Beth Kephart's Blog, page 250

Upcoming: The Mt. Airy Kids' Literary Festival at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore

Spring is here, the blues are bluing at Chanticleer, and this coming weekend I'll be joining a cast of very special writers—Wendy Mass, Audrey Vernick, Stevie French, Jennifer Hubbard, Ellen Jensen Abbot, Nancy Viau, and Amy Holder among them—for the Mt. Airy Kids' Literary Festival at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore.  My event takes place on Saturday, April 9, at 3 PM, and I'll be sharing the mike and hour with the talented Kate Milford (The Boneshaker).  More information can be found here.

Dine In, Help Out: Philadelphians Taking a Stand Against Hunger

I seek out Philadelphians who make a difference; sometimes I have the honor of calling them friends.  Tonight I joined old friends and new at JG Domestic, an innovative Jose Garces restaurant, to herald the launch of Dine In, Help Out, an initiative designed to increase access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food in North Philadelphia, one of the poorest—and hungriest—congressional districts in our country.



The initiative is the brainchild of Jan Suzanne Shaeffer, who isn't just my beautiful and witty friend; she's also the executive director of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, an organization with an established interest in the people of North Philadelphia. Not long ago, Jan and her board read the  devastating Philadelphia Inquirer portrait of North Philadelphia hunger and began to work toward solutions.



Through its very own Farm to Families, the Foundation is already bringing fresh farm foods to those North Philadelphians whose diets are saturated with health-compromising sugars and fats. Through Dine In, Help Out the Foundation raises the ante—asking friends and families across the region to commit to forgoing "one night of dining out by donating the dollars they would have spent at a restaurant to help bring affordable, healthy, farm-fresh food into North Philadelphia homes."



It is an idea that has caught the imagination of many.  It has, moreover, won the backing of those who are pictured here (left to right) with Jan—Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg; NBC 10 President and General Manager Dennis Bianchi, Iron Chef Jose Garces (I have all my most important meals at his restaurants); and Montgomery McCracken Managing Partner Steve Madva.



Others of us are proud ambassadors—people who have committed to hosting meals in their homes on behalf of this initiative.  I'll be having a small event at my own home in early May (hoping that clean windows, fine Ikebana arrangements, and a newly mulched garden will compensate for any flaws in my menu).  I'm encouraging others of you to do the same.  It's time, every now and then, to remember how very blessed we are.  It's time to come together, over our own tables, so that we might give back to those in need.



Please look for more information here, on Dine In, Help Out's spanking new web site.   

They forecast storms.

I suggest pink.

Making room for perfection in an imperfect home

I had given myself the once-annual cleaning weekend off.  It had been my birthday, a birthday weekend—justification, I thought, for leaving a broken umbrella and defunct soccer ball by the front door, my husband's mud prints across the porch, an influx of dust against the hallway shoe.  Just let it be, I'd told myself, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.  You'll get to it.  It was Monday by now.  Late afternoon.  I'd spent the day doing errands and while I knew that it was time to clean—it really was, I swear it was—I'd decided to settle down with a book instead when I heard a knocking at the front door.



A knocking.



That could only mean one thing:  Someone who didn't know that I, on most occasions, keep the house obsessively clean, had come to visit.



Not only that—she (for it was Patty, a dear soul) was bringing me a gift.



It goes with the theme, she said, handing me a bag.  Do you want to come in? I asked, mortified by the dust bunnies behind me.  No, she said, demurely.  She was on her way to or from some place, something.  She was, in other words, pretending that she hadn't seen the week's accumulation of dust, though she was standing (albeit delicately) upon the mud prints.  Beside the broken umbrella.  Down a spit from the retired soccer ball.



It took me until just now to get over my mortification and open the bag.  Will you look at this?  It's the cover of Dangerous Neighbors.  I mean—the real thing:  twigs and eggs.  I've never seen anything like it.  A perfect gift for a less than perfect hostess.  And so very deeply appreciated.







And so, Patty, is your note with your typewriter-emulating handwriting.



What does a woman say?  Only this:  I've cleaned the house since you were here.  Thrown away the umbrella.  Wiped the dirt from the front door.  Welcomed the nest into a nice, clean space.

The funny thing about this photograph is

that I didn't think I'd caught the running boy.  My camera was turned off and I was on manual focus when I saw him and rushed to get the shot.  Only later, rummaging through all 102 images I'd taken yesterday at Chanticleer, did I realize that both boys were with me still.



Ghosts in a frame.

How To Live or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer/Sarah Bakewell: Reflections

At my advanced age, any insights into how to improve my living (before it is, indeed, too late) are welcome.  Besides, I've always liked reading Michel Eyquem de Montaigne or about him, and besides (and in addition), I write memoir, I teach it, and I blog; I have, in other words, a debt to pay when it comes to this thoroughly-modern 16th-century wine-growing Frenchman who made it his practice to pay attention—to himself, mostly, and to those around him—and to write down what he thought.



Long story short:  As soon as I heard about Sarah Bakewell's How to Live or A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, I bought it.  This weekend, I sat down and read it.



Oh, what pleasure I have had.  How much respect I have for Bakewell's thoroughly ingenious, utterly companionable go at a man and his era.  No mere biography, this.  No self-help guide, either.  Might we call it a romp, then, through history and idea?  Might we simply say that history rarely feels this contemporary, especially when centuries stand between the subject and the reader?



Montaigne spent years observing, contradicting, bellowing, whimpering, celebrating, complaining.  He wrote hundreds upon hundreds of "essay" pages.  Bakewell organizes the best of him, his times, and his work into twenty chapters that are titled like this:



Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop.

Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity

Q. How to live? A. See the world.

Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing.

Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer. 



You're in love with this already, right? (Come on.  It's just us. Tell the truth.)  You want an excuse to sit with a fat hardcover filled with old-time iconography and well-told stories about a long-dead man so that you can (at your leisure) take measure of your own life, your own ways, your next steps.  I know this about you, for I know it about me.  We're human, the two of us, and so it's what we need.



P.S. This photo, taken earlier today at Chanticleer garden, heralds spring where I live.  It heralds seeing.

The Iron Witch/Karen Mahoney: Reflections

Karen Mahoney and I are friends born of the alchemy of blogging and e-mails.  We may live on different continents and in different time zones, but our passions overlap and blur.  Passions for the reading and writing life.  Passions for stories about strong girls.



Earlier this year a package arrived for me from London containing Karen's first novel, The Iron Witch (Flux Books).  I was taken at once with the book's gorgeous cover and placed it uppermost upon my growing stack of unread books.  It has been a University of Pennsylvania semester, as most of you know, and when I teach memoir I almost exclusively read memoir (or books about memoir's forefathers).  Teaching is a discipline and it is also a marathon.  All around me, of late, piles of alluring fiction grow.



Still, in bits and pieces I would read from Karen's book, growing more and more intrigued by her protagonist, Donna Underwood, whose forearms have been branded, tattoo-like, with iron and silver and whose history involves a missing father and insane mother—all thanks to an attack by fey spirits. The Iron Witch is an urban fantasy, a composite of high school angst and shape-changing wood elves, first love and alchemical secrets, the pleasures of best friendship and the doubts that arise from being branded unnaturally different. We meet Donna just as her tightly guarded world begins to crack.  As she slowly reveals her history (and the existence of dark evils and woodland threats) to both her best friend, Navin, and a beautiful young man named Xan, a terrible series of events ensue. 



As a fine writer, Karen gives us much more than mere story here. She gives us carefully calibrated scenes and distinguishing prose.  Take this passage, for example:

The two clockwork birds—the size of very large crows—were made from brass and copper and iron, with bright silver eyes and polished wings that reflected the natural light from the high windows.  They arced and swooped all the way up to the workshop's roof, finally settling in the rafters with a click of metallic claws.

Karen likewise yields, in The Iron Witch, real relationships—a friendship in which you believe and a romance for which you are rooting.  It is no wonder, therefore, that this first book in a planned trilogy has been celebrated by lovers of fantasy and romance since its release in early February.  Today I join that celebration, sending this blog (and my alchemical tulip) across the seas and across hours, to our new fantasy novelist, Karen Mahoney.

The intimate heart of a tulip

What, we wondered, enables us to see, forces us to pay attention, yields the startling, essential, cracked-open image?



I return, I said, to the camera's eye.  I practice seeing by training the lens on the interior of an object, the corner of a room, the splaying of light, the hurried-up something.  I take, for example, a macro lens to the intimate heart of a tulip, where beauty is architecture and dust.



Thank you, Mario, for the flowers.

today I shall do nothing

but that which I wish to do.  I will listen to the rain.  I will read of Montaigne and Cleopatra.  I will watch "The Fighter" in mid-afternoon.  I will buy a cupcake and eat it.  Two?



No gym, no student papers to grade, no annual reports to review (okay, maybe just one), no assembling the text for a client's presentation (all right, so, just a few more texts for a single presentation), no counting calories.



An hour ago, I found this photo in my mother's wooden scrapbook. I'd never seen it before.  Never seen evidence of me this young, two months old.  So this, I think now, is how it happened, all those years later, that my son was born with a full head of hair.  And this is proof that my hair has been unruly from day one. 

Lauren Wein, An Editor Among Us

To visit an editor is to walk into a realm—into small offices made labyrinthine by the architecture of stacked books and scrambled manuscripts, posted notes to self, cardboard cutouts, events long gone but living on in the fade of aging posters.  I have been lucky in my travels, blessed to enter in, and time and again, I have been made grateful for those who spend their days leaning their imaginations and hearts against and into the work that they've acquired.  Editors, the best of them, make books better.  They allow books to live.



We hear from authors far more than we hear from editors.  We conjecture about editors' lives more than they know, more than they likely wish we would.  But in recent days, Lauren Wein, an editor at Grove/Atlantic who worked with her team to bring Francisco Goldman's remarkable


It's no ordinary retelling, Wein's essay.  It is a reflection that begins with the line "Francisco Goldman is an unlikely Hades" and that yields, over its quiet coursing, insights not just into the novel that Wein helped edit but into the transformative nature of editing itself.  We come to know the book and its author in Wein's essay; we also, magically, come to know Wein, who in August 2005 traveled to San Miguel de Allende (where the above photograph was taken two years later, when I journeyed there myself) to attend Goldman's wedding to Aura, the young woman, sadly no longer alive, who stands at the heart of Say Her Name.  "I traveled there with a colleague, Amy Hundley, and my six-month old daughter," Wein writes, continuing:

I sobbed through much of the nearly 12-hour journey. As a new mother, I was still finding my footing. I could not believe I'd been entrusted with this new life, and what was I doing taking her so far from our comfort zone?





But those days in San Miguel, that wedding, were among the best moments I've ever shared with my daughter. It proved to be an empowering journey in every sense—away from home, family, work, caregivers, she and I learned each other's rhythms, learned to trust one another. We survived, we transcended, we fell in love. Frank and Aura were people who inspired others to leave their comfort zone—they led by example, they dared you to take risks that enabled you to become more than you were before.

Wein ends her essay with lines from a poem.  I won't share them here, for it is my hope that you'll go and read the entire essay itself—that you will, on this day, grow in your appreciation for the hearts and minds of the editors among us.