Beth Kephart's Blog, page 288

Body Combat (Girl Power)

I was beginning to feel my energy return.  I scrubbed the bathtub and didn't collapse.  I wrote two pages, and kept part of one.  I cooked a full meal and then, the next day, cooked another.  I got up Saturday morning and said to myself:  Oh, Beth.  The time has come.  Body Combat at the gym.



Body Combat.  It's martial-arts inspired.  It's hit-the-air-like-the-air-is-your-enemy inspired.  It's jabs and hooks and upper crosses and more jabs, some shuffle to the right, some roundhouse kicks, s...

Out dancing

We were out last night; we were dancing.  With our friends (you see how beautiful they are).  With our one arm (my husband) and our stitched-up gums (that would be me).  It had been months since I'd seen many of these friends, and they all had stories to tell—a mother's tale about a baby's adventures with make-up, an inventor's tale about a phantom ponytail, a little girl's story about illness and wellness.  I go to dance, of course I do.  But mostly I go to be with those who are growing in d...

Opening lines

My house is a storybook house. A huff-and-a-puff-and-they'll-blow-it-down house. The roof is soft; it's tumbled. There are bushes growing tall past the sills. A single sprouted tree leans in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing acorns to the ground.



Splat and crack. Another acorn to the ground.



"Sophie?"



"Mother?"



"I'm off."



"Right."



"Be good."



Be good. My mother's instructions. Her rules. 

The Tell Me a Secret secrets

When Holly Cupala asked a number of writers to share a secret to help celebrate the launch of her engrossing first novel, Tell Me a Secret, I said (because I adore this woman) sure, having zero idea what I might actually say when the recording light of my computer eye went on.



Something, in the end, got said, a small secret revealed, but far, far better in this secret-revealing video are the pearly somethings unveiled by writers ranging from Melissa Walker to Lisa Yee.  Check it out.

Kingdom Under Glass/Jay Kirk: the early awesome reviews

Those of you who follow this blog know how eager I am for Jay Kirk to publish his first book, Kingdom Under Glass (Holt, November 2010)  Jay is, for starters, a terrific writer/thinker/explorer of mind and matter.  He's a colleague of mine at the University of Pennsylvania, a fellow winner of a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, a man who is concerned with Big Things and has the vocabulary to parse and recount them, and a friend with whom I trust both the good news and the not so good news of...

After a hiatus, I consider writing again

"You'll never even know that you are taking the antibiotics," the doctor said, and given my size (not quite 105 pounds) and my history with medications (abysmal), I thought, hmmm. 



So that perhaps I am the only person ever to whom antibiotics worked a strange kind of un-magic, or maybe it's the heat, or maybe waiting for literary news plays tricks on my mind, but I have not been me for awhile.  Yesterday it took me seven hours to write a client proposal that should have taken half the time. ...

Dangerous Neighbors: An Indiebound Children's Pick Fall 2010

Well, here is some fabulous news, just in, over the wire:  Dangerous Neighbors is an Indiebound Children's Pick for the Fall of 2010.



Is it possible to hug the independent booksellers of America over the internet?  Picture me trying!

Dangerous Neighbors (the book) Arrives

I could tell the story of this day, but I won't.  I will only say that after a journey up the road and back, and up the road again and back, and then onto the train and into the city and back, I came home to two boxes of books.  Those books.  My books.  My twelfth:  Dangerous Neighbors.



You tire, perhaps, of me singing the praises of Egmont USA.  Let me do it one more time, at least.  Dangerous Neighbors is an unusual historical novel, with crossover possibilities and 1876 Philadelphia at it...

That Old Cape Magic/Richard Russo: Reflections

In this, the summer of my extensive, happy reading, I sit at long last with Richard Russo, who establishes himself as the perfect confidante from the first pages of That Old Cape Magic and never falters.  Russo is writing of marriage in Magic, and of the thwarting antecedents of parental influence and intrusion.  He is writing of the inability nearly all of us have to be the person we wish we could be (a theme that has repeatedly surfaced in this, the summer of my reading).  He is writing of ...

Getting it right (or not) with memoir

We bring out the old albums, and, remembering, they talk.  The long gone near again, curiosity alive.  I could almost imagine (listening to them remember) that the stories themselves had not yet unfolded, had not revealed their denouement.  When I wrote Still Love in Strange Places years ago, I was writing about my Salvadoran husband's family stories, about the capacity for reimagining, and about the pliable nature of marriage.  I was writing to get it right.  But listening again to his famil...