Beth Kephart's Blog, page 338

The Drexel InterView: Beth Kephart and Paula Marantz Cohen

I had the great pleasure, last October, of sitting down with writer and professor Paula Marantz Cohen for the Drexel InterView, a talk show that is carried by numerous cable stations across the nation. We spoke of many things. In these last four minutes, the talk is of this very blog, the world of dance, and next projects. At the time, Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel, was still in the making; it is now a literary YA book due out from Egmont USA in September 2010. Additionally, at...

Stand Tall

In about two weeks I'll be standing on a stage, hopefully blinded by the lights, dancing a tango in Act One and that much-feared Broadway number in Act Two—all as part of the DanceSport showcase. It's always about now in these scenarios that I ask myself, And what, Beth, were you thinking? When I wake from a dream (I mean to say nightmare) purely certain that there's an elephant turning a pirouette on my chest.

Graceful beasts, those elephants. And so heavy.

Every time I think about getting ...

Autumn in Pennsylvania

She was the poet about whose work I had been raving—stopping friends and making them listen, stealing her book into conversation, (blogging). She wrote to me, then, asked about autumn in Pennsylvania. Said she missed it like she missed the spring's pear trees.

I said, Here is the view of just now, the slam-in upon my glass-topped desk. Here is morning, in autumn, in Pennsylvania.

Let the Writing Take You Where

The only way to free yourself from the fear of writing is to do the writing. The only way to advance the work is to sit with it. Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the book's final quarter. And if you write like I write, which is to say scene by scene and absent an outline, you are writing with no safety net. You have jumped and you are hanging from a bungee cord. You do not know if you have a book until you write its final line.

There's panic bound up in that. There is (but of cours...

Work in Progress

It has been those long seven weeks since I could work at all on my novel in progress, this one for adults. I had left the book at a crucial place. I was afraid, frankly, that it would deny me access. Sometimes all you can write in a day is a scene. This one takes place in 1955, in a hospital for the mentally unwell. The photo above is the Alcatraz kitchen. It was the closest I could come to an institutional shot.

Down the long vat of the hall, the day is a scowl. The...

Shuffling Bricks

For seven weeks I'd been telling myself, If you can just get to that night. If you can just get.... Last night was that night.

Why does everything ache when you thought that only your head would be tired?

I look for words. It's like shuffling bricks. Like fighting the barricade of traffic on a smeary night.

English 145 (3)

At the end of class, the question: But how do we imbue our memoirs with meaning? The answer, which came later:

First and foremost, memoir writing is not autobiography. It is not the straight line of the what happened. It is the what happened and why, and what did it mean then and what does it mean now. Mostly it is about asking the right questions about the past and about the human condition. What are the conditions that lead to violence? What is the aftermath of abrasion? How does...

Anxious?

Whether I'm writing about a river or a young woman confounded by corporate America, about a marginal high school poet or a girl trying to survive the loss of her mother, I am, with my books, writing what I know, what I have felt. The Heart is Not a Size is no exception. Georgia, the narrator that Ed Goldberg describes so well in his review, is very much like I was and am—plain and responsible, known for taking care, and, at times, debilitated by anxiety and panic attacks. Georgia worries a...

The Heart is Not a Size Unveiled by Way of an Ed Goldberg Review

How do we meet people? How do we continue to know them? Years ago, it seems, Ed Goldberg, a Syosset, NY-based librarian and an avid reader/reviewer, asked if he might have a copy of one of my books. It was sent. He wrote a gorgeous review; it was posted. There was, after that, another book. Ed asked. It was sent. He read carefully and dearly once again, sharing his thoughts with me, then with the world, and in the meantime advocating my work to others. He became—over Facebook, on the b...

Does the dream define you?

And he says, "It never matters what you can do or what you have done or what you think or how you dream. It only matters who you are."

And I say, "But isn't the dream the who?"