Beth Kephart's Blog, page 257

Joshua Bennett: Beyond Poetry

We began class by listening to Sylvia Plath and Etheridge Knight read their work—tape recordings from years ago played out loud to a quiet room so that we might understand long lines, short lines, loud inside soft, the daring image inside the purposefully mundane, the right repetition, the empowered list.  We had listened to that, and then we had read out loud.  We had dreamed about our memoirs, closed with lines from Lia Purpura, packed our things; we were almost gone.  Except that B was still there, his laptop open.  You were speaking of poetry, he said.  You should hear this. 



I have watched and listened to this three times now.  I share it with you.  A former Penn student in a scream sing from the very top, as he says, of his fingertips, while President Obama looks admiringly on.



Remarkable.



Thank you, B.

You can't teach memoir without introducing Patricia Hampl

I never do teach the same thing twice, but that doesn't mean I forsake the classics in favor of novelty.  The one, single essay that I have carried forward into every memoir class is Patricia Hampl's "Memory and Imagination," found within I Could Tell You Stories.  You just don't teach memoir without it, or at least I don't.  These words, then, for today, from Hampl, as I head out into more snow (there's always snow, it seems, on teaching Tuesdays), for the University of Pennsylvania campus.

We seek a means of exchange, a language which will renew these ancient concerns and make them wholly, pulsingly ours.  Instinctively, we go to our store of private associations for our authority to speak of these weighty issues.  We find, in our details and broken, obscured images, the language of symbol.  Here memory impulsively reaches out and embraces imagination.  That is the resort to invention.  It isn't a lie, but an act of necessity, as the innate urge to locate truth always is. 

My boy receives word

and he is, indeed, into a much hoped-for summer abroad program.  He is flying with joy, and I am flying for him.  No other words are needed.

Looking back over 1,737 blog posts

I spent part of this weekend looking back, over 1,737 Beth Kephart Books blog posts, an effort much akin to opening the pages of a diary.  I began this blog in October 2007.  I've posted poems, interviews with bloggers, conversations with writers, reflections on books read and people met, photographs, celebrations, gratitudes.  I have yearned.  I was, perhaps, most surprised by the number of work-in-progress excerpts I have posted, by how willing I have been to test things here, in a public fashion, to be so very much less than perfect. 



What does it all mean?  What is it good for?  There have been those who have urged me to spend my time doing "better" things.  I am glad, in this case, that I listened to my own heart pulse, that I kept blogging.  For as raw as some of this is, as unfinished, as sometimes redundant, as at times too frail or too skimpy or too soft, it exists, and because it does some part of a world that would have otherwise drifted remains—the weather I lived, the moonscapes I saw, the flowers I walked past, the people and books I have loved.  You, too, exist.  In your comments and in your goodness toward this strange and still enterprise. 

Searching for beauty in language: on what can we agree?

Among the returning motifs in our memoir class is the idea of beauty in language—rhythm, pattern, song.  It's not easily classifiable stuff.  We come toward it each with our own idiosyncratic preferences, our mysterious politics.  Name your beauty, and I shall name mine.  Instruct me and I will teach you; I will show you what I mean; I will hearken and hold.



Toward the final pages of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, a series of lectures delivered in 1927, the great novelist says this:

Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way.  Expansion.  That is the idea the novelist must cling to.  Not completion.  Not rounding off but opening out.  When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom.  Cannot the novel be like that?

Forster writes of the novel, and I teach memoir, but there are lessons here, of course, just as there are lessons on every page we read.  We are honing our idea of good.  We are turning away from that which flattens our curiosity, our desire to know. 



This morning I was looking at the first pages of two award-winning debut young adult novels.  One teased and seduced me; it opened a world.  The varied shape and length of its sentences installed, within me, a mood, while its repeated words and sounds felt considered, not convenient.  The other opening page crunched as I read it; it stuttered.  Through a series of noun-verb, noun-verb declarations, it directed me to know and did not give me room to feel.  Both books, as I have noted, gained the adoration of judging panels.  Both have been widely read.  I wonder how these two examples work upon you? Which is the book you'd like to read?  Which is the one you feel you'd learn from?

Example 1:  By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.  We arose in the dark, hours before sunrise, when there was barely a smudge of indigo along the eastern sky and the rest of the horizon was still pure pitch.  We lit our kerosene lamps and carried them before us in the dark like our own tiny waving suns.  There was a full day's work to be done before noon, when the deadly heat drove everyone back into our big shuttered house and we lay in the dim high-ceilinged rooms like sweating victims.  Mother's usual summer remedy of sprinkling the sheets with refreshing cologne lasted only a minute.  At three o'clock in the afternoon, when it was time to get up again, the temperature was still killing.

Example 2:  Nailer clambered through a service duct, tugging at copper wire and yanking it free.  Ancient asbestos fibers and mouse grit puffed up around him as the wire tore loose.  He scrambled deeper into the duct, jerking more wire from its aluminum staples.  The staples pinged about the cramped metal passage like coins offered to the Scavenge God, and Nailer felt after them eagerly, hunting for their dull gleam and collecting them in a leather bag he kept at his waist.  He yanked again at the wiring.  A meter's worth of precious copper tore loose in his hands and dust clouds enveloped him.

We left the sun and drove

Suddenly it wasn't sunny anymore.

The most extraordinary meal — ever

The day went from a blast of premature spring sun to the whipping in of wind; mid-afternoon, spur of the moment, we called one of the Philadelphia area's hottest restaurants and asked if they might have room for two.  Yes, as a matter of fact, they did, thanks to a last-minute cancellation.



And so we drove down 476 and over the bridge and into Conshohocken to Blackfish.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  We are Top Chef watchers, Anthony Bourdain fans, cookbook collectors, studiers, attempters.  We are only now, at the age that we've become, beginning to explore, very infrequently, this kind of actual (as opposed to virtual) restaurant dining.



I have never (never) had a meal like I had last night—a baby arugula/English cucumber/cherry belle radish salad; striped bass with golden raisins and pink peppercorn vierge; and vanilla creme brulee.  So perfectly light, so perfectly finished, so utterly satisfying.



Philadelphia Magazine has just named Blackfish the area's top restaurant.  Number one.  No wonder.

History of a Suicide/Jill Bialosky: Reflections

The memoir is called History of a Suicide:  My Sister's Unfinished Life.  It begins in a quiet place, an explained place:  Years ago, the author's young and beautiful sister chose to end her life.  An inexplicable act, a hole through the heart, an eternity of impossible.  Jill Bialosky, the sister, the poet-author, has written this book to make some peace with partial knowing.  She has traveled as far as she can, through research, grief, and fragments reassembled, to "make [Kim's] lapse into darkness and the devastation of suicide understandable." Suicide, Bialosky says, "should never happen to anyone.  I want you to know as much as I know."



But what does Bialosky know?  What can anybody tell her?  How can the pattern be sifted and threaded to yield something—some word, some advice, some insight—that will save another from the irretrievable act, that will allow Bialosky to sleep at night?  Bialosky reads literature (Melville, Plath).  She reads science, gathers the statistics.  She spends time with those who grieve like she grieves and with those who have seen the grieving of others through. She writes poems. She writes essays.  She watches, closely, her own young son.  She wants to know and she cannot know.  When she writes, her Kim is near.



There is an extraordinary quietude in the book's opening pages.  There is one fact following another, the surface skim.  We are waiting, I was waiting, to know—to truly know—this too-soon departed Kim, and Bialosky keeps us on edge, keeps us not knowing until, midway through the book, with breathtaking beauty, Kim comes forcibly to life, Kim is here.  All the demons that beset her.  All the good she was and sought.  All the questions she couldn't answer.  All her hopes to be loved for who she was by the men—her own father, her boyfriend—who betrayed her.  Kim was loved hugely by her sisters and by her mother.  Was it enough?  Would anything ever have been enough?  Could this young woman be saved?



Not long ago, in a high school near here, a ninth grader took her life.  She had, apparently, been laughing at school the day before and partying that night with friends.  She'd slept in her mother's arms after she'd arrived drunkenly, it was said, home—in the arms of a mother worried about the effects of too much drinking.  It was when her mother slipped out that morning that this young woman took her life. 



I was shattered.  I walked about for a long time trying to understand; I wrote a long short story.  This wasn't my daughter, this wasn't my family, this was just entirely tragic, inexplicable, and it hurt like hell, and I cry now, to even type this.  I understand—we all understand—how much suicide hurts, how much it thieves.  I believe that Bialosky's book—so thoughtfully considered, so reaching out toward others—can save a life, and that it will.  History is an important contribution to literature.  More than that, it is a gift overflowing with compassion.

Lastingness and The Secret Gift: Two Chicago Tribune Reviews

I had the chance to review two books for the Chicago Tribune these last few weeks.  The first, Lastingness:  The Art of Old Age (Nicholas Delbanco) seeks to understand why some artists continue to grow with their work as they age, and why others peak and fade away.  The second, A Secret Gift (Ted Gup), tells the story of a grandfather's outreach to those suffering in the midst of the Great Depression, and the complicated motivations behind his goodness.  I've linked to both reviews here.

Memoir Fetish (welcoming these new titles to my memoir library)

My appetite for books is insatiable, always, and when I teach, buying and reading memoir is a seamless compulsion.  Every student is on her own course.  Every young writer must be guided to just the right books at the right time.  To a memoir library already teeming, I this week add the following titles:



Devotion, Dani Shapiro



Mentor: A Memoir, Tom Grimes



How to Live:  Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell (yes, this is a biography, but it is a biography of our most iconic early memoirists)



History of a Suicide, Jill Bialosky



The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (I need a new copy)



Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf



House of Prayer No. 2:  A Writer's Journey Home, Mark Richard



Townie:  A Memoir, Andre Dubus III



Duke of Deception:  Memories of My Father, Geoffrey Wolff (hugely ashamed that I have not read this before)



Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman (classified as a novel, much like Dave Eggers classified his own memoirish story as a novel;