Beth Kephart's Blog, page 56

Joy in the wings: Daniel Menaker and Jeff Hobbs to spend time with us at Penn

Yesterday, on my way to teaching at Penn, I took a small detour to see a Paul Strand exhibit in the Fine Arts building. Then climbed the steps. Took out my phone. And snapped this shot through the window.

Damn, I thought. How lucky am I to be a spring semester adjunct here. This campus. This place. This Creative Writing arm of an English Department USA Today just ranked second in the nation.

Last year, Avery Rome and I joined forces and hosted Michael Sokolove (Drama High) as a special guest. Michael thrilled our students, taught us many things. This year, I'm enormously blessed to be hosting Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction for The New Yorker for 25 years and served as the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House, acquiring books by some of my favorite writers. In his various editorial capacities, Daniel has worked with Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders, Charles McGrath, William Trevor, Norman Rush, Katha Pollitt, Colum McCann, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie—and many others. He has also written a memoir I loved, My Mistake. I wrote about that here—a blog post that initiated an unexpected conversation.

Daniel will be at the Kelly Writers House on February 24, beginning at noon, when he and I will be talking about the vagaries of the publishing industry. The larger community is welcome. At 1:30, my class will join with Lorene Carey's class to talk in private about My Mistake.

After Daniel was in touch regarding my words about his book, Jeff Hobbs, the wholly compassionate and deep-seeing author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, got in touch about this blog post, in which I spoke of how I was incorporating his book into my teaching plan. Jeff, who lives in California, offered to come visit my class as part of a larger east coast tour. When the dates weren't quite working out as we had hoped, a Skype visit was planned instead.

And so my students will have the opportunity to meet two authors whose books and lives inspire. My students—who are teaching me words like "jawn" and authors like Maira Kalman, teaching me narrative photography and the nuance of talk, the pronunciation of complex cloud forms and the Black Scholes equation. We are learning memoir new, and we are learning it together, and I am beyond delighted that the neon lyric of our conversation will be further radicalized by Daniel and Jeff.

we can only write toward our obsessions

A photograph taken in the Santa Croce Cathedral, October 2012, while researching the book that would become One Thing Stolen.

To the left, the mosaics of colored glass tell us stories, suggest a beginning or an end.

To the right, no colors, no stories, just a little framing and the blast of temporal sun. My story, the one I was writing, lived somewhere in there. Still amorphous, still radically strange, but beckoning. It hurt to look at it. I could not stop looking at it. It suffered itself into being.

I suffered, too.

Now, less than two months from the book's launch date, I ponder this strange existence of wading through the formidable dark toward a fledging, heartbreaking story, while thinking not at all about what the market will actually bear. What is the category? What is the tagline? What is the label? This book has none. I have flirted with doom. And persisted.

Why?

Because we can only write toward our obsessions.

Because we must be who we are.

when a writer is found inside the pages of her own novel: Elizabeth Hand in RADIANT DAYS

I suppose, as with books, there can only be one single beginning to a blog post. The problem here is that I don't know which beginning to choose.

I could start with my introduction to Elizabeth Hand, through my friend Collen Mondoor—Read Illyria, Colleen whispered, and I did. I wrote of it here.

My appreciation for that book and its author fueled a friendship with Liz, so much so that once, too long ago, this Maine-besotted writer traveled all the way to Philly on book tour and spent some time with me. We walked the parking lot of a strip mall on a rainy day. Up and back. Up and back. The rain in our hair. It could have gone on all day.

Then Liz went back to her world and I to mine. I knew that she was working on a book that mattered deeply to her—a book that had her hero, Arthur Rimbaud, at its heart. I knew that she was studying the man, translating his poetry, finding a way to make this French poet of the late 19th century come alive (this young genius declared a genius by the genius Patti Smith) for teen readers today. I knew about the project, but mostly what Liz and I began to write of then were our lives off the pages—hers in her rural world, mine in suburbia. Lives. This is what we spoke about.

So here is another beginning. A week or so ago, a padded envelope appeared at my front door—a gift from the Viking editor Sharyn November. We'd been talking about books that matter. I was naming titles, she was naming titles, we were having the kind of conversation two lovers of books have; it was that simple. Here, in this envelope, were books that Sharyn loved. There, in the mix, was Elizabeth Hand, her Rimbaud book, Radiant Days, a book that Sharyn edited (Sharyn edited Illyria as well).


Which I finished reading this morning—a smile on my face. For Liz has done it, found a way to tell this story about a renegade poet of the 1870s and a 1978 painter, also renegade, who has dropped out of Corcoran to find her way. She's armed herself with cans of spray paint.

Time melts for these two characters. They meet—and Liz makes it believable. Washington, DC, and Paris bend, and the scenes are impeccably drawn, believable. Uniting the two is a former rock star named Ted Kampfert, a homeless guitarist who says, among so much else, "Magic isn't something you do. It's something you make. And if you don't make something and leave it behind, it's not just that it's gone. You're gone."

This book, Liz Hand, is magic made.

Here is Merle, musing on the wonder of this otherworldly collision with Arthur Rimbaud:

I wasn't sure what had changed—if Arthur's presence had somehow altered the sidewalks and back alleys around us, the way his poem had shaken something loose inside of me, something I couldn't articulate and maybe couldn't even paint: not so much a different way of seeing the world as a different way of feeling it. Maybe because when I was with him, I didn't need to explain who I was; maybe because he seemed even more out of place in the streets of Georgetown than I was. With him, I felt the way I did when I gazed at The Temptation of Saint Anthony—as though the world held a secret that I was on the verge of discovering. 

Here is part of the world they inhabit, during their one glorious burning night:

Behind the Dumpster a narrow alley wound between an overgrown hedge and a brick wall, so encrusted with ivy it was like burrowing into a green tunnel. Moonlight seeped through the tangled branches overhead, and there was a pallid yellow glow from the upper windows of a nearby row house. After twenty feet or so the alley widened into a tiny courtyard surrounded by buildings in varying stages of decay. Cracked flagstones covered the ground, along with dead leaves and several plastic chairs that had blown over. Small tables were pushed against the rear of a warehouse, its windows boarded shut. A tattered CLOSED sign flapped from a door chained with a padlock.

Note: I might have also launched this blog post with the news that I had been holding, in my hands, another graffiti novel. I don't know how many of them there are, but Merle, Liz's contemporary character, has herself a mean tag (Radiant Days) and glorious command of color and meaning. I wished, as I read Liz's powerful graffiti passages, that my Ada (of Going Over) could time warp and meet Liz's Merle. That they could stand together and talk about art and about the people who are missing from their lives.

Because, in meeting Merle, I know that I am also meeting, anew, Liz Hand—a brilliant woman whose life has been seeped in art and Rimbaud and who makes unusual and therefore lasting books because she (and this is rare) can.

must truth always be held within the unrelenting I? Falling Out of Time/David Grossman

David Grossman's elegiac Falling Out of Time is not a memoir. It is not a memoir even though it comes from such a deeply personal place—the loss of the author's own son, an inconsolable grief. The book is, instead, a Greek chorus of a book—a concussion of voices, of grieving parents, of thoughts that wander through the dark night of loss. A Town Chronicler and a Centaur, a Duke and a Midwife, a Woman in the Belfry, an Elderly Math Teacher, a Woman in Net—each character spiraling down upon the empty place where a child no longer is. The "noneness."

They walk the night. They look for signs. They ask their wives or their husbands how they will ever again love each other "when/in deep love/he was/conceived."

They rehearse their history:

Two human specks,
a mother and her child,
we glided through the world
for six whole years,
which were unto me
but a few days
and we were
a nursery rhyme
threaded with tales
and miracles–

Until ever so lightly
a breeze
a breath
a flutter
a zephyr
rustled
the leaves—

And sealed our fates:
you here
he there
over and done with,
shattered
to pieces.

 I read the book late last night and this morning, in preparation for my Tuesday class at Penn, where I will be talking about (among many other things) the various forms of memoir. The graphic memoir. The second person memoir. The third person memoir. The photographic memoir. The poem as memoir.

Grossman's book is not a memoir, as I have said. But it is a suggestion of a form that memoirists might use—a place where truth might be put and rallied after. I'm exploring that idea as I prepare for Tuesday. I put it here, to share with you.

And in the meantime, I step away from my studies today and prepare for a bit of a party in New York. We have been celebrating, this week, my father's special birthday. May the festivities continue.

in exacting, excruciatingly lovely detail: Rainey Royal/Dylan Landis

Sometimes I bring a pen to the books I'm reading and scrawl across the margins—outlining and exclaiming, starring the sentences. Sometimes (very rarely) I know, after the very first lines, that such an undertaking would be pointless. Every detail would be starred. Every terrible, haunting surprise.

Every sentence.

I did not write in Rainey Royal, the Dylan Landis novel, because I would not have left a page untouched. I'd have lost the lines beneath the multiplying stars.

Details matter to Landis, and for her teenage angsty artful Rainey, for Rainey's duo of best friends, for Rainey's terrible and charming father, her Rainey's house full of musicians and cast of teachers who can do nothing to protect her from the hands of her father's live-in best friend, Landis offers details of a precisely feral sort. This house where Rainey, now motherless, lives among her father's "acolytes" and within her father's rudderless command (so many straying hands). This school where Rainey gets away with murder, and wishes she did not. This couple that Rainey, on a dare, robs. These streets where she walks where she must be as tough as the world thinks she is. This best friend of hers who may be sleeping with her father. Is she sleeping with her father?

I saw it all.

Rainey's adolescence will either break her, or she will make of all its pieces art.

Here is Landis, making art:

The grandmother is tethered to earth by the steel wheels of her chair and the absence of one leg. Her remaining leg, and her upper arms, are buttery loaves of flesh. Yet Rainey looks at the high cheekbones and flawless hairline, the elegant ledges of brows and lips carved as gracefully as Tina's, and takes her in as shapely. Someone has pinned up the grandmother's thick silver hair with curved combs, and gold hoops hang from her ears. Rainey repeats to herself: She has no idea. It is the source of her beauty.

Moravian Writers' Conference: blessed to be joining the community

Many years ago, I found and read a book I loved, In Hovering Flight, and wrote about it here.

I never anticipated that Joyce Hinnefeld, that novel's author, would one day lead the writing program at Moravian College and create, as well, an extraordinary writers' conference that last year featured both Laurie Halse Anderson and Ursula Le Guin. I never imagined that I'd receive an email from the beloved teen author/Bethlehem Area Public Library Executive Director Josh Berk that contained both a question and a bridge.

But both things have happened, and this June I will have the great pleasure of spending time with Joyce as well as Josh, as I participate in the Moravian Writers' Conference as a keynoter and panelist and (to make it all even more glittering) in conversation with the very special guest A.S. King. (King, we're gonna have to take our glorious private conversation public. You ready?) There are so many opportunities for area writers during this three-day (June 5 through 7) event—so many terrific writers, teachers, publishers participating.

(Another special bonus: my friend Nic Esposito of The Head and The Hand Press will be participating in the publishing panel.)

I invite you to learn more about all the presenters and the line-up here.

do not be thrown off your rails

There are a million things that can throw the writer off her own rails. Fear that she is being eclipsed. Fear that she is unheard or unseen. Fear that she is second tier or third tier, maybe even fourth. Fear that the Elite will always and forever be the Elite, an unbreachable club. Fear that she can't or fear that she won't or fear that the wrong reader, with a decade's old complaint about her style, personality, or hair, will one-star the book to death in every public forum.

Two weeks ago I learned that two of my books are being sent off to the No More Farm, their publisher, Egmont, going out of business.

Just yesterday I learned that a book that had been destined for foreign translation will no longer be translated. I am not, as it turns out, a star in Germany.

I could be thrown from my rails. I won't be thrown from my rails.

Because, in the end: I remember this. We are writing because it is what we feel impelled to do. We are doing (unless we are rushing or lazy or writing for the wrong reasons) the best that we can. Our measure, as human beings, is not the number of prizes or the number of books written or the number of books sold or the number of stars given but the number of times we actually stepped outside of ourselves and lived bright, thought big, made connections, reached over the fence toward another.

One of the reasons I love teaching at Penn as much as I love teaching at Penn is that it gives me zero time to worry about accolades or counts. I'm just worried about knowing as much as I can about how stories get made. Desperate (and it's all consuming, it takes every spare moment) to find the words and books and exercises to whisper down the lane.

all the different ways we have to tell the story of our lives: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?/Roz Chast

I know I was supposed to be watching the Super Bowl, gauging the plumpedness of those laced-up game balls, but I, beneath my furry blanket on the long stretch of the couch, could not take my eyes from Roz Chast's bestselling, award-winning graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Chast's illustrated story of her parents' later years is devastating and also beautiful and finally heart crunching. An only child of two people who have lived inseparably for years, Chast finds herself challenged by the encroachment of their needs and by the intensifying quirks of her parents' respective personalities. The domineering, almost bullying mother. The talks-too-much-and-can't-fix-a-thing-and-has-a-holy-soul father. They live in a four-room Brooklyn apartment crowded by lifelong detritus. They live increasingly afraid of stepping outside. They rely on Roz, but Roz is hardly enough. And when they finally agree to move into an expensive assisted-living facility, things don't get a whole lot easier.

But like Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure, the memoir we'll be unpacking in tomorrow's English 135 at Penn, Chast doesn't allow her confusion to rise to clanging bitterness. Doesn't allow her own disappointment, weariness, frustration, beleaguered condition to transmute into hateful spite. Doesn't tell her story to trump or exploit. She is just telling it as it was—the good she can remember, the empathy she feels, the anger that flashes, the hurt places in between the loved places, the ambiguity she will always feel about her mother and the love she'll always feel for her dad.

It's not a tirade, in other words. It's an archeological dig.

It's here, it's gorgeous, it proves (again, like Edward Hirsch's Gabriel proves, again) how many different ways there are to tell the stories of our lives.

the after gift of publishing the South Street/Folk Art Story

Once each month I contribute a story and photographs to the Philadelphia Inquirer, stories about the intersection of memory and place. Most recently I traveled back to the Gaskill Street trinity I'd shared with my husband early in our marriage and remembered, with the help of Julia Zagar of Eye's Gallery and Isaiah Zagar fame, the neighborhood and its evolution. I wanted to know what parts of my memory could be validated. I wanted to know, among other things, how others remembered the wow of art that lived just down the street from me—the rag-rug lady, the Christmas party thrower, the man who had painted his car, his street, his telephone pole the colors of Woodstock.

Had it all been just a dream?

I meandered, took photos, wrote, and the Inquirer published that story here.

After that, the story kept changing.

Friends and strangers got in touch with memories of the rag-rug lady I'd mentioned in the tale. Others remembered, for me, parades. Others said, I live there now or I lived there then. Reconstitutions. Plastic memory.

And then this past Thursday, I returned from a job to a phone message from a certain Ruth Drake, now living in Woodstock, New York. Call me, she said.

So I did.

Ruth Drake, as it turns out, held all the missing pieces of my story.  She had been told by a friend about the Inquirer spread. She had heard, in the lines read to her over the phone, reference to the man she had married and loved—that artist referred to, in my story, as Bud Franklin.

My husband, Ruth Drake said. (Bud) Franklin Drake.

And there it was—the full name I'd been searching for. And there was more, now, so much more, that Ruth was saying—about her husband's degrees from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, about his one-man shows, about that crazy car with the mattress spring crown and the flower-power colors that was parked out on our street. Ruth remembered with me the rag-rug lady—Ella, she said, who had been raised in a lighthouse. She affirmed the existence of the man who had lived across the street and filled his home with a Christmas tree so huge it had to be stuffed in through an upstairs window. She said that Bud had planted morning glories in a pot on their stoop and encouraged them to grow skyward, and oh, how they did. She said that she, Ruth, had gone off each morning with her corporate gloves to her corporate work and then come home to Bud's great spirit.

We'd been neighbors all those years ago. He'd painted the neighborhood, even painted a bump on the street. He'd led parades. His art was his power. I was young and watched, an outsider. I didn't know half of how lucky I was to be there then.

(Bud) Franklin Drake lived a fascinating life. Ruth hinted at the details as we spoke. At years spent in Manhattan while Ruth worked on Wall Street. At a painted Cadillac limo that attracted the eye of (among many others) the Rolling Stones. At the Drakes' colorful entry to Philadelphia in that same Caddy—Mayor Rizzo's police surrounding that car until well-heeled Ruth and her petite mother emerged and asked, sweetly, "Is there some trouble, officers?"

There was so much to tell, and Ruth told it so well, and I promised I would complete my Gaskill Street story here. (Bud) Franklin Drake wasn't just the wild-hearted artist on a street where I lived years ago. He was a well-respected, studio-famous artist whose work can still be found here, on the Franklin Drake Gallery.

Often it's not the words we write that make the difference. It's the conversations they stir.

Teaching the Teachers FLOW as part of the William Penn Foundation funded education program

Last year I shared the extraordinary news that my river autobiography, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River , was selected as a core element in a William Penn Foundation-funded program designed "to improve environmental education in Philadelphia middle schools."

The first sweep of teachers is now meeting every Saturday morning at the Water Works (pictured above) to build the sweeping curriculum that will change the way children learn in my city. This morning, I'm joining my dear friend Adam Levine there on site to contribute to this program. Adam will be sharing his huge knowledge of secret city water ways and streams that have become sewers. I'll be teaching the teachers how to teach Flow, giving them writing exercises and critiquing ideas.


And so into the frosty cold we go....