Beth Kephart's Blog, page 339

Myself, Today

Today: Awakened at 1:35 AM, I come downstairs and do not sleep. A few lines make their way to a blank page; I do not know if the lines are good.

Morning, then, and at the gym, I find Ann, an old friend, long lost; I'd once thought forever. In the large group room Theresa, leading the Body Pump class, has chosen the music of men. She turns her barbell into a guitar and sings her Aerosmith loud; the rest of us abide her antics, need her antics, love them. We don't scream the pain we feel. ...

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Review

Audrey Niffenegger's new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, arrived two weeks ago from my friends at the Chicago Tribune. I post below the opening grafs of my review. Here is a link for those of you who wish to read more.

Readers' responses to Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger's new novel, will depend, I suspect, on how they like their ghosts.

Those who prefer their apparitions straight up, poltergeist-style—banging about houses, turning off lights, writing coy communiqués into the dust...

We Can Be Who We Are

The extraordinary week that has been this week found me in a classroom last evening among teens who have lived through the hardest kinds of sorrow and who look at now and look ahead and imagine themselves writing. I'd written a talk. It was soon abandoned. It was more important to sit on a desk with my things sprawled about me and listen for the young writers' stories. We talked about whether or not writing heals, and about whether or not it's possible for writers to write what they do no...

Career Night, Soul Shifts, Small Triumphs

I'll be speaking tonight at the Presbyterian Children's Village about the writer's life, and as I've been finalizing the talk this morning, I've been remembering a moment in Prague, 1995, when the poet Carolyn Forche shifted the tone and urgency of my writerly desires. I thought I'd share the opening paragraphs of the talk here today as well as the poem (previously published in the early days of this blog) that emerged in the wake of that experience.



Before I get to that, though, a few seem...

Lore Kephart

On the eve of the inaugural Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series program, my mother came to me in a dream. We were walking, down. To either side of us the view was green. There was an alter at the bottom of the hill, a white gleam, and something about its architecture that she wished to share with me. That was all. That, and she seemed to be at peace.

Ether and Nether at Penn

Years ago, E, C, and I stood here, at this stone banister, looking down on the University of Pennsylvania's quad. We wore straw hats and alma mater colors. We had become what we had set out to be—degreed and ready for the world.

My freshman-year dorm room was in the far corner, on the fourth floor. My memories were of Spring Fling, Arlen Specter's son, the roommates whom I could not rescue and the ones who rescued me. E and C had been there throughout the best and worst of it—allowing the ...

English 145 (2)

We considered foreground and background in English 145 yesterday—the interplay of primary and secondary, the fringe of context, the depth that is gained by incrementally adjusting the writer-observer's depth of field. We took our cameras out and searched for the iconic, then asked ourselves what lay beyond the chosen subject, what defined the borderlands, how the borderlands in turn shadowed and shaped the subject.

For my part, I returned to the Quad at Penn—my home during a tumultuous fres...

Horace Kephart in Words and Pictures (America's Best Idea)

The image above is drawn from the new Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea," and introduces the words and images of my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, who (as I've said previously, forgive me) played a pivotal role in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Those of you who might interested in reviewing a brief segment from the film can go here, to the WHYY web site. I never heard my great-grandfather's voice, obviously. It is fascinating to hear it rendered by this voic...

readergirlz writing contest (2): the story song

For the second readergirlz contest, I've chosen a topic close to my heart—choreography—and called it The Story Song. Please find the details below:



I read books to meet new characters, to go new places, and to find out what happens. I also read to learn how the author has chosen to choreograph the narrative. Is it a straight-forward telling, or a book that turns round on itself? Does the story speed up and slow down, are there embedded refrains, which themes recur, which d...

readergirlz writing contest: the 'remain vulnerable' winners

Extraordinarily fine work was submitted for the inaugural readergirlz writing contest, which asked writers to yield a brief piece of a fully lived emotion. In the end, a single winner would not do. Please join me in congratulating the winners here, below, who are all receiving signed copies of Undercover. And please join us for the second of the four contests, newly posted here.

Jennifer Petro-Roy is a librarian/graduate student in Library Science with eventual aspirations to be a young...