Beth Kephart's Blog, page 357

Power Surge

At 3:30 AM this morning, after my husband drove off in the rainy dark to catch a plane to El Salvador, his home, I posted here a stillness-seeped excerpt from Nothing but Ghosts. That's the mood I was in—stillness seeped.

An hour or so later, though, I was at the gym, working abs and arms, pecs and tri's, bi's and all manner of psycho stay-with-it tricks. I was rocking and urban, determined and persevering, and when I left the gym, the sun was out. This changed my mood, so it changed my post,

Nothing but Ghosts/Excerpt

Here is Katie, my protagonist, looking down on her mother's garden from a window up above. With her mother, lost to cancer, gone for nearly three seasons now, Katie continues to calculate the rubrics of survival. Nothing but Ghosts has at last come into its own as a tangible hardcover.

... all I have before me now is sky and gravel, and, to the left, below, my mother’s garden. The yellow, white, and red of the big fat dahlia. The effusive zinnias. The catmint and the mounds of hellebores that

On Writing the Last Sentence First/John Irving

I love the New York Times Book Review conversations with authors—Sam Tanenhaus meets a writer meets a camera.

The current subject is John Irving, now nearing the completion of his twelfth book, Last Night in Twisted River.

What I find extraordinary about this conversation is what Irving reveals about his process. He writes, he says, his novel's last sentence first, and that sentence never changes, not even the slightest grammatical bit. Seven months to a year after finding the book's last senten

Quaver/Beth Kephart Poem

Now you understand
everything. How it was never
what he said or how he listened,
never the violent grind
of his coffee at dawn,
or the caution: Leave me
to what I am, to my idea
of the intransitive.

It wasn’t the way he kept
the birds in seed
or how time idled
in the architecture
of his afternoons,
or how, at night,
he resolved,
or I should say countered,
distance.

It was color.
It was the way
intimation came to him,
and shade,
the way the paint
roamed a glissade
but would not settle.
His assertion of quaver.
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What a Girl Wants

From a Sunday New York Times (Douglas Quenqua) story entitled "Blogs Falling In an Empty Forest," this:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream—or at least an ambition—unfulfilled.

And later:

Richard Jalichandra, c

This Photograph was also taken by Jill's Blackberry

I have drawn the brilliant conclusion that all important messages are sent to me while I am at the dance studio being tossed about, from partner hip to hip (do they really call that move the back breaker?), or when being encouraged to go high on the tango kicks (really? you want me to kick that high?).

For today while being asked to scorpion my legs while being spun but a quick half turn (okay, you try it), the red phone light was blinking with this news: The Heart is Not a Size is now available

Storm Mourning

You recognize the pale gray pink before a storm; you know the storm's coming. Even so, when the storm came in this morning, I was unprepared for its volume—thunder like a jet just off the tarmac, hail the size of rock salt, rain in straight white nails driving down.

It is a storm in the wake of a week of losses. The grandson of my mother's best friend, just 24. An ebullient former colleague of my husband's, only 49. A friend's beloved father. The first two taken as suddenly as the storm that

The Photographer at Work

Because turnaround really is sometimes fair play, I post a photo that Leslie Kase has now sent my way—me behind the camera Saturday, freezing young dancers for eternity's sake.

We have a good time, those of us who join in for the Dancing Classrooms Philly extravaganza—getting lost on flights of stadium stairs, corralling children, begging for just half of that salty soft pretzel, and urging the make-up lady to shower us with a smidgen of her glitter. Finally we step back and then: the show belo

The Shadow Catcher and the Word "Beautiful"

I am there, in the round chair in the thin room, the day coming in through the slender screen, and I am reading—finishing the final pages of Marianne Wiggins' odd and remarkable The Shadow Catcher (a WG Sebald-like melage, a tour of the early lives of the photographer Edward Curtis and the woman he married, an inverted commentary on the making of a novel, a discourse on sound). Outside it is still, save for the bounce-echo of the ball that my son sends up and down the driveway.

I don't know how

To Be Young Again, To Dream

Scenes from Dancing Classrooms Philly, Finals, June 6, 2009
Sponsored by Harvey and Virginia Kimmel, among other fine and loving Philadelphians.
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