Beth Kephart's Blog, page 364

Companionable Existence

Early this morning, before the sun rose too high, I dug out the old cat mint and slipped armeria and black chervil into the ground, within the peninsula tip of my garden. Out by the street, I buried the perfect bulb of an elephant ear. By the front of the house a new vine still awaits digging in—red trumpet flowers, a hummingbird's seduction. I want hummingbirds to join my 24 carat finches. I'm glad the robin is back, in her old nest.

The new plants were all collected Sunday, from Handmade Ga

Disambiguation

I've started on something new, very different, perhaps risky. I remember how whirligig beginnings are. You could be anywhere, but you are not there. You can almost see there, but you cannot write it. An idea is an idea: It's big. A story lies in the details; they are small, and they take time. Turn around it. Hammer it in. Hope that it coheres.[image error]

Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and te...

Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.

So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.

Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and

The Books on my Shelves

The fabulous Holly Cupala of Brimstone Soup tagged me on this meme, and since I was musing just yesterday about bookshelves and friendships , it seems an appropriate Sunday launch. The question is, What's on your bookshelf?, and the specifics are these:

Tell me about the book that has been on your shelf the longest...

A beaten, brown thesaurus (the pages unbound now and out of order) and the bible my mother gave me. In fact, however, most all of my books have been acquired during the last 20 ye

Child's Play

Yesterday Ruby came to play. She's almost three, and from her tiny perch upon the world she sees most everything. The bees building their hive in the high canopy above our heads. The black bird in the white scorch of plane plumes. The crack in the spinning wheel's last spoke. She thinks it's funny that I can't draw, so she makes me draw. She steals the soccer ball into the net, despite my best efforts to thwart. She waits until the music is loud, fast, and sure, then dances.

She forgives m

The Prologue in Memoir

Last night, in part two of my two-part class,"Very First Words," we spoke of the prologues that seem to launch so many memoirs—the pronouncements of theme and tone, the pencil strokes of frame, the percolated entanglements of story lines. We read out loud from books in the making and looked for wasteland stretches that might be eradicated, flat horizons in need of sky, opportunities to turn complication into complexity.

This morning, a day of corporate work begins (interviews! a succession of s

Chasing our own Tales, or The Blog is Dead?

Are blogs dead? Are they being repurposed? Is the air going out of the balloon? Are we really on the edge of a no-book, no-newspaper, no-blog world, content to feed on the 140 characters of Twitter? Or have we already arrived?

I was talking with Anna Lefler about all this the other day—spinning out my theories and my unevidentiary evidence—and Anna being Anna (that is, infinitely more connected and tied in than I'll ever be), came back last night quoting an interview with Andrew Keen, author o

Here Right Now

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When the World was New (an excerpt from Ghosts in the Garden, a moment for Tessa)

I know that I've said it, but it bears multiple repeatings: An Aerial Armadillo is one of the most blessed blog spots on the virtual earth. Go there and be somewhere else—in Southern Africa, in Lantau, in a sacred before, above a plate of sushi. Go there and see beauty captured with utter verisimilitude, or with bold, painterly geometries. Go there. That's the thing. You won't want to come back.

Tessa, the force behind An Aerial Armadillo, has been reading a book I once wrote about marriage

No Such Thing as the Real World: A Book is Born, a Possibility (i.e., Teen Writing Competition) Sounds

Today is April 21, which is another way of saying that today is the birthday of No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen anthology that bears the subtitle: Stories about growing up and getting a life. "What's the line that separates childhood from the 'real world'? the back jacket asks. "And what happens when it's nothing you imagined it would be?"

There are six of us telling stories here—An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, Jacqueline Woodson, and myself—and it is a very happy