made and lived every thereafter day of my life.  It would make me want to find a way to pass the knowing down.

The boy comes home for a day or two

and he sleeps up there in his room, above my head.  I skip Body Combat to write, because I know this to be true:  When the boy (no longer a boy) is near, I can.  Two full chapters that might have otherwise taken me a month to write came easy today because he's here. 



That's just how it is with me.  The joy of him filtered through.

Let others ease you forward

Sometimes you just have to put yourself in the hands of others.  Yesterday I did.  Let Kristy work her hands across my face and neck, easing the stress and pressures there.  Let Heather do her thing with my hair.  There are things you can change about your life.  There are things you cannot.  It is important, sometimes, to ask for help.  To let others ease you forward.

Tomorrow

we will see our boy.



Is that paradise, or what?

The Rise of the Illustrated Young Adult Novel

I had heard so much that was so good about A Monster Calls, the Patrick Ness novel inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, that last night, when my arms were too achy to type a single letter more, I downloaded the book onto my iPad2.



Had I known that this book was so beautifully illustrated, I would have gone out to the store and bought myself a copy instead, so that I could, from time to time, look at these extraordinarily interesting, wildly textured Jim Kay drawings.  A Monster Calls would be a very different book without these images, just as Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the Ransom Riggs books enlivened by surreal old photographs, would not be the book it is had not a publishing house decided that teens, too (and the adults who inevitably read teen books) need, every now and then, to stop and see the world not through words but through images.  Maile Meloy's new historical YA book, The Apothecary, is due out soon—a book that (if the preview pages on Amazon are accurate) features some very beautiful illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.  And let's not forget The Boneshaker by Kate Milford, with its beautiful Andrea Offermann images. (And, of course, there are so many, many more.)



A Monster Calls reminds me, in so many ways, of the great Roald Dahl story The BFG.  Dahl's books, illustrated by Quentin Blake, sit beside The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer) on my shelf—books that take me back to some of my favorite mother-son reading days.  We loved the stories.  We loved the illustrations, too.  We loved the entire package.



Maybe we have Brian Selznick to thank for this return to the visual—to ageless picture books.  Maybe it was just plain time.  I only (with absolute surety) know this:  I recently completed a young adult novel amplified by (in my eyes) gorgeous illustrations. I can't wait to see where that project goes, and on what kind of journey it takes me.

Publishing Perspectives, Shelf Awareness, and Ellen Trachtenberg: The Good Things in Life

Yesterday, on Facebook, I was talking about how much I love Shelf Awareness —the rightness of tone, the clean-ness of look, the clarity of opinion, the depth of coverage.  It's a very fine publication.  We readers are lucky it's out there.  If you don't already subscribe, please subscribe.  It's free, and it's a happiness feeling.



Today, I'm singing the praises of Publishing Perspectives, the brainchild of one Edward Nawotka. This internationally focused bastion of up-to-the-minute publishing news is really quite fascinating and feels (is there another way to say this?) delightfully new.



Today, for example, Publishing Perspectives has stories with titles ranging from "The Power of Innovation in Publishing" to "What Role Does Social Networking Have in Scholarly Publishing?" to "Building Online Communities for Teen Readers."  The voices of agents, publishers, editors, and technocrats can all be found here, and (again) the slant is decidedly global.



My thanks to the entirely fantastic Ellen Trachtenberg of Braintree PR for pointing me toward this magazine.  Sometimes you just make the right decisions in your life, and having Ellen along on this publishing journey has most assuredly been a right one.

Four lines stolen from a poem

My friend (I call her Soup) is one fine writer.  She taught me tricks a few years ago.  Okay, so it was a few decades ago now, and she was my neighbor, and her real name is Andree, and if you want to know how much I just plain like this lady, then you can read all about it in a little book I wrote, a memoir called Into the Tangle of Friendship.



But that is beside the point right now, because Soup grew up and I moved away, and Soup's children—they grew up, too.  The last time I saw Soup's youngest, Aimee, she was young, very young.  She was carefree.



Today Aimee is a high school student and a poet, and Soup just sent two of her newest works on to me.  There is a line in one that strikes me as particularly alive and yearning and exquisite, and I hope Aimee won't mind if I share it here.  Look at this.  Say it out loud and listen.  The words of a young soul leaned forward:





How

can I say what I've lost

if you're not

drowning yet.

— Aimee Seu

They must have hearts that can break

As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels.  But they must have hearts that can break.

            — Edith Wharton