Beth Kephart's Blog, page 232
July 19, 2011
My Baby Turns 22
July 18, 2011
The Author House Party: Join Elizabeth Mosier and Me For a Literary Mother/Daughter Evening
On Tuesday, September 20th, I'll have the great pleasure of joining the always gracious, perpetually brilliant Elizabeth Mosier for an Author House Party created by Lynn Rosen, the mind and heart behind Open Book. Elizabeth's smart new novella, The Playgroup (which I've had the privilege of reading early) will be available that evening, as will her YA novel, My Life as a Girl. I'll be reading from and talking about my Philadelphia-centric books Dangerous Neighbors and Flow. All in all, I know that I'll have fun, because I'll be near two writerly forces whom I've grown to love.
I hope you'll join us, and even spread the word. In the meantime, take a look at all the other wonderful things that are being offered this summer-fall through the Literally Speaking Author House Parties. It's a fabulous line-up.
In celebration of rivers, rowers, and the work we won't neglect
In the writing of the slender book that became Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, I moved in several directions before I settled on a form. For a long time the book was a collection of stories about people, most of them imagined, who lived by or near the river at different junctures in time. Today, I was remembering a piece I'd written about a character I'd originally named Lennie—a young woman who goes to the river in the 1870s to row. This is a fragment torn from the original draft. I publish it today in celebration of all my friends who do row or have rowed that river, including Katherine Wilson and Pam Sedor. I publish it, too, in celebration of all of us who work and rework our books, who keep thinking them through, until they are the best that we can make them and the world makes room for them.
She wore her scull upside down on her head like a hat, her hands on the riggers. She rolled it over and laid it down, pulled the oars through the chokes, fastened the gates, and settled her heart. She planted her feet in the stretchers and oared her way out, her back facing forward, her mind on her father's words: Shoulders to the sky, Lennie. Knees at an angle. Catch and drive and always finish. Feather the blades so you'll fly. She left her hair loose, a dark burst about her face. She let the breeze into her blouse. She listened to the river, and to what the river had to say. She went and she went, always beginning.
Toward the wirework of the Girard Avenue Bridge. Toward the ghost of John Penn and the animals that had come to town in '74 to live in their fanciful abodes: the Fox Pens, the Wolf Pens, the Raccoon House, the village for the prairie dogs, the stoned-in pits for bears, the house of birds. It was coming on to four o'clock, and she rowed: oars in, oars out, the commotion of animals up the hill. A hawk, she noticed now, had flown in from the east, its red-tipped wings and tail mirrored in the river's surface. One of the reflected wings kept breaking apart and resurrecting itself with each of her oar strokes, as if it could attach to the scull its own flight.
July 17, 2011
My dad, at the beach (1955)
Because it's a pretty day out there, and because I wish I was among the beachers, rolling and surfing and reading my book (which is Jennifer Haigh's Faith, at the moment), I post this 1955 photo of my dad — years before I knew him.He looks happy and tan. In other words: he hasn't really changed all that much.
July 16, 2011
Melissa Walker Earns Her Place in New York Times Book Review
Melissa Walker is adorable. She's the author of five YA books, a sometimes guest on big TV shows, a name you'll find in the Times Style section, a magazine writer, a voice on NPR, and an observer of our times. She is also out there on a daily basis telling the stories of how other writers' novels came to be, how they settled in with their jacket art. A few years ago, when I knew few souls out here in the Land of Blog, Melissa made a video log after she read my second young adult book, House of Dance. It made me cry. Later, she gave me room to tell the cover art stories of several of my novels. Melissa, moreover, is part of the reason that I had the good fortune to serve as the Readergirlz inaugural author in residence. Melissa reaches out, is what I'm saying. She reaches out all the time, even as her own career and fame and family grow.For many reasons, then, I am here today celebrating Melissa's debut in the pages of the New York Times Book Review—a Carlene Bauer review of Small Town Sinners, Melissa's fifth book, debuting Tuesday. It's a glowing review, noting, among other things:
Walker has written a credible and tender evocation of the moment when a young person's beliefs begin to emerge and potentially diverge from the teachings of a family's religion. Lacey's blind faith may not be entirely understandable to those who have never believed as she does. But for teenagers raised in more evangelical homes, as I was, the character's spiritual life will ring absolutely true.
"YOU SO ROCK!!!!!" I wrote to Melissa, when I saw the review at 4:30 this morning. And that's because she does. A big blue ribbon to Melissa, then, on this happy day.
July 15, 2011
Celebrating Musehouse: Philadelphia's New Center for the Literary Arts
Today I join my fellow writers and readers and thinkers and dreamers in celebrating the planned September 10 opening of Musehouse, a Chestnut Hill center dedicated to the writer's life and craft. Musehouse, which is described in this Philadelphia Inquirer story by staff writer Kristin E. Holmes, will apparently offer a range of workshops, readings, and lectures for writers of all kinds. It is the brainchild of Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, a former English teacher and award-winning poet, a mother who has borne an unimaginable loss, and an idealist who won a $50,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation. I encourage all those Philadelphians who have been seeking shelter for their aspirations and words to seek out this home come September. I know that I'll be making a visit.
Small Damages, a horse named Tierra, and a recap of a crazy week
This has been quite a week here at the old household. Our son returned from his six-week stint abroad, regaled us with photos and stories, then promptly began his internship at a remarkably innovative advertising agency (while filling the coffers with night work at the local theater; last night's midnight showing of the new Harry Potter was, he reports, sold out). On the Fusion Communications front, six new client possibilities and projects floated in, thanks to our new website, while familiar (and much-loved) clients kept us occupied, too.In the world of books, both YOU ARE MY ONLY and SMALL DAMAGES came in for page proofing within 24 hours of each other. YOU ARE MY ONLY (Laura Geringer, Egmont USA, October 25, 2011) is two weeks shy, I'm told, of being sent off to the big printing presses. SMALL DAMAGES (Tamra Tuller, Philomel, Summer 2012) is headed toward bound galleys. Both books took me on a journey and hold an immeasurably special place in my heart. I am grateful.
In the hub-bub of it all, we at Fusion created a very small Berlin book for a photo contest we wanted to enter. We didn't have the time, but we had the desire. Let's just say it went down to the wire.
Finally, in the midst of searching for photographs for assorted other purposes, I came again across the picture above, taken earlier this summer at the Devon Horse Show. She is the living incarnation of the horse, Tierra, who takes a star turn in SMALL DAMAGES. She'd been out there, it turns out, all along.
July 14, 2011
Berlin: A Prose Poem
We came to Berlin to discover the places in between. The fresh scrawl of sprayed paint. The sudden lark of a solemn boy. The brume that settles just ahead of storm.
Between buildings resurrected, among sculptures re-adhered, beneath the dome that bowls up and through an effervescent sky, Berlin is defiantly alive. It is point and color counterpoint, love in the park, a neon thatch of hair, a colossal strike against despair.
Where am I? The question.
The answer: We were there.
July 13, 2011
You Are My Only: a small excerpt
Because I finished working through the last of the copy edits of You Are My Only this week, and because I have lately been hearing from a few early readers (and I thank them from the bottom of my heart), and because this photograph reminds me of Autumn, one of my characters, it occurred to me to post this small excerpt from the book, due out from Egmont USA in October.I hear the creak of a bed. I hear another blow of giggles. Finally Granger walks to the curtain and snaps it back, and there Autumn is, standing on her own thin cot in a gray T-shirt and a red puff skirt, throwing a ridiculous curtsy. Through the small round of the window behind her, the sun comes in and where it hits her hair, there's a burst of yellow orange.
"What happened to you?" she asks me.
"Be nice," Bettina tells her.
"It's a question," Autumn says, "is all." And now she curtsies again, pinches the red puff up into her skinny fingers, cracks her legs at her knees, and says, her voice gone solemn, "Welcome to State."
