Beth Kephart's Blog, page 334

Rain Smear, First Drafts, and the National Council of Teachers of English

You should see the view through my office window, I wrote to John V., one of my earliest dance teachers, and still a dear, even if he's moved to Germany. Take a picture, he wrote back, and I did—the panes smeary with rain, the sky beyond somehow broken. It was the end of a day in which a long-loved novel found its final line, in which I stopped holding my breath, and exhaled. Anna sent a box of royal riviera pears from California—five of them, green golden. They arrived on my stoop the v...

Dreamscape

From high up, what does he see? What, after all these years, is he still hoping for?

He dreams with his hands.

He folds fabric over wire, and the breeze blows through.

What a Girl Wants: The Mean Girls Question

In her ever-popular What a Girl Wants series, Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray is asking about that notorious literary mean girls fad, specifically wondering, "Does teen literature exaggerate the mean girl phenomenon too much?" Laurel Snyder, Zetta Elliott, Lorie Ann Grover, Melissa Wyatt, Sara Ryan, Kekla Magoon, yours truly, and others have opined. As always, the conversation is rich.

On other fronts, I am about a chapter and a half away from finishing the first draft of the adult novel ...

Devotions/Beth Kephart Poem

K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.

Devotions

The hawk came three months after the fox

had taken that one last lubricious

step onto my porch, a day of deer

unclasping the bracelet of themselves

across my lawn. I wasn't ready. I hadn't been

English 145 (6): The Art of the Interview

In English 145, we talked about the art of the interview. About framing the conversation without boxing it in. About listening for the tangent and knowing which tangents count. About never pretending to understand more than one actually does. About follow-up and follow-through. We had the fabulous Paris Review interview of Truman Capote as a model Q and A, and then we turned to one another, or the students did, for trial interviews.

I took a walk while the students dialogued. Found my wa...

Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (5)

She runs the tip of her tongue over the ridge of her mouth. She blinks, and a tear falls down her one cheek, through the pebble land of her freckles. From far away I hear the high gauze of a church song—bells. Sunday, I think, and somewhere there are everyday people in everyday cars going somewhere. There are the mothers, and there are the babies, and they are together.

His World

I'd stayed up late being silly the night before (some people dress up for Halloween and look gorgeous; I dress up and I am still, unfortunately, me, although, quite fortunately, I have my Halloween-glam friends who stand by and beguile, who also (miraculously) dance with me, even that friend who spends part of the night telling me how gorgeous all the other women are, detail by detail, he explains, they are so gorgeous, they have, he says, an aura, and that's right, these friends, they have a...

Rain-soaked Autumn

The rain has was melting the leaves from the trees; at the height of storm, I went out foraging for color.

Mirror Image

BTW, my friend Anna wrote, my daughter and I want to see your fanciful jacket.

And since today is a day in which no one is pressing, nothing is pushing, my mind is unspooling, and my thoughts are easy, I grabbed my camera, went upstairs, and stood before the only mirror in this house that is bigger than 12 inches by 12 inches. I actually never see myself from head to toe, which is probably a good thing. But at least the jacket is short, and I could snap this picture.

William Robert

at the Richard Avedon show, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
August 2009.