Beth Kephart's Blog, page 274

Nothing to say, nothing to do

I've just now returned from visiting our son, happily ensconced in his third year of school.



Hey, he says.  And that's all I have to hear.  Everything riddling and wrong, everything knotted or unstrung fades away.  He's near.  I'm whole.  The sky is every color; the leaves are gold.

Words to live by

This past Wednesday, while walking the hallways of the KIPP DuBois Collegiate Academy, I was stopped in my tracks by these seven words. 



Is there anything more to say?  I don't think so.

The Pennsylvania Gazette Feature/Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt

The University of Pennsylvania has been extraordinarily good to me—inviting me to contribute to the pages of The Pennsylvania Gazette and Peregrine; trusting me to teach a small class of brilliant undergrads; putting me at the helm of an online book group; asking me to read with Alice Elliott Dark, or to sit on panels with Buzz Bissinger, or to join David Remnick for a Kelly Writers House dinner; and to come to know, even better, the likes of fellow teachers Jay Kirk and Karen Rile. 



Earlier this summer, John Prendergast, the editor of The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote to say that he'd read Dangerous Neighbors and that he looked forward to having a conversation.  We had that conversation on a sunny day sitting on a row of skinny benches while a tennis match played out before us.  I was my breathless, enthused, and sleep-starved self (as you'll read) and John was the thoughtful man he is.  Several weeks later, the photographer Chris Crisman and his team met me at Memorial Hall and put up with me long enough to take my picture.



It is an extraordinarily generous story, accompanied by one of my favorite scenes from the book.  It will always be cherished.  And Chris, thanks for pulling your camera lens back.  You know what that means to me.

Oh, he said

"You're a photographer?"



"I have a camera," I said.  "And I like taking pictures."



"Then you have to come here," he started walking, "and see this."

Philadelphia at Night: A Portrait (and a fine Dangerous Neighbors review)

I returned home from my afternoon at 1209 Vine to spend an hour reading the latest thoughts, impressions, and declarations of the online book discussion group that I've been leading for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.  I then turned right around, hopped the train once more, and headed back to the city for the launch of Jay Kirk's first book, Kingdom Under Glass, an altogether wonderful affair conducted within the halls of the Academy of Natural Sciences.



It was near midnight when I crossed the river and looked south, toward the newly rehabilitated Main Post Office Building at 30th Street.  My city photographs well, any time of day or night.



In between the travel and the book-club talk (and, okay, true, a few corporate assignations), I received word of this gorgeous review of Dangerous Neighbors over at Alison's Book Marks, which concludes with words that any writer of non-vampire texts yearns to hear:

Different from anything I have ever read before, Beth Kephart raises the bar on Young Adult novels. She proves that you don't need vampires and werewolves to capture this audience's attention, and bring them on a journey they will not soon forget.

  Thank you, Alison.[image error]

Where the heart is: 1209 Vine Street, Philadelphia

Today I sat in a teacher's room listening to children sort b's from g's, and pigs from bibs, all under the encouraging eye of a reading tutor.  I watched a multi-purpose room take on countless purposes and, shortly after noon, absorb the ninth graders of Philadelphia's KIPP DuBois Collegiate Academy.  I listened to Kyle Zimmer, president and co-founder of First Book, as she told stories about the revolution that book ownership yields; listened to the mayor of my city compare books to passports; listened as one sponsor after another made promises they plan to keep about literacy, education, and tomorrow.  And then I watched as Dangerous Neighbors made its way into the hands of those KIPP ninth graders, stewards of our future, all.  There were so many people who made today happen, and key among them is a young lawyer named Heather Steinmiler, who seems to do many things in many ways on behalf of the children of Philadelphia.



My dear friend Jan Suzanne Shaeffer was in the room today, and it is because of her that I have these photos to share.  I looked out, saw her sunny face, and took calm from it as I stepped up to the microphone.



Gratitudes.[image error]

By Nightfall/Michael Cunningham: Reflections

If I have at times been mildly bewildered by some of the plot points in Michael Cunningham's new novel, By Nightfall, I have never been less than enthralled by the sentences this artist makes, by the craftsmanship of this intimately close-over-the-shoulder rendering of one Peter Harris, aesthete in mid-life crisis. 



The story can be easily summarized—Peter and his wife, Rebecca, are comfortably married but perhaps privately disillusioned when Rebecca's much younger brother arrives, a beautiful bi-sexual with a wayward touch who is using drugs again.  Peter finds the brother's presence distracting, even deconstructing.  He is reminded, increasingly, of his own brother, now dead "of a virus." He questions nearly everything about him—his career as an art dealer, his history as a father, his reasons for marrying Rebecca—while maintaining, throughout most of the book, the sheen of business-as-usual.



We are given, through Cunningham, Peter's history, and at times I found it difficult to bridge connections between Peter the child, Peter the adolescent, and Peter the middle aged.  My disorientation was utterly beside the point.  For there are so many pleasures in this book, so many passages I envied for their ease and suggestible insights.  Let me share just two with you here:

Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness.  You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good.  We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it. 

Or how about this Gatsby-esque moment, which we find early on in the book:

They are crossing Central Park along Seventy-ninth Street, one of hte finest of all nocturnal taxi rides, the park sunk in its green-black dream of itself, its little green-gold lights marking circles of grass and pavement at their bases.  There are, of course, desperate people out there, some of them refugees, some of them criminals; we do as well as we can with these impossible contradictions, these endless snarls of loveliness and murder.

When I grow up, I want to write at least one sentence like at least one of those.

Where do the years go, and the children?

He sat by the water's edge, thinking.  He was a student, here from Gabon.  He titled his poem, "The Dream of the American Soldier."



I miss him.  I miss all of them.  Five years have gone by, in the meantime.

Joining the Mayor of my City, on behalf of First Book

It is the children, always the children, who give me hope.  The ones I've met in gardens, who shared their poems with me.  The ones who read Kipling out loud, so loud, that the story became a song.  The ones who extended my own vocabulary by giving me elements of theirs.



And so it is a tremendous honor to be asked to join Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter; Lehigh Valley County Executive Don Cunningham; First Book President and CEO Kyle Zimmer; KIPP Philadelphia Charter School CEO Marc Mannella; and Host Committee Chair Heather A. Steinmiller, among others, for a celebration of the good that books can do in children's lives.



First Book, which was mentioned in this recent New York Times Magazine story, was founded nearly twenty years ago by a corporate lawyer who tutored children at a soup kitchen by night—a lawyer who came to believe that books were critical to the health of families, and of nations, and who has, in the intervening years, overseen an organization that has delivered more than 70 million books to programs serving children in need.  KIPP Philadelphia Schools is a network of charter schools born of a nationwide system known as Knowledge is Power Program.  The event, which will take place at 1209 Vine Street this coming Wednesday, October 27, at 12:30 p.m., at the location of the KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy/KIPP Dubois Collegiate Academy, will kick off the Third Annual Book Bash, which will be held in New York on December 10, during the Pennsylvania Society Weekend.



I've been invited to talk a little bit about Dangerous Neighbors, a book that all 108 ninth graders will be given during the event.  You can't imagine how happy that makes me—to be part of a day in the life of a brand new school, talking about a city I love, talking about once and talking about tomorrow.  I thank Laura Geringer, Egmont USA, and the good people at First Book for all the convergence that has made this possible.

You Are My Only: There, breathing

Sometimes the only way to finish writing a book is to read a book you haven't written, and this weekend I distanced myself from You Are My Only by reading By Nightfall, the new Michael Cunningham novel.  Between reading, I went off to Skippack.  I took a walk.  I took my big camera out and found my way to the back side of an old cottage at the Willows, where I discovered this tank, its clock forever corroded by time.



It was, all of it, a restoration.  I returned to my own novel in the middle of last night and read it through once more, adding, subtracting, but not by much. 



It is there.  It is whole now.  I can breathe.