Beth Kephart's Blog, page 358

The Teacherly Personality

In "Show and Tell," the Louis Menand/New Yorker essay on creative writing programs (June 8/15, 2009), these words arise:

Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn't matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.

John Gardner, Menand says, "was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His prefe

What Blogging Is

Early in the writing of a book, the mind is a jostle. It's bump and grind. It's lonely. It's spending six hours writing a sentence or two, and wondering the next day, What was I thinking? If I can't get a scene right, I can't move on. In the beginning, I hardly move on.

Yesterday, though, I had this mini-breakthrough. I had something that might be something; I wanted someone to tell. But how do you justify crashing in on another's day—smashing up whatever thoughts they're having with your

Life Lessons

I am thinking this morning of the smash and fractions we leave behind, of the contradictions we provoke, of the black clouds we send up over our own heads. I think of the comments we make in a moment of hurry or exhaustion, the tossed-off observations, the words we use to delineate one thing from the other, to set one thing to the side of another, at the awful expense of that other. These things echo; they reverberate. We don't see the ramifications coming, but they will come: you wait, they

An Insomniac's Writing Moment (or, excerpt from novel in progress)

In July the orange-pink of the gladiola crack from their husks; they split the dark. The birds fidget in the trees. The crows are disgusted. The noise of quiet places is impossible. It kept Sophie awake all that night.[image error]

Heart Healing

In a story posted yesterday on MSNBC.com, Bill Briggs writes of the doctors who are "increasingly studying—and employing—the physiological dance music does with the body's neurons and blood-carrying cells." Of patients whose rooms are filled with the sounds of harp or Brazilian guitar, post surgery. Of melody's vital role in slowing heart beats, spiking pituitary growth hormone, or dilating the tissue in blood vessels. Of the relationship between song and healing. The harp, as it turns out, h

Slow Parenting

"Let the Kid Be." That was the headline topping Lisa Belkin's essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps, the piece suggested, we've at last moved beyond "Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting," perhaps beyond, even, the bad mother confessionals that Ayelet Waldman and a host of bloggers have lately been promoting. Indeed, writes Belkin, a "second wave has taken hold—writers are moving past merely venting and trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement" that some call "s

We had a party

and our friends came—wearing cowboy boots, bearing an ice cream cake, and balancing a bowl of potato salad on one hand, like some Grecian goddess. They are dancers, these friends, with dancer-brand intelligence, and so the night was a song, a salsa mix, the bolero of a story Tirsa told. I am, I remain, a person on the edge. Watching and loving with a full and complicated heart.[image error]

There is so much

that can't be undone, day by day. So that a life travels with you, hovers, and when you look into the faces of children—when they turn and look up into yours—the thought is (my thought is), Be safe from yourself. Do right.[image error]

Speed and Power

The question becomes: How does one write a scene that powers forward (can't be stopped) and yet (and for me there is always the and yet) makes room for the stop-to-watch-it-work invention of language?[image error]

Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel, has found its right home

Several years ago, Laura Geringer wrote a most extraordinary note, inviting me to consider writing for young adults. Despite years spent teaching children and a stint as the chair of the 2001 National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury, this was not something that I felt I knew how to do. Nonetheless, I loved Laura's mind from the first, I loved our conversations, and we kept talking. We talked for almost a year until we finally met in person—Laura asking me questions on a rainy Sunda