Beth Kephart's Blog, page 62

In clay I was allowed to fail; I loved my failings

Yesterday I said goodbye to the pottery ladies—and to Bobby D., too. The semester was over and I know, looking ahead, that there will not be time in my upcoming world for Wednesday-morning clay.

The thing about clay is that it allows you to fail. Smash it up. Try again. Recook the glaze.

The thing about working in a medium where no one expects you to succeed is that you leave without marks, reviews, evaluations. You laugh it off. You dive into gossip. You show up with your hair in a knot and no one asks for explanations. "What are you making?" they might ask. And I will say, "This."

The work here is the work of my semester. I experimented with trays, added an apple to my apple collection, built an old-looking pot, bent a grid, punched holes into a bowl so that I might someday weave burlap through it.

Someday.

Oh, Pottery Ladies and Bobby D., I will miss you. Thank you for making room for this novice.

In losing, we grow more grateful for all that we still have

Today I lost something that was important to me. It's no longer here. The one significant thing I'd bought in Berlin, a city I desperately miss. I left this artisan's work, I realize (only today, I realize), in a hotel room a few weeks ago. I've called. There's no hope for it. It's gone.

So this box of treasures is a lesser place now. So I have chastised myself all day long. For taking leave of a hotel in haste. For not being at least a little bit smarter.

(All my life, I've wished that I was smarter.)

But as much as I hate not having this jewel anymore, I've lived today feeling so blessed, too. That my loss is but material. That my loss is, in the end, so small.

There are planes falling out of the sky. There are children not coming home. There are jobs that disappear. There are flood waters inside homes. There are wars and there is terror and there is age and there is hurting and there is impossible injustice, raging.

Sometimes losing is what we need to be even more grateful for all we still have.

Dear Thief/Samantha Harvey: Reflections on a brilliant novel

I'm not sure how many books have been added to my library courtesy of the great critic James Wood—which is only to say that I read his essays, and I believe him. But this weekend, thanks to this Wood review in The New Yorker—this welcome defense of the odd in literature—I bought Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief.

And swooned.

Those wanting a plot summary will have to do (here) with this single sentence: A woman, middle-aged, is writing a letter to the friend that she loved and hated and loves still, and still hates.

What matters, mostly, is the way that letter is written, the compression and elegance of time that it portrays, the unreliability of testimony and the sick power of delusion (self delusion, the delusion of others), and the sentences, one after another, so brilliant.

The voice.

The anti-instructions on writing, like this:

I have wondered about this kind of thing for the last hour, sitting here turning the piece of Roman jet in my hand and trying distractedly to think of ways of describing it. This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.

The statements of paradoxical fact (perfectly bound up with the novel, perfectly true within our own lives):

I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive—knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

The articulation of life:

We encroach on one another, be it painfully or pleasurably, we encroach and run into each other, and this is what we know fondly or otherwise as life. It is not life to think that to love somebody is never to be where they are and never to intrude upon them.

Obviously I need to say no more.

Just buy it.

This is the season. Live it while you can.

Somewhere along the way I've decided to think of this particular holiday season—its every single day—as a gift, which is to say not as a headlong rush.

I will have nothing to do with checklists. I will distribute the gifts as I find them—on Thanksgiving tables, at my father's door, in a bag slipped to a friend at lunch, in packages mailed way too early, but who cares.

I will dance the flawed cha cha once again, for it means time spent with friends. I will head out in the gray slash of wet weather with one of my very oldest friends, searching for barn lights and orchids behind frosted glass. I will wear sequins in a library and stand, grateful for my city, among beloved writers and clients, the daughter of one of my mother's closest friends. I will make my way to the early service at church to sit with my father and to listen to a minister whose words, so often brilliant, embraced, today, dark and light, candles and prayer, the story of a divided then freed Germany. I will set aside my writing "plans" to spend Sunday afternoon among Moravian tiles with the man I love, because

this is the season,

this right now.

I'm not waiting for the calendar to tell me when.

I'm living while I can.

The odds are powerfully stacked against originality — and yet: read James Wood on Samantha Harvey

It's been a week of long and important correspondence with friends. Among the topics: How do we manage lives built (in part) of original ideas? Stories that haven't been previously told. Characters that don't come pre-packaged. Books that don't fit the cross "this famous book" with "that famous book" and you have this new easily tagged and marketed and therefore soon to be famous book.

We talk, we ponder, we encourage. We look for signs.

I found one this morning, reading James Wood (oh, bless James Wood) in The New Yorker, discussing, in an essay titled "Fly Away," the work of Samantha Harvey.

I'd like to share the opening paragraph:

The odds are powerfully stacked against Samantha Harvey's third novel, "Dear Thief" (Atavist): sometimes you feel that the author has enjoyed building a trembling wall of them. Her novel takes the form of a long letter, written by a woman in middle age, to her childhood friend, and so most of the narration languishes in the corridor of the second-person singular. The friend (the "thief" of the book's title) disappeared a decade and a half ago, and so the narrator does much reminiscing, with the danger that the novel drifts fairly often into the pressureless zones of retrospect. And the narrator's lost friend was a "character," a large personality remembered, with loathing and love, for her enigmatic singularity: so, most perilously, Harvey's novel must work to convince us that this vague "you" of the narrator's letter deserves her extravagant reputation and the time spent recalling her. The book is sometimes precious or whimsical, and can be frustratingly diaphonous. It has nerves of silk; it could probably do with more robustness, and a bit of comedy.

So it is odd, Wood tells us. So it veers. So it isn't what we "expect." And yet, the rest of this fantastic essay is devoted to the beauty and success of this novel "with no interest in conformity."

To which I say, Yes. Through which I decide, I am buying Samantha Harvey.

Thank goodness for James Wood and The New Yorker (which also celebrates the poetry of Olena Kalytiak Davis is in this issue). Thank goodness for publishers who believe that there are readers out here who are willing to venture into non-conformist territory. Thank goodness for editors who say, It's worth the risk. You are.

And thank goodness for my friends who believe, with me, in the odd and the new.

living in incomprehensible times and finding, in the personal past, perspective

Maybe it's the time of year, but I'm feeling nostalgic.

For a time when I believed (at least) that there was more justice in the world. For a legal system that did not turn away from videographic evidence to render an incomprehensible decision. For an era of greater self-restraint—less lambasting, say, of the unprotected innocents; less strutting with keystrokes.

For a time when we all paused another beat or two before we pressed Send.

We live on a crippled planet, and we've placed each other on edge.

Yesterday, following a zany corporate work week, I took a walk in the bright chill air. Didn't know where I was going really, just had to get out, away, unto myself. I ended up in a shop a mile or so down the road and there encountered a former classmate from Radnor High. I see her, from time to time—at the gym, out in the world. She is a first-rate beauty, that miraculous kind who doesn't seem to know it, or, if she does, to care. We talked about the things that matter most—our families, our children. About loving our parents. About the ways our children are carving out their lives. About the digital age and Google Adwords and small apartments and courage.

It was real, personal, connected, meaningful—this chance conversation—and as I walked away I thought again of all those people from my past who keep returning. Who show up at NCTE and tell me the story of a life. Who gather at Chanticleer for an almost evening. Who slosh through a rain storm for a reading. Who stay in touch in gentle ways.

I thought, I think, of how I didn't know what I had, who I wanted to be, or what I was building toward, all those years ago, and yet, somehow, the past finds me. The past, which seems necessarily gentle to me now and more whole. The past, which yields perspective. The past, which pauses and which is, somehow, more comprehensible than so much of what is happening in the present.

Olena Kalytiak Davis — in memory, in The New Yorker — and what a poem is

I'm absolutely certain that Olena Kalytiak Davis would not have loved the idea of me sometimes looking for the ephemera of her when I visited Alaska this past summer.

But I did. I searched. Couldn't help it.

I'd met her at Bread Loaf. She'd haunted us all. Reading in the moted light about a wedding dress. Sitting on a stoop in the early morning, the smoke of a cigarette swirling. The things people say and the things she said, and the delicate and fierce in her, and later, riding a train from DC with a fellow National Endowment for the Arts juror, the talk between him and me was almost all Olena. Where she was. What she was doing. How much better mystery is, than fame.

She lives in Alaska. She's a single mom and an attorney. She has a new book out, a third, "The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems." And also: Dan Chiasson just gave her two amazing pages in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

I gasped when I saw it. Hadn't find her in Alaska. Found her here, in the dark, after a many-hour work day, when I needed a little actual poetry.

From the last paragraph in this exquisite bit of appreciation, lessons on poetry, thoughts on Davis:

The medium of poetry isn't language, really; it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively.... Writing a poem, you create that vivid otherness; reading one, you re-create it in your own person. These two lonely souls, writer and reader, are bound to one another. They can be miles or centuries apart, but in Davis's book the passage between them sees some heavy traffic.

Art on the Hill and Crowds in the Streets, in Today's Inquirer

In today's Inquirer I write of a recent visit to the Paul Strand exhibit, and the marathoners—and winners—who crowded the streets. The full story can be found here.

With thanks, as always, to Kevin Ferris. And to the city I love.

your story is waiting for you

More than a year ago (perhaps two) I had an idea for a novel. A really cool novel. A genre-breaking novel. A let's-drop-the-categories novel. A novel I'd have given anything to find a swatch of time to write.

That isn't my life. Time is elusive.

Every now and then, on the sly, I scratched out a page or two. Then weeks would go by, months, of utter dormancy.

It's no way to write a novel, right?

But, for me, it is. It has to be.

Yesterday, and the day before, I found an hour to return to this book. What struck me is how much I had taught myself about the story and the way it was getting told throughout the months of not writing a word. I'd solved problems I hadn't even articulated to myself. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, I thought, as I read over my own shoulder. Then: Here. This part. That's right. Do more of this.

Today the corporate work swirls once more. Today and tomorrow and perhaps for much of December then in through the spring semester at Penn there will not be much novel time. And yet, progress has been made, the book comes more clearly into view, my mind keeps telling some part of my mind the story, as it waits for typed-out words.

I write all this, put it here for you to say: If time is running short on you, do not despair. Somewhere in your head, your story is waiting for you.

Branded incapable, she made exquisite art

There's a very special young woman at Chronicle Books (I think I've mentioned this) named Taylor Norman. Has books—and kindness (and smarts)—in her blood. Is out there reading our manuscripts, tweeting our stories, talking about our books, talking us off cliffs if, indeed, we find ourselves standing on cliffs.

A few days ago, Taylor, who, read One Thing Stolen , my novel about Florence, Italy, art, obsession, and mental wellness, when it wasn't much of a book at all (oh, poor Tamra, and oh, poor Taylor), sent this link from The New Yorker. It tells the tale of an exquisite fiber artist, Judith Scott, whose work involved the making of secrets—embedding umbrellas and tree branches and other found objects within weaves and knots.

But that is not all of who Judith was. Judith was a twin sister, born with Down syndrome, whose profound deafness went undiagnosed while she lived out her years in an institution. Here is the story, in the words of New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott:

Scott died in 2005, at the age of sixty-one, and didn’t start making art until her mid-forties. She was born with Down syndrome, went deaf as a child, and never learned how to speak. Languishing in an institution in her native Ohio for more than three decades with her deafness undiagnosed, Scott was considered so beyond help that she wasn’t allowed to use crayons. In 1986, her fraternal twin, Joyce, brought Scott to San Francisco and enrolled her in Creative Growth, a community art center for disabled adults. At first, Scott dabbled in drawings. A smattering are in the show, but they’re no match for the radical beauty that followed, when Scott took a textile workshop and had a breakthrough, loosely binding sticks into an uncanny totemic cluster. As her work gained complexity, the Bay Area began to take note; by 2001, Scott had been the subject of major shows in Switzerland, Japan, and New York.

So much about this story sears. And yes, Taylor, this reminds me, in so many ways, of Nadia Cara, my character, whose art is also a secret as well as a compulsion coming from a secret place.

Judith Scott's work is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum. I intend to see it.