Beth Kephart's Blog, page 342

Making Music: The readergirlz writing contest

This is a reminder to you under-25 writers out there about the readergirlz writing contest that is now up and running. Please visit the readergirlz author-in-residence site to watch a brief video that features yours truly talking about the importance of vulnerability in writing. The contest prompt is described below. The winning work will be posted on this blog.

"I believe that the stories that touch us are written by authors who remain vulnerable to the world - who leave themselves open...

First Class Day at Penn

Yes, this is a photo of San Francisco, just beneath that great and golden bridge, and yes, Penn is urban and east coast and miles from any bay. But this photo is the right photo for my present mood, for I've just returned from the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, where I travel now not as student, but as teacher.

Those of you who follow this blog know how many different ways I've danced the syllabus through. You know how many books I re-read before selecting passages to share ("Au...

The Heart is Not a Size/The Children of Anapra

The Heart is Not a Size will not be released by HarperTeen until March 2010, but it is often on my mind. In this brief video montage, I read from the book's prologue. The photos were taken in July 2005, during the trip to Anapra that inspired the story. The music, a haunting piece called "Alex to Himself," is by the supremely talented Jordan O'Connor.

On Being that Main Line Writer

I have written of how much I love my home—not just the tiny tudor where I work, cook, sleep, read, dream, entertain, but the neighborhood itself, which is history and horses, big trees and the cracked urns that show up in neighbors' yards, recalling an era past.

Last weekend I went to the bookstore twice, and among the many books that I carried home was Devon (Margaret Depiano and Stephen Diaddezio), a self-published photo history of my hometown. I live on the grounds of The Devon Inn, pictur...

The Good Thief/Review

It would not be possible to say just how much I loved Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief, though if I told you that it sits directly beside The Book Thief in my estimation, you would perhaps begin to understand.

It's the sort of novel I wish I knew how to write—a straightforward, plot-rich escapade about a one-handed boy on the lam from the orphanage from which he has been taken by a story-spouting graveyard robber, who isn't half as bad as that description makes him seem. One thing in this book d...

Baptism/Beth Kephart Poem

The distance between now and then is the ants,

spilled as if from a candy dish

across the wood horizontals of the deck,

and so swiftly organized into cross currents

that I am sent back in time

to the cracked pavement of Ashbourne Hills,

where I sit naked kneed to the sun.



I wear the short pixie hair of a girl

who has not yet come into all her moods.



I have braided the streamers of my brother's new bike.

I have watched him swirl the cul-de-sac

on the balance of two wheels.

I have heard my...

Webbed in with DanceSport

Dance studios bring together souls from the middle of this country and the middle of another, guys who aren't precisely big on books and guys who are, mambo kings and samba sensations. In other words, they bring together people like Scott Lazarov and Jean Paulovich, who are pictured here. Scott is the artistic force behind DanceSport PA and one of the best choreographers anywhere (on Tuesday afternoons my husband and I dance Scott's brilliant tango; when I wrote House of Dance, I used Scott...

Where Beauty Runs Deep

Probably in this case the title says it all, for this is Magda, a world champion ballroom dancer who comes to Dancesport a few days a week and gives to others what she knows. She does it without temper or stomp, without conceit. She dances for you and with you, so that you might align, however briefly, with the slip light of her grace. She raises her arm and her hands are liquid, and for a fraction of an instant you are liquid, too—seeing possibility, hearing song, finding new religion in t...

The Cat is Back

I was finishing work on one more corporate magazine story and (almost) finding the energy for the next when I happened to look up and out through my office window, toward the garden that has grown wild with summer rain.

There she was. White, pure, perfect with her imperfectly matched eyes. I reached for my camera, opened the door, thought only to photograph her from afar, but (I swear to you), she turned and began hurtling toward me—zipped through the green with jungle speed and took the por...

Image as Foothold

"I have been," I said, one afternoon in Union Square, "admiring your hat."

She laughed. She turned. She smiled. I lifted my camera, and she did not protest.

Now she's always here, and without the photograph, I'd have forgotten the best details. She'd be vapor and sense, a vague wasn't there once?

The more I write, the older I get, image is my foothold.