Beth Kephart's Blog, page 54

One Thing Stolen: The Shelf Awareness Review

I read Shelf Awareness like others take on their morning cups of Joe: religiously.

And so, just now, while taking an Awareness break between invoicing and client calls, my world skipped a beat when I saw the words: YA Review: One Thing Stolen.

I had to put my hand over my heart to calm its sudden lurching.

But Kyla Paterno has been enormously generous to my Nadia and her Florence. A few words from the review here, below. The whole can be found here on Shelf Awareness, an online books and bookselling magazine that reminds us (in every issue) of the power of kindness.

Nadia's gut-wrenching descent into her unexplained illness is explored through carefully crafted narrative and the later, cautious observations of those who love her. Kephart's novel succeeds on many levels. One Thing Stolen takes the bold approach of keeping the majority of the story, all of Nadia's descent, solely in Nadia's perspective. Readers cannot easily determine if she is a reliable narrator, or if parts of her story may be delusions.... Kephart applies a deft hand and instead looks inward and asks readers to come along with Nadia and experience the danger and beauty of her world. --Kyla Paterno

Those interested in receiving an ARC of One Thing Stolen have a few days left to enter this Goodreads Giveaway. 

not quite, but close (brief and probably erroneous thoughts on copy editing)

This coming September, Temple University Press will publish a collection of my essays and photographs called Love: A Philadelphia Affair.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that I've spent the better part of yesterday and today with notes from the very gentle copy editor. Which is to say that I've spent these hours in rigorous mortification of myself.

Okay, so maybe that term doesn't make actual sense, but I'm just going with it, because, hey, might as well be myself. Or, I could fill the rest of this blog with commas that, shouldn't, be there. Or maybe I should just use the same phrase twice. (I'll use the same phrase twice.) And if I seem to be calling you by your surname as I speak to you here, why don't I just switch it up and go with your given name? Nothing like keeping a reader on her toes? His toes? Their toes?

And if I tell you that I'm moving toward you, you'll know what I mean. That I am moving TO you. See? I've just arrived.

It's not even what the kind copy editor has noted that remorses me out. It's what I see in myself, my old writing tics, my go-to poetics. It's me on the page, and golly by joe (I'm making more things up), I often wish I were other.

Was other?

Why can't I write like Michael Ondaatje at his best? Why not Alice McDermott at her most precise? Why Why Why couldn't I have bought my Kitchen Aid sooner (KitchenAid?) and given my life over to olive oil cakes and fudgy brownies? Fudge-y brownies?

I want a do-over, Writing Life.

I want a better brain.

Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah/Anna Badkhen

I had said, about this blog, that I would reduce my frequency. Posting just Mondays and Thursdays now (unless there was personal book news to share). Making more time for Time. Easing away from increasingly desperate sense that more was expected of me than I could ever adequately deliver.

But yesterday and today, reading Anna Badkhen's memoir, Walking with Abel, I realized that there will be some days, some books, that will require an interlocutory post.

I can no longer read everything I'm sent, write about everything I read, respond to every package that arrives on my stoop.

But I must write about books like Anna's.

I've written about Anna here before—the day I met her, in the living room of the home of the documentary photographer Lori Waselchuk. I have written of her Afghanistan narrative, The World is a Carpet . I have come to know her—only occasionally, but always meaningfully—in the time in between. We have discussed self-compassion. Bigotry. Chromites. New books due in August, about love. I was prepared, in other words, for Walking with Abel, her story of living with a family of Fulani cowboys and starwatchers as they move herds across the country of Mali in West Africa. The wisdom of the Fulani is earth wisdom. It is in the sand they cross, the rivers that rise, the frogs that sing, the constellations that guide, the nudge of a cow. It is in the stories they ask for, and the stories they share.

Into their wisdom came Anna.

Here, in the early pages, she tells us what she seeks:

To enter such a culture. Not an imperiled life nor a life enchanted but an altogether different method to life's meaning, a divergent sense of the world. To tap into a slower knowledge that could come only from taking a very, very long walk with a people who have been walking always. To join a walk that spans seasons, years, a history; to synchronize my own pace with a meter fine-tuned over millennia. For years I had wanted to learn from such immutable movement.

Anna's immersion is uncompromising. She sleeps beneath a tree on blue plastic tarp, her backpack at her head. She wakes, one day, to a goat standing on her knees. She bathes in rivers. She churns the buttermilk. She holds the babies. She learns (perhaps I should have started with this) that language. She finds breathtaking beauty in her hostess:

She had no front teeth left and the remaining teeth were rotted and brown. She was narrowboned and gracile and she wore her long gray hair in cornrows woven so that two thin braids ran down in front of either ear and the rest bunched at the back of her head. The tattoo that once had accentuated her whole mouth and blackened her gums had long faded except for an indigo shadow on her full lower lip.

This is Anna making room for astonishment in the world—Anna who is both a migrant and an immigrant, a former war reporter who is capable of seeing beauty and who ponders, out loud, in Abel, this: "Maybe a true writer of conscience was one who never put down a single word."

I am glad, we should all be glad, that Anna puts down her words (and her pale, evocative sketches of the homes she made on that swatch of earth). I am grateful that this book leans into memoir, yields Anna's own vulnerability as she tries to live in the aftermath of an ended love affair, that she uses both her heart and her eyes to see, that she writes, or seems to write, this book for the man who, in transient moments, made her happy, the man she carries forward, memories now, interludes, words. Who was he? Who were they? She tells us:

My beloved and I had been comrade voyagers before we became lovers, footloose storytellers who shared a supreme reverence for wordsmanship. We filled our notebooks with the beauty and the iniquity with which the world branded and buoyed us. We wished our stories to bring it to some accountability, some reckoning.

Anna, the world is better for your reckoning.

making the day what it can be, in the winter of should have/would have

We're frustrated. Face it. We are. Our delayed trip to see our daughter. Our thwarted trip to see the sun. Our meeting that's been canceled. Our promise we can't keep.

This is our weather, and this is our now. We've tilted our planet on its axis, so to speak, and the planet was always going to be larger, and more powerful, than we are.

Today I was to have joined Professor/Writer Cyndi Reeves and her students at Bryn Mawr College to talk about memoir. I was to have later lunched with her and her teaching colleague. After that I was to have headed down to the Philadelphia Flower Show with my husband, looked at flowers and pots, and joined my friend Adam Levine for the official launch of his glorious horticultural magazine, GROW. And finally, 8 o'clock, thanks to my brother and sister-in-law, I was to have dined at Laurel, the "intimate French/American BYO restaurant by Chef/Owner Nicholas Elmi." (Top Chef viewers will remember him.)

All of that now jeopardized, junked, postponed, terminated by all the snow that falls.

"Peaceful out there," my husband just said, having opened the door and stood, for a moment, in the white plenitude. "Peaceful." I stop typing. Can barely hear the wind. Can almost hear a train on its track. Can see no one in the street, no car passing.

Peaceful, he says.

Make the day what the day can be, I remind myself. A lesson that my son keeps teaching. A lesson that the world is demanding that we learn—again. Make the day what the day can be. In this sudden wash of white time, I will write an essay about my students, My Spectaculars, and what they teach me (and us). I will count the eggs and measure the sugar and experiment, again, with my new KitchenAid. I will read the new memoir, Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah, by my brilliant friend, Anna Badkhen, who walks the world to learn the world and who whispers one word, again and again: compassion.

Peaceful. To you, from me, while the planet reminds us how small we are, how temporary and shifting our plans.

thoughts on my Spectaculars and a week spent receiving art

I call my students The Spectaculars, and they are. As kind as they are bright. As funny as they are compassionate. They are particular, unrepeatable people. And yet—oh my. Our whole.

Teaching them, I am teaching me. Racing out ahead with books and dreams. 

There is never enough time.

I watched "Whiplash" last week and wondered how any teacher could be so cruel—and if cruelty hones. I watched "Birdman" and considered the rewards of high narrative risk. I read Atticus Lish's Preparation for the Next Life—and then sat with a student, just the two of us, and talked about the value of spending summers pumping gas and seeing life, the literary value of the un-rareified existence. I (and my students, along with the students of Lorene Cary and Max Apple) sat with the editor and writer Daniel Menaker and talked about how memoirs get made, how truth is shaped, the chronologies that must be broken (Lorene's blog post on that afternoon can be found here.).

But all of this wasn't enough, it's never enough, and so I began to read Ander Monson's Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries—a book that delights in breaking rules, a book that, in the midst of all its subtitle promises, its wild accords, its politics and prose, releases thoughts like these:

The space between biology and biography is vast. Both are tests. They seek to understand a life. We might believe we write our own, that who we think we are gives us the right to tell ourselves as we believe we are. The telling of a self is fiction too, salesmanship, however unintentional, how in narrating I we change the I—we make it harder, stellar, starlike, more like shell than skin, how we hide all evidence to the contrary, believe ourselves impermeable.

We read the world, we watch the art, we ask the questions, we do our own small parts. We can't make art without receiving art. Last week, most of this long winter long, I ceded, I cede, to receiving.

an ode to Wayne, in today's Inquirer

I moved a lot as a child—and then, at last, settled in.

In this weekend's Philadelphia Inquirer, I'm writing about the place that has been close to my heart ever since that eighth-grade move, the town of Wayne, PA, which has beguiled me, supported me, and, of late, returned old friends to me.

With gratitude to all those fellow Radnorites and shop owners and librarians: this. While this Wayne story and my South Street/Magic Gardens story were written too late to be incorporated into my forthcoming collection of essays and photographs, Love: A Philadelphia Affair, both essays live close to my heart.

Meanwhile, this past week I've been watching intense movies, reading an extraordinary book, talking to the esteemed editor Daniel Menaker, sharing a glass of wine with the great Debbie Levy, and learning from my Class of Spectaculars at Penn. I'll reflect on all that in the Monday edition of tomorrow's blog.

Anyone interested in receiving a free ARC of One Thing Stolen can now enter the giveaway on Goodreads.

LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair (the cover reveal)

With enormous thanks to the Temple University Press team—Micah Kleit, Ann-Marie Anderson, Gary Kramer, Joan Vidal, Sara Cohen, Kate Nichols, Debby Smith, and Director Mary Rose Muccie—I share a first look at the cover art for Love: A Philadelphia Affair, my collection of Philadelphia-themed essays and photography, due out from the Press later this summer.

Southwest Philadelphia, Fairmount, Woodlands Cemetery, Wissahickon Creek, Old City, Memorial Hall, City Hall Tower, Locust Walk, South Philadelphia Sports Complex, Wayne Art Center, The Martha Street Hatchatory, Port Richmond, Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fairmount Water Works, 30th Street Station, Stone Harbor, Glenside, New Hope, Mural Arts, Eastern State, Bush Hill, Chanticleer Garden, Hawk Mountain, The Devon Horse Show and Country Fair, The Schuylkill Banks, DanceSport Academy, Beach Haven, Valley Forge National Historical Park, Reading Terminal Market, Wilmington, DE, Stone Harbor, the Poconos, Hawk Mountain, Lancaster, PA—my memories of and reflections on these and other elements of this region have all been collected here, along with my black and white photography.

This book owes a huge debt to Kevin Ferris and Avery Rome of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who invited me to write, idiosyncratically and happily, for their pages.

I thank Amy Rennert, who ushered this project through all those terms I'd never understand on my own.

The Temple team has worked enormously hard to get the book out in time for the Pope's visit to our city; copies will be available by then. It will be here and near during the Democratic Convention. And it will serve as a companion book to Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, another Temple University production.

The official catalog copy, as penned by the great publicist, Gary Kramer:

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-noshow:yes; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} </style> --> <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 259.55pt; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">From the best-selling author of </span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Flow, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comes a love letter to the Philadelphia region, its places, and people</i></span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 259.55pt; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Love</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">A Philadelphia Affair</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Beth Kephart</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Philadelphia has been at the heart of many of award-winning author Beth Kephart’s books, but none more so than the affectionate collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love. </i>This volume of personal essays and photographs celebrate the intersection of memory and place. Kephart writes lovingly, reflectively, about what Philadelphia means to her. She muses about her meanderings on SEPTA trains, spending hours among the armor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and taking shelter at Independence Mall during a downpour.</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love, </i>Kephart shares her love<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>of Reading Terminal Market at Thanksgiving, “This abundant, bristling market is, in November, the most unlonesome place around.” She waxes poetically about the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, the mustard in a Salumeria sandwich, and the coins slipped between the lips of Philbert the pig.</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Kephart also extends her journeys to the suburbs of Glenside and Ardmore, and beyond, to Lancaster County, PA, Stone Harbor, NJ, and Wilmington, DE. What emerges is a valentine to the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love, </i>Philadelphia is “More than its icons, bigger than its tagline.” </span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Beth Kephart</span></b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> is the award-winning author of 20 books, including <i>Going Over, Handling the Truth, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, and Ghosts in the Garden.</i> She has been nominated for a National Book Award, has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and has won the national Speakeasy Poetry Prize. Kephart writes a monthly column on the intersection of memory and place for the <i>Philadelphia Inquirer</i> and is a frequent contributor to the <i>Chicago Tribune</i>. She teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs daily at </span><span style="mso-field-code: "HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.beth-kephart\.blogspot\.com\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022";"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com</spa... style="font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Philadelphia Region/General Interest/Urban Studies</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">October</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">112 pages, 39 halftones, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2”</span></span></div><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Cloth ISBN 978-1-4399-1315-4 $24.50</span></span></div></blockquote><div class="feedflare">
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One Thing Stolen: A Booklist Star and a Goodreads Giveaway

Maybe the pre-publication months are the hardest months on writers. Best to shrug them off, develop distractions, think on next stories, next things, new recipes.

Earlier this week, through the nervous silence (and a search for tea for two guests at Penn), came news of a Booklist star for One Thing Stolen, as well as some very generous words from School Library Journal. I also learned that Chronicle will be sponsoring a Goodreads giveaway, beginning on March 1st. More on that can be found in the sidebar on my blog.

For now, I share highlights from the book's three early trade reviews:

Fans of Jandy Nelson’s dense, unique narratives will lose themselves in Kephart’s enigmatic, atmospheric, and beautifully written tale.  — Booklist, Starrred Review

“Kephart’s artful novel attests to the power of love and beauty to thrive even in the most devastating of circumstances.”—School Library Journal

"Kephart has crafted a testament to artistry and the adaptability of the human mind.  Set in Florence, Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance, Kephart transports readers across the ocean from Philadelphia, Pa., to the cobbled streets of Italy." — Kirkus Reviews 

 In other publishing news: This kind review of Handling the Truth, in Assay Journal, by Renee D'Aoust.


And Love: A Philadelphia Affair (Temple University Press, August 2016) has an official cover and flap copy, which I will share here when the time is right.

reducing my frequency

In the midst of a difficult winter, I look for signs. Or, I read the signs newly. Collisions. Rejections. Reversals. Silence. Extended cold fronts. Impossible expectations. An unanswered rapping on that door, this door, that door, too.

One can either walk the same line, ducking and swerving and hoping, or choose another path.

Why not choose another path? Focus brightly on the new, rather than darkly on all of that which might have, perhaps even should have, gone another way.

I'm making changes. I'm going to spend more time in the kitchen, say, and less time at the computer. I'm going to fill my own imagination with the possibilities of olive oil cakes and double roasted chickens. I'm going to take more walks beside more friends. I'm going to read more so that I can teach better. I'm going to write less, am already writing far less. I'm going to buy only those books I actually wanted to buy and when even those books aren't the books I'd hoped they'd be, I'm going to set them aside.

Life is too short.

Finally, I'm going to show up here less often, perhaps just twice a week, perhaps Mondays and Thursdays, to talk about books and life and the lessons of teaching.

It's a privilege, being out in the world with you. I'm going to work against overstaying my welcome.

on the difficult topic of recommendation letters: a modest proposal

I love my students. That's absolute. I learn from them, I learn with them, I want, for them, the best of all worlds or, at least, the best of this one.

Teaching is my great privilege. It is my deep pleasure.

And so I am not in the least complaining about the students I love when I raise my tired head from the snow and bitter winds and aches of this winter, and ask: Must the graduate schools and post-undergraduate opportunities and fellowship institutions and grant-giving bodies to which my undergraduate students are applying be so increasingly—is the word cruel? or perhaps just insensitive?—in the requirements they place on those of us who write freely—and frequently—on the behalf of students?

Should not the time of adjuncts, who teach not for financial gain but because it is good for the soul, be somehow valued, too? No. Should not the time of every teacher be valued?

Why, for example, must we Recommenders take what increasingly feels like examinations on behalf of our students—eight-part or ten-part essays per chosen institution, each single essay introduced by quantifying questions, and none of the essay writing transferable to any other application related to that student? Why must we, for every school, every institution, fill out a bevy of computerized forms (remember your passwords!) before we are allowed to send in the letter that we have already spent an afternoon crafting, the letter in which we speak with open hearts about students we (I use the word again) love?  What was the point, I would have loved to ask that Veterinarian School, of asking me to write that essay about myself (for hadn't I just written nine essays about my student?)—that essay in which I was asked to assess my own self as a teacher, grader, person in the world? Really? Or, what was the point, Oh School in a Foreign Country, of not allowing me to email the forms—of requiring me to walk through weather to the post office, to stand in line for twenty minutes, and to pay the four dollars and something to mail a letter I might have simply sent via electronics? And: I know you would like me to send my letter on official university letterhead, I know you are saying that the words I just spent hours writing won't count—will be quickly dismissed—unless they are on official letterhead, but: I'm an adjunct. I don't have official letterhead.

I repeat: Should not the time (and resources) of those who teach somehow be valued, too?

I'm wise enough, human enough, not to penalize students and their dreams for the onerous nature of the process. But I do want to ask, as gently as I can:

Why is this process becoming ever more onerous? Could one not anticipate some sort of backlash, in which teachers simply throw up their hands and say, No more. Please. No more of this. I cannot possibly create another new account for another institution so that I might send in a form.

We're here, as teachers, because we love (love!) our material and our students. We are doing all we can to help them move toward their dreams—in the classroom, outside of the classroom, and in our letters.

Think of us when you design your forms, create your frameworks, ask us for more, and then again more. Think of us. I beg you.