Beth Kephart's Blog, page 273

More Scenes (and a promise)

I have two new books to read this week—Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air and my friend Susan Straight's Take One Candle Light a Room—and I am eager for those quiet hours, eager to escape into the worlds that others have created.  I'll be writing about those books here, as soon as I know just what to say.  



In the meantime, and finally (I promise), these last images from the Radnor High Hall of Fame weekend: 



In the first, my friend Ellen, who knew me in my years at Penn, stood beside me at my wedding, invited me to stand with her at hers, and has remained so dear.  In the second, "Precious" (and precious) filmmaker Lee Daniels, the extraordinary athlete Chris Sydnor (we ran track together, but let's just say he was a tad more talented in the speed department than I'd ever be), and yours truly, on four-inch, non-sprint-able heels.  In the third, my former English teacher, the inspiration for my fictional Dr. Charmin (Undercover);  she said she had hoped to write a perfect introduction, and oh, she did. Finally, it all begins with our parents, and here is my father, who I am so glad could spend the day with me.

Representing: Radnor High Class of 1978

The magnificent, big-hearted, beautiful-eyed Lee Daniels, the mind and soul behind "Monster's Ball," "Precious," and so much else, brought us to tears with his remarks at the Radnor High Hall of Fame induction ceremony. 



I won't forget these past few days. 



Not. 



Ever.

What the brain will do

It's a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.

Loren Eiseley, quoted by Carl Klaus, in The Made-Up Self

Radnor High Hall of Fame, an image from moments ago

Radnor High Hall of Fame, Induction Day

Today I'll be inducted into the Radnor High Hall of Fame.



I type those words.  Sit back.  Wonder how that ever came to be.



I spent last evening in the home of Radnor graduates, parents, and administrators who are all working toward giving students the best education that can be gained.  I spent it talking to Nancy Carpenter Barnes, a fellow inductee, a well-known artist, the former president of the Barnes Foundation, and an Emmy-winning producer for public TV.  I'll spend today not just with Nancy, but with Lee Daniels, the film producer and director; John Galloway, the theologian; Christopher Goutman, the award-wining producer, director, and writer; Paul Michel, the federal judge who, among other things, served as an assistant prosecutor in the Watergate trial; Charles Ryan, the investment banker who created Russia's leading investment bank; and Chris Sydnor, the extraordinary athlete and coach.  The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer and the music writer and producer Andy Mark, both sadly deceased, will be remembered as well. 



The inductees will share this moment with the teachers and students of Radnor High, and I will be introduced by the very woman who inspired the smart, encouraging English teacher in my first young adult novel, Undercover.  She could not have been more than 25 back then.  She paired my reading of Juliet with a Romeo reading by my secret crush.  She read between weak, overwritten lines and saw the seeds of a writer.  I'll stand with her today.





There's more about this day here.  There is so much in my heart.  I don't even know who to thank.  But few honors have affected me in the way that today does.  I wish my mother were here to see this.

The gracious Bookslut review of Dangerous Neighbors

In Colleen Mondor's wonderfully informed Bookslut November round up, she's taking a look at mysteries—books like Double Trouble, Fixing Delilah, Zora and Me, The Painted Secret, and Tell Me a Secret.  I was happily surprised to discover that Dangerous Neighbors was included in the mix, and I am honored.  Colleen clearly puts her heart and soul into every review she writes, every opinion she offers. 



A few words from her November column here:

First and foremost, this is a love story to the Philadelphia of long ago. Kephart has steeped herself in the city's history and it shows, especially in the detailed way she writes about the Centennial events and displays. But it is also the story of a secret love and how keeping that secret can be especially appealing to a teenage girl -- how it can lead her to forget about everyone else and how watching that secret grow larger and larger can torment those who keep the secret with her. Dangerous Neighbors is about sisters and a city and a whole lot of love and tragedy. While not a thrilling mystery it is a confection of singular depth nonetheless and just as irresistible.

In preparation for my upcoming Radnor Memorial Library talk I look back and find

...the very first page of the very first notes I ever took, for my very first writing workshop.  I was a mother already.  I was way too old to be a newbie.  But there I was in Spoleto, Italy, in July 1994, and there, before me, stood Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown.  In two too-short weeks they taught me most everything I still know about the making of stories. 



I'll be reflecting on the idiosyncratic evolution of this writer's life, among other things, at the Radnor Memorial Library, November 16th, 7:30.  I hope you'll join me. 

The Made-Up Self/Carl H. Klaus: Reflections

If the titles designating the four parts of this slender paperback seem, at first, daunting—"Evocations of Consciousness," "Evocations of Personality," "Personae and Culture," and "Personae and Personal Experience"—there's nothing but good stuff in between.  Delightful ruminations on the poetics of self, the possibility/impossibility of tracking the mind at work, the grand seductions and sometimes promise of what Klaus, the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, calls "The literature of interiority.  The story of thought. The drama of mind in action." etc. We get satisfying reflections on Montaigne reflecting on Montaigne, pithy quotes from nonfiction masters, mind teases that force us to conclude (again and again) that writing (and reading) the personal essay is both a mine field and an irresistible enterprise.



Every time I teach memoir or essay, I yearn to be writing it again.  This happened to me during the online book club ("Literature of Bearing Witness") that I was recently leading for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.  Memories leak.  Assertions are disproven.  The mind set free veers, trembles, and ultimately discovers something that might have been, something that might still mean something.  If only we knew for certain what about any of it were true. 



Reading Klaus put me right back into that danger zone—that thirst for trying to write the personal all over again (and yes, dear readers, I do realize that I write the personal every day on this blog).  Klaus gave me new essays to read (note to self:  read more Didion; get a copy of David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," get Anatole Broyard's Intoxicated by My Illness). He gave me experiments to try out on myself.  He gave me cause to think, and he made smile, and it was all delivered with the kind of companionable prose that made me feel like I was in a classroom, which is where, so often, I want to be.



I have said this a few times this year; I grow redundant:  We have entered, I believe, a new era of memoir making and personal essay writing.  An era in which the forms feel noble again—better explicated, more sound, more open to new possibilities.  I grow increasingly tempted to write toward the true.[image error]

Main Line Today on Dangerous Neighbors

Many thanks today for this shout-out from one of the best magazines our Main Line has to offer, Main Line Today.  I am less than good at many things, including generating brief summaries of my own work.  This single paragraph is a gift.  Thank you.

Dangerous Neighbors

By Beth Kephart (Egmont USA, 192 pages)

In her 12th novel, award-winning author and Main Line Today contributor Beth Kephart escorts readers into the world of 19th-century Philadelphia—onto the Centennial grounds, over the icy Schuylkill River, down Walnut Street and through Rittenhouse Square—as twin sisters Anna and Katherine experience love, tragedy and a coming of age. Set against the backdrop of the 1876 Exhibition, Dangerous Neighbors celebrates the often-mysterious bond between twins. Entertaining, haunting and unforgettable.

[image error]

The sky is a dirty green-gray bowl (a sliver of excerpt)

Sometimes you write the scene and, a few weeks later, you actually see the sky you'd dreamed into words.  This then, from You Are My Only, which is due out from Egmont USA next fall.


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A storm is coming.  The moon is lying low, out of the way, and the sky is a dirty green-gray bowl.  Autumn has pushed me around to the window, which is thick as some old encyclopedia, nailed shut.  She lies on her bed with her goggles on, humming some strange little tune.