Beth Kephart's Blog, page 363

UNDERCOVER Paperback Release, Contest, and Poem

This coming week, the paperback of UNDERCOVER, along with its back-0f-book, extras is being released. Some of you know already that the story continues in those extras, revealed by Elisa through a new collection of her poems. Elisa has given me permission to run one of those poems here.

In the meantime, I am (and I say this without excess) astonished, daily, by the poems that so many of you are writing and posting. I would like, then, to announce a contest, the winner of which will receive a s

Pink Snow in a Cherried May

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In Which I am Named by a Song

And while this really happened, I am posting it just because it's, um, funny and so very my-husband like. The long and the short of it is: a) I am too dim-witted to complete surveys, and b) I do not know myself.[image error]

The Garden of Invention by Jane S. Smith/Chicago Tribune Review

With the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, I rarely read outside the realm of biography and history until I was in my late twenties. I wanted to know as much as I could back then; I thought all education was based on the facts. And so I read about the history of science and the history of technology. I read the life of Tolstoy and not his stories.

When Elizabeth Taylor recently asked me to review Jane S. Smith's new Luther Burbank biography, The Garden of Invention, for the Chicago Trib

There will be a line

The slow unfold of the black amaryllis cautions me to go slow.

Don't write the first draft of any book on the bright, loud ding of the computer. Travel to the other room, where the light is new, and sit. Let no clock near you. Write with a pen that blurs. Don't be afraid of all that will be wrong. There will be a word you like. There will be a line.[image error]

Let the Music Free You

And then Jean said, "Beth, you have become someone with whom I like to dance. You keep your own balance. You can turn. You can follow. You have technique. Now I worry that the music holds you back. Let the music free you."[image error]

Housekeeping

It's been fifteen years since we drove down an unlanterned street, peered up toward the one lit window of a hunched house, and somehow decided that that house must be ours. Most everything about the house was broken, and there was hardly any garden, and once we got inside we understood that each of the six slanting rooms was a shattering in desperate need of imagining. Year after year, we have imagined.

Yesterday, between client calls and mad frustrations (did the refrigerator have to die so sp

Behind the Camera's Tunneling Distance

Once on an overnight train from Barcelona to Venice, this boy became my friend. Outside my compartment he sat, cat like, waiting for me to compliment him on the fearless red of his shoes. He liked to stand at the windows, looking out. I liked that, too. He performed acrobatics on the old blue rug. I was his audience.

He wanted his portrait taken. I took several.

I escape mirrors, as you know. I refute photographs of myself (just ask Tirsa). I am out with my camera, most every day, tunnelin

Regrets

I don't think I was ever the girl I might have been; I could have used a more sustained carefree.

Today I heard myself again: Serious, when others were laughing. Pushing for absolute when almost was all that moment needed.[image error]

Tangled Threads (again)

In the beginning of a story, everything signifies, everything has consequences. That's why beginnings are so hard: You must stay in the moment, but also, you must see ahead. You cannot trap yourself inside the sound of a lovely line if the line is not a fathoming.[image error]