Beth Kephart's Blog, page 256

Reality Hunger/David Shields: Reflections

All right, then.  Along with the ten new memoirs that sweep into my home last week slides David Shields's manifesto, Reality Hunger—a meditation on and exercise in literary collage, appropriation, fusion, blend, bend, thought poem, risk.  Do you believe in, say, fiction as one category and nonfiction as another?  Go talk to Shields.  Do you actually believe that other people's thoughts or ideas should be housed inside quotation marks, that truth can be located, that plot is story, that fiction (or at least conventional fiction) has something to say?  Do you know what you love?  Do you honor beauty above raw?  Have you given enough space to white space?



Go talk to Shields, or read him.  Or, I should say, read this book, which is only, perhaps, 82% Shields, in terms of the lines themselves, the rest being borrowed from, say, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Hampl, William Gass, Margo Jefferson, John D'Agata, Lauren Slater, Philip Roth, Charles Simic, J. M. Coetzee, Ross McElwee, Anne Carson, and if I listed them all, I would be taking you through the 618 citations in the back of the book, reluctantly delivered by Shields, at the advice (or insistence) of his attorneys, though Shields, begging us not to refer to the citations at all, declares, "Reality cannot be copyrighted."



(Please, Mr. Shields, forgive my quotation marks.)



When you write across genres, as I do, when your autobiography of a river feels like the truest book you've ever written (the angriest, the most beseeching, the least afraid of either beauty or despair, the most unprotected and therefore the most vulnerable), you engage with Shields, you talk to him in your head, saying:  Yes, this is so.  No, not so much.  Or, Are you perhaps dangerously close to exhibitionism with your extremism?  And, Will you be offended if I thank you for this late-in-the-book chapter called DS, where it is you and only you straight for a couple of pages, you getting (unassisted) to your heart of things, your unmediated why of things, though I recognize, I obviously do, that appropriation and plagiarism are your method here, your trump card, your manifesto, your heart?



What does, indeed, offend Shields?  Boring does.  Boring gets him big.  Conventional forms, conventional ideas, conventional courtesies—these would not survive in the land of Shields.  What Shields wants, in his own words is found under section 457:  "So:  no more masters, no more masterpieces.  What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror."



That is what Shields wants.  And you?

In which my Seville novel finds its right home

Many, many years ago, I began to write a book about Seville. Or, I should say, a book inspired by my many travels to Seville, where my brother-in-law lived for years.  I met an old man named Luis in Seville—a cook with a passion for colorful birds.  I fell in love with gypsy song and flamenco, traveled the dusty roads, went out among the bulls with one of the country's most respected bull breeders, climbed the towers, sat in the cathedral, grew obsessed with paella and saffron.  Seville was heat in the high summer and a wise men's parade in early January and long rides in a temperamental citroen named Gloria.  It was, for me, story.



I wrote that story many ways.  I kept looking for its heart.  Many times I came close, and then something frayed or fell apart.  No one, I suspect, thought I'd keep working at it this long.



Last summer, I believed I had found my Seville story's center, and I sent the book to Tamra Tuller, the Philomel editor whose work—most recently the much-anticipated Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys (translation rights for which sold in dozens of countries long before the book was close to launch) and 2010 National Book Award winning Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine—I'd been hearing so much about (thanks, in part, to my friend Jill Santopolo).  Tamra and I began a conversation, and it is with great, great joy and a certain recognition for the many blessings in my life that I can (my agent Amy Rennert tells me today) share the news that SMALL DAMAGES has a home, a beautiful home with Tamra at Philomel. 



I am overjoyed.

House of Prayer No. 2/Mark Richard: Reflections

You get saddened up, out here in life, by all the hum drum and the done before, the standard issue, the colors shimmed off to gray.  So that when you pick up a book like House of Prayer No. 2, a Mark Richard memoir rendered in meaty second-person prose, you let a smile crawl across your face and stay.  Just two weeks before, in my creative nonfiction class at Penn, a student had asked if memoir had to be, by definition was, a first-person accounting.  Tuesday I'll head back to class with House of Prayer No. 2 in my bag.  Second person works, I'll say.  It works, if you're Mark Richard.



Well, first, you have to have a life like his to tell a true story story like this, and I'm pretty sure no one else has lived precisely Richard's way—poor and "special," his hips whacked out, his days (or far too many of them) stuck in the hopeless heat of a hospital for crippled children, and, afterward, everything you hope your child doesn't do, doesn't get involved with, doesn't risk—all that done, by Richard, on his way to growing up, on his way to faith and writing.  Jeepers, where to start?  With the snakes he battled, with the things he stole, with the run-down houses he thieved into, with the ship captains and the small-time jail stints, with running off to Cuba, with running more (but hardly running, with those hips), drunk and from the law?  Smart kid, this Richard, big reader, fine writer with stories to tell, but so intent on his own dissipation for so long that if it hadn't been for editors and other writers mailing Richard's stories to contests and all, who knows what would have happened to this guy and his talent?  Who knows?  Richard was living one crazy thing after another, no plan, and no plan takes him, eventually, to New York, Nan Talese, Pen/Hemingway Award, Norman Mailer, Hollywood, and a bunch of other stuff you'll have to read about in the book.



Read about it, second person.  Read about it, time flying or time going slow, and every sentence so rich with things you haven't seen before.  Or, at least, I haven't.  Call me sheltered.



I folded down pages to share with you.  I am having a devil of a time deciding.  All right, here.  A paragraph plucked from Richard's early wacky newspaper days—a tame paragraph, as this book goes, but a little show and tell of Richard's rhythms, his capacity, despite it all, for fun.  One thing leading to another.  Second person. 

Overall it's a good place, and you fill the pages with your name and several of your pseudonyms.  You cover the world's largest naval base and its air wings, NATO, the shipyards, the weapons centers, and anything else that interests you, and it all does.  You interview admirals and senators, enlisted men, pilots, and junior intelligence officers in their crisp khaki shirts whom you talk into taking you into the restricted areas down in Dam Neck.  You write editorials for the Op-Ed page, and you write scathing letters under fake names back to yourself, and you write letters the next week in answer to those, and you feel like Mark Twain, and it's a lot of fun to feel like Mark Twain.

 

The Two.One.Five. Dangerous Neighbors Interview

Sometimes, at the end of a corporate work week, you are missing your students—their vitality, their freshness, their willingness to think beyond, to dare—and you are just a little run down when you get the good news that another college student has posted the interview she conducted with you awhile back.  Dangerous Neighbors had recently been released.  Rosella asked me questions no one else ever had.



Rosella Eleanor LaFevre is an aspiring writer and the book critic for Two.One.Five.  She and I talked, in her words, about "the inner workings of (my) characters, the meaning behind the title, and the symbolism of birds." The link is here.

Win Win: In audience with Tom McCarthy and rising star Alex Shaffer

Last night, at the close of the Philadelphia screening of the soon-to-be-released feature film, WIN WIN, writer/director Tom McCarthy and 17-year-old wrestler/terrific actor Alex Shaffer took questions from an audience that had clearly fallen in love with their film (I was right there with them: in love).  Alex plays a wayward kid who finds himself in the home (and on the wrestling team) of a good man who has done a bad thing.  Can I leave it at that?  Should I also add that the good but ethically compromised man is played (phenomenally) by Paul Giamatti, that Amy Ryan adds great emotional depth, that there are little girls in this film who will blow you away, and that a nerdy wrestler had us screaming for him when he finally took on Darth Vader at a match?



McCarthy, who wrote THE STATION AGENT, THE VISITOR, and UP, doesn't go for easy in his plots.  He has a surprising range of unexpected story lines (who puts croquet and wrestling in the same film?), an ability to dig out from moral tangles (why are we rooting so hard for Giamatti's character, when he has done such an unscrupulous thing?), an impeccable ear for real but original dialogue (there's a great bit here that arises from a certain JBJ tattoo (see the film, find out for yourself)), a dancer's rhythm (we need to laugh just when McCarthy gives us cause to laugh) and an outstanding eye for talent (seriously, this is some cast).  I have had the pleasure of meeting McCarthy's partner on this and other films, Mary Jane Skalski of Next Wednesday productions, and I felt her talent and presence as well—her ear, her eye, her maternal heart. 



Alex Shaffer had never, he told us last evening, acted beyond a stint in a middle school play before he responded to a call for theater-tempted New Jersey high school wrestlers.  Man, can this kid act—slaying the audience as much by what he won't say as by what he finally does.  Apparently Shaffer is also quite the wrestler, having won the state championship shortly after this film wrapped.  It was fun to watch him share this film last night with his four best friends and his cousin.    



Find out more about the film here, and go see it when it appears nationally in theaters in mid March.

Win Win: A New Sundance Selection Film

Closing the books now, turning off email.  Off to see this long-awaited film, at a special Philadelphia screening.  Those of you who had the pleasure of seeing either "The Station Agent" or "The Visitor" (or the movie "Up") will have some sense for just how special this movie will likely be, for some of the same great minds and hearts (Tom McCarthy and Mary Jane Skalski) are the magic behind this one.  Check out the trailer.

Not writing the book you are writing

Have you ever had an entire book in your head—the idea of it, the mood, the structure, the sound—and let the days go by, day after day, not writing a word?  That is where I am just now.  Waiting.  Because the book is too big, and because it needs its space, and because the book is fine where it is right now, curled inside the shell of me.

Devotion/Dani Shapiro: Reflections

What could a book called Devotion be about?  Devotion to whom, or to what?  Devotion because of...?, or instead of...?  Devotion as religion, or as a way of life?



In the quiet, so-elegant prose of Dani Shapiro, devotion is another word for quest.  It is the journey to know—and to reckon with not knowing—how one lives in a world of risks, in a body aging, in the vessel of uncertainty.  Having reached the middle-middle of her life, having left the city for the country, having raised a little boy who beat the odds of a rare and dangerous disorder, having achieved much as both a novelist and a memoirist (and also a screenwriter), Dani Shaprio wakes from her sleep full of worries and lists.  Her jaw quakes.  Her thoughts slide.  She gets caught up in the stuff of life and then—and then—she worries.



Shapiro was the child of a deeply religious household, and she doesn't know what she believes.  She is the mother of a boy asking questions, simple, impossible questions about God and heaven and sin.  She should know something, shouldn't she?  She should have something definitive to offer.  But what, in the end, is rock solid, sure?  What bolsters us, protects us, from vicissitudes and chance?



"It wasn't so much that I was in search of answers," Shapiro writes.  "In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers.  I wanted to climb all the way inside the questions and see what was there."  Revisiting the orthodoxy of her Jewish past, taking time for meditation and retreats, seeking more and more from her long-practice of yoga, Shapiro makes herself vulnerable to possibilities.  She yields, more and more, to present time, the unrepeatable eachness of each moment.



Sentence by sentence, this is a beautiful book—considered and (the word kept occurring, so I'll use it) pure.  Structurally, it is magnificent, scenes abutting scenes, time cutting into time, small threads woven into a greater tapestry.  One wants to know Shapiro, as one reads this book—one wants to talk about all that can't be puzzled through, all the losses one can't stop, all the hurt that will go on and on, no matter how "smart" we are about our living.  We never really do have more than one another, and that is what Shapiro comes to.  Shapiro's book, itself, is a hand outstretched, an open door, a place to dwell.   

President Obama Speaks to the Horace Kephart Legacy

Today my cousin Libby sent me the transcript of a talk recently delivered by President Obama—a talk centered around America's Great Outdoors Initiative.  Tucked within those remarks are these words about my great grandfather, Horace Kephart, about whom I have written here many times on this blog, as, for example, here.



President Obama's words, which I reproduce here, make me, might I say it, proud?  They also make me hopeful.  (Added as a postscript, in my bronchitis haze:  I allude to legacies here, but I don't make a very persuasive link to the photograph.  And so, a correction:  In addition to the land my great grandfather helped to rescue from plunder, he sired the children depicted here.  The young, soulful-eyed man on the left was my grandfather, who sired my father, who is a continuing great dad to my brother, sister, and me.)

So conservation became not only important to America, but it became one of our greatest exports, as America's beauty shone as a beacon to the world.  And other countries started adopting conservation measures because of the example that we had set.



Protecting this legacy has been the responsibility of all who serve this country.  But behind that action, the action that's been taken here in Washington, there's also the story of ordinary Americans who devoted their lives to protecting the land that they loved.



That's what Horace Kephart and George Masa did.  This is a wonderful story.  Two men, they met in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina -- each had moved there to start a new life.  Horrified that their beloved wilderness was being clear-cut at a rate of 60 acres a day, Horace and George worked with other members of the community to get the land set aside.  The only catch was that they had to raise $10 million to foot the bill.



But far from being discouraged, they helped rally one of the poorest areas in the country to the cause.  A local high school donated the proceeds from a junior class play.  Preachers held "Smokey Mountain Sunday" services and encouraged their congregations to donate.  Local businesses chipped in.  And students from every grade in the city of Asheville -– which was still segregated at the time –- made a contribution.



So stories like these remind us what citizenship is all about.  And by the way, last year Michelle and I, we were able to walk some of the trails near Asheville and benefit from the foresight of people that had come before us.  Our daughters, our sons were able to enjoy what not only Teddy Roosevelt did but what ordinary folks did all across the country.  It embodies that uniquely American idea that each of us has an equal share in the land around us, and an equal responsibility to protect it.

Story by way of indirection

It was from "Spire" that we read yesterday, Lia Purpura's four-page essay in On Looking.  We had been speaking about the ways that stories can and do get told.  We had listened to pages from Jill Bialosky's History of a Suicide and I'd been tempted to carry in Kathleen Finneran's The Tender Land when, at the last moment, I shuffled Lia's book into my bag.  Like Bialosky and Finneran, Purpura writes of suicide in "Spire," but Purpura works by way of indirection, leading us toward feeling not with biographical detail, not with the facts, per se, but with an astonishing series of images.  Here is the story's final paragraph:

Once while I was working I looked up and saw a woman digging her window box out with a fork.  It was cold.  Late November.  She dug and pulled the dry stalks up, shook the roots and put the old flower heads into a little basket. Then she hit a tough spot—it must have been frozen—and had to dig hard.  The fork caught the plant's root and flipped it in air.  She watched it go down.  Put her hands on the rail and watched as it fell.  Then she stopped altogether.  Left the fork in.  Left the window box like that, half-finished, all winter.