Beth Kephart's Blog, page 365

The Argument/Beth Kephart Poem

The slide down
by slide of rain.
The argument
that we stopped having
over fiction.
Calling each other
by our last names again,
to nearly prove that we didn't mean it.
That I will be right
and you will be right
and the end begins the end.

The biggest fight I ever had
was not my own.
It was trapped in the wall
at Gaskill Street where
I was young—
the baroque aftermath
of a man and woman's war,
the heel of a shoe as the spike,
the color red.
I don't particularly care
that she left him afterward.
The rage remained.
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At the Dance Studio/Beth Kephart Poem

You are not, he said,
using your hands.
You are not
in the glass in the shadow:
There.
Here.
Hands being the verbs.
Verbs being the story.

Later I slept beneath
the umbrella arch of the rescued calla
underwinging reach.
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The Cradle/Patrick Somerville

Yesterday I read past the beginning of Patrick Somerville's novel, The Cradle, and straight through to the end. "You enjoying that book?" my husband would stop by and ask. "I am," I'd say. "Okay," he'd say. "That's good."

(that would be book talk, in our house)

But why? Why was I enjoying this book, which can be summarized in a snap: Man gets sent out to search for an heirloom cradle by a very pregnant wife who most often gets her way. Or can it? The man is Matthew Bishop, after all, the p

Dream Interrupted

"Still Dancing in Her Dreams." That was the title, and so I read, unprepared, this story about Liu Yan, 26, who was paralyzed in an accident just prior to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. According to New York Times reporter David Barboza, Ms. Liu had been China's leading classical dancer, a woman of such extraordinary grace, extension, and soul that she had earned the only solo performance in the extravagant, theatrical Zhang Yimou show. It was to last six minutes. It was to ha

The House of Dance Trailer

House of Dance has a slightly modified cover in store for its release next March as a paperback; thank you, Carla Weise and Jill Santopolo.

In this trailer (the last of the three that I've been creating these past few weeks), we go through the streets of Ardmore and up into the Dancesport Academy studio, where it has taken an entire country's worth of gifted dancers—Scott, Jean, John V., John L., Jim, Cristina, Aideen—and one very fine manager (the lovely Tirsa) to teach me a few things about t

The Undercover Trailer

The Undercover paperback is due out in a few weeks, and it arrives with extras—Elisa's story moved forward in time and documented with her newest batch of poems.

I invite you to watch the trailer, here.[image error]

Very First Words

It often feels as if I live multiple days within the framework of one. I was writing about global health care for hours in the early part of yesterday, before I scrambled to my former middle school for the exhilarating Operation TBD, then went out with video camera and my Sony in hand to collect footage for book trailers now in progress. An hour of email, then to the high school down the road, where I was teaching a mini-course called "Very First Words." At nine-thirty I was sitting in our fa

Rocking the Drop for readergirlz

I have returned this moment from Radnor Middle School, where I left three copies of House of Dance along the bus line. The former Dr. Dewsnap teaches there now, having moved there awhile ago from the high school where she inspired me and, ultimately, many pages in my first young adult novel, Undercover.

The books are there to be discovered. They are there as part of the terrific national program, Operation Teen Book Drop, which celebrates its second anniversary today and owes its birth to the e

Roughen it Up

I was not a good writer in my younger years. I was stymied, arrested, by the wrong idea of what beauty is. I thought the language had to course, unstopping as a song. I decided that if a thought, a moment, a scene could not be expressed with some degree of beauty that it should not be expressed at all. It was always all about words for me. I could not see beyond that fence.

But there is room, in writing, for the forcible, physical, coarsened, unfinished. For the gap, the pause, the uncertai

True Beauty

Because I do not know where my head will be tomorrow (if, indeed, it will be found) and because I am taking a small break from the sort of work overwhelm that leaves me gasping (sometimes crying), I want to post this thought right now, before I lose it, or lose me—whichever happens first.

When my agent, Amy Rennert, today sent me an email with the subject line "this will bring a smile," I thought, Oh dear, what might this be? I opened the email to find a YouTube URL. Nothing more than that.

Well