Beth Kephart's Blog, page 313

Lucky in Life

Sometimes (often) I really miss my cat, Colors. I found her when I was an eight-year-old in Boston. She traveled with us to suburban Philadelphia. She lived until just before I married. She was so gorgeous. She was so calm. And when I was sad or angry, she brought her peacefulness near.

When I miss her I try to remember this: But she belonged to you. Once.

Does Literature Move Forward? (and more on names)

Yesterday, inspired by an Elif Batuman book and a James Wood essay in The New Yorker, I wrote about novel names. I absolutely adore those of you who shared your own perspective on this. Sarah and others wondered how I name my characters, and I will admit here that sound has so much to do with my decision making. Sophie suggests a particular kind of person to me—internally focused, quietly questing, curious. Riley, for me, is an artist. Tara is wise, winningly sarcastic, eager for the next...

Novel Names, or Names in Novels

Twice this day, I've encountered critics reflecting on the names writers give to their characters—the authenticity or not, the too-frequent overdeterminedness of the enterprise, the leap of faith that is all bound up in naming.

In Elif Batuman's marvelously idiosyncratic memoir, The Possessed (ingeniously subtitled Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and rather otherwise ingenious, all around), Batuman, writing of the "perfection" of Anna Karenina, celebrates, among the ...

The Heart is Not a Size: The Giveaway Winners

I asked readers of this blog where they would take their next best journey.

Lenore said Bologna, Italy, NYC, and perhaps Senegal and Kuwait. Bee dreamed of Greece. Bermudaonion and wordlily named Asia, Melissa Sarno named Japan, and Kelly H-Y spoke of Tuscany. Inspired by Nora Roberts, Fantast fantasized about living in Montana and Alaska. Pink Dogwood said she would either stay home and live a simpler life or travel beneath the Tuscan sun. Cuileann said "the faroe islands." CK said "the...

Atlantic City, Almost Night

(all red letters, all bright lights)
(I keep remembering then; it was last Thursday; I was free)
(I don't gamble, just for the record)
(I go for the possibility of the photograph, and for dinner at Cuba Libra)

Target Practice

You Were All Right

...I found that I couldn't actually go three days without writing something of my own.

I couldn't do it.

What I needed, I realized, was to write something entirely new. A different voice, a different tempo, a subversive sense of humor.

The sun came in, and for three hours, before the clients cast a glance in my direction, I wrote.

Two New Memoirs/Two New Blogs

[image error] Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and I are friends. We met, as I've noted here before, over the essays we wrote about mothering—our work ultimately appearing in Salon.com and in the two wildly successful anthologies that Kate edited with Camille Peri, Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. We continue to meet, from time to time, in San Francisco, in New York City, or here outside Philadelphia. When we can't meet, we email and call. We read the other's books long before most people do. ...

Abandoned Go Kart Tracks, Atlantic City

In Atlantic City on Thursday afternoon we happened on an old Go Kart track—stripped to the bones, awaiting restoration. Only the hob-legged pirates stood while just beyond them surfers rode the crash-waves by the pier.

Raimund Abraham, 1933-2010

I've learned just now of the passing of Raimund Abraham, the gentleman designer who taught at Yale while my husband was there getting his master's degree in architecture. He was Austrian, a visionary, already white-haired when I met him. He believed as much in works on paper as he did in the metal and glass of the buildings—Manhattan's Austrian Cultural Forum, most famously—that he designed. He was, to me, a legend—that rare individual whose intelligence and artistic fierceness figured prom...