Beth Kephart's Blog, page 301

University of Pennsylvania Alumni Day (getting ready for)

Tomorrow I'll board the train and head down to my alma mater for Alumni Day.  I'll take the twenty minute walk from 30th Street Station through the Drexel University campus toward the University of Pennsylvania campus, then head up Locust Walk toward Kelly Writers House, past all the tents and hoopla, where I'll join Alice Elliott Dark for a reading. 

That much I know for sure.

What I don't know yet is what I'll be reading.  Not precisely, not yet. Though I think I'll begin with these words fr...

Author? Writer?

Earlier this morning I had to define myself for the purposes of an upcoming event, and I stumbled.  There was to be a single one word descriptor, followed by a bio.

One. Word. Descriptor.

Author? I wondered.  Or writer?

Writer feels where I am, just now in my career.  Author is what I think I'm supposed to be (when I grow up, when I get all this, when all this gets at least a little easier). 

Do you feel as I do, about those words?  Does the word author seem somehow enthroned?  Or am I obsessing...

Comcast-ed

This afternoon, while waiting for our son to finish an interview in a Philadelphia office building (he's only just arrived home from college, and we wanted to take him out to dinner to celebrate the completion of his sophomore year), my husband and I wandered into the Comcast building on JFK Boulevard.  I'd watched the building go up a few years ago (indeed, the whole city did; you can't miss it), but I'd never gone into the lobby.

It's wild in there, I discovered—seemingly wooden panels erupt...

What a Girl Wants: Letters to Teen-aged Self

Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray had us all thinking hard, again, for her terrific series, What a Girl Wants. This time we authors were challenged to write a letter to our teenaged self, suggesting the novel or novels we should be reading right then/back then.  My response is here, below.  But for really interesting reading—Neesha Meminger, Laurel Snyder, Sara Ryan, Lorie Ann Grover, Zetta Elliott, Tanita Davis—travel over to Chasing Ray.

"Dear Beth, The world doesn't conform to your own ideas ab...

My Best Advice Ever (get ready)

Perhaps some of you come to this blog for writing advice (though mostly what I can offer is recommendations of books I've loved or enthusiasm for authors I love...or consolation along this hard journey).  Perhaps some of you come to see whether I'm still dancing (yes, I am—waltzing with smooth-shoes John Larson and rumba-ing with DanceSport owner and choreographer supreme Scott Lazarov), gardening (less than I should, but I've got glamorous purples out there this season), and writing (for eve...

Zumba Joy

She's clear-eyed and blonde, a starlet's face and a body that a dancer of any age would love to have, and on Mondays she joins us for Zumba.  She's lived enough years to have great-grandchildren (she tells us this; we don't believe her; she seems, to us, infinitely young) and you can find her now, before the salsa and hip hop starts, reading a reliably fine book on her Kindle.  I dance beside her and she laughs at me, reminding me, however politely, that I'm just a nudge to the other side of ...

There's a Book reviews The Heart is Not a Size

I am grateful this morning for the extraordinarily generous words about Heart posted yesterday on There's a Book.  This is a reader who knows Juarez well, and who shares her own interesting perspective.  Thank you, 1st daughter.

Yearnings

My tiny house is filled with books and also with bookshelves, but even so, every few months I'm at the local public library, handing in stacks of books for which I've not been able to make enough room.  The one shelf that never gets relieved is the shelf pictured here, beyond my desk in my office.  It's where I keep my poetry and nature books (or some of them), as well as the memoirs that I teach.  We learn a lot about ourselves, I think, when we consider which books we're willing to part wit...

Talent?

Every now and then, someone will say, Oh, it must be great to have a writing talent.  

I think so, too.  It must be great:  To write like a dream, and to write with ease.

That, however, is not my life.  Today, for example, I cranked open an old book in progress.  There are lines in it that I'd love to blame on someone else.

Unfortunately, I wrote them.

Mother's Day

This morning, my email contained a message from Anne Lamott, one in the occasional essays she'll sometimes send out to the writer/reader world.  It's an essay called "Why I hate Mother's Day," and in it she makes this argument:  "...Mother's Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women:  that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha!  Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as...