Beth Kephart's Blog, page 259

Wall Street in the morning, riverside

I Wanted (a poem)

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I Wanted

I wanted the whole moonwhite where it is, blue how it falls.

I wanted the earth,collapsing and folding.

I wanted the ocean to riseand unberth us.

I wanted the loudest thingin the morning lightto be my heart,still beating. 

The short breakin a long poem.

The glass to stopbreaking.

 

Crack of Dawn at the Down Home Diner

I'll be headed to New York City at the crack of dawn tomorrow, student essays in my bag, a client on the docket, and the chance, at long last, to meet someone whose words have always been dear to me.  I'll roll back home under the cover of dark.  I'll sleep past dawn on Saturday.  If all goes well I'll steal an hour from the weekend, maybe two, and read.  I have so many books here that are begging for a read.

The Academy of Music, 1876

Over the last few days I've been assembling images for a talk I'll be giving this coming Valentine's Day—a small event that has turned quite not so small, thanks to the very fine people of St. John's Presbyterian Church.  In any case, I've had reason to return to that Centennial year in Philadelphia.  To revisit old research files.  To imagine, again, the cacophony of horses and flame-throwing lamps, music in the winter chill.  This is the Academy of Music in 1876, as an artist drew it that year.  That building still stands, still gathers unto itself anticipation and performance.

YOU ARE MY ONLY arrives at my front door

Look.  The thrill of seeing your uncorrected bound proofs arrive in a (very-well sealed) box doesn't go away.  That just happened here.  Thank you, the always miraculous and dear Egmont USA.

Good to one another

I snapped this photograph of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing building early yesterday afternoon, just ahead of class.  The wind blew me through the door.  A half hour early, and two of my students already there.



It's been like that this semester.  These are very special kids.  Especially motivated, especially talented, and remarkably good to one another.  We had, for example, been working on voice.  I asked the students to entrust their work to another—to allow classmates to read their anonymous pieces out loud and to give us room to try to identify each writer.  Would the syntax, the eye, the I, the obsessions be consistent with the writers we were coming to know?  Would we hear progression within the voices?  Would the reader be able to read the piece as the writer intended it to be read—grow still and grow emphatic between the commas and the dashes?



You have to trust a class to behave with honor and integrity in exercises like these.  I trust my class implicitly.  Again and again, they prove me right and leave my soul uplifted.  They are curious.  They are open.  They are giving.

Philadelphia finds its sun

I never want to read, after a day of teaching.  I never want to talk on the phone, do business.  It's the in-gathering that rides the rails with me.  The coquettish business of the sun.

The doomedness of theories of creative writing

As the sun tries to rise on Philadelphia today, I pack my bags for the University of Pennsylvania, English 135, where Vivian Gornick's most essential The Situation and The Story:  The Art of Personal Narrative will be our partial guide.  It is my guide, as well.  From the final pages:

Any attempt to teach writing ... out of anything other than that which the teacher knows intimately rather than theoretically is also doomed.  Theories of creative writing I find even more damaging than questions of craft.  It seems to me that as teachers of writing, we are there only to make the widest and most thoughtful sense of our own experience.  Out of that alone comes useful exploration. 

Some people just have it all going on

You have to love the CEO (I do, at least) who walks down the steps of his own immaculate corporate lobby to lead you up to the meeting.  Who talks (fluently, seamlessly) about the genesis of shirts, the affability of a certain car mechanic, the allure of the farm and the sea (also the fish-stocked stream), and the holism of a certain river before settling into the meeting itself—a review of numbers and themes.  I see this man once a year, maybe twice, if I'm lucky.  What makes him extraordinary is his willingness, always, to grow.  I guess I should mention that he runs an extraordinary company extraordinarily well.  Which isn't precisely beside the point.  It's in addition to.



Some people just have it all, and I'd wager that they're the ones who figured out long ago that personal wealth is not in the end about money.  It's about how we reach toward the world, and how we allow the world to reach back out to us.

Moment of Truth

Here's what happens when I finish writing the book that has beckoned and consumed me, sent me into dark corners at ridiculous hours just for the chance to write another word:  I realize that it is now time to take care of many other things.  Client work, for one (though honest to goodness, I mostly keep up).  A good friend's birthday (it has been the snow, mostly, that has gotten in our way).  Taxes (I so don't like that part of my job).  Preparation for all the talks I've promised to give (so many different topics, always).  And a much firmer resolve to stop eating the scrumptious among us, else I'll have to go out in search of a new wardrobe.  (Maybe I should already be in search of a new wardrobe.)



Does it get any easier?  Ever?