Beth Kephart's Blog, page 247

The UNDERCOVER letters stream in from Zionsville Middle School; p.s.: these students want a movie!

A few days ago, I introduced Rachel Bing of Zionsville to readers of this blog.  Rachel is the Zionsville Community High School senior who has been reading Undercover, my first young adult novel, to the sixth graders of the local middle school—gaining their attention, eliciting their responses, and encouraging them to write their own stories.



Elisa, the protagonist and narrator of Undercover, is a young poet who dares to see and define the world in unique ways; her special gift also leaves her on the margins until a certain English teacher (Dr. Charmin) and an engaging young man (Theo) draw her out of a place of loneliness and toward a kind of belonging.  Do words separate us, or do they unite us? They can, of course, do both, but Rachel is clearly a unifying angel—a young woman who asked her students to reach all the way from Indiana to Pennsylvania through the bridge of letters.



Over the next few days, I'll be running these exceptional, smile-inducing, happy-tears-provoking letters.  I begin with the first five.



Alison writes:


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Hello, my name is Alison, and I attend Zionsville Middle School. My peers and I read your book "Undercover". I enjoyed reading your book and think it would make a fantastic movie. In "Undercover", Elisa, a girl with the gift of poetry finds herself going through hard times with her family. Once you start liking the book you realize that the title, "Undercover" was created because Elisa writes letters for boys to give to girls which is 'undercover'. If I were a character in your book, I would probably be Elisa because I am quiet and love to turn anything into a story. Also, I think I could be Jilly because I am an older sister out of two. I can also understand Elisa's stress because I moved to Zionsville two years ago and when I moved, I was so sad that I couldn't see my friends that often anymore. I made new friends and am happy to be in Zionsville now and I like my teachers at Zionsville Middle School.

My class and I couldn't stand not knowing what would happen next in your amazing book. The suspense was taking over me and I was taking in every word like dessert after dinner. Your book changed my way of thinking about what can happen to a person just because of their poetic writing. When my cadet teacher, Miss Bing read "Undercover", I was extremely overcome by the abundance of words in your story, which pulled me into your book. I have read many books in my life time, but this book was one of the best books I've read and I was amazed at how well you wrote about Elisa's emotions. I hope that you keep on writing spectacular books that my class and I will love. I also hope that you will try to turn your book into a movie because it would definitely make a superb movie. I wish you good luck in any other book that you are working on and thank you for writing your extremely, beautifully written book. It changed me.

Alex writes:


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Undercover is a book that leaves you thinking- it was an unpredictable plot! It was written very well with romance, friendship, love, family, and poetry! A situation in my life is actually related to when Elisa wanted Theo to like her and she cared about him. Elisa could feel her getting jealous of Lila and Theo together. It relates to me because I have wanted a lot of things to happen my way, and you'd just have to find out what happens! I liked how you didn't make Part I and Part II about the same thing. You focused on two major points. Part I was about the letters that Elisa wrote and about love. Part II was about figuring out things with family and friends. One point I specifically liked about the book was the suspense because you never knew if Elisa was ever going to be with Theo again. If you really thought about it, Undercover would make a great movie! You should definitely contact someone about that! The character that I most relate to is Elisa. I relate to Elisa the most because I always bump into situations where I just want everything my way sometimes. It kills you when something terrible happens right in front of you, like in the book, Elisa always having to watch Lila with Theo- Theo, her love. At the end of the book, the ice skating competition seemed to bring everyone together. It brought Theo and Elisa back together, and especially Elisa's family that struggled to keep it together with Elisa's dad and mom "crumbling down." Some themes in this book were friendship and love.    Undercover has taught me some lessons, such as to stay true to yourself. Elisa gave up on Theo for a while because she never thought he would leave Lila. Also, another lesson was believing in yourself and other people. This lesson relates to how Elisa thought that her family was just going to break apart when her mom and dad didn't seem to love each other anymore.

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Anthony writes:

My name is Anthony and I am in sixth grade.  Recently my teacher read out loud your book, Undercover, and I thought it was an outstanding piece of work and you have amazing talent.  I wanted to know where you came up with this idea and does this book relate to your life?  Your story was amazing and I was also wondering how you came up with part two. In part one, Elisa was just a girl who wrote poems and was an undercover high school student.  Also, have you ever thought about making this novel into a movie? I was also wondering if you were going to make a sequel to Undercover and show what happened to Elisa and Theo after the skating competition and Elisa's life. I would go see your movie the first day it came out.  I'm sure you would make the movie an outstanding story because of your great talent and creativity.  What I've learned from your book is that even though you can be pretty, you can also be very mean.  In the book Lila was the girl that every boy wanted to date, but Lila was also mean when she cut up Elisa's dress and when she got jealous of Elisa. I can relate to Elisa's character because I am a good writer too and I like to write stories just like you. I was inspired while listening to your book and I hope to see a sequel or a movie in the near future!

Cameron writes:


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In class we have been reading your fabulous book Undercover. I love Undercover not only for its amazing story but mostly for its incredible grammar, metaphors, and similes. I would love for you to make a movie out of this. It would be so cool. I would see it the first night it came out. Even though I am a boy that has read Undercover I don't really take it as a girl book. I take it as a book that everyone can learn a lesson from. What I learned from this book is that some people can be really pretty on the outside, but their inside could be dark and evil, making them ugly even though they are pretty. I also learned that your family will always be there for you no matter what.

 Charlie writes:
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In my 6th grade class we have had a student teacher come in. Her name was Miss Bing. She has emailed you before. I bet you have heard from her. Anyway, she read us one of your best- selling books, Undercover! I thought that it was a pretty good book. It had poetry, romance, and other things that I liked. Also I liked it because there was two parts to it. The first part was about Elisa writing love poems for other people. The second part was kind of about getting her family back together and skating. Also I wanted to know if or how this story related to your life? Also, I wanted to know what you like specifically about the book?

 Did you know that I am writing a book too? But, enough chit chat about me let's get back to the book. I really thought that this book can make a huge movie. You should ask some directors to make your book a screenplay. Just think about it! Undercover on the big screen! You could even get to walk the red carpet. I think you should totally write a second book. I have even thought of some ideas! Maybe Lila gets another boyfriend and she tries to get revenge on Theo!

Also I thought that your book had an amazing ending. I thought it had a good ending because it brought everybody together. Also I had another question. What lessons did you learn from this novel? Please share. I was also wondering if some of the characters were based off of people in real life. Some other things that I wanted to say was that I liked how Elisa stuck out from the rest of her family because her family was girly and Elisa wasn't just "girly" she didn't try to be girly she was herself.

Also I thought that it was cool how Elisa and her sister's relationship grew as their parents started to separate. I thought that was very creative. Maybe their parents going separate ways for a while was a good thing.

Thank you so much for writing this amazing book. My favorite part of the book was when Lila ripped Elisa's dress because it showed the power of Lila and how Elisa overcame it and still performed. I love a happy ending.

I'm still drying my tears, reading this letters.  I'm imagining myself in that classroom with Miss Bing and her students.  I'm going to answer everybody's questions in the final blog in this series.  For now, Zionsville Sixth Graders (and Miss Bing), just know that I'm listening and that I am deeply moved.  A sweet Easter weekend to you all.   




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Not perfection (and Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace)

This is not my yard.  This is the perfect lawn of Chanticleer Gardens, where two of my books take place and many of my other books have been considered.  This is the lawn children tumble down, the lawn my own Chanticleer students once traversed as they made their way from prose poems to villanelles.



This is also not my life—this quiet, green perfection.  My life is more like last night—those 45 minutes of sleep that I finally got—or more like this morning, when, after deciding that further sleep was not an option, I turned on my computer only to experience a three-hour computer crash.  My email files have now been restored, thank you very much.  But it's 11:20 AM, and I have not dressed for the day.



What I have done, while wading through no sleep and no connectivity is read and blurb a book, to talk to my father, and to read Jonathan Franzen's essay, "Farther Away," in last week's The New Yorker.  This is the piece my dear student brought to me on Tuesday.  This is the quality of work she finds inspiring.  And no wonder.  I share with you now the passage my student read aloud to me, on that gray day, in that dark and too-cold room, her voice the warmth, her presence the light.  It's Franzen reflecting on David Foster Wallace:

People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul.  A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure.  Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn't "belong" to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of people closest to him.

What we learn from our students.  What they yield.

Peregrine magazine: standing among giants (and friends)

"You stand among giants," I could often be heard telling my students this semester, and there wasn't a speck of exaggeration in the claim.  For I had a class—oh, I had a class—and they taught me and one another.



It is perhaps fitting, then, that this past Tuesday, Peregrine, the Creative Writing Program magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, began to make its way into mailboxes and classrooms. It's the fourth issue of this beautiful publication, and all credit goes to the great poet, teacher, and CWP director Gregory Djanikian, who quietly sifts and mingles the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of faculty, students, and alumni to bring this book to life.



I am so honored to be included in this magazine, and I am so touched to find myself here among the likes of C.K. Williams and Charles Bernstein, Alicia Oltuski and Rick Nichols, and my dear friends Karen Rile, Alice Elliott Dark, and Kate Northrop.  I've set this afternoon aside to read.  It will be time extremely well spent.

You Are My Only, the galleys read through

I have, as readers of this blog know, a bad case of avoidance when it comes to reading my own published or nearly-published work through, and I'm especially anxious once galleys arrive.  Is my book what I think a book should be?  Does it represent a step forward? Is it original and new?  I need to know, and I'm afraid to find out.  A writer requires distance, and courage.



And so, these past many months—through corporate projects and student papers, through the finishing of another novel and the start of a memoir—the galleys of You Are My Only have been sitting here, awaiting my attention.  When you get the time, I kept telling myself.  When you are ready.



This morning I made myself ready.  I sat, and I did not move.  I stayed with Sophie and Joey, with Emmy and Autumn, and I read all the way through.



I emerge at peace.



Thank you, Amy Rennert, Laura Geringer, and Team Egmont USA.

When the body quakes and the heart can't say goodbye

It rained yesterday.  The wind blew, the skies were gray, and I wasn't ready for it, dressed poorly.  I took the train into 30th Street, walked the many blocks to the Penn campus, bought a cookie and a bottle of water, and made my way to my classroom.  I was meeting with my students, one by one.  Bring me your questions, I'd told them.  Talk to me about whatever is on your mind.  Their summer jobs.  Their fascination with lyrics. Their profiles, in progress.  Their stories about first love and remembered love.  Their forecasts of their futures.  This piece she had read in The New Yorker.  Here, she said, slipping the magazine from her bag and reading to me from passages underlined with her own black ink.  I'd like to write like that, she said.



The room was cold and dark. Their hair was damp from the rain.  I began, two hours in, to shiver.  By the end a certain palsy had set in, a fire in my throat and ears, an inner convulsion.  Only one week left with these students whom I love, and it wasn't just my heart protesting; it was every bone and fiber.



Do you think you could pick me up at the station? I called and asked my husband, for by the time I reached 30th Street and got back on that train I was incapable of going any farther.  He picked me up and brought me home.  I slept from dusk to dawn.  Love hurts like that.  Goodbyes do.

UNDERCOVER goes to Zionsville Middle School thanks to one sensational cadet teacher

Inside the rage of work—the new memoir, the novel for adults, the assessment of students at the end of a most remarkable semester—a note comes in via email, returning me to a story written a few years ago.  "I am a senior at Zionsville Community High School in Indiana," the note began, continuing:

I am a cadet teacher this year and have been working with sixth graders at the middle school. My mentor teacher, Monica Plantan and I found your book, Undercover in the middle school library and were captivated by your writing style.



I have been a writer since elementary school and knew English would be the subject I would want to teach kids. I have been reading Undercover to my sixth graders and they are admiring the story line. They are engrossed in the book and always want me to read one more chapter to them. We have discussions everyday and answer the study guide questions I made for them.



After we finish Undercover I plan to lead up to a creative writing project and have the kids write their own story. I'm going to use Elisa as an example since she is a writer, too. I will ask them, "What would Elisa do?" to remind them to find examples from Undercover. As a beginning activity I would like to have my students write letters to you. If this is possible, is there a mailing address we may write to?



Thank you,



Rachel Bing

Cadet Teacher

Zionsville Community High School

Zionsville Middle School  

Return, for a moment, to that first line:  I am a senior at Zionsville Community High School....  This work, then, this idea, this carefully constructed, touchingly thoughtful letter emerging from a young woman months away from her first days at college. 



Of course, I said, I would be happy to participate in any way possible, and so soon, on this blog, you'll be meeting some of Rachel's students.  You'll be seeing the impact that a young woman with a sure ambition is already having on the world.



I am honored to serve as one means of conveyance.

One student at a time

Today I'll sit with each of my students, one at a time, ten minutes at a time, looking back on the semester, looking ahead.  These final two weeks are bittersweet.  Love never does run its full course.

On writing (and improving) a novel for adults. For real this time.

If there is anything that I've learned from writing the books that I have written, it is this:  Take your time. Get it right. Don't send your book out for editorial review until you can't write it any better, or any more.



I have written three novels for adults in the past.  One became, after fifteen years of radical reworking, the El Salvador memoir, Still Love in Strange Places.  One, following equally radical shifts and reimaginings, became the young adult novel due out this October, You Are My Only.  The third former adult novel is at the tail-end of a redrafting process; you'll be reading more about that no-longer-an-adult novel soon.



Last year, I sat down to write my fourth novel for adults.  This time, I would not tolerate the ersatz in me.  This time, I would work the novel and set it aside, work it and set it aside, until finally I asked my agent, Amy Rennert, and my friend, James Lecesne, to read.  They had wise things to say, loving things, hopeful things, and I listened to them—reworking the structure of the book at Amy's brilliant suggestion and intensifying the heart of the story, at James's.  I worked the book, set it aside, worked the book, and made a decision:  Before sending this book to any editor in the land, I would mail the whole to my friend Marjorie Braman, who recently stepped down from her role as editor-in-chief of Henry Holt to launch a literary consultancy.  I value what Marjorie has to say; I have learned from her counsel in the past.  I wanted to know what she would make of a story that means so much to me.



This is to say that I made the right choice, for Marjorie's notes, like Amy's notes, proved to be invaluable.  It's not just that she was so enthusiastic about this project.  It's that she read with care, wrote notes with precision, pointed me to places that needed rounding out and places that needed trimming.  She was honest and she was galvanizing.  I could not sleep (and I have not slept) for I had been given a new key to my own strange land.  I have rounded passages and abbreviated others.  I have softened and also clarified.



This blog post, then, is a thank you—to Amy Rennert, for sharing my hope, for believing in this dream, and for so conscientiously delineating ways that I could make this novel better; to James for being the love and light that he is; and to Marjorie for demonstrating her continuing commitment to the clarified page.

Which portrait seems most authorial?

With a new camera and tripod, my husband, who is the real photographer in the family, decided to turn late yesterday into a Beth photo session. "You need a real author's photo for once," he said (and judging from the comments I've received on other of my book-jacket photos, I reckon I do), though few things make me as self-conscious as sitting in front of a camera.  I was feeling especially self-conscious yesterday, for I'd spent twelve hours of it practically immobile, staring at a computer and talking to the screen.  Whatever.  Bill set up the lights.  I put on some lip gloss.  He took 30 pictures, all I could stand.  He's a talented guy (those who know me in person can attest), and he just sent me three photos to choose from.



Which of these, I wonder, would you most want to encounter on the back of a book jacket?

Standing with the Narcissi/Beth Kephart Poem

I have denied the dahlias their second season,leaving their fretwork earthed in for the winter,their prospects overcome by white ice.



Beneath the lilacs, in the tulip bed, the gnawing hunger of the mole,and in the crush of azalea nearest the house,proof of the deer that came in the season of my insomnia and flared the windowWith its stoked breath.  This leaves



the burden of forgiveness on the red ranunculusand also the heather, dug in yesterday,as also the yellow broom that sweeps the teethof the iris you sent to me in a box from California,marked Yours. The burden of living forward stands with the narcissi.  The burden of truthwith the bleeding heart besidethe shaft of wintered grasses.