Beth Kephart's Blog, page 275

Dangerous Neighbors: The Philadelphia Inquirer Review

Sometimes angels appear in your life.  This has certainly been the case with Elizabeth Mosier.  To my great surprise and wonder, it is Elizabeth's review of Dangerous Neighbors that appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. I read these words and, literally, wept.  But mostly—mostly—it is how this review is written that takes my breath away.  Elizabeth Mosier explains this book better, and more beautifully, than I have ever been able to explain it myself.  She teaches and leads, in all that she does.

Teenagers can smell a fake, or a lesson, a mile away, so authenticity is key to persuading them to suspend their disbelief. In Dangerous Neighbors, Kephart's fifth book of young adult fiction, 1876 Philadelphia is rendered realistically in exquisite sensory detail: the flowers and foods and fabrics of the Centennial Exhibition, all the "noise and crush of progress" encroaching on a city once so quiet you could hear a runaway pig squeal in the street or a girl "flat-fingering" a Schubert piano piece.



This living history - the "unfinished pile of City Hall like a half-baked cake," the just-built Academy of Music, masted ships afloat on the Delaware - makes the old city new. But what makes Kephart's work feel true is its authentic adolescent sensibility, which she artfully conveys.



Here is 17-year-old Katherine's love for her twin sister, Anna, which sometimes seems like a battle unto death. Here, too, is Katherine's angry scrutiny of her unfashionable suffragette mother, who abandons home and hearth to fight for her daughters' futures. And here is romantic love as Anna experiences it: forbidden and dangerous, secretive and sweet (literally so, as Bennett the baker courts her with cranberry pie), a rebellion against her parents' matchmaking plans.



Kephart understands the trap and allure of being chosen - Anna is picked as the family's marriageable beauty, identical Katherine as their father's favorite - particularly for Katherine, a young woman who doesn't yet know who she is, whose future has vanished with her sister's death in a fast-changing Centennial world.





Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20101024_Girl_and_nation__coming_of_age.html#ixzz13GZi1ctU

Gratitude is an insufficient word.

Because it's like this

Last Sunday I met Cat at Whole Foods. Cat is one of Elizabeth Mosier's two beautiful, artful daughters, and she had questions for me—questions about the writing life, the reading life, the remembered life.  Noting that I site many of my stories near my home—in or around Philadelphia, at the garden down the way, within the province of the four-cornered town, up and down the roads I've driven for nearly three-quarters of my life—she asked me to explain why.  She wanted, I think, to know what about this geography, this landscape inspires me.



I'm sure I didn't have an articulate answer.  Often, I don't.  I had, instead, all these images in my mind's eye—the slant of the sun, the black cows, the rows of unharvested corn, the pockets of color on the ridge at the Willows.  Today I went out and took a photo for Cat. 



This is it.



This is why.



This is because.

The glamorous life? Celebrating White House/Black Market

Writing may be a lot of things, but it is not, most of the time, the glamorous life.  Let's take this past week, for instance.  Were you to have driven by my house at nearly any hour of the day/night, you'd have seen the lights in the old office burning.  If you had stopped to stare in (and thank goodness you didn't), you'd have born witness to yours truly—hair frazzled, eyes blackened, shoulders slumped, Phillies T-shirt on.  I was dumping ten chapters of a book and writing ten new ones.  I was chatting with the brilliant members of my online Penn book group (and let me tell you, these people impress).  I was writing magazine copy for my corporate clients and teasing out a suite of new proposals, and, yes, I will admit, I was sitting here crunching into yet another chocolate chip cookie.  This was my week, this is my life.  Glamorous it isn't.



Sometimes, however, one must be fit for the world, and over the next several weeks, I must somehow become worthy.  Or, at least, dressed for events that range from talks and school assemblies to wondrous lunches and book panels.



And where do I go, when I'm in need of some beauty?  To White House/Black Market, but of course.  The clothes fit and they withstand the test of time.  They have some razzle dazzle, some style.  Add to that the fact that this year, White House/Black Market celebrated its 25th anniversary by honoring those who have survived breast cancer (one of whom, I'm so proud to say, is my friend, Denise), and you get the kind of store that I believe in.



At 5:30 this afternoon, I was there, at the Ardmore location, looking weary, acting overwhelmed, asking for favors.  Here's what I have going on, I said, and within minutes, thanks to the loving, competent, creative, patient staff there, I was—is the word equipped?—to be a social person again.



It means more than they could probably know.  So I'm telling them right here.



(Now if I could only fix my hair.)

We're Still Alive (go Phillies!)

He tells a story

The trees are losing their leaves.  It is my favorite time of year, and also the most melancholy.  I was here, working on revisions to YOU ARE MY ONLY, when my son called.  He'd written a story for his fiction workshop.  He was describing its warp and its weft. 



How did you get to be you? I wondered, as I listened, as I watched the leaves beyond the window fall.



For he has emerged as an extraordinary writer, a young man with an empathetic imagination, an ability to manage an exquisitely complex plot, a heart and a head tuned in to words.  He was my muse, always.  He is my teacher, increasingly.

From whence did this blog come?

In April 2005, following a tremendous bout of insomnia, I began, again to write poems, a medium I had sidestepped for years.  Soon I was working visually with those sounds and songs of the lines and, with my husband's help, converting my photographs into washes of color that could frame and hold each poem.



It would have been nice to publish a book like that, but when it became clear that that wasn't to be, I began a blog—became a self-published poet/photographer, if you will, until the blog took on a life of its own.



Today I wish to thank Sam Strike, for her Radnor High Hall of Fame story in Mainline Media News.  I wish to thank Colleen Mondor, too, for including me in her most recent, and provocative, edition of What a Girl Wants. 

The 13th book has a title

and that title is YOU ARE MY ONLY.  Words taken from the book itself, but calmly discovered by my agent, Amy Rennert, and her assistant, Robyn Russell, during what was, for me, a panic-stricken week.  I now have editorial notes and will be spending the next few weeks deep within the book, stretching characters and scenes.  If I am less than present in the blog-o-sphere during that time, I hope you will forgive me.[image error]

On Waiting

Years ago, I received a call from a local high school about a young poet who hoped to spend some time working with me.  He had been an inconsistent student, but teachers had seen, in his writing, in his habits of reading and of mind, great promise.  I invited him into my world.



He was, as it turns out, extraordinary, and in his first assignment for me (for he was a photographer as well as a poet, and we had much in common and then again, hardly anything at all in common), he photographed this place.  He wrote it down.



Yesterday, while waiting for notes on a novel, I traveled to his (I will always think of it as his) abandoned greenhouse, stole past the fence and the no trespassing signs, and stood—wondering what became of him, wondering what would become of the novel.  A question gets asked, and a door opens.  Glass breaks.  Sun fights its way in.

Great House by Nicole Krauss/Reflections

It is a book that folds.  It is a book whose mysteries are coiled and whose resolutions are many and mostly what we see coming wasn't what was coming after all.  With Great House, Nicole Krauss has assembled a somber, riveting meditation on the place of things in our lives (symbolized, in this case, by a massive, 19-drawered desk).  She has introduced fantastical details into harrowing, philosophizing prose.  She has declared fifty-year-old women old and mothers incapable of protection and children capable of lies and fathers capable of loving too much and too little, and, mostly, lovers incapable of knowing one another.  She has declared writers incapacitated, and also incapacitating.  It is raw.  It is hugely sophisticated.  It is frightening, it induces a form of wonder, to imagine living inside this book for as many years as Krauss as surely lived inside this book.



Great House is featured on the cover of today's New York Times Book Review.  It was nominated, this past week, for a National Book Award.  Word of this book is everywhere, and you don't need me to lay out its plot—such as it is—or to explain how it is an interlocking of short pieces that build to a long piece that step back down toward a quiet denouement that is, nonetheless, full of psychic violence.  You only need to know what the prose sounds like, how the searching scratches deep into the page, and so I will quote from it here, leave you to your own devices:  Read it or not. 



The words of a protagonist-writer:

And as we spoke a picture of myself emerged and developed, reacting to S's hurt like a Polaroid reacting to heat, a picture of myself to hang on the wall next to the one I'd already been living with for months—the one of someone who made use of the pain of others for her own ends, who, while others suffered, starved, and were tormented, hid herself safely away and prided herself on her special perceptiveness and sensitivity to the symmetry buried below things, someone who needed little help to convince herself that her self-important project was serving the greater good, but who in fact was utterly beside the point, totally irrelevant, and worse, a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words.

The words of a lover:

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break.  And it's there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

The words, again, of a lover:

All my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin.  Imagine myself into her loss.  Trying and failing.  Only perhaps—how can I say this—perhaps I wanted to fail.  Because it kept me going.  My love for her was a failure of the imagination.

An Afternoon with Jessica Francis Kane

Every now and then, an author whose book I loved emerges from her brilliant pages and becomes a correspondent, an email friend.  That has been the case with Jessica Francis Kane, whose The Report is an immaculate work of fiction—bright, sensitive, complex, provocative.  I found the book almost by accident at this year's BEA.  I read it in a matter of days.  I enthusiastically endorsed the novel here, and Jessica and I began a correspondence that I have treasured. 



Today, Jessica came to town—or to a town thirty minutes down the road—and kept an entire coffee shop in her thrall while she answered questions put forth by the proprietor of Wolfgang Books, the sort of innovative independent bookstore that makes me proud (once again) of the Independents.  It was, in all ways, a lovely afternoon—an affirmation of all the good that still percolates up and through fine books.