Beth Kephart's Blog, page 268

Joan Rivers, Gail Godwin, and Age, Invincible Age

Last night, in between bouts of fever-induced delirium, I watched the IFC documentary, "Joan Rivers - A Piece of Work."  It was, in a word, riveting—a blow by blow account of Rivers' 76th year, of months spent seeking work, seeking access, seeking acclaim, seeking relevance, seeking, above all else, respect in a world that honors youth.  She is relentless, Joan Rivers.  She is needy.  She is not afraid to show it.  She wants to squeeze every hour for what it can deliver unto her, and she wants you to show up—at her signings, her shows, her roasts, her Apprentice TV—so that she can be sure that she still matters.



This past weekend, in the New York Times Book Review, Gail Godwin, now 73, wrote a moving piece about what she, as a writer, still wants.  "You want to be taken seriously; that doesn't change," she wrote.  "What has changed for me is the degree of compromise I am willing to inflict on my work in order to see it in print."



Godwin, unlike Rivers, is not making impossible demands on every hour.  She does, she tells us, "a lot of lying around."  She has accepted that her "supine dithering is fertile and far from a waste of time."  She has gained an "increased intolerance for the threadbare phrase."  She hopes "to do credit to the material that has been hers...."



Reading Godwin's essay and watching the Rivers documentary back to back is like being offered two utterly dichotomous versions of your future—the future in which you still trust time to give you time (and story) or the future in which you do battle with every second.  I hope I have the presence of mind to trust time, if I live to that age.  I hope that I do not need to be loved, but that I still have a talent for loving. 

You wake

from the chill and sweat and torment of a fever, and who are you?  what are you? where are you? Have you been reconstituted?  Does sun shine through blisters of cold?  Has someone called out, "Catch!"?

The stunning kids of Norristown High

I never quite know what is going to happen when I enter into the world of students, and earlier today, thanks to Asha Verma of the Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library, I spent an hour and a half with the ninth graders of Norristown High School—students who had read Dangerous Neighbors as an independent reading project and who had questions they wanted answered.



We created classified ads declaring our secret ambitions or yearnings (WANTED:  Peace.  WANTED:  Fluency.  WANTED:   Summer freedom.  WANTED:  One more chance to say goodbye.  WANTED:  Sunday, Again.  WANTED:  Someone to look up to.).  We identified those 2010 world phenomenon that, were the kids in charge of a contemporary world exhibition, would get top billing:  Puerto Rican culture, iPads, student grades and grading systems, a slice of ocean, a sliver of mountains, the history of cancer treatment, a display revealing the history of computer technology, a peace congress, a collage of 2010 headlines from a multitude of media, a history of music.  We talked about how books get made and why they are read.  We talked about faith in the face of rejection.  We talked about the kids' own writerly aspirations.  We talked about birds.  We talked about my character Anna's last word—the why of it, the impact.  These were beautiful kids, with wholly invested teachers, and it was an honor to share my morning with them.  It makes what I do so worthwhile.

On feathered wing

We take the long drive to collect our son from college today.  Through dark clouds and rain, toward mounded snow and suspensions of ice.  And then home again, where the sun always shines when he's near.

Our journey begins

My husband and I have known each other for twenty-seven years.  He is the artist, the multilingual world traveler, the photographer.  I am the writer who likes to take pictures, who loves nothing more than steeping myself with all the essence of a place—Philadelphia, El Salvador, Juarez, Seville, Barcelona, San Miguel, Cascais, Sainte-Eulalie d'Olt, Chanticleer garden—until that place becomes a story. 



What do we do with what we can do, with what we love? we have asked ourselves, all these years.



Last night, we found our answer.



I am marking that decision here.  As things progress, as work gets done, I will share with you our journey.

On the street where I live,

they tore it all down.  They dug their holes, they filled their holes, they paved a drive, they muddied it over, and every day has been a bulldozer day.  We have waited for progress.  Today the bare land was made green again.  The vanquished trees were replaced.  No new houses have risen from the din, but it is the din that we remember.

It's not every day

that I see all my young adult novels in one place, dressed up in red, to boot.  Thank you, Lisa and Marguerite and all of those who helped create this year's Baldwin School Book Fair. 



This coming Monday, I'll be joining the students of Norristown High School at the Montgomery-County Norristown Public Library, where we will be putting some of the Dangerous Neighbors Teacher's Guide exercises to work.  I look forward to talking my city, and to bringing the past alive, if only for an hour or so.

I danced instead

Yesterday afternoon, save for a single client call, I did not work.  I headed off to DanceSport Academy instead, where I took not one, but two lessons.  At the end of the second, Scott Lazarov worked on some cha-cha choreography, and we recorded it, so we wouldn't forget when we got back to it.  I'm walking my way through most of this, for most of it is new.  My point is this:  I went to the dance studio yesterday and all the stress of which I've been lately speaking vanished.



Vanished, I say.



Which is what dance, every single time, does for me.

Not wasting away

It doesn't seem right to me (does it seem right to you?) that I spent the last many months working twenty hour days, frying my brain down to a mere fraction of its former self, frittering away my finger tips, pacing the floorboards at 3 AM in search of just the right sentence to begin the eighth corporate story of the day AND to emerge from all of that five pounds heavier.



My brain is nugget sized.  Shouldn't the rest of me be, too?



And do I have to give up cookies?



Sigh.

A very special Dear Author honor

I have had a year of gifts—quiet moments I'll never forget.  Late today (it was bitter cold; I was blurred by exhaustion), another gift arrived—word that John of the wonderful Dear Author site had chosen Dangerous Neighbors as one of the top published books of the year.



I choose this Michael Tolbert photo, taken on the day Mayor Michael Nutter and I celebrated a First Book milestone at KIPP, to celebrate John's generosity.  Because books are written to be read, and it's especially wonderful to be read by a reader like John. 



Thank you.