Beth Kephart's Blog, page 305

Laura Geringer and Me

at a party.  I dedicated Dangerous Neighbors to Laura and worked with her on four other books and one short story.  It's a friendship worth celebrating.

Dangerous Neighbors: the first review

Every time I post this cover image I sigh, happily.  This evening I am sighing doubly happily, for I have read what is in fact the first review of Dangerous Neighbors, a five-star VOYA review, and it touches my heart deeply.  For now I share these words, which do such an outstanding job of capturing a story that, in my five years of working on it, I struggled to adequately sum up.

Originally I was just going to tell you exactly what the author, Beth Kephart, tells you about Dangerous Neighbors...

One Crazy Summer/Rita Williams-Garcia: Reflections

A week ago today, I joined Catherine Murdock and Rita Williams-Garcia at the Philadelphia Book Festival—sat in the cold air before these brave folks and talked books and book making while the wind blew.  "Zumba for everyone," Rita signed my copy of One Crazy Summer, as I headed home.  A little joke that had crept up between us.

Today I read that signed book through, smiling bigly and longly, thinking with each page, and then with the next one, I have another perfect book to recommend.  I love ...

In Praise of George Ellison, the Horace Kephart biographer

Every once in a while I get a phone call from a southern gentleman.  His name is George Ellison, and he has been my great-grandfather's biographer since 1967, when he was asked to write the introduction to Horace Kephart's Appalachian classic, Our Southern Highlanders.

A brilliant librarian, a devoted outdoorsman, a conflicted husband, and the father of the six children pictured here, Kephart had retreated to the Carolinas following a mysterious breakdown.  There he outposted in a cabin, read ...

Leave Your Sleep/Natalie Merchant: Poetry Made True

Back on December 27th, I wrote of Natalie Merchant on this blog, wondering out loud where she had gone.  In the intervening weeks and months, I began to hear rumors.  Ed Goldberg, a librarian, had spotted her, he said at a convention; she'd set poems to music, he reported, and they were lovely.  On April 18th, The New York Times confirmed Ed's promise; Leave Your Sleep, a project that took Ms. Merchant five years, was now available in stores.  My Friend Amy further confirmed the fact; on Apri...

The Song is You/Arthur Phillips: Reflections

It was in the tiny Appleton-departing plane, flying toward Chicago, here, above the 307-mile-long Lake Michigan, that I decided that I had to find a new book.  I'd read a big national bestseller on the way over and had found myself enormously disheartened; it was so plodding, so textbook researched, so predictable, so grating, and I knew that I'd not write of it here.  What is the point of defrocking a book that millions have loved?  Nothing at all, I've learned, or nothing much.

The B Concour...

Saul Bellow, on what a novel is

"A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay."

—Saul Bellow, from a 1953 letter to Bernard Malamud, quoted in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010

(found today, one day after I sat with my novel for adults and read it through one more time after many more times, questioning this very idea of looseness and playing it against the seeming demands of graspable structure) 

He lives beside the dam;

he lives within it.  His whole life is regulated by river fury and splash.

My Desk, Earlier This Morning

(there bloom those trees)(there sits a heart)(gifts)

Presbyterian News, Bermudaonion, Gratitude

A few weeks ago, Bethany Furkin of Presbyterian News interviewed me for a story about The Heart is Not a Size and the trip many of us had taken to Juarez.  I was aware of myself talking too much and too fast, and I thought, after I hung up, about how hard a job listening can sometimes be.  I am deeply moved, then, to read Bethany's story, which focuses as well on the great work that Amy Robinson of Pasos de Fe continues to do down on the Juarez border.

I am also deeply grateful this morning to...