Beth Kephart's Blog, page 60

ending the year with a little laughter (Gary Shteyngart)

I am at work on a long essay and preparing for the memoir class I'll teach this spring at the University of Pennsylvania

This is hardly drudgery.

I am, for example, entertaining myself by reading Gary Shteyngart's brilliant bittersweetness, Little Failure. It is quite an effort, between crying at all the funnies and crying at all the sads, but I have persevered.

Today, last day in a year that has been hard for so many of us, on so many of us, I pluck a passage from Little Failure to share. The deliberately understated absurdity of it made me holler with laughter. I hope it makes you laugh, too. Sometimes laughter is the best gift we can give another.

Here are Gary and his father, relative newcomers to Queens. They have an adventure:

There's a movie theater on Main Street, and my father is excited because they are showing a French movie, and so it must be very cultured. The movie is called Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman, and it will be interesting to see how joyful these Frenchwomen actually are, most likely because of their exquisite cultural patrimony. ("Balzac, Renoir, Pissarro, Voltaire," my father sings to me on the way over to the theater.) The next eighty-three minutes are spent with Papa's hairy hand clasped to my eyes, the Herculean task before me: getting it unclasped. The less explicit parts of Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman are set in a Hong Kong brothel or a Macao girls' boarding school, and then it's all downhill from there.

remembering my mother

There were two bouquets like this one two Sundays ago at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church—gifts from my father, remembrances of my mother, all white blooms.

I think of her today, her final day, eight years ago. I think of her every day.

Missing you, Mom.

Brown Girl Dreaming/Jacqueline Woodson: a whole story, a lesson on writing

This morning I have been raised up by Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's masterpiece. I have sat with her poems and her life on my lap, seeing with greatest clarity. A story of growing up in the south and in the north, of reading slow and remembering deep, of telling stories that might have been as if they happened yesterday. Life is apportioned but it must be lived whole. In fractions we find our trembling unities. In love, our idea of home.

This is Woodson's story. But it's also the way she tells the story, the deep, clean beauty in the lines, the wisdom in the narrative idea, the authenticity of the recurring themes, not a single (bless her) gimmick. It's how she speaks for all of us, how she makes us want (at once) to pass her story on. It's how she  makes me remember, when I read her book, sitting in the back of a teacher's conference in Boston, only last year, with Nancy Paulsen, Woodson's editor, beside me (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin). Woodson was on the stage. Paulsen was smiling.

"She's written such a beautiful book," Paulsen leaned over and whispered, and I said (all honestly), "I have no doubt."

Not one.

Have no doubt about this book. Read (if you haven't already) the whole, but start with this single page called "writing # 1." It, like the entirety of Brown Girl Dreaming, calls to all of us:

writing #1

It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak,
the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair,
crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.
But as I bend over my composition notebook,
only my name
comes quickly. Each letter, neatly printed
between the pale blue lines. Then white
space and air and me wondering, How do I
spell introduce? Trying again and again
until there is nothing but pink
bits of eraser and a hole now
where a story should be.

Perfection? I think so.

on leaving your writerly self some writerly threads, and on reading RAIN REIGN

I was feeling sad. It doesn't matter why. I wrote part of a story then I didn't have a next, and so I went to take a walk. To think this inchoate tale of mine through. To cast about for a "then...." I wasn't planning to write another word, but I don't believe you can leave a story hanging on the edge of its own cliff. You have to have something to return to—tomorrow, next week, next year. You have to have some dangling threads.

I went to a patch of woods, stood by a creek, took photographs, made notes, gave myself a place to begin again.

Then I came home and chose from this stack of books and read.


Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin is the book I chose. Count me now among the crowd of admirers of this simple-seeming book. It's the story of a girl who loves homonyms (which are in fact called homophones), a girl who loves rules, a girl whose single dad may not be well-equipped to handle her quirks, her needs. Against the odds, this girl's dad does, for her, something that seems right and good—brings home a dog she names Rain. But after a superstorm separates the girl from the dog, she learns loneliness, worry, and how to handle the truth. How to be bigger than one's own needs. How to see the world as others do.

How do we teach our children integrity? We give them books like this one—Rain Reign.

How do we write well, whenever we will write again?

By reading the right books. By burying our sad in another's art.

what do you want? to write (a shred), to read (up next, on my list)

But what do you want? a friend asked, and I said (hurrying past, on an errand, again), Time.

I'd give you some of mine, if I could, he said.

I believed him. I walked on.

This is a Sunday. I claim it as mine. I spent the morning writing a shred of this strange new inchoate book of mine, the one that will take a very long time; let it take a very long time. I don't want to be in any other imagined space than this one. I don't want to write to be done. I don't want to know, even, if the world will want this book of mine. I just want to write it. Twenty-five thousand words in, and who knows what the hell will happen next. I write to find out. I write to invent the language that this story must be told in.

This afternoon I will choose among the books I have lately gathered unto myself and read. Little Failures. Brown Girl Dreaming. Rain Reign. I'll Give You the Sun, The Dinner. And also, a gift from Daniel Torday's publisher, The Last Flight of Poxl West, which is due out in March and which has been called many great things by many great people.

A writing morning. A reading afternoon. The gift I gave myself for Christmas.

There are no failures .... words my son lives by (and the failure memoirs)

Whenever I want to learn something really important about life, I hang out with my son, a philosophizing dude if ever there was one.

During a recent search for a new career, this handsome philosopher never once allowed disappointment or consecutive near misses or the perplexities of corporate America to daunt him.

You're winning because you never lose hope, I would tell him.

I'm doing what I have to do, he'd say.

One day, texting the words above, he also wrote this:

"I've come up with this motto," he said. "And I plan to live by it."

This year at Penn (a coincidence) I'm teaching failure memoirs. As I prepare for the class, reading, say, Charles Blow and Daniel Menaker and Gary Shteyngart, I'm looking back at my son's live-by-them words and thinking about how implicit that lesson is in each story I read—and how it applies to us all.

We had our son's motto carved into cherry wood and framed for Christmas (my husband's design). It's not a new car, a new suit, a new electronic device, even. But it seemed the biggest gift we could give. Our son's intelligence reflected back at him.

wishing you peace; our holiday card

Married 29 years. That means we've together made 29 cards. This year, it was Bill's pottery and photography that inspired a few words.

Wishing you peace at a tremulous time. Goodness, because it waits for you. Kindness, where you can give it.

Twenty Feet from Stardom: the documentary, the feeling

We've all been there. So close, but not yet. Passed by, again. Promised, but the promise floats off, vanishes on the horizon. The hard work, the high hopes, the quiet.

We make music. Others star. No matter where we are, in our work out here, it can feel like we've missed the boat called "Big Time."

Is it the boat we want to be on? Can we even answer that question?

Is it our fault? Is it anybody's fault? Is it talent? Is it timing? Is it luck?

Last night I watched the 2014 Oscar winning documentary, "Twenty Feet from Stardom." Didn't expect as much depth as I encountered. Didn't think I'd cry; I did. Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer. Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Sting. (Judith Hill, midway.) The distance between the back-ups and the spotlight. The barriers—the right song or luck (not the talent, in these cases)—that stand between. The things that happen to those who press ahead and those who step aside. The regrets, in both cases, the need for grace in it all.

This is an important story for the artists it introduces (again). For the superstars we already know, but who speak (not surprisingly, in all these cases) from a magnanimous place. For us, wherever we are, whatever we want, whichever doubts we entertain. For the music that, nonetheless, gets made.

Twenty Feet from Stardom. 

And?

thoughts on 30th Street and a son's homecoming, in today's Inquirer; thoughts on the new Robert Hellenga novel, in the Chicago Tribune

With gratitude, as always, to Kevin Ferris and the Philadelphia Inquirer team. The link to the story is here .

Those interested in my thoughts on the new Robert Hellenga novel, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, can find them here, in today's Chicago Tribune

Introducing a Gorgeous New Magazine Called GROW

I have spoken here of Adam Levine, a Philadelphia writer, historian, gardener, and friend who was so instrumental in my search for Schuylkill River images during the creation of Flow. I have referenced a certain Rob Cardillo, an exquisite photographer (he and Adam together created the definitive guide to the great gardens of Philadelphia), who recently asked me to join him at Chanticleer in something other than a black coat. (I took my own small camera along and snapped these photos.) Let me here introduce Scott Meyer and Kim Brubaker, former editor and art director for Organic Gardening, respectively.

Together these four have concocted a most gorgeous magazine called Grow, for the 25,000 or more members of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. It has launched this week. It is worthy of a celebration.

I was honored to contribute this back-page essay to Grow. Rob Cardillo took this photograph just before the rains unleashed at Chanticleer. I share just one column of the text. The rest lives for the Growers of PHS.