Beth Kephart's Blog, page 263

Where does the short story take you?

The New York Times Book Review has been doing a lot of things right lately—like, for example, giving my friend Robb Forman Dew's Being Polite to Hitler a stellar review—and I'm intrigued this weekend by the trio of short-story collection reviews that have been grouped under the heading "Small Moments."  Here the new collections by Colm Toibin, Charles Baxter, and Edith Pearlman all get their due in essays penned by Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates, and Roxana Robinson, respectively.  I particularly love the juxtaposition of these two opening grafs, the first by Prose and the second by Oates:

Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant's work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction. (This is Prose, who then goes on to note the exceptions to the rule while returning to her theme that the "short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.")

Reflecting our dazzlingly diverse culture, the contemporary American short story is virtually impossible to define. Where once the "well crafted" short story in the revered tradition of Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce was the predominant literary model — an essentially realist tradition, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic — now the more typical story is likely to be a first-person narration, or monologue: more akin to nonliterary sources like stand-up comedy, performance art, movies and rap music and blogs. Such prose pieces showcase distinctive "voices" as if fictional characters, long restrained by the highly polished language of their creators, have broken free to speak directly and sometimes aggressively to the reader — as in boldly vernacular stories by Junot Díaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson and T. C. Boyle, among others. (Yet Edgar Allan Poe, as long ago as 1843, brilliantly gave voice to the manic and utterly convincing murderer of "The Tell-Tale Heart" — perhaps genius is always our contemporary.) (This would be Oates)

What, I wonder, do you expect when you read a contemporary short story?  Where do you expect it to take you, and by what means?  Where do you hope it will leave you? Who is, in your opinion, the best practitioner of the short story today?

 

W.I.P.

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Your temporary madness, Kate would call it.  Your solitary confinement.  Becca lived, and then she wrote it down.  She listened for music inside silence.  She had made a commitment to the unalloyed, the unveering line, the raw wound, the relentless grab at authenticity, and now she was two poems away from a new collection.  "I'm calling it Heart Blue," she'd told Vin, a few nights before.  "Or that's what it will be, when it's finished." 

Winter light at Valley Forge

It's 20 degrees outside at this hour in this day, and as I sit here working, reading, writing, contemplating, I am blessed that 233 years ago, in cabins such as these, the soldiers of General George Washington's Continental Army hunkered down, withstood the weather, and summoned all they'd need to go back up against the Brit's Sir William Howe and his army, which had taken over Philadelphia and was threatening to win the whole war.  Look at the planks upon which these soldiers slept.  Look at the earthen floor.  Imagine going day in and out in winter weather on subsistence meals, waiting for the thaw.



There are threats without and threats within.  My prayer for this country is that it will rise again to decency.  That it will honor not just those fallen in Arizona last weekend, as our president so eloquently encouraged, but those who withstood a long winter long ago so that we could have what we now claim as ours.

Dora Explorer Never Loses Her Head

We went to a Dora Explorer birthday party a week or so ago, and we had ourselves a brilliant time (so, as you can see, did this cat).  But part-way through the festivities, this version (we had many versions) of Dora lost her head.  It could have been calamitous, save for the ministrations of a certain man (my husband) who self-designated himself as Mr. Arts and Crafts.



I could use a little glue myself these days, running about as I am, losing my pace and face.  The trick, I think, is to find a cave of silence every day. Something like the near sleep of yesterday.  Somewhere in which my own thoughts can be tested, drawn out, heard.

The Half Place

There is that half place between dream and story, where the mind, the creating mind, must hover.  I hovered there today in a room that isn't this one, with an aqua-colored pen and a pad of paper stolen from a corporate exercise.



I wrote 2,000 words. 



I did not want to open my eyes.

The most beautiful thank you I have ever received

Today was, as I have written, one of those days—a chase of a day, only-a-few-minutes-out-beneath-the sky day—and it wasn't until dinner was over that I opened the white envelope that had been addressed to me by a certain extraordinary seventh grade teacher at a nearby middle school.  I'd made a presentation at this school not long ago—invited the students to write poems, invited them to see themselves newly.



The white envelope contained the most precious thank you letters I've ever received.  I stood and read them and cried.  Clearly the students had been asked to write what they'd learned from me, or how my presentation had changed their view of poetry or writing, and with stunning precision and generosity these students dedicated themselves to that task.  "My poetry has changed because I write about real life events because I can connect with them."  "I learned that you don't have to write about something amazing."  "I was the one in the audience that you called on that only had 4 words on his paper, but with your help, I now have many words that I made into a poem."  "I used to think poetry was kind of dull and a boring type of writing, but now I think it is really fun."  "I liked when you talked about how being a writer can be free and have no rules except for grammar to put down our feelings and emotions."  ".. and now I know how to write poems from the perspective of nature.  It's given me a new way of writing and I even want to write one for my mom to give to her at Christmas!"



Letter after letter, and then, beyond those letters, the poems that these students had finished after I'd left the room. The poetry of young hearts set free.



Remarkable teachers—those in the classroom day in and day out—instill the remarkable in their students, and were it not for two teachers' urgings, I'm not sure I'd ever have known just what these students heard that day.  This is a gift I will always keep, and will, no doubt, always return to.

Snow sky through screened window

It was supposed to be a snow day, but it really wasn't.  There was work to do, a big pot of soup to make, bills to write, a house to clean, a special dinner to prepare for my father.  But all day long I was watching the sky—watching it change, watching it drift—through my window. 



In the end, I went outside to breathe. 

Snow Day

You Are My Only: in the afterglow of the copyedits

You know how it is:  You write a book because it is furied up inside you—molten and untouchable but ineluctable, too.  You are the huntress.  You're after something you don't quite understand, and you're going to win; you're going to conquer; in the process, you're going to get burned.  You're going to make up words and fury nouns and add commas where you shouldn't. You're going to mix metaphors.



(It's like writing a blog, sort of, without the back-up support.)



Thankfully, then, there are agents like Amy Rennert who calm you down, and editors like Laura Geringer who ask questions, and a team like Egmont USA, which stands behind you, relieves you of you.  One of the great gifts, in this process, is the gift of copyediting, which Egmont's Greg Ferguson and Nico Medina handle so well.  This time, additionally, Egmont engaged a certain Hannah to read the pages of YOU ARE MY ONLY (due out next fall), and Hannah made sure, among other things, that I didn't have a certain character deciding to take the day off on the day that was already her day off, and that I didn't have the moon wane too quickly.



I've just now finished reading the book through, and can I say (would it be boasting?) how excited I am?  I can't wait for this one to be on the shelves.  I am so grateful to all of those who are helping it come to pass.

Astonished by 1st Daughter's year-end wrap up

These waters are blue rearranged by pink, the colors of sea and sky, and I thought of this image when I learned this morning of all the very kind things book blogger 1st Daughter has done and said about my books this year.  She is one very special and cherished reader.



In her year-end wrap-up of her blog, There's a Book, 1st Daughter named Dangerous Neighbors one of the top four books of the year as well as the most beautifully written book of the year, named me her favorite newly discovered author, and listed The Heart Is Not a Size as the book that had the greatest impact on her in the year. This is high, high praise from a blogger named Best KidLit Book Blogger by the BBAW of 2010 (congratulations to 1st Daughter for that!!).



I am deeply privileged, and very blessed.  Thank you.