Beth Kephart's Blog, page 290

Rainbow embers

The day began with a storm, which melted into heat, which remained heat until a new fleet of silver clouds pushed in, and then there was storm again, the skirts of trees immodestly blowing.  We were celebrating my son's birthday at a restaurant when the rain stopped, and when I looked outside, a rainbow was arching over the telephone wires.  A half hour later, the sky was this, lit from below, I suspect, by rainbow embers.

American Music/Jane Mendelsohn: Reflections

Sometimes all I want to do is run up and down the street, and then to the mall and through the mall, and then to the beach and across the whole of the coastal shore, and then through an airport (among all those airport-bookstore-book toting readers) and then across an ocean to proclaim, I have just read the perfect book. 



I have read a book that held me, moved me, stirred me, awed me, restored and redeemed me—I have read that book.  It's called American Music, and by all rights I should hav...

My baby is turning 21

Of course I have always loved him.  Of course.  Loved him like my life depended on it, because perhaps it does.



It is the mother's right, and purpose.



Happy Birthday, J.

In which she wears the blue glass snake

I mentioned a luminescent glass snake in my previous post—the work of the talented (and completely lovely) Madeline Smith.  She taught us so much last night in her lamped workshop—about implosions of glass and the conduct of heat and the varying properties of colored rods.  This is how you make a dinosaur's eyes, she said, as a 2000-degree flame emanated from the metal wand in her hand.  This is how you distribute a figure's weight across its head and feet.  In any case, I couldn't go home wi...

They grow up

Here is one of the benefits of being my age:  I have had the privilege of watching my friends' children grow up. 



Last night, following a garden party thrown by a dear and talented friend—she writes, she takes photographs, she teaches, she teaches me how to teach and listens when I fail—we gathered in her daughter's lampworking studio to watch two rods of Pyrex become a new breed of dinosaur.  I have loved my friend's daughter and her sisters since I met them years ago.  About sisterhood, mu...

How do you choose the books you are going to read? she asked

A few days ago, when Amy Riley and I were taking a wee break from techno talk (Beth:  HTML code?  Amy (long distance):  Okay.  I'm doing it with you.  Are you on the Feedburner screen?  Do you see the box next to the words ....?), I told her that I'd just returned from the bookstore with an armload of new books.  She, being a great reader herself, asked me which ones.  I listed Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only W...

Not just a new banner, but a new blog

Well, you know I could not have come up with this one on my own.  I needed a trip to Chanticleer's lotus pond, so that I might find the photo.  I needed my husband to make that photo art.  But most of all, I needed Amy Riley and Nicole Bonia of Winsome Media Communications to patiently wade through my design hopes (can it be simple? can it be easy for me to maintain? can it be basically like it was but a million times better?), to kindly walk me through Feedburner and the Site Meter, and to b...

Not my finest hour: book festival blues

Yesterday afternoon was not, shall we say, my finest hour.  It was hot—hair coiling, neck boiling, don't-get-lost-in-a-town-you-don't-know-because-you'll-end-up-asking-innocent-by-passers-for-help hot, and I was on my way to a gathering with other authors.  Book people.  A festival.

I had in hand (or in two born-of-plastic-bottles bags) a small collection of my books, a couple of bookmarks.  The point of the festival was to meet and greet and sell.  I stink at selling.  First-class bad.  They ...

Barely holding on

"Adam," I said, for he was standing close beside me, "is that a dragonfly right there, and is he eating?"  I asked Adam because Adam knows pretty much everything.  Especially garden things, so many garden things, that later I wondered out loud how it would feel to be so smart, to know the names of things, Latin and otherwise.

He wouldn't tell me.

Encounters with Gerald Stern

I joined my father on an errand to Lambertville, New Jersey, yesterday—a very beautiful, very hip little place with just the right balance of old and new.  "You know," I said, as we drove down one narrow street, "I once interviewed Gerald Stern in a house right near here."  As I was saying the words, recalling that lovely afternoon with the National Book Award-winning poet whose fluid, smart, resonant work has actually been known to cure my migraines, I found myself looking at Gerald Stern hi...