Beth Kephart's Blog, page 319

Buried

(the view now, from my desk, 10 AM)

When they said snow they meant snow

I know they said that snow was coming, but I was so entirely buried in work that I raised my head just long enough to say, Snow. Oh. Okay. Snow. Then buried my head once again.

I just woke up. I just looked out the dark, snow splattered windows. I saw the porch rail toppled with at least two feet of white, the porch sculpted with drifts of perhaps four feet, the blue back of the car weighed down with white.

The word "snow" has an entirely new meaning now, in the Beth Kephart lexicon. The l...

Are you a writer?

These words appear toward the end of Charles McGrath's recent NYT profile of Don DeLillo:

Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn't publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls "a golden age of reading," in which he would "consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal."

Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: "I don't have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself...

Don't you just love him?

I do.

Get your feet off the floor

I know that it doesn't make much sense to go ballroom dancing with a smashed-up toe, but I've skipped Zumba this week and taken funny, peg-legged walks, and I just couldn't help myself, so I went—climbed the stairs to DanceSport, opened the door, donned my un-girly shoes, and risked it.

I don't think there are enough words for dancing. The ones we use are too often used, and they are rather stultifying. Swirl and twirl—like two bad-hair day sisters. Sashay—if you are doing that, are you rea...

A Jury of Her Peers: what a girl should want

For the 11th question of her What a Girl Wants series, Colleen Mondor asked a number of us one of her typically challenging questions: What does it mean to be a 21st century feminist, and on the literary front, what books/authors would you recommend to today's teens who want to take girl power to the next level?

Lorie Ann Grover, Laurel Snyder, Loree Griffin Burns, Margo Raab, and Zetta Elliott all came through with reliably interesting responses. I was caught up in a series of corporate proje...

Remembering Juarez

They were in high school. They were in college. They were between the ages of 13 and 42, post-partying after a soccer game and celebrating a birthday. They were shot down in cold blood this past Sunday by gunmen who barricaded the street with their cars, infiltrated a concrete house, moved from room to room with guns held high, and let the bullets fly. Some 14 are dead; more are critically injured. One was named Adrian Encino, 17, a recently state-honored academic light, who died in his ...

Me, Long Ago

One Christmas my mother's gift to my father was a photo album. Thick wood cover. Black interior pages. My mother's handwriting, in white, beneath each picture. This is something we'll treasure and, I hope, add to, she wrote, for it will become more precious as time goes by.

Beneath this photograph, she wrote: Here we are: Bethie at 5 months. Jeffie at 2 1/2 years.

How I Became a Famous Novelist: Some Thoughts

Today was one of those days—accidents fueled by an insane level of exhaustion (knives swashbuckling across fingernails that might have been fingertips; perhaps a broken toe). After awhile I decided to stay put on the stiff black couch and read Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist, about a wanna-be bestseller who eyes the novel competition, studies the stats, and bludgeons his way onto the charts with a novel he calls The Tornado Ashes Club (decode that, if you will). The wannabe wave...

Sometimes it takes ten years to write a novel

... and this morning I wrote the final words of the novel I've always called Small Damages, save for that two-year period when I knew it as The Last Threads of Saffron.



These words as prologue:

Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby's spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.

...