Beth Kephart's Blog, page 304

When You Reach Me/Rebecca Stead: Reflections

I have been reading, this week, the books of right now—lauded prizewinners from across multiple categories.  I know bestsellerdom is many a writer's ambition.  I like to read, and I often learn from, books that win a jury's favor. 

Today I read Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, the recent Newberry Medal winner.  It's a book that never once loses its footing in terms of tone—our narrator, Miranda, sounds precisely like the circa-1970s New York City sixth grader that she is.  Steadfast, observa...

Next?

I read a book each day, again, an old habit made new by a temporary easing of corporate responsibilities.  I search for the what next of my own career.  What genre?  What purpose?  What mood?  Is there a story left that I wish to tell?  Will the story somehow find me?

A few weeks ago, following a Fox Cities Book Festival school assembly, a young Wisconsin boy stood last in a long line, waiting patiently to speak with me.  When it was his turn, he slipped a bookmark into my hand.  I read the wo...

Heart Full

I have said this before; I grow redundant.  I don't go looking for reviews of my work.  I don't Google my name, I don't check Amazon ratings, I learned the hard way:  One gets burned.  When a new book comes out, I grow especially nerveless—make fewer trips around the land of blog to protect myself from happening across something I was not meant to see.  Like Georgia in The Heart is Not a Size, I have learned, after all these years, how to manage my anxieties.

Again and again, however, goodness...

Tinkers/Paul Harding: Reflections

It's a famous story by now—how Paul Harding's first novel, Tinkers, wended its way through a world of publishing no's until it arrived at the door of Bellevue Literary Press (NYU School of Medicine) and was welcomed in with a yes.  Early reviewers loved it; independent bookstores did, too.  A few countable days ago, Tinkers took the Pulitzer.

I ordered it at once, as I blogged I would.  It arrived yesterday and this afternoon, after much tinkering myself (the large garden now weeded, the old w...

The Heart is Not a Size, or a flower,

but it is friends like these, dear and true, who read your work with a wide open soul.  Thank you, so much, Booking Mama.

I don't think I ever fully exhale

until I get outside, into my garden.  Aideen said she drove by the other day.  I hope she'll drive by again. 

Not precisely an airstream, but close enough for a fiction writer

Sophie looked past Helen for a moment, to the room's one window, and beyond, where Cloris's silver airstream was parked, shiny as the bottom of a new pan.  "For when we take our cross-country," Cloris had always said, but Sophie had never seen the airstream travel.  The airstream was rooted in, like a squatting tree.  It had grown, Sophie imagined, silver roots.
(excerpted from Good People, the adult novel in progress)

Do we seek authorial greatness?

The following lines are excerpted from Charles McGrath's New York Times Book Review of Muriel Spark:  The Biography (Martin Stannard, W.W. Norton):

Reading between the lines of Stannard's book, one concludes that like a lot of great writers, Spark was actually a bit of a monster—a charming, appealing monster but a monster all the same, willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of her work.  She was a neglectful mother; a mercurial and inconstant friend who 'went through people like pieces o...

Chocolate equals depression? I'm not buying this

Okay, look, seriously.

I like my chocolate; I always have.  I'll eat a square most days (not a bar, but a single Dove milk-chocolate-with-almonds square,) and it makes me happy.  One editor consoled me about my habit by reminding me that chocolate is a vegetable.  Friends think nothing of it.  I don't actually think that much of it, either (I cook entirely healthy meals, I exercise an hour most days, I am not a couch potato), but late last night, after a very long work day, I read an article o...

Living out loud

I'm going to say one thing, and I'm going to say it quick: The world can be a messy place.  Promises dropped like a cellphone call in a tunnel.  People talking who cannot seem to hear themselves.  Airplanes flying and going an endless, strange nowhere.  Illogic ruling as if it's logic after all.

You're going to be frustrated.  I get frustrated, too.  I say to myself, Nope.  Not getting up today (and then I do).  Nope.  Not answering that call (and I say, "Hello?").  Nope, I'm not.  Nope, I won...