Beth Kephart's Blog, page 289

At my father's house

Even before my husband's accident (see yesterday's post), my father had called and left a message.  He'd be out of town this weekend, he reminded me, and he knew that we were expecting guests.  "If you'd like to use my house to entertain," he offered, "it's yours."  We have but one downstairs air-conditioning unit in my own house; yesterday's heat was soaring toward 100 and humidity was pushing the discomfort zone farther.  I try never to impose on anyone, never to take advantage, but this ti...

Glass shatters

We were in the final ten minutes of preparing for the arrival of three members of my husband's family—earlyish in the morning, wicked heat of the day already arrived, my post-oral surgery face looking like a boxer's favorite punching bag.  I was in the shower, to which I had rushed and in which I was counting down the checklists, when I heard my husband's voice.  "Um," he said. "There's been an accident."  Something broken, I thought, but when I pushed the curtain back I saw his hand, or, I ...

Dangerous Neighbors, a reading

A dear friend, who loves the river like I do, shared this image with me.  It originally appeared in Harper's Weekly, on February 28, 1880.  It depicts, like some of my story, skating on the Schuylkill River.

Seeing Past Z, Singapore, and what a difference time makes

Earlier today, while I was crawling my way back onto my feet, I was stopped by a letter originating in Singapore and come to me by way of W.W. Norton, New York City.  A handwritten, many-paged letter from a certain G, who was writing to tell me, among other things, that she had found my fourth book, Seeing Past Z:  Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, "at the corner of the library where suggested readings and new arrivals are placed—a very prominent place where every visitor wou...

The finch at my window (snapped moments ago)

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It/Maile Meloy: Reflections

Though there was a period of time when I wrote and published short stories (in literary magazines like Alaska Quarterly Review or Sonora Review or International Quarterly), I never fooled myself into thinking I'd mastered the form.  In short stories big things (or ideas or discoveries or defeats) happen in small spaces; back story is many times a trick of innuendo; there's no The Passage-sized lean toward what is really going to happen.  Writers of short fiction have no veils behind which to ...

Things don't always fall apart

As anyone who might have read my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth.  Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well).  And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately...

Dangerous Neighbors, the sequel?

My friend Adam (he of knowing all-things-garden fame) wrote just now about Dangerous Neighbors, a note that echoed my friend John's note of a while back, and Ed's note of even longer ago, and Mandy's, too.  What they said is their own business.  What it has all made me think is this:  Perhaps, if I am lucky, Dangerous Neighbors will earn its sequel (as I had always hoped Undercover would; I'd planned the whole thing in my mind).  And if it does, I know the story I will tell, I know where I wo...

This is not the hummingbird that sat upon my shoulder

or hovered there, if it is precision that you seek.  I'd been waiting all summer for its arrival.  I'd gone outside with a book. I heard the machinery of wings, and I turned.  Red-throated, westward-pointing, no more than six inches from my chin, speed fluttering, and then it was gone.  I had no camera.  It would not have stayed that long if I did.

I Curse the River of Time/Per Petterson: Reflections

They sit together now, on the edge of my desk:  Out Stealing Horses, To Siberia, and I Curse the River of Time.  They are the novels of Per Petterson, an author born in Oslo and translated around the world, a man whose work draws the almost impossibly delicate balance between the deeply specific and the mesmerizingly vague.  Petterson's characters recreate the past, live the past, want to change it; they cannot.  Their present ticks toward the future, which is to say it ticks toward death.  N...