Beth Kephart's Blog, page 55

Headed back to NYC to See "A Delicate Balance." I will not be taking Amtrak.

In this, the winter of few things going according to plan, I begin to wonder: What is the point of any plan?

I'm not the only one asking this question. Oh, Boston. Oh friends in Boston. How do you do it?

Yesterday, I left the house in the cold and early dark, leaving myself five hours of extra time to get to my NYC client meeting an hour ahead of time. A six-hour cushion, in other words. But, oh, what a chase it became, as Amtrak dropped train after train and then left a single track open for trains headed into and out of Penn Station.

You go. No, you go. No, all right, you go. No, I'm happy to wait another hour. You go.

I made the meeting in time, but only after a mad dash through the train station that culminated in an encounter with a man of little means (and clear psychological demons), who turned around on the escalator leading to 31st and Eighth and (seeing I cannot imagine what in me) threatened to push me down the moving stairs. I held the badly bruised arm of the week's earlier accident just out of reach and barely escaped the possibility of a mean tumble.

Getting home from NYC proved to be an odyssey of even greater proportions. The details don't matter. I was hardly alone (indeed, I was with my client and hundreds upon hundreds of others) as one train after another was cancelled, delayed, left on the tracks, neglected, checked in, then out of the You go, No, you go single tracking situation. Sure, I should have spent the time reading the fantastic Atticus Lish novel I recently downloaded. But at one point I gave up.

I became a simple, unexercised, bruised silly lump of Wait. A walking, mostly sitting exemplar of What is the point?

Today, believe it or not, I am headed back to New York, this time to see Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance," starring Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Lindsay Duncan, Clare Higgins, and Martha Plimpton, then to take my son out to dinner. It's my early birthday present to myself (aided by my father's Christmas gift). The play's closing weekend.

I will not be taking Amtrak.

please join us at Kelly Writers House as we host Editor/Writer Extraordinaire, Daniel Menaker

A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL MENAKER (TUE, 2/24 AT NOON)

Dear friends,

We hope you’ll join us next Tuesday, February 24th, for a noontime
conversation with DANIEL MENAKER. Over the course of his career, Daniel
has been the fiction editor of THE NEW YORKER and Executive
Editor-in-Chief at Random House. Now he works with Stonybrook
Southhampton’s MFA program and consults for Barnes & Noble—so rest
assured, this is a man who knows his books. The conversation will be
moderated by BETH KEPHART. RSVP now to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call us
at 215-476-POEM. We’d love to see you here, next Tuesday.

All the best,
The Kelly Writers House
______________________________

The Sylvia Kauders Lunch Series presents:
A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL MENAKER
Hosted by BETH KEPHART

Tuesday, Feb. 24th | 12:00pm | Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required - this event is free & open to the public
______________________________

DANIEL MENAKER is a fiction writer and editor, currently working with
the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and as a consultant for
Barnes & Noble Bookstores. Daniel was a fiction editor at THE NEW YORKER
for twenty years and had material published in the magazine frequently.
In 1995 he was hired by Random House as Senior Literary Editor and later
became Executive Editor-in-Chief.

clipped by a van on a wintry day — and then

I left the house early yesterday morning with the hopes of catching one of the trains that now run at random, unpredictable hours during this winter of snow and ice.

The poet Anne Waldman was at Kelly Writers House. I'd experience her, then meet with a student, then conduct my three-hour class.

The day didn't turn out quite as I had hoped it would. There is a four-lane road (Lancaster Avenue) that I must cross to get from my house to my train station. There were no cars coming from the west. There was one car coming from the east. He stopped. Waved me on. I waved back at him indicating I could wait. He insisted. And so I walked across the street, thanked the man in the waiting car with a wave, and was struck—such a noise it was—by an old van that had barreled in from a seeming nowhere. That fourth lane. In from the east.

I had not seen so much as a glint of it.

It was hard, at first, to make sense of who or where I was. Just a woman who had lost her hat, a woman whose iPad and iPhone in their bright red bag had taken a huge brunt of the hit. A woman with sudden, terrible pain, but I was standing, wasn't I? I was standing. It wasn't my head. It wasn't my legs. I was upright, talking, consoling the man and his wife who had hit me — Don't worry. Don't worry. Thanking the man who had waved me over for stopping. Thank you.

I need to take you to the hospital, he said. Let me take you to the hospital.

I can't, I said. I can't. I have to teach.

You need the hospital.

I can't. It's just my arm. I don't think it's broken.

I saw how hard you were hit. You need the hospital.

I'll go to the hospital down at Penn.

He agreed to let me go. He pointed to my hat, still on the road. To the van's side mirror, that had been clipped off by the impact with my arm. A second later, I thought. A second more. A nano more of anything, and— Don't think about it. Don't you dare what if this, Kephart.

The train finally came. I climbed on. Sunk into my seat. Held the flame of my triple-sized arm. I didn't realize how much I was trembling until a woman sat beside me and I turned and I said that I'd just been hit by a van. I don't know what impelled me, really, why I felt the need to share, but that is what I said.

Angels of mercy. That's what the day became.

To this woman, my seat mate, who arrived at 30th Street Station with me, who insisted on a taxi, who rode the taxi with me, who paid the cab driver to take me to the HUP emergency room against every single one of my protestations, who wrote afterward.

Thank you.

To the student who passed the news quickly on to all my other lovelies (Prof Kephart may be late).

Thank you.

To my students, my beautiful students, who sent their healing words.

Thank you.

To my friends at Temple University Press writing with kindness (and good news).

Thank you.

To my neighbor who heard the news from Temple and wrote with love.

Thank you.

To my husband and my father and my son on the phone, and, therefore, close.

Thank you.

To the x-rays that revealed no broken bones. To the doctor who provided the splint, the ice, the pain killers, and released me just in time to make it to class, to teach memoir.

Thank you.

To my students, again, for our wholly imperfect perfect day.

Thank you.

Do you know how lucky you are, Beth Kephart?

Yes, I do. Yes. I do.

In today's HuffPo: writing toward fear, as I wrote toward One Thing Stolen

 
I have made reference to the challenges that beset me (self-afflicted, surely) as I set out to write One Thing Stolen. Today, in Huffington Post, I'm write of the fears I was writing toward during the process.
The piece begins like this, below, and carries forward here.

There is a girl who only just recently knew who she was, what she wanted, the dimensions of now. A girl who has a retro-minded best friend and a reputation for ingenious ideas about night snow, urban gardens, and the songs that rise up from Philadelphia streets. She has a mother and a brother, both loved. She has a father obsessed with the Florentine flood of November 1966--that unforeseen spill of the Arno River, that mud that clawed through homes and stores and across the face of Cimabue's "Crucifix," among so many other treasures. This girl has moved with her family to Florence. This girl is losing herself.

It's hard to say, precisely, when she began to peel away. When an obsession with nests and nest building became her terrible secret. When thieving erupted as a necessary part of her existence. When words began to clot and clog and answers became elusive.

It's hard to say when all this started. It's impossible to know how it will end.

if you want to leave behind something lasting, don't middle-of-the-road your art

In this frigid northeast cold—when I am deliberately not writing books, when I assert through seeking, when I am teaching which is to say wholly focused on the work and hearts of others—I have, among other things, been watching my favorite moving art form: the documentary.

Last night: "Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow," a portrait of the artist Anselm Kiefer by Sophie Fiennes.

This morning: "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," by Alison Klayman.

These two artists could not be more different in temperament—the first nearly monk-like in his approach to living and seeing, to directing the crews that enable him to fulfill his fantastic visions; the second commanding the world and his assistants through the stage of Twitter and communal politics and irreverence. And yet both remind me (again) of this: only those who walk the cliff line, who don't comfortably retread or remake, who work with vulnerability toward the new, who are willing to say "I don't understand but perhaps someday I will"—have the power to unearth, disturb, and shift points of view.

What kind of artist do you want to be?

As a non-artist in this right now, as someone who has stopped her own work to consider, to ask, What is it all for? What am I capable of?, these documentaries force me into a deeper self-appraisal.

An upcoming memoir workshop, via New Directions Program

A number of you have written to ask for the details of this upcoming all-day memoir workshop, which I will be conducting on behalf of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis on April 23rd.

Details have just been released and are visible above. Registration is available here.

I splurged (time in the afternoon, and two new cookbooks)

By 1 p.m. yesterday afternoon, I'd been sitting at my desk for nine hours, more or less—a long stretch of work following a long week of work, following a long month of — well, you get it. I'd not exercised. I'd not dressed for the world.

I pushed back.

My husband was at the pottery studio. The house was still. I had a few hours before I was to meet my friend, the great Kelly Simmons, to celebrate her completion of a novel she has bravely tangled with. There was time, I realized, to do the things that I take comfort doing—laundry, sweeping, food shopping, wine buying, maybe I'd even procure for the house (so stark with winter) a little calla lily color.

I dressed, went out, explored, harvested in small quantities, carried everything home, then went out again and arrived at the designated meeting place—the Valley Forge Flowers barn. I was a few minutes early. That gorgeous, open, airy space was full of light, but hardly any people.

And so I found myself with time. And so I sat with two of the Barn's gorgeous cookbooks on my lap. And so I turned the pages. Mused.

I tend to be an instinctive cook—remembering my mother's ways, guessing at the proportions, settling in with perhaps two dozen known dishes. I do own cookbooks. I consult them sometimes. But mostly, and especially lately, I have locked myself into familiar grooves.

One of these cookbooks — Sunday Suppers: Recipes and Gatherings by Karen Mordechai — was so magically presented that I felt as if, in looking at the photos and the dishes, in touching the soft pages and the quiet typography, I had entered an undamaged world, a place where intelligent conversation and sweet, small touches contained the whole of life. The second — The Newlywed Cookbook by Sarah Copeland — had absolutely the wrong title for a woman soon to celebrate her 30th wedding anniversary, but absolutely the right content: "fresh ideas and modern recipes for cooking with and for each other."

In both books I found recipes I not only believed in, but believed myself capable of. In both books I found the promise of allure. Of moments yet to be made and remembered.

Buying both would have been a major extravagance for one who lives (and increasingly so lives) with measured care. Buying neither would have been a lost opportunity—a vote against magic.

I voted for magic.

memoir is not this:

This week at Penn I taught a book that, though it has been marketed widely (and successfully) as memoir, though it looks back over an important life, fails to meet most of the standards we should be setting for the form. It was the first time I'd deliberately chosen to teach a book that doesn't work as well as it might. We can learn, I think, as much by kindly examining the choices an author might have made as by the choices that appear on the page.

While preparing for the class, I discovered these words by a reviewer of our chosen book—words that epitomize everything I strongly believe memoir is not.

Memoirs are endeavors wherein the author says to the reader: "Here's what happened to me." The authorial motive, more often than not, is a combination of the memoirist's need to get something off his or her chest (or out of his or her gut), along with the need to tell everybody: "This is how I became the person I've become."

Here's what happened to me. Getting something off one's chest. Here is how I became me. Those are slight and merely autobiographical objectives, reflecting a writer interested in one soul thing—himself. Memoirists need to do far more, and the best of them do. Here, in my review of Alexandra Fuller's new Leaving Before the Rains Come, I think again out loud about what real memoir is.

reviewing Alexandra Fuller for the Chicago Tribune

The thing is, I could have written a book about this book. I'd have dedicated a long chapter, at least, to a comparison, side by side, of three particular present-tense scenes in Fuller's first memoir played out against those same three scenes, now recorded with the reflective and rearranging past-tense of this new third memoir, Leaving Before the Rains Come.

Fuller is an exquisite writer. Memories shift.

I wrote what could fit, the full review here.

what our readers teach us, with thanks to Serena Agusto-Cox, an early reader of One Thing Stolen

Writing, we tunnel in. We go to dark places. Walk contorted paths. Stumble. It takes a long time before we re-emerge, our eyes blinking into the sun.

Hard to know, in all that desperate making, if we have created something whole. We wait to hear from those who have read.

This morning I am so very grateful to find these words from Serena Agusto-Cox.

Her review begins like this:

One Thing Stolen by Beth Kephart, which will be published in April, 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.  Nadia Cara is a young teen who builds nests by weaving seemingly incongruous materials together, making things of beauty.  She’s an artist on overdrive as other parts of her life disappear and flounder amidst the detritus of memory.  She knows that she’s struggling, she knows that she is becoming someone she does not want to be, but she also knows that she is powerless to stop it.

And can be read in its entirety here.

Thank you, Serena.