Beth Kephart's Blog, page 5

Tell the Truth. Make It Matter.: forward movement is our measure

Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., our illustrated memoir workbook, is now available through Baker & Taylor and Ingram, as well as Amazon. We're hearing beautiful stories about the book's introduction into workshop and teaching environments. We're reading blog posts inspired by the pages. We're grateful to the private high school that has just purchased copies for its entire tenth grade. I'm excited to teach from its pages at another local high school gathering in a few days. And we're really grateful to local bookstores that are saying yes.

Two years in the making. Still a long way to go. But we are making progress, bit by bit. Forward movement is our measure.

Juncture 17: Tova Mirvis deconstructs the making of her memoir

There are doors. And there are windows. There are fences. There is sky. In the current issue of Juncture Notes, Tova Mirvis stops by to explain, in illuminating detail, how she built a true story out of a hunch, an editorial conversation (about a novel), and a fascinating commitment to giving the book a compelling arc.

The memoir is The Book of Separation. The editor is Lauren Wein, whom I once profiled here in Publishing Perspectives.

Also featured: News about Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., our memoir workbook which is now available through Baker & Taylor and Ingram (and showing up in classrooms and workshops), and homework from our wise and inspired readers.

You can read all about it here.

Traveling 5,000 miles across our country, a Philadelphia Inquirer photo story

With thanks to Kevin Ferris, for embracing this story. With thanks to my husband, for driving the distance with me. And with thanks to all of those we met, our resilient Americans.

A full link to the story is here.

36 Craven: Home, Interiors, Staging (and Bill's art!), 138 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia

There are many reasons I love the man I love. I cannot count the ways. But right in there, nested toward the top of the reasons pile, is our shared approach to valuing the made thing. Bill was studying to be an architect when I met him, but I fell in love with his watercolors first. And after that with his balsa-wood models, his black-and-white photographs, his 3D experiments, his oil paintings, his sketches. Bill, in my mind, could do it all.

And then Bill started working with clay. He had found, he deeply felt, his truest medium.

Bill hasn't taken the obvious route. He hasn't studied the trends and then fallen in line. He has, in his own words, "been inspired by rugged landscapes and ancient artifacts. Not only by the beauty of eroded surfaces, textured by time and nature, but also by the fact that the original layers of function and meaning have long been stripped away to reveal their innermost secrets."

Bill likes, he continues, "to think of the pieces I make in a similar way—as things that are found rather then made. I imagine them having their own logic and history as objects from a different time and place. I would like these objects not to stand still, but to have the flexibility to live in a different context than what was imagined for them."

Bill has made what has felt right to him. I, in our little home, have cheered him on, Facebook posted him, boasted of his work as we've wandered in and out of shops, for Bill would never boast on his own. Last summer, at Show of Hands, located at Tenth and Pine in Philadelphia, Bill was generously exhibited in a solo show for the first time. Two skilled curators happened into that show—Neil and George. They saw Bill's work. They remembered him as they put together a plan to build an exquisite lifestyle shop in Old City that they call 36 Craven.

Recently opened, this shop features what George and Neil call "primitive antiques, contemporary textiles and unique artwork for the 21st century home."

We visited the shop before it opened, as signage and interior work were under way. We visited again yesterday afternoon and found the shop in the immaculate condition above. A small space with a big heart featuring expansive ideas of the old merged with the new.

(And what a fantastic sales assistant, too. The shop is new. She's studied it all so well, so soon.)

Bill's work is there on the glass shelves and located throughout. It can be ordered, too, through the 36 Craven web site . I highly recommend visiting the shop in real time. It's not that different from visiting a fine museum where, for affordable prices, you can actually take the art home.

resources for memoir writers

I've just finished writing the 17th edition of Juncture Notes, our memoir newsletter. My focus this time is on the development of characters in memoir. My sources are Alexie, Gay, and Ford. We'll send this out into the world in late July.

Meanwhile, we have updated our Juncture Workshops site with a compendium of the memoir resources (beyond our upcoming Longwood Gardens and Cape May, NJ, workshops) we've created over this past year. Bill has found a way to make all previous issues of Juncture Notes available for public viewing. Interviews with Paul Lisicky, Sy Montgomery, Angela Palm, Diana Abu-Jaber, Megan Stielstra, Chloe Honum, Kristen Radtke, Brian Turner, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Dani Shapiro, and so others can be found here. So can my thoughts on issues relating to the making of memoir, my recommended reads, my homework prompts, and the work of our readers.

(If you are one of our featured readers, you can now share your work with your friends.)

We urge you to check it all out here.

Dignity, Our Fellow Americans, and The Fifth of July, by Kelly Simmons

I knew that driving nearly 5,000 miles across this country would change the way I see and feel; I wanted it to. I wanted to attach my empathy for other Americans to a more complete sense of the lives those other Americans live. The lonesome and the lovely landscapes. The shuttered stores and the Big Brands and the possibilities that a single restaurant proprietor stirs in Hope, AK. The music in truck cabs and the music on Beale Street and the fullness and yearning of it all.

This country that we love in our own ways is worth loving. It is worth protecting—not just its resources and its people, but its dignity. Dignity is a gigantic word, measured one act and one word at a time. It can be modeled. We can model it for one another.

And, right now, we must.

While I was away I had in hand a copy of Kelly Simmons' The Fifth of July, a book due out in a month or so, a book Kelly had slipped into my mailbox, at my request. I read this novel, which takes place in Kelly's own beloved Nantucket, while in hotel rooms in Columbus, OH, St. Louis, MO, Oklahama City, and Santa Fe. The smells and symbols of the beach were therefore there with me no matter how far my husband and I traveled from the sea. Kelly renders this landscape with the full, personal knowledge of someone who has lived it.

This, below, is the voice of Caroline, a wife, mother, daughter, and former girlfriend of the local handyman, who will soon become embroiled in a family death and mystery:

We turned the corner at Brant Point Lighthouse and waved back only to strangers—beachcombers, fishermen in waders casting into the surf—who greeted the ferry, hour after hour, day after day. Year after year. Here we come again. The salt air woke everyone up; the lighthouse made everyone smile. The town dock came into view, the boats gleaming, the lines of families waiting for the arrivals like a parade.

There are all kinds of mysteries in The Fifth of July. Who, for example, is mongering hate with posters and swastikas? What has led to the death of an unwell man? Who perpetuated a crime against Caroline years ago, and who is now marauding around town, threatening teenage girls, and who is genuinely in love with who? Who has another's back? To tell the story, Kelly employs multiple voices and points of view. The frame remains that seaside place, which Kelly yields with consistent authority.

This is the voice of Tom, Caroline's brother, who will not escape the doubt or suspicion that settles across the mysterious death and separate hate mongering. He, too, is gloriously attuned to the reliable routines of this ebb-and-flow place:

The rooms that faced east, like mine, fairly glowed from five a.m. on a clear day. Then there were the birds, with their array of voices. If the songbirds signaling each other didn't wake you up, the seagulls cracking oyster shells would finish the job. Arriving next, around seven a.m., were the gardeners, with the whine of their weed whackers and hedge clippers. And then, a little before eight, the construction workers with their nail guns and saws.

Sometimes darkness enfolds us. Anger, misunderstanding, lost or too-residual love. In Kelly's Fifth of July, a family, its neighbors, and its help negotiate the darkness of personal histories and legacies. The book takes us into those scary places where the wrong things perpetuate wrong things, and where the land and those who intimately know the land stand strong, and most true.

Summertide and Currents arrive by mail

Not quite a year ago, I sat with Bonnie Offit in Rittenhouse Square talking about a dream she and her friend Gary Jacketti had to produce a free summer magazine for the Stone Harbor crowd. The magazine would feature literature and art. All proceeds would go to the CHOP Brendan Borek Fund. Might I have some ideas, Bonnie asked.

I pondered. I thought of this: Why not share the first two-thirds of a summer mystery, to be completed by a young writer? And why not introduce Bonnie to the work of Hannah Litvin, a talented poet and memoirist (and fiction writer, too) whom I had met while teaching memoir at Rosemont College?

And so those things happened. I shared my story. A willing mystery writer wrote the end. Hannah shared her poetry. And then Bonnie, with her team of Gary, Jen Gensemer, and Cailin Fogarty, went away and dreamed much bigger, inviting photographers and designers and other writers into the fold.

Today I received my two copies of Summertide, and what a genuine beauty it is, both at its soul core and in its art. At the same time, I received our copies of Currents, the magazine we create for each Juncture workshop initiative. Within this edition are the empathy pieces our writers wrote about their Frenchtown partners. Portraits that Bill took. Images of that place and our time.

And so it is a lovely day here. A day of quiet thanks.

a generous review/interview for Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., and more

We rented a car and we drove. To Columbus, Ohio, through Terra Haute, to St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, Ruidoso, Marfa, Fort Worth, Hope, Memphis, Lexington, Charleston, WV, and then, yesterday, home.

It was research. It was escape. It was a necessary immersion in our country.

It was our anniversary, too. Thirty-two years together.

While we were gone, Serena Agusto-Cox, a poet, reader, and reviewer kindly reviewed our new memoir workbook, Tell the Truth. Make it Matter., then asked me questions for an interview. We had not brought a computer with us, and so I tapped out words with two fingers on a borrowed couch and hoped any nonsense might be forgiven.

I am always enormously grateful to Serena for doing so much, so kindly, so consistently, even as her own career takes off with a first major reading and more and more yeses from journals.

The review is here.

The interview is here.

Gratitude is everywhere.

We also learned, as we drove into Memphis (fittingly enough) of the stellar SLJ review given to the anthology, Behind the Music, which is the brainchild of K.M. Walton. "This anthology about music hits all the right notes," the reviewer wrote, and we are all so happy about that.

My review of Julia Fierro's The Gypsy Moth Summer appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

And I received word that Love: A Philadelphia Affair will be available as a $12 paperback from Temple University Press come October.

I return to 2,000 photos to sort through (this one above was taken in New Mexico), an enormously interesting memoir to review for the Chicago Tribune, a promised story to the Inquirer, and a novel, now half-written, that requires its second half.

A novel that has found its second half.

I must settle down and make room for it. I must remember, in other words, how to sit in one place and think, for I am accustomed to rumbling now.

Reviewing Julia Fierro's The Gypsy Moth Summer in Chicago Tribune

My thoughts on Julia Fierro's new novel, in the Chicago Tribune. The full text is here.

we will live, we will love, until the world takes that from us

Our friend Katherine got married near Asheville a few years ago, and to celebrate—to celebrate her, to celebrate our long drive south—I found this doll, this bird-loving doll, and I bought her.

She hangs on my office wall now, a reminder of a book I wrote and believed in, a reminder of a moment when I walked into a gallery and said (no doubt, no fear), "I'll buy her." What was I thinking? Why wasn't I weighing the pros and the cons of the expense, the implications for my bank account, the long term ... what? The long-term what?

The past few years haven't been the easiest here, if you're counting all the pennies. And this past week wasn't the easiest, either, if you're counting the hard stuff, the disappointments.

But then again, sometimes we do the math all wrong. Sometimes we get lost in the debit/credit and forget what really makes the difference.

Here's what makes the difference:

I'm passionately in love with my husband after all these years. We have a son who perseveres like there is no tomorrow—he's funny, he's forthright, he's a hell of a writer, he's creative, he's kind, he's surrounded by friends, he doesn't give up on this world; he won't let me give up on the world. We have friends we love from years ago, and friends whom we're still making, and we have people who remind us that things aren't as bleak as they seem; in fact, they say, we're just wearing the wrong glasses.

This week my father called and I burst into tears; all seemed so gray. This week I thought much was over, and then important things shifted. This week I went out to dinner with my husband, and I looked at him with all my crazy love for him, and I knew, I just knew, that this love of ours, after all our years, was sweeter than our love had ever been. This week my son did something crazy cool with his crazy cool. This week a woman named Karen wrote words that saved me. This week I talked to friends, cried out to friends, spoke defiantly to friends, learned from friends, embarrassed myself and was forgiven. This week became  Friday evening, 9:38, which is right this minute, when I am writing this.

And I survived.

And we must survive.

And we will live and we will love until the world takes that from us.