Beth Kephart's Blog, page 272

The light at the end of her tunnel (Colleen Mondor sells her first book)

A week or so ago, Colleen Mondor, Chasing Ray blogger and Bookslut reviewer (among other things), wrote to say that she would soon be able to share big news.  And so I waited, knowing, as I did, that Colleen had been at work for several years on a book she'd called THE MAP OF DEAD PILOTS.  It was a book inspired, in part by her work as co-owner of an aircraft leasing company, her knowledge of Alaska, her love for boundary-stretching literature, and her passion for melding fact and the imagination.  And it was a book agented by one Michele Rubin of Writers House, whose belief in this project Colleen has described in posts spanning several years.



This was an author and agent who would not give up.  Not in the face of so many almosts.  Not in the face of a rapidly changing industry.  Not in the face of so much that can feel so bleak when you are on the waiting side of a coin.



And so, this week, I waited for Colleen's news.



It came yesterday—news that this book, described in Publishers Marketplace as being "about Alaskan pilots navigating a world that demands close communion with extreme physical danger and emotional toughness" has been sold to Holly Rubino at Lyons Press.  It will go on the fall 2011 list.



I could not be happier for Colleen, who has cheered so many of the rest of us on, has gotten us talking about important book issues (diversity in storytelling, honesty in jacket design, the value of nonfiction for the young), and has never bowed to envy or bitterness.  Colleen Mondor has sold her first book, and she'll tell you more about it here. 

The ALAN YA Historical Fiction Panel

On Monday, November 22, I'll be in Orlando, FL, joining English teachers and writers for the yearly Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English.



I'll be sitting on a panel moderated by Ricki Berg of Rockville High School entitled "Finding Myself in the Past:  YA Historical Fiction and Fact."  My two co-panelists are women I can't wait to meet—Susan Campbell Bartoletti (The Boy Who Dared, They Called Themselves the KKK) and Jeannette Ingold (Paper Daughter, The Window, Mountain Solo, and others).



I hope you'll join us for the 1:50 PM session.

Yellow facing red

Maybe this photo is enough?  This yellow facing red sizzled by sun, a stone cross in the distance.

A book takes a journey; a book is framed by light

I was standing right here, on the edge of an old cemetery, watching the sun light up the earth, when Laura Geringer's final notes on YOU ARE MY ONLY buzzed in on my phone.  I read them through.  I looked back up.  The sun had rearranged itself, and yet the day was bright. 



I began this book three years ago, inspired by the legends of urban explorers and by the haunting stories I had heard about a Philadelphia asylum known as Byberry.  I was encouraged to keep writing by the magnificent Lauren Wein, of Black Cat/Grove, and by my sustaining agent, Amy Rennert.  I was helped to think harder by memorable conversations with Marjorie Braman of Holt.  And after Laura Geringer (Egmont USA) read the book, I reimagined characters into their younger selves and watched to see what might happen.



What happened, in the end, was light.

A walk in the four o'clock hour

If the work keeps you bound to the desk (your mind clouded, your shoulder bones crunched, your fingertips hollow), do this, at least:  Wait for the hour in the day when the sun pours not down but through, and meet it halfway.

It was the way

It was the way the buildings weighted down while the river kept on (kept on).  The way the sun would not be thwarted.  The way old and new was now.



Set a novel in it.  Film a movie.  Write a poem.

Photo Shoot

I wrote, a while ago, about all the babble that goes through my brain when a camera is pointed in my direction.  I am not, within, what I am without.  Do any of us achieve that perfect correspondence?



But for the recent Pennsylvania Gazette story about the life I've lived through books, I was invited to a enter the cinematic world of Chris Crisman, another Penn grad who has made it his business to appease and to ease and (somehow in the midst of it all) to make art.  You would never know it, by looking at this shot, but the lens was so close to my face when this picture was made that I suspected Chris of doing a study on the tangle of my eyelashes.  (Lancome, next time, I was thinking to myself.  And also:  I wish I'd gone to bed last night.)



Clearly, though, Chris knows what he is doing, and I share this outtake from the shoot today because Chris made Memorial Hall, a Centennial-era building, the true and deserving subject of his shot.  It's a beautiful place, newly and justly restored, and can't you just picture it back in 1876—the crowds massing in the high heat of summer, eager for the art within?

A Saul Bellow Sky

This is the view through my office window, at just this moment.  I look up; I see the sky.  I look at my screen, and I see these words quoted in Michiko Kakutani's review of Letters by Saul Bellow:

To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others.

Yes.



And also:  Yes.

There will be, Lawsy writes to say,

a Dangerous Neighbors e-book.  Available come January 4, 2011, she says, wherever e-books are sold. 

We love our Lawsy.

We are grateful, still, and nonetheless, for books and lamps to read by.

Hunger

I haven't traveled nearly as much as I long to lately, but my life journeys me down so many roads.  So that yesterday afternoon, in the still, a friend arrived and here we sat talking, among other things, about her passion (proven, honest) for being part of hunger's cure.  We talked numbers, and we talked families.  We talked about what local farmers can do and already are doing to help bring nutrition, and not just empty calories, to North Philadelphians in need.



"We need new ways to tell our story," she said, and all through the night I dreamed.