Beth Kephart's Blog, page 253

A YA Special Collection, second, perhaps, to none

Not long ago, I received a request from Joan Kaywell, who (in addition to being a professor of English Education at the University of South Florida, an award-winning author, the ALAN Membership Secretary, and the 2010-11 Senior Executive Director of FCTE) founded the Ted Hipple Special Collection of Autographed Young Adult Literature, a collection of what is now nearly 2,000 YA autographed books housed at Joan's university.  " Ideally," Joan wrote, "we're collecting the manuscript, the ARC, the first edition, and subsequent paperbacks—ALL AUTOGRAPHED—of each author's works so interested individuals can see the life of a book."  

 

The special collection, says Joan, was officially dedicated on May 23, 2007, and honors a man who was the founding member of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN), an organization that is now the largest assembly affiliated with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) with both a national and international reputation. I, in turn, am honored to now have some of my books (both in galley form and in published form) winging their way to the collection. 



I urge you to find out more about Ted Hipple, Joan Kaywell, and this remarkable collection—which includes handwritten manuscripts, galley mark ups, and rare first printings—by visiting this web site. 

Blessings

We were having a special dinner.  We needed flowers. These are the ones my son carried home—violet skinned and bright eyed.  This morning I worked for several hours, then stepped outside toward sky and sun to clear the dead glad stalks from the feet of the rising daffodils and collect the twigs knuckled down from the recent storm.  I have never taken the sanctity of home for granted, and in the wake of news like we've had, in the wake of all the tremendous sadness of Japan, I am ever more cognizant of how lucky I am, how rich in life, to set flowers down into a well of fresh water in an unbroken vase on a table that is steady, rooted, calm.  Books in the background, photos on the wall, things in their place.  My place, here, now. 

Under construction

"Let's take a walk," my son said.



"I know just where," I told him.



Down the street, up the gravel drive, to where the workers had left for the day.



"What do you think?" I asked him (as if the house under construction were mine to give).



"Like it," he said.  "Really like it."



"What would you do, if you lived here?"



"Parties." (He knew at once.)  "Dancing over there," he pointed.  "Kitchen over there.  Up there," he pointed again, "I'd lie back, watch some TV, relax.  And you?"



"I'd sit in the sun windows and read," I said.  "I'd stake out that room as my own."

DA BWAHA Voting has begun, and Dangerous Neighbors is among the contenders

If you would like to play along in the voting process, the link is here.



Well, folks, in the hour or so since I posted this, the polls have closed.  I tip my hat to the deserved winner! 

In prayer at the Woodlands Cemetery; In critique during class

Yesterday, before class, I sought a place to pray for all the heartbreak that is Japan.  I walked to a garden beyond the veil of steam that gushes through the old medical school grates.  I walked the alley between the new vet buildings.  I keep walking west and south up to 42nd Street, until I found myself here, at Woodlands.  Once the home (purchased in 1735) of Andrew Hamilton, the estate was ultimately willed to Hamilton's grandson William, a botanist and architectural enthusiast who built his grand mansion on the far edge of the grounds overlooking the Schuylkill River.



In time, part of the Woodlands estate became home to the University of Pennsylvania.  Part became a cemetery, and today that cemetery, with its original home and stables, sits on the National Historic Landmark list.  Thomas Eakins, the painter, is buried there.  So is Silas Weir Mitchell, the physician-writer, and William Rush, the sculptor, and Rembrandt Peale, the artist, and Jessie Willcox Smith, the illustrator, and Paul Philippe Cret and Wilson Eyre, both architects.  The man who founded Campbell Soup is here.  So is Anthony Drexel, who, among other things, funded Drexel University and helped create America's first true suburban community, Wayne. And once the body of George W. Childs, a quiet hero in two of my books, lay in the Drexel family vault at Woodland, his goodness permeating.



But I was the sole living soul on this gray day.  I went deep, to the edge, to the western reach of the river.  By the time I returned to campus my students were gathering for what would be a most intense, most extraordinary conversation.  My job, I keep reminding them, reminding me, is to push them each as far as they can go.  Because sometimes love looks like do not change a word.  And sometimes it looks like, frame it newly, reimagine the tone. Hope is there, inside both conversations. Faith that these young writers are going far. 



   

The Scholastic Edition of Dangerous Neighbors

This is simply to thank Paul W. Hankins (a very funny man, a great and opinionated reader, and a friend of Lawsy's, meaning a friend of mine) for writing these words to me this morning:  "BTW, Beth. Dangerous Neighbors is now on Scholastic's Reading Counts list. I put it out on the front display yesterday afternoon. We'll see who bites today."

Because that's what people do, he said

The headlines are impossible.  The news is cataclysmic.  I woke at 3 this morning and came downstairs, praying that something in Japan had changed for the better.  It had not.  I sat here staring.



The night before, Saturday, rifled through with a bad case of food poisoning, I found myself curled up, exhausted, on a cold tile floor.  It was dark, a night now veering toward morning, and suddenly I heard my son on the other side of the door, roused, I suppose, from bed.  "What can I do for you, Mom?" he said.  "Should I call a doctor?"



Later, many hours later, I thanked him for his compassion, his concern.  He shrugged.  "It's not anything that anybody else wouldn't do," he said, "for somebody they loved."  Making it sound so easy, making me think, again, of the hundreds of thousands of survivors in Japan who need, just now, someone like my son—huge hearted and strong bodied, gifted with healing compassion.

a single line from the (adult) novel in progress

(with thanks to the real Kate for the wheels and the ride) 

"I lose these wheels, I lose my poetry," Kate would say, and after all these years, Becca decided that her best friend meant it, that Kate needed the spoil and ruin of the car, the raw skin of the night on her skin, the sacrifice demanded by the old '66.  Hang a flag from the thing, and it'd be its own parade.

we watch the news, we cannot breathe, we know

how many lives have been taken, how much of the earth seethes, how much danger seeps into the air.  We send prayers; we yearn for greater power.



My son arrived in the dark last night, and I take not an ounce of his presence, his safety, his right now for granted.  My students, on their own spring break, are now returning to Philadelphia from their travels all around the world—China, South Korea, the Philippines the high seas, the Cayman Islands, Mexico, San Francisco, Warsaw, Prague, Rome, some undisclosed nation in Europe.  I travel with them in my mind.  Send up more prayers. 



Keep them safe.

Sending love and prayers to the people of Japan

and to my so many friends on the west coast and elsewhere as the earth shakes and heaves.