Beth Kephart's Blog, page 366

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

Forty times over the course of recorded history, the Thames has frozen through, giving rise to frost fairs and temporary bridges, royal spectacles and common fare, ice skating and drownings. Winters cold enough to freeze a river freeze ale, wine, ink pots, too. They kill those who don't keep moving. They precipitate new forms of entertainment, and despair.

In forty brief chapters, in a book called simply, The Frozen Thames, Helen Humphreys conjures a scene from each of the forty freezings—an o

Writing the Elements

I write the elements, I said. Earth. Air. Fire. Water. I imagine myself gone, within them. The river as a woman. The fire as a man. The earth cracked open, so many mouths through which to speak.

And air?

And air is wind. And air is weather. A character—changeable, present.[image error]

To be Heard

It was all moving by too fast. The day with its demands. The things undone. The stack of those things that must yet be completed, before tomorrow, which will soon enough begin in earnest with its own misbehaved list of musts.

In the middle of this, a phone call. A conversation about a book I wrote, the delirious spark of questions no one else has ever asked. How did you decide...? Where did you discover...? What did you mean when you wrote...? How did you know...?

The gift was being taken

The Rehearsal

It was late, Easter Sunday. She was putting on her show. No one but me, my son, my husband in her audience, and we were in shadows, in the brisk night, on the wrong side of the glass. We were, I am certain, unseen.

She stood and declared. She fluttered her hands, bent forward, seemed to walk away, but then came back so that she might peer out over the empty chairs and tables, and begin again. More feverish now, more determined to enrapt and engage, and I thought of me writing. Of me in my v

Easter Day

And the chimes broke free from the stone tower and fell. And the birds were high on the wind.[image error]

Human and Whole: Two Films

On this early Easter morning, I am thinking many things—gratitude for my son's few perfect days home, gratitude for family and friends, gratitude for the sun rising, gratitude for the pink blending yellow ripping through white that is this early spring.

I am thinking, too, about the two movies I watched this weekend—"The Visitor" and "The Station Agent." Both produced by Mary Jane Skalski, both written and directed by Tom McCarthy. Both entirely human and intensified by the space between words

Book of Clouds: A blog review about a book that takes risks

Wearied by an overwhelm of work and the static panic of good-news hoping, I had again let reading go, until yesterday, when I brought home Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), The Frozen Thames (Helen Humphreys), and The Cradle (Patrick Somerville). This morning through just now I read the first, a book about which Wendy Lesser, in the New York Times Book Review, recently wrote: "First novels by young writers who see the world with a fresh, original vision and write about it with clarity and restra

For Whom Do We Write?

In my post yesterday, "Boy among Girls," I riffed a bit on a conversation I'd recently had with my always dashing, never boring ballroom dance instructor, Jean Paulovich. He'd made a claim a week ago that turned on this fortissimo: men and women are two separate species; hence, the stories women tell about men have always and will forever devolve into a frustrated yelp of incomprehensibility.

I should say here about Jean that he is a purebred Belarussian and yet, since coming to this country les

Boy among Girls

Oh, to be this boy among girls. To have access to their riffling suspicions, their percussive dreams. To know when they mean what they say, and also what they would say, if only asked. At the dance studio last week, Jean claimed, "Every story a woman tells about a man is the same."

"Can't be," I said.

"Oh, yes. Believe me."

(And I pictured this ballroom dance instructor day after day, hour after hour, women in the hold of his cha-cha, his rumba, confessing and declaiming and wanting and hoping.

The Soul of an Insomniac

Imagine the moon like this—this bright in the sky. Imagine the blade of light that falls through the window now, slashes my glass desk, deflects at the touch of my hand, is not cool, is not warm, is not a weight, is yet alive.

There are reasonable people who claim the moon is nothing but dead, a stone in the sky.

There are those who like their words straight up, their stories quickened.

But I have the soul of an insomniac and the eyes of my mother, and I pour color down, where I can, where I am.