Beth Kephart's Blog, page 295

Tell Me a Secret/Holly Cupala: Reflections

Bad girls are never bad girls to begin with; maybe it's not fair to bullet them bad at all. They are girls who grow up taking risks and diverging, girls who don't trail down expected paths. They leave questions behind, and secrets, always.  They leave parents and sisters and boyfriends.

With her engrossing, fast-moving debut novel, Tell Me a Secret, Holly Cupala (a most cherished readergirlz) pulls back the curtains on the life a so-called "bad girl" named Xanda left behind—the vacancies that ...

Sorta Like a Rock Star/Matthew Quick: Reflections

On page 328 of Sorta Like a Rock Star, Matthew Quick's joyful-noise-making novel, Joan of Old, a woman just then dying, quotes some Nietzsche to our heroine, Amber Appleton.  It goes like this:

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Damn, I thought, when I got to that page.  I just knew Matthew Quick had dancing in him.  For Quick's Amber Appleton might, when we meet her, ...

Everywhere Here: The Birds and Their Mothers and a Book, Nearly Done

So much life outside, while I have been holed up here, within.  But there is news.  There is an end.  A book has (I think) taken form.  Thanks to all of you who said, Keep going (and have forgiven my uncharacteristic absence on the web).  I have learned, in addition to much else, this:

* where a passage feels dead, it's not typically because it hasn't been written well, but rather because it hasn't been properly imagined;

* don't let the ending you've had for four years dictate the ending you n...

The Heart Is Not a Size: The Traveling Arc Comes Home

Do you remember how, in high school, you learned so much about yourself, about who you were and how you were seen, from the notes others wrote to you in the pages of a yearbook?

Today, thanks to the generosity of Sara and Drea at travelingarc.blookblather.net, and thanks, too, to Word Lily, Readergirls, Nomad Reader, Hope Princess, Bookworming in the 21st century, and Read What You Know, I had one of those moments when I opened my mail to discover the traveling arc of The Heart Is Not a Size c...

Taking Advice

Sarah (my Zumba Sarah) said:  Walk away from it.  Work in the garden.  Do anything else.  It will come.

Bill said:  If it isn't working, throw it away.

I took both pieces of advice today.  Spent the morning in the garden and talking to clients.  Sat at my desk in the afternoon, opened the file marked "novel," and tossed the thwarting chapter to the other side of nowhere.  Threw it away.  Done.  Gone.  And guess what?  The book is better for it. I (liberated) now move on.

Carousel

If you were asked to teach a single story or essay over a ten-day period—had to narrow your choice to just one life-changing text, what would you do?  That's the question that faces me today.  I've narrowed my thinking to these options:

"Sonny's Blues," by James Baldwin
"I Stand Here Ironing," by Tillie Olsen
"Souvenir," by Jayne Anne Phillips
"Accident and its Scene," by Terrence des Pres
"Memory and Imagination," by Patricia Hampl

And you?

It was his first flight

and so he stood outside my window, wavering.

Hiroshima in the Morning/Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Yesterday I sat outside beneath a canopy, reading Hiroshima in the Morning, a memoir by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto due out from The Feminist Press this coming September.  It is her story, of course—about a journey she takes alone to Japan, about the things that she learns, about the world that opens and the world that shatters in the midst of self-discovery.  It is a story in which everything is on the line, and in which bargains must be struck with time.  What is a mother?  What is a wife?  What is...

Excerpt from that novel still in progress (but getting there, at last)

She names a year:  1939.  She names a city:  Triana.  She tells me about a basement bar thick with people hiding from the bad news of the day.  Old corrida posters on the wall, she says.  The smoke of bad cigars.  Short women with big necks talking crazy with their hands, and men thumbing a short deck of cards.  A little stage, up in front, with a stool, and two long tables that you couldn't walk between at midnight when everyone was sitting three-deep in.  The bar was the thing,...

Zumba (before the storm that is us)

The other day, I snuck into the Zumba room early with my raspberry camera.  Ten minutes later the room was rocking.  It's relatively easy, I think, to capture a Before and a Right Now.  It's much harder—on film and in story—to convey those transitional almost-but-not-yet moments that constitute so much of life.