Beth Kephart's Blog, page 318

My Main Line Home

The snow is high past my knees, and many of the roads here are not yet plowed, but this morning, with a bad case of cabin fever, I set out. I think I live in one of the world's prettiest places. It's not exotic. It's not nearly perfect. I don't often belong. But when snow falls and wind blows I can walk within 30 minutes to a scene like this—all open space and blue. I can count the stripes between the trees, and I can talk to myself about the novel I am writing or about a problem that i...

The Sun Also Rises

(icicles at sunrise)

Iced In

(where the icicles are stalactical)

Thundersnow: It's Happening

About five minutes after I took this photograph of this snow-encumbered greeting, the sky ripped open with a bolt of lightning. I counted one beat, two.

Then thunder. A lion's roar.

Thundersnow is not a fable anymore.

Re-entering the mind space of a novel

The blizzard's here. Thick snow. Blowing wind. I'm not sure what this day will bring, and so I make a quick stop at this blog from the office depicted above. Way, way back, past the masks, on the shelf, is the only framed photo of me in this house, taken by my brother during the National Book Awards dinner of 1998. It gives me hope sometimes.



I mentioned yesterday that a bungled transition (once identified) can give an author a new lease on her own book—a new way in. Yesterday I entere...

Notes to a Writer's Self

The first flakes of the fabled thundersnow have started to fall. Home will be the globe now, so they tell us.

Today, while talking with clients, while reviewing proposals, while sending an email or two, I had this thought about the novel that I wrote for adults, a novel that needs another round of attention before I send it out newly into the publishing world.

If a single transition—in a poem, in a story, in a novel—is broken, then the whole is broken; it is untenable and marred.

Find the bro...

Thundersnow, A Heart Blog Tour, A Blogger Panel, and...Romance?

Last night, following a dizzying 11,000-word client project day interrupted only by an hour more of shoveling and my perfect virtual walk with Katrina Kenison, I sat staring, comatose, at the 10 PM newscast on TV. The guy was using terms like "possibly 20 inches of more snow" and "thundersnow." I decided, being a writer of fiction and all, to pretend it just isn't happening.

Here, though, is what is happening instead, thanks to some very wonderful people out in the blogosphere:

Drea and Sara ...

Tonight I'm Honoring Some Mega Flying Writer Friends

and I'm beginning with Katrina Kenison, who took a virtual walk with me this afternoon (we were on the phone; we live many states apart; I walked by this stream; I took a picture. Snap.). Katrina's newest book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, came out this past fall and has been doing what thoughtful books do, over time—which is to say that it has been gaining momentum. Visit Katrina's web site. Watch the video she's made. Let her tell you about the life she has been living. You'll see why...

Writing What I Know and Where I've Been

"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."

— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter

Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet ...

Grace Paley on Plot

[Paley:] insists that life continues beyond the confining plots of tragedy or comedy; she hates plot, "because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real, or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter, pg 462,

Leave it to Paley to so brilliantly express this particular propulsion that in so many ways defines my own approach to my work: Everyone deserves the open destiny of a life.