Beth Kephart's Blog, page 225

Generocity: Philanthropy Made Easy

Generocity.org is a rather unusual—and beautiful—undertaking, the brainchild of Sandra Baldino. It is, in her words, a "one-stop-shop for all of you folks out there who just give a damn." A place where stories about good people doing good works will get told.  A place where people who want to give can be helped toward that giving.  A place that reshapes and reinvigorates the idea of corporate citizenship, particularly in the Philadelphia region. 



I contributed a story about my river—that Schuylkill—and those who continue to rescue her in today's edition.  Perhaps you'll stop and take a look.  But mostly I hope that you will check this brand-new organization out for yourself.  Generocity is making difference-making easy.  I kind of like the sound of that.

Jill Lepore to Headline the Third Annual Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture

A week or so ago, when my husband and I were powerless, my father called and invited us to dinner at his home, where my mother's orchids still grow, the figurines still shine, and the sun yet goldens the rooms.  Glimmers of my mother, all.  We were almost finished with this delightful repast (cloth napkins! dimmed lights! smart vegetables! organic cookies!) when my father mentioned that the Villanova University committee entrusted with the selection of a scholar for the Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series had made its decision, and that Jill Lepore was slated to come.  She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engaging Andrew Bacevich  in this role, and she will appear at the university on the evening of December 6th, details to come.



Jill Lepore happens to be one of my idols. She's not just the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker.  She's a woman who smiles warmly back at you from her portrait photos, despite the fact that her head is preposterously full of stuff about Charles Dickens and the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and the Tea Party, eighteenth-century Manhattan and the King Philip's War (she has written or is writing books about it all).  For an apparent change of pace, she's even co-authored a widely acclaimed novel called Blindspot.  And once she wrote a New Yorker piece called "The Lion and the Mouse" (about E.B. White, Stuart Little, and the sometimes ridiculously short-sighted nature of critics and publishing houses) that was so letter perfect I didn't just blog about it here.  I wrote Ms. Lepore a gushing fan letter.  Miraculously, Ms. Lepore wrote back. 



Jill Lepore will be talking about the Tea Party and the Constitution in December.  I'll be providing more details as I can.  For now I'm simply expressing my excitement that my mother and father are working together once again to bring all of us something grander than grand.



My thanks to Paul Steege, a good friend, fine teacher, smart writer, and great soul, who remains a key member of this selection committee.

Talking about Connectivity, Melissa Sarno, and a Stealth You Are My Only Giveaway

I want to talk for a moment about connections—about the way one thing leads to the next.



The story starts with this blog, begun in a vacuum in 2007, begun with absolutely no idea of what a blog might reap, or what a blog should be.  (As you can probably tell, I am still figuring that out.)



Somewhere along the way, somehow, the magnificent My Friend Amy found her way here.  And because My Friend Amy had, scores of others did, too.  My Friend Amy is that kind of gal.



Among the My Friend Amy coterie was one Melissa Sarno, now a dear, amazing, smart, funny, treasured friend.  Melissa is a writer and producer for a toy company by day, as she will tell you on her exceedingly intelligent blog.  She is a fiction writer by (extremely late) night.  In between she keeps me laughing with her tales and her adventures, her threats to visit upon me the world's best pairing of cookies and wine, say, or a perilously stacked cone of ice cream.  Twice Melissa has stood before me live and in person at the BEA.  Always I learn from her.



Last week, Melissa was away.  Yesterday she was at certain tennis match.  This morning, I turned on this computer to find Melissa right here, with me, undertaking a Stealth (which is to say surprise) In Anticipation of You Are My Only giveaway.  It's pretty big.  It's so Melissa.  It threw me for a Coney-Island-Roller-Coaster-quality loop.  Please take a moment to visit her blog and see what she has in store for you.



Melissa, you rock.  The next triple scoop is on me.  Plus the world's best malbec.

The BBAW 2011 Short Lists are Announced—and Voting Begins

It's that time of year again—that time when book bloggers take a moment to stop and to honor the work that gets done out here by so many.  Pure love and countless hours define book bloggers.  Engagement with a larger community, conversation across time zones and geographies, and a chance to articulate and debate opinions are the rewards.  Friendships erupt and stay firm.



This year, as always, the list is rich, and now it's up to you to take some time and vote for the winners.  Winners will be selected by voting via Twitter or Google log-in at the BBAW site and will be announced during the week of September 12 - 16 against the backdrop of interview swaps, guest posts, and giveaways.  To see the short list, to vote for your favorites, or to learn more, go here.



I find myself on the short list this year, and I could not be more humbled or (at the same time) proud.  Proud to stand among these bloggers who, time and again, have reached out and made my life as an author brilliantly real and lastingly meaningful.  When the chips have been down—and yes, from time to time, they have been down—book bloggers have risen up, spoken out, and given my books and me a second life, a greater chance.  A huge thank you, then, to those who nominated me for the long list and to those who kept me here on the short list, and to those myriad bloggers, everywhere, who have made my world complete.  I am grateful.



Here are just a few of the categories you can vote for.  Please take the time to give all the bloggers on the list a real boost:



Published Author Blog

Beth Kephart Books

Maggie Stiefvater

Veronica Roth

Kidlit Book Blog

Charlotte's Library

The O.W.L.

There's a Book

Poetry Blog

Necromancy Never Pays

Savvy Verse & Wit

Publishing Industry Blog

Olive Reader

The World of Peachtree Publishers

Young Adult Book Blog

Forever Young Adult

Galleysmith

I Swim for Oceans

Pure Imagination

The Book VixenyaHighway

Best Author Interviews

Presenting Lenore

Relz Reviewz

Stacked

There's a Book

Unabridged Chick

Best Written Blog

A Room of One's Own

Parajunkee's View

S. Krishna's Books

Shelf Love

write meg!

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, a test image

Between a lot of work and a lousy flu, I've been at work on yet another read through of my Dangerous Neighbors prequel, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent.  My talented husband and business partner has, meanwhile, been at work on the illustrations. 



From within the heat of this fury (and fever), then, I share with you an early fragment from the sketches in progress.



It's all going off to my agent, Amy Rennert, today.

The remarkable My Friend Amy writes about small moments

and why they matter in works of art.  I was thinking, as I read, that the New York Times Book Review should hire Amy as a weekly essayist.  She is just that good.  I was thinking, too, about how lucky I am to count Amy as a faithful reader and so entirely generous friend.



Thank you, Amy, for these words.  Thank you, indeed, for everything.

We the Animals/Justin Torres: Reflections

I'm not quite sure what it was that made me decide (spur of the moment, really) to buy We the Animals, the slender debut novel by the widely acclaimed writer Justin Torres.  I'd heard some humming about the book.  I'd seen the ad.  I'd read what Marilynne Robinson had to say: "Brilliant, poised and pure." I'd read the words of Paul Harding:  "It is an indelible and essential work of art."  It was an impulse purchase, a little easy finger work, and there it was, on my iPad, waiting to be read.



From start to finish, without once leaving the couch, I just read.



We the Animals is the third book that I've encountered in the space of a little more than a week that builds through plurals. There was the rhythmic they, they, they of Colleen Mondor's remarkable debut memoir, The Map of My Dead Pilots.  There was the haunting, concentrating we of Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic.



And now here comes Torres with his story about brothers growing up within the chaotic fist of a poor, troubled family.  "We wanted more," this book begins.  "We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry.  We wanted more volume, more riots.  We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."



Truly, I am tempted to just keep on quoting.  Because look at that.  Listen to it.  Justin Torres is carving out the sound of a song.



These boys are wild.  Their mom was a teen when all three were born.  Their father is a big, muscular, knotted man—a charmer and a rogue, a man who can purple up his wife with his fists and, just as powerfully, bathe a son. The kids are bound to each other and they're plastering each other—with hands, with words, with wants.  Each scene is a distillation, a moment.  Time moves warily forward.  The boys are in for hurt, and they do some hurting themselves, and sometimes it all grows so unbearably tense that I had to close my eyes and summon my psychic strength to keep on reading.



Readers can never change the fate of the characters they meet.  They can only hope for them.  They can only fear for them.  In reading We the Animals, I did both.  I succumbed to Torres's tale.  I honor his literary powers.   

The Bird House/Kelly Simmons: Reflections

No, that isn't actually a bird house pictured above (as astute readers will surely divine), but it is an iconic bit of architecture on Philadelphia's Main Line (do I have guessers?).  I begin with this image because I've been reading Kelly Simmons' The Bird House this morning, a wonderfully complex, Main-Line-Philadelphia-saturated second novel about (here we go again, the dreaded plot summary) a woman on the edge of early dementia and her relationship with her eight-year-old grandchild.  Okay, it's about more than that.  It's about family secrets and honor, judgments and forgiveness, the things that get passed on.  It's hard to hide your secrets in this life.  It's harder, even, to guess who has already secretly found your secrets out.  And despite who we are or who we want to be, it's really really really important that nothing separate a loving grandmother from a super special child.



The Bird House has been on my TBR list for quite some time.  I liked what I was hearing about the book—absolutely—and I like what I know about the author, formerly the chief creative officer of the impressive Philadelphia ad agency, Tierney, and now the president of Bubble Advertising, which trains its wise eye on the xx's among us.  Simmons has been called one of the most winningest ad writers on the east coast, and you don't have to read more than a clutch of pages from this fine novel to know you are in good hands.  The woman sees.  The woman can write.  And her dialogue snaps and sizzles. 



The Bird House is a weaving book—diary passages tell us the tale.  We alternate between the early months of 2010 and the heady days of 1967—between memories that our narrator wishes she could suppress and memories she hopes never to forget.  The diary entries may be a necessary structural vehicle, but they never interfere with the narrative, nor do they get in the way of Ann Biddle's remarkable voice, more ironic than nostalgic, perhaps, and often funny, despite the dark secrets that she keeps.



Here's an example of what I mean.  You'll have to purchase the book to read more.

A handful of men around my age sat on stools, looking as if they'd stopped off to have a few drinks and pick up their wives' birthday cards.  Familiar red baskets of glistening onion rings and French fries slide across the wooden bar with a kind of grace impossible to find at a fast-food restaurant. There is more to inexpensive food than inexpensive ingredients: there has to be humility. Hardworking humility. I was comforted by the dirty aprons and dented spoons; they spoke of effort and toil.  The muscles in the young woman's arm flexed as she scooped the ice cream for Ellie's float; anything good, anything worthy, I wanted to tell her, took some doing.

Alyson Hagy Wins The 2011 Devil's Kitchen Award

When I think of Alyson Hagy (and I often think of Alyson, for she is one my most cherished friends in this literary world, and has been for years) I think of weather and bird calls, horses and tennis, a big, wide generous heart.  I think of Wyoming, where she now lives, and the University of Wyoming, where she has helped to create one of the best lit departments in the country (I'd give anything to live closer to Alyson, not just to be taught by her but to participate in the programs she assembles for the whole town).  I also think of of her extraordinary work, which I have written about on this blog from time to time.



Most recently I wrote about Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf), her collection of short stories, which was hailed by critics across the country.  I loved it, too, of course I did, and you can find my brief blog posting here.



All of which is prefatory to this fabulous bit of news:  Alyson Hagy has won the 2011 Devil's Kitchen Award in Prose for Ghosts and will be participating in the Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  Anyone close enough to go should really try to meet her.



Or buy her book.  It will astound you.  (She's got a new novel due out soon.  You'll read about that one here, I can assure you.)

In the art of her becoming (dancing with Miss M.)

I'd always thought that I'd have one of those rambling, big families—a couple of boys and a couple of girls.  Instead I was given the greatest son a mother could ask for.  Light emanates from him.  Wisdom, too.



Still, being the mom of one has raised up the aunt in me; I am, I will confess, that woman (yes, that one) who seeks out friendships with those who, by virtue of their age and their perspective, their fearlessness and hope, are so much smarter and livelier than moi.  I'm the neighborhood crazy (as some have called me) who brings the kids into her home to talk words and books.  I'm that lady with the camera snapping shots of kids hanging from trees or sledding down hills or bringing water up a hill.  I'm that professor who stands crying in the classroom at the semester's end, and I'm that blogger standing in awe of the young talents who reach out to me.



I'm useless, really, but that's the thing: these young people forgive me.



I was thinking about all of this last night as I took a cha-cha lesson with a golden-haired eleven-year-old I'll call Miss M.  She's got the cha-cha down already, see, while the rest of us need far more practice.  We need patience, too, and Miss M. has that.  We need to know what she knows, and she shows us.  "What was that again?" we'll ask her, and she'll say, "It's the basic, and then the New Yorker, and then the chasse and the alemana."  "Hmmm," we'll say, and she'll demonstrate, without an ounce of arrogance in her.



Miss M. will make an astonishing teacher someday, but before that, she's going to wow the dance world with her dancing.  I feel rather privileged to know her right now, in the art of her becoming.