Beth Kephart's Blog, page 277

In search of a title

What do you do when the very perfect title you'd picked out for your new book is—uncomfortably, sadly, a fact discovered late in the game—a title David Foster Wallace used for a short story a few years back?  What do you do when nothing else seems to fit?



You find a quiet place in which to think, for one thing.



And you call your son, a genius at titles, among other things, who, years ago, when a certain untitled book was a day away from final catalog copy, called out to you, from where he was writing,



But Mom, he said, isn't that book (a memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man) about how there is still love in strange places?



Still Love in Strange Places? you said. 



Yeah, he said.  Something like that.



Two minutes later you were on the phone with Alane Mason, your W.W. Norton editor.  We have a title, you told her.  She didn't skip a beat.  She agreed.



Late last night, you called your son.



I need another miracle, you said.



Give me a day or two, he told you.

An evening at the Kelly Writers House

This is the season during which the work days never end, and the skies darken for long stretches, and the rains come, and the tree limbs scratch their chaos into the tired stucco walls of this house.



This is that season, again.



But last night, through what was cold and what was dark, I made my way by train and collapsed umbrella to the University of Pennsylvania campus, which Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian have turned into a second home for me.  I traveled there to hear New Yorker editor David Remnick speak of journalism—then and now.  I traveled to sit with my dear student Kim, and to hear of her life, how it unfolding.  I traveled for the chance to chat with the great fiction writer and teacher, Max Apple. I traveled to sit among students intent on learning all they can—there, here, now—and among teachers and working writer/editors (Dick Pohlman, Avery Rome, more) who are generous with their own stories.



A gift, all of it.

From the novel newly sold

The light of the real day is gone.  The lamplight is harsh.  My mother's hands are blue blooded and thin and heavied down with her chin, and in the silence I remember her years ago, on the floor of a lost house, beside me.  She'd bought a long roll of waxed white paper and pots of finger paints and said, "We'll paint what we dream."  There wasn't white in her hair.  There wasn't night beneath her eyes.  She'd unrolled the paper across the whole wide of the floor and all afternoon we painted dreams.  Hers were blue like sky.  Mine were yellow-pink, like sun.  Afterwards, for the whole next week, her fingers were the color of the purple inside shadows.

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When the black squirrel flies

(taken yesterday, on a certain college campus, while walking with a certain beautiful son.)

Gratitude for the Cybils Nomination

My thanks go out this morning to 1st Daughter of There's a Book, who has been so kind to Dangerous Neighbors, and who (a friend whispered in my ear) has nominated the book for a Cybils Young Adult Fiction Award.



I owe her a bouquet like this, and more.

A novel in which everything is perfect is waxwork

I find this in the NYTBR Jeanette Winterson review of By Nightfall, the new Michael Cunningham novel. 



I find it, and I celebrate it:

Good novels are novels that provoke us to argue with the writer, not just novels that make us feel magically, mysteriously at home.  A novel in which everything is perfect is a waxwork.  A novel that is alive is never perfect.

Happy Birthday, Aideen

It was her one day.She wanted none but the darkand the dance of us.

Through the rain, he came

Those of us on the east coast were hammered all yesterday and late last night by rain.  It was unremitting and sometimes cruel—felling trees, swelling rivers, flooding homes—and all the while the wind whipped and through it all, my son was coming home.  He'd made the plans two weeks before.  He was to have arrived by 10 PM, the passenger in a friend's car.



I stayed at my desk, working, picking up his intermittent texts—we're near the tunnel, we're through the tunnel, we're close to the fifth exit—until finally a text announced the name of a neighboring town, and then at last he was home.  I don't think the kid has ever been hugged that hard.  I don't think he's ever looked that good.



What am I today, but grateful—to his friend, for driving intelligently; to the forces that be; to him.  Nothing we win or do or are promised in this life can matter like the people we so deeply love.

Inviting you to a commemorative evening

This is a page torn (or falling out of) my Radnor High School scrapbook, a place where I keep the ribbons we—the tennis team, the track team—won, a place that houses all the goofiness and wonder of then.



It was to this scrapbook that I returned in late March of this year, when I received word that I would be inducted into the Radnor High School Hall of Fame this coming November.  The news came as an utter surprise to me.  Few honors have moved me so thoroughly; few upcoming events have been anticipated so eagerly.  I loved my high school and I've placed some of my own stories, including Undercover, within a reimagined version of it.  At Radnor, I had an English teacher who cared, who set me on the path that I am now on.  That very same English teacher, Dr. Maryanne Caporaletti, will introduce me during the induction ceremonies, where I will be joined by Lee Daniels, the director/producer behind such films as Precious and Monster Ball; Christopher Goutman, currently the head writer of As the World Turns; Paul R. Michel, a federal judge; the theologian, John Galloway; the musician/producer Andy Mark; the international banker Charlie Ryan; the football star Chris Sydnor; and the family of Eygptologist Henry George Fischer.  Previous Radnor High Hall of Famers include David Brooks, Sally Bedell Smith, Janis Grant Berenstain, and Anna Moffo.



Pamela Sedor of Radnor Memorial Library has offered to make this moment in my life even more special by setting aside the evening of November 16th at 7:30 PM for what will be my first reading from Dangerous Neighbors.  I'll talk as well about my years at Radnor and about what is next in my writing life.  I hope those of you who live near can join us. 

Joining the long list of the many things I am really bad at

is standing in as myself at a photo shoot.  I don't know how it is done.  I don't know how anyone stares placidly into the glass eye of the lens, or away from it, chin a-tilt.  Even when the chosen photographer is outstanding, as surely Chris Crisman, today's poor victim, is, I cannot be me in front of a camera, cannot give up the self-conscious glint, cannot stop imagining all the ways I'd rearrange the proportions of my face.  I cannot, most of all, stop imagining being him, the poor photographer, who took on this noble trade to do far more, I'm sure, than photograph an author who spends most of her time alone at her desk, or at a gym or studio, sweating.  I'm either boringly still or impossibly active.  I am not what pictures are made of.



Still, as with all difficult things, there is a lining.  That lining lies, for me, in getting to watch this remarkable photographer at work.  His portfolio speaks volumes.