Beth Kephart's Blog, page 42

what makes a book small?

It's been some time since I wrote that fifth memoir, Ghosts in the Garden—a meditation on the two years I spent walking Chanticleer (in Wayne, PA). I was at a crossroads. Middle aged. Not sure. Pondering my purpose.

Published by New World Library, this slender book, about a well-loved but entirely local garden (every garden is an entirely local garden), went on to be reviewed in papers across the country (I could not have guessed that) and to be translated (this was an even bigger surprise) in South Korea. It sold out of its original modest printing of 5,000 copies and was never reprinted.

Done. Gone. Another Kephartian exercise, by most standards, in the small.

And yet. Every now and then the book returns to my life. This past week it did, in the form of this photograph—a South Korean garden lover who had read the translation in her country (she holds it in her left hand) and come here, to Wayne, PA, to find the garden with her husband.

A book brought a reader across the ocean to a garden.

What makes a book small? What makes a book big? I wish we never had to ask that question. I wish that we'd stop quantifying authors by sales or prizes and take solace in stories about individual readers who allowed a book to prompt a journey.

One book. One reader. One garden. One sunny day. One surprising photograph. Two smiles on two faces.

Thank you, BJ, for sending that smile my way.

This Is the Story of You: Cover Reveal

Next April, This Is the Story of You will be released by Chronicle Books. It's a book for those of you who love the beach (and a good mystery), those who care about the environment, those who wonder about those storms and survival in the age of the Anthropocene.

Today I'm so grateful to the entire Chronicle team—designer Jen as well as Tamra, Taylor, Ginee, Sally, Jaime, Lara—for seeing this story through. I so look forward to holding it in my hands.

Tamra, we are four books strong. And this is our beach tale.

With thanks to Tom, Nancy, Jess, and Stephen, who told me their own stormy stories. With thanks to Sean Banul, my student, who lifted the paw of his cat in a scene he wrote and gave me, in that instant, the brave-tender character of my Mira Banul.

A description:

On Haven, a six mile long, one-half mile wide stretch of barrier island, Mira Banul and her Year-Rounder friends have proudly risen to every challenge. But when a super storm defies all predictions and devastates the island, when it strands Mira’s mother and brother on the mainland and upends all logic, nothing will ever be as it was. A stranger appears in the wreck of Mira’s home. A friend obsessed with vanishing is gone. As the mysteries deepen, Mira must find the strength to carry on—to somehow hold her memories in place while learning to trust a radically reinvented future.

Gripping and poetic, This Is the Story of You is about the beauty of nature and the power of family, about finding hope in the wake of tragedy and recovery in the face of overwhelming loss.

thoughts on dispositional gratitude, from my son and David Brooks

Did you read David Brooks on "The Structure of Gratitude" last week in the New York Times? His thoughts on being grateful, on "the sort of laughter of the heart that comes about after some surprising kindness"? His thoughts on those who seem "thankful practically all of the time"?

Specifically:

These people may have big ambitions, but they have preserved small anticipations. As most people get on in life and earn more status, they often get used to more respect and nicer treatment. But people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyperresponsive.
This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture.

Brooks concludes: "People with grateful dispositions see their efforts grandly but not themselves. Life doesn’t surpass their dreams but it nicely surpasses their expectations."

I was struck by this column when I first read it. I thought of the most grateful person I know—my son—who  never fails to see the beauty in a day, the goodness in another, the possibility in an hour. Among the countless things I've learned from him is the power of looking for and seeing the good. It's a better way to greet the day. And it gets you going places.

So that my texts and calls from my son are always cast in light. Beautiful day, he'll say, on heading out. Good day at the office, he'll say at day's end. Just talked to a really cool person in the park. Just ran by the river, and it's gorgeous out there.

Beautiful day. Good day. Great day. Gorgeous. My son's messages are bits of magic—interruptions in any darkness or churning I might be feeling at that instant. Wait, I'll think when the phone pings and it's him. It really is a beautiful day. Or, yeah. Every day can be conceived or reconceived into some kind of happy.

Why not do that reconceiving, my son reminds me. Why not reap the rewards of looking for brightness? I don't always get it right; sometimes I wallow. But then a sunshine text comes in, and I think: Yeah. Right. Why not be grateful?

And so this post script. My son knows precisely what he wants to do with his life (the perfect job taps his great strengths in statistics, new media, pop culture, demographics, and trend spotting) and two months ago, he was hired as a contract employee at the perfect company. A six-month job, but glory, he was going to take it, and every day he's been there—happy to stay late, happy to do more, happy to take on more training, happy to do, happy to be around people he respects and people who clearly respect him. My son wasn't going to worry (like his mother tends to worry) that it was just a six-month contract. He was just going to love the days he had. He was going to remind me, when the topic arose, how lucky he was to be where he was. Right now. The future would come. But someday.

Turns out my son didn't have to worry. Turns out he was right all along. The future would come, and earlier this week he was offered a full-time job at this company that he loves.

I have to think his aura of gratitude worked in his favor. I have to keep learning from him.

the fame trap. thoughts on the responsiblities of artists and their fans, after viewing "Amy"

Every representation of a person's life is just that—a representation. A curation. A summary. An interpretation.

I know that. I off went to see "Amy," the deeply moving documentary about the great singer, Amy Winehouse, fully aware that what I was about to witness was a life encoded by footage and recall, and not a life itself.

Still. There are some incontestable things about this British singer with a genius touch and a tortured relationship with her own talent. First (incontestable): she could sing. Second (I think it's clear): she wasn't always sure of who to trust. Third: she died too young of alcohol poisoning in a body winnowed to near nothing by too many drugs and an eating disorder.

Fourth: Winehouse never originally wanted to be famous, never thought she would be famous, never imagined herself capable of fame. She is there, in the footage, saying so. But fame became hers, fame became her, and she had to live, and die, with the consequences.

There is a dividing line between those who make things in order to be known or seen, and those whose loyalties lie with the things themselves—the songs, the films, the stories. There are those who craft themselves into a brand—who orchestrate aggrandizements, who leverage opportunities, who seek out "friendships" that will advance them, who overstay their welcome, who build cliques that further not their art but their careers, who ricochet with gossip. And there are those who (I think, in the book world, of Alice McDermott, Marilynne Robinson, and Michael Ondaatje) seek out private quiet. Yes, they cede to interviews and talks and touring when their books are released. But they also vanish from public view, and consumption, just as soon as they're able.

Fame—a seething hope for it—is not what propels them.

Watching "Amy," one wants to turn back time. To give the artist her creative space. To let her walk the streets without the blinding pop of cameras. One wants to give her what matters most—room for the everyday and the ordinary. Supremely talented, unwittingly destined, Amy Winehouse suffered. She made choices, certainly. She faced a wall of personal demons. But the media that stalked her and the fans who turned hold some responsibility for what happened.

Artists have the responsibility to do their work for the right reasons. They have responsibility to the work itself—to not sell out, to not write to trends, to not step on others in their quest for something.

But fans have responsibilities, too. To give the artists room to make, to risk, to sometimes fail. To love artists for who they are and what they do and not for whether or not, in this bracket of time, they appear to be potentially famous. To see artists as people who would be better off, who would be healthier, given some time to live with dignity instead of trailing endless glitter.

pondering life's pauses, and turns, at Andalusia, in today's Inquirer

In the Philadelphia Inquirer today I'm thinking about serenity—how we need it, where we find it—at Andalusia, along the Delaware River.

A link to the story is here.

A link to my blog post about the children I met and taught at this Biddle mansion is here.

Start Where You Are — an illustrated journal by Meera Lee Patel

Meera Lee Patel (illustrator, innovator, gentle soul) entered my life through a quiet door, sending me glory in the midst of worry, kindness in the form of a small book, goodness in the form of a nest.

And then, this week, her newest creation—Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration. It's a book of quiet urgings. It yields room to reflect. It asks us to breathe, to clear our minds, and to move forward.

It gives us the words of others, and it gives us Meera herself, who, in her introduction, writes:

I spent a lot of my years longing for the past or waiting for the future to arrive, confused about where I was and where I wanted to go.... I welcomed distraction. I ventured down various paths for the sake of going somewhere, even though none of them took me close to where I wanted to go.

And then.

By simply going forward, Meera says, she wrote, and is still writing, the story of her life.

I don't know how your summer is going, but mine is somewhere between cataclysmic and silent. Or maybe both things at once. I don't know where you are in your life, but I stand at the bottom of a mountain looking up, bewildered and saddened and determined to push on.

Meera's book whispers, Push on. Push on. It's as lovely as she is. It's now available from Perigee (Penguin Random House). It's another Meera gift.

a most incredible Bank Street Book Fest

How lucky am I?

What an incredible line-up.

I will learn so much.

I am grateful.

Thank you, Jennifer Brown, Bank Street, and all those writers, reviewers, librarians, teachers, thinkers that I will learn from soon.

You can register at Bank Street College. And I hope you will.

Marciarose Shestack, broadcast pioneer, will join me at the Free Library, to launch Love: A Philadelphia Affair

This, up there—the gorgeous woman seated beside Tom Snyder—is Marciarose Shestack.

The first woman to anchor a prime time daily news show in a major market (famously rivaling Walter Cronkite in the ratings). The face of ABC, KYW, Noon News, and her own "Marciarose Show." A film and theater critic. A woman who regularly sat with presidents. A credible and beloved analyst of culture, history, and politics.

Marciarose—still gorgeous. Once my mother's friend, and, today, my own.

How grateful I am to her, then, that she has accepted my invitation to join me on the Free Library of Philadelphia stage as I launch Love: A Philadelphia Affair (Temple University Press) on October 7, at 7:30.

I hope that you will join us—and take this opportunity to meet this Philadelphia legend on a night dedicated to Philadelphia love.

With thanks to Andy Kahan, always, for opening the door.

Love will go on sale on September 7.

One Thing Stolen beautifully illustrated and excerpted in Main Line Today

Hugely grateful to Hobart Rowland at Main Line Today for including One Thing Stolen in the Big Summer Read edition of his magazine. And happy to be spending time there with my friends Kelly Simmons and Daniel Torday.

A link to the full story is here.

Gratitude is here but also where nobody but me can see it.

My earliest public words about and for Philadelphia

Long before I was writing essays for the Inquirer or novels enriched by my city I was a 25-year-old marketing coordinator for Cope Linder Associates, a Philadelphia architecture firm. I got the job in part because of my great uncle's role in the creation of the Waldorf Astoria, the Pierre Hotel, and dozens of other major buildings (I had a degree in history from Penn, but I could talk architecture in interviews). I stayed with the company not just because of the friends I met along the way (one friend became my husband), but also because of the opportunities I was given. Organize the photo library. Write proposals. Research potential clients.

And go in and out of libraries on behalf of projects like Penn's Landing. I found the Philly firsts that are inscribed along the plaza. I collected the art and wrote some of the captions for the placards. It felt like a big deal then, and today, returning to the old plaza by the Delaware River with that very same husband I felt a surge of Philly pride.

I may be so much older.

I still love the same things (and man).