Beth Kephart's Blog, page 340

New York City, in sun and sweet rain

We met our boy for a weekend in New York City. He is tall, upright, happy. Taller, perhaps, than he was just a month ago, when we dropped him off at college for his sophomore year, and he is happier than, well, ever?

Where, I wondered, does such happiness come from, and how might it be kept near? Beside him, I walked Broadway in the tinseled dark. Beside him I laughed out loud for no good reason. You made me a mother, I kept thinking, as I watched him. No one else, but you.

Meditations on Choreography

What, I've often wondered, is the language of choreography? How is the idea of movement communicated; how does it evolve? What lives within that mysterious shift space of motion and narrative?

When I began to take ballroom dance lessons from the choreographer Jim Bunting, at DanceSport PA, I had the chance, at long last, to ask questions. Ultimately I had the chance to visit Jim while he was at work on a piece with two young dancers—to watch him yield his story to them. I wrote a bit abou...

Ken Burns, Horace Kephart, and an Upcoming Documentary Film

Ken Burns has been at work on a six-part documentary called America's Best Idea—a series that will tell of the making of our national parks. Since my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, played a pivotal role in the creation of the Greak Smoky Mountains National Park, he, along with his good friend, photographer George Masa, will be featured in the stories told.

The photograph here is of Horace Kephart's son, George Kephart, my father's late father. Though Horace was absent during the majority ...

readergirlz: inaugural writing contest

A quick reminder here that today is the final submission day in the inaugural readergirlz writing contest. I have loved reading through the entries that have been received thus far. If you've written a short piece inspired by the idea of writerly vulnerability, I invite you to send it in for consideration.

The winner will be announced and featured this coming Monday.

Running in the Family

"My Grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree. She could read thunder."

— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

I read Running in the Family for the fourth time, in preparation for a class conversation on Monday. I come across the lines I remember loving and the lines that strike me as being brand new. This line here is an old favorite—the surprising synesthesia, the resurrection of the grandmother, the utterly indelible attributes. People are known for many things. We pile u...

My Unbirthday

Dear B, the card read, Happy Unbirthday! I thought you might be interested in the ghosts that haunt a fellow Pennsylvanian. Kate is now a colleague of mine.

When your birthday is in April and you receive an unbirthday gift in September, you are stopped in your tracks. When the gift comes from Alyson Hagy, a friend of whom I've written here before (her books—Graveyard of the Atlantic, Keeneland, and Snow, Ashes—on my shelves; her gifts to me strewn across the window sills of my house; her wo...

State of Mind

So I said to Jean today, I said, "Jean." (We were about to step onto the dance floor to take on our Broadway/fox trot/Charleston/Quick Step/Lindy Hop/Jive. I was delaying the inevitable.)

"Yes?" Jean asked. (He raised one of this fantastically elastic eyebrows and gave me his best Belarussian stare.)

"Do you sometimes just feel like..." (I stopped inside my quandary, did a little run-around-my head in search of the right words.)

"Like escaping yourself?" he asked. (He lowered his one eyebro...

What a Girl Wants: Because we are not all rich girls

In question number seven of her fantastic series, What a Girl Wants, Colleen Mondor asked us to reflect on whether historic MG and YA fiction addresses socioeconomic status more effectively than contemporary titles, and whether or not readers need to read about people who are experiencing their same financial struggles, or prefer to live vicariously inside socioeconomic fantasies. As always, I had to think long and hard about this one. Check out what Jenny Davidison, Zetta Elliott, Melissa W...

What Will the Tango Mean?

We danced the tango for Magda today. She helped us to see it through her eyes—shifted the balance in things, taught us the momentum that builds from a rightly strengthened spine, helped us close the piece in, so that we danced it, mostly, for each other.

But maybe that's not why she's entered our lives at this time—all this making right of a single dance, to be performed in a month, for a few hundred people. Three minutes—less—and it will be over, done—the steps worked out or not, the final ...

English 145

Yesterday the brave souls of English 145 at Penn lobbed Natalia Ginzburg, Paul West, and Annie Dillard around the room—declaiming, declaring, rebutting, suggesting, insisting on asynchronous points of view.

West, via his essay "Remembrance of Things Proust," emerged variously as brilliant, smug, teacherly, full of his own conceits, and ultimately vulnerable. Ginzburg, with her classic "My Craft," riled the suspicious among us with her declaration that, "When we are happy our imagination is ...