Beth Kephart's Blog, page 248

I want to take your picture, he said

a rainy day diversion.

Just a month and days away from the Devon Horse Show

and there are the grounds, off in the distance.  I walked through the open gates yesterday afternoon.  Sat on a bench, waiting for horses.  One lone soul with a big truck was moving the mountains of new white sand around.  Like snow beneath a magnolia sky.

books in progress, a writer in un-progress

It's only paper, I told myself.  Or (another tactic), One thing at a time.  



But today it seemed too much—three manuscripts in their piles—on the floor, on the chair, on the glass pane.  Three manuscripts, waiting.  The You Are My Only galleys, to be read one final, change-it-now-or-never time. The one hundred pages of memoir proposal.  The adult novel I've been giving myself deliberate distance from, now returned to me after a marvelously close reading.  Three utterly separate worlds in one small space requiring an enhanced version of me.  Three different voices.  Three different things I'd come to say.  Words the only tool I have.  Words insistent and inadequate.



I pulled weeds instead (there are plenty of those to go around).  I took a walk.



I was, I'll admit this to you, afraid.



Tomorrow is another day.

We sit at lunch, we chat,

we look out on Wayne, at the passersby. 



"Do all of your young adult fictions take place in the Philadelphia area?" I was asked, the other day. 



I thought about it for a moment, just to be sure.  "They do," I said.  And smiled.

The Cherry Trees of Spring (a seconds-long video from my world to yours)

Rocking the Drop

I rocked the drop with The Heart is Not a Size and Undercover in support of Teen Lit Day today. 



Get out there, or get here, and check it out!

Teen Lit Day: Rocking the Drop with Readergirlz

I'm about to go out and Rock the Drop for Readergirlz in support of Teen Lit Day.  What's that, you say?  You don't know about Teen Lit Day?  You don't know about Readergirlz and its mission to promote teen literarcy and corresponding social service?  You don't know about Figment?  Stop all traffic.  Take a moment here.  Get yourself involved.

How do you like reading on the iPad2? they asked

The iPad2 was my husband's gift to me—marketed weeks upon weeks in advance.  "I don't need that," I kept saying.  "It feels indulgent."  But we run a communications business here, we need to know what is up, what can be done, what hasn't been done yet, and besides, he had to talk me into a Blackberry, too, and you don't now find me going out too often without that.  Also besides, I've been saying for a long, miserable time that I need to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in a quiet place, a room or two away, reading and writing.



And so, the iPad2, which arrived a week ago, and which I have put to minimal, but interested use.  I am a New York Times subscriber, for example, and so, by downloading the New York Times app, I can now sit with this glass tablet on my lap in the dark making no disturbing rustling noises while I read the reviews of such great books as Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name.  I find it easier to read this way—my arms don't hurt, my eyes don't squint, and I can turn off the lamp beside my husband while he watches shows about fish, food, and war (sometimes he's lucky and all three things appear on one show at once).  I'm reading my hometown paper this way as well, and when my subscription to the paper version of The New Yorker runs out, I may go iPad with that as well, though I don't know.  I'm rather fond of my stacks of New Yorker stories, torn fresh from the bindings.  Vanity Fair?  Maybe.



I also, as readers of this blog know, downloaded Tina Fey's Bossypants and iPad2'ed it—the perfect book for this medium.  As much as I loved Bossypants, I don't plan to ever teach it, do not need my scribbled marginalia as a guide to my first readerly reactions.  I know that some sort of marginalia can be achieved via the iPad2, don't get me wrong.  I'm just not interested in going there at this moment and rather suspect I'll never be.  There's an art to making notes in books, and I like pen to paper.  I also like, however, the extras the expanded iBook version of Bossypants afforded—more photos, an audio chapter, pretty cool flipping and bookmarking technology.  I've just downloaded Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as a guide to Croatia for my next iPad2 readings.  I want to take Egan to Ithaca over Easter weekend and Croatia to Croatia, some time in June.  I think of these books as traveling companions.



Finally, I've downloaded the PDF app that will allow me to iPad2-read my own manuscripts-in-progress.  I've got two books I'm working on—a novel, nearly complete, and a memoir.  I've worked to give myself enormous distance on the novel and reading it again on a new technology, following a final set of revisions, will, I think (I hope), allow me to see this book as a stranger might.  That, at least, is what I'm going for.



My friend Karen, always so far ahead in matters of technology, does many things with her iPad that I don't know how to do—watch Netflix movies while exercising, say, or grading student papers.  She's the real expert on this (as she is on most things).  I'll become a smarter iPad2 user in time, I hope.  But for now, to answer your questions:



I really like my iPad2.

And while students interviewed students in class

art was being made on the home front.



Through it all, I was a mere interloper.  Sometimes teaching is simply and only about listening.  Sometimes being married to an artist means watching the colors shift, the ground fold, the slantwise tower (upon reconsideration) hold.

Scenes from the University of Pennsylvania, earlier today, spring rain