Beth Kephart's Blog, page 330

Purple Slash

Because it's gray outside, and the day wants color.

Lit: A Review

I've titled this post "Lit: A Review," but on this blog, I don't write reviews; I save that voice for the Chicago Tribune. Here I write about a book's impact, about where I was and how I felt when I read it.

I read Lit while lying on the slender black couch where I spend most sleepless nights. I read it pulled up under the blue blanket that snuffs the perpetual winter chill. I read it in three sittings and would have been happy with just one, but life (my life) got in the way. I heard voi...

A readergirlz Winner

I felt a bit like an elf today, slipping through the halls of a local high school and delivering a copy of Nothing but Ghosts to Kiera Ingalls, the talented young writer who won the third readergirlz writing contest. I meant to stay for a short while, but my hosts—Katherine Barham and her class of aspiring writers—were dear and gracious, giving me room to talk about the extraordinary enterprise that is readergirlz and asking intelligent questions about the writer's life. Where do stories be...

Lit

I said I wanted to read a good book, a very good book. I picked up Lit, by Mary Karr. I picked up Lit, and suddenly I wanted my son to have a copy, my students, my friends. In the middle of all my reading and wanting, my friend Kate Moses called, and I said, Lit. Lit. Lit., and she said, Did you get to the part about the wedding yet? and I said, I don't want this book to end. Sometimes I think I've fallen out of love with books. And then comes Lit, and I'm impassioned once again.

Home Coming

I stood outside my own kitchen, looking in, for I'd just been on that journey with the moon. I'd promised myself a few things, come December. More time to cook (by which I mean, time with new recipes). More flowers bought on a whim (and not just because the guests are coming). More time spent with books I actually want to read. Fewer yeses to requests that I can increasingly not live up to.

It was cold outside and warm within. My house always welcomes me home.

Full Moon

This evening I chased the moon, a fine, swollen creature.

Earlier in the day I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help, which I wanted to like so much more than I did. I am addicted to nuance and to language as a reader; that is all I will say. Later on in the day, reading the opening chapters of Mary Karr's Lit, I felt my readerly self settling in.

Then came the moon.

English 145 (10): The What Still

It rained yesterday, and the wet was in my socks and in my hair, it was the glance across my jacket, it was the chill in the room of Kelly Writers House, where my students had gathered to discuss their literary reportage projects. We got the heaters turned on to blast the chill away. We had peanut butter cookies to bolster our thinking. We measured how far each writer had come. We talked through the what next, the what now, the what still.



There is no perfect, I reminded them. There is ...

Juxtapositions

It's the juxtapositions that tell the story, the relationships between things
(between us)
that matter.

Always The Days Keep Passing

We spent five minutes sitting together in morning silence before we threw my son's things into the back of the jeep and set off for the city, where the bus that would return him to his school hover-hummed. There is never enough time when my son is home. There is always, when he is near, tremendous calm. He hasn't an ounce of the self-trumpeting about him. No need to command the stage. I can't decide what I love most about him, but this is high on the list.

I spent the day, then, thinking ...

Main Line Today: In which my friend Libby Mosier and I get to share a page

(scanned from Main Line Today, December 2009, "young at heart: the western suburbs seem to nurture authors with a knack for connecting to kids and young adults." by J.F. Pirro)