Beth Kephart's Blog, page 63

Nest. Flight. Sky.: on the physical page in the Shebooks anthology

Deeply grateful to Laura Fraser and Peggy Northrop and the entire Shebooks team for including Nest. Flight. Sky.: on love and loss, one wing at a time in a first print anthology that also features the work of Mary Jo McConahay (on war reporting in Central America), Faith Adiele (on women's health), Barbara Graham (on abuse), Ethel Rohan (on survival and forgiveness), and Susan Ito (on the search for a birth mother).

The book is here, with me, and and now available for order. I am especially grateful to Beth Hoffman, the incredibly talented and generous author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and Looking for Me, for lending her voice to the back cover.

Neverhome/Laird Hunt: Reflections

 
"Also: it's not a Federal crime to put something in someone's mailbox, if you tell them, right? OK bye."
Wrote Kelly Simmons. In a text message. After she told me to be sure to look for the setting sun. While I trained back to Philadelphia from DC.
Not a crime, I thought. Not when it's Kelly Simmons.
It was dark when I outted Kelly's secret: a copy of the Civil War novel, Neverhome, by Laird Hunt. She'd read it not long ago and raved. She has exquisite taste. She knows what I love. She knows we often love the same thing (see Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See). There it was.
First sentence: "I was strong and he was not, so it was me went to war to defend the Republic."

Oh, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, I thought. I'm a-gonna love this book. And so I read. Couldn't stop reading. Had soup to make, cranberry sauce, potatoes. Had gifts to (skim through and then) wrap. Had my gorgeous son home with me, but I just sat there reading. The story of a woman who goes to war as a man. Who emerges as a song and a myth. Who starts out with some tenderness in her heart and who hardens over time, temptation, warship. She's known as Ash Thompson. She can shoot a squirrel at many feet. She can crawl herself out from under the heavy load of a fallen tree. She can confuse most but not some. She can help a one-armed man carry the photographic plates from which a greenhouse will be built. (Oh, that image, one of my favorite ever found in a novel.) And she will never, really, get home again. She will tells us her story in her broken-poem way, even though she isn't trying for poetry, not even close. Poetry is just how her words come even when she's talking about the rut of damage on her arm:

The flesh of my arm crept each day closer and closer together. Like two ragged companies didn't know yet they were fighting for the same side.

Or what happens in a ruined asylum when she's trusted with a razor:

I shaved him, then shaved his friend, and every now and then after I got called on to scrape a face. Mostly it was guards but twice or three times there was a prisoner in the mix. These were big-bearded things attached to some flaps of skin, some ruins of shoulders, some piles of bones. When I shaved them up there was anything left to them. You could of just dug at the dirt and kicked them straight into the hole. They were happy, though. Smiled and winked.

Neverhome is a book magnificently well made, but that doesn't mean the story isn't hard to live with. The ending that you see coming isn't easy to take. But you take it because it's smart and vivid and so real that I started reading again at 3 AM last night and finished this morning so I could tell you, on Black Friday, that if you have to go out buying things, buy this book for a friend.

I'd have bought it for Kelly Simmons. But she's already read it.

Preparing the table, at Thanksgiving

This photograph was taken a few short weeks ago, during our first slight snowfall, when the leaves on the trees that shelter my deck were still clinging to their limbs, or falling in red surges.

Today we watch rain turning to slush turning to snow and wait for those we love to find us.

These are restless days in our nation, and on our planet. I wish you peace as you wait, as you watch, as you wrangle with the news which is always, ultimately, personal.

What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir/Abigail Thomas: Reflections

You know how it is—the winding and wending through book booths. The writers signing, the multiples of the new fresh things in stacks; it's hard to take it in, at least for me. I never return home from The Events with a bag full of randoms. I return home with the books sought out or placed in my trust. A handful.

But there I was, Friday, at the National Conference for Teachers of English at the National Harbor Convention Center. I'd be doing my own signing in fifteen minutes, but I had time. And so I walked, my eyes cast down, and there it was, a pile of books, the cover whitish and thin, two streaks of color, a title, a name. Abigail Thomas, I read. Kept walking. Stopped. Backtracked.

Abigail Thomas? At NCTE?

"Um," I said, to the Scribner person.

"Yes?"

"Are you giving these ARCs away? By chance?"

"You want one?"

"Desperately."

"So go ahead."

It was mine! The new Abigail Thomas memoir, coming in March 2015, but I don't have to wait that long. Not me, who loves Abigail Thomas, who sang her praises in Handling the Truth, who reads her words out loud to my Penn students. Not me. I have What Comes Next and How to Like It. I read it when I was supposed to be writing, which is to say I read it today. All day and now I'm done, I'm finished, and I'm sad about that, because books this good don't come around too often. Books this good need Abigail Thomas to write them.

"Abigail Thomas is the Emily Dickinson of memoirists," Stephen King has said. UmmHmmm.

Where to start, or have I said enough? A book about friendship and motherhood, about painting and words, about comfort and soup, about sleeping all day, about waking ourselves up, about love, an "elastic" word, Thomas tells us. Proves it. Thomas could blare, in her bio, about a lot of writerly things, but what she says first is this: "Abigail Thomas is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve." Yes. That's how Thomas describes herself because that, with infinite beauty, is who she is first. Who she will be. What makes her the powerhouse writer she is. (Though to that description one must add a pile of dogs.) Thomas writes, in this new memoir, about how we hold on knowing that one day we won't. How we outlast ourselves, or live with the fact that outlasting doesn't last.

I loved every torn page. The arrangement of the pages. Thomas's smart abhorrence of chronology. How many times, in class, to students, to writers, have I said: Don't tell me the story in a straight line. Break the grid. Steer your way toward wisdom by scrambling the sequence of facts.

Now I'm just going to read Thomas:

I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it's so boring. This comes out of me with the kind of vehemence that requires a closer look, so I scribble on the back of a napkin while waiting for friends to show up at Cucina and it doesn't take long to figure it out. The thought of this happened and then this happened and then this and this and this, the relentless march of events and emotion tied together simply because day follows day and turns into week following week becoming months and years reinforces the fact that the only logical ending from chronological order is death.

Yes. And that, by the way, is a single chapter in a book built (miraculously) of brevities. A book in which the page by page sequencing is as shattering as the pages themselves.

Why do we go to NCTE?

For the friends we have made, and keep on making.

For the quick lobby Lisa embrace. For the spontaneous crisp-night-air talk with Paul. Because Mark stops when you call his name. Because Michael is there. Because Ilene finds you, and Mary does. Because Susan is there, right there, in the atrium. Because a Freckled Librarian brings her megaphone. Because a friend from long ago surprises you. Because Joan has another Ted Hipple Special Collection book for you to sign. Because Jennifer and Susannah are in the house. Because Edie tells you stories and because Melanie really does have that color hair and because you have found Liz weeks after the panel she moderated and you can tell her (again) how intelligent she was. Because Michaela and K.E. are so talented, and because you have much to learn from Christine and Shanetia (and because you will come to covet Christine's coat and Shanetia's easy dancing heart). Because your sister is there.

Because Chronicle Books is that kind of company, the kind of company you deeply want to keep.

And because Debbie Levy is in the mix—Debbie with her wide intelligence and big heart, who drives you, when it is all said and done, to the shadows of the Capitol and to a reservation she has made in a restaurant called (appropriately) Art & Soul. Debbie, who has given you two of her most recent books—the award-winning We Shall Overcome: The Story of a Song, illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton and utterly smart as it offers the biography of a rich and prevailing song; and Dozer's Run, illustrated by David Opie, the adorable true story of a dog that ran a marathon, and then ran home. Debbie, who has given you, as well, "Dark Lights," the original jazz recordings of Alex Hoffman, her very talented son.

We go to NCTE for the people we find there.

At the Reading Market in advance of Thanksgiving, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer

Oh, that Philadelphia Inquirer. Oh, Kevin Ferris and your design team. You make waking up every fourth Sunday such a pleasure. Thank you for the glorious celebration of the Reading Market in today's Inquirer. I loved writing this piece and taking those photographs. I love being a Philadelphian.

The story can be read in its entirety here.

This essay is one of three dozen that will appear in LOVE: A PHILADELPHIA AFFAIR, due out from Temple University Press next fall. More on that here.

Elena Vanishing/Hope and Other Luxuries/Elena and Clare B. Dunkle (Chronicle Books): Reflections

A few years ago, in a novel called The Heart Is Not a Size, I wrote of Juarez, of a squatter's village, and of two best friends, Georgia and Riley, each of them navigating this foreign terrain while also navigating secrets. Georgia was privately negotiating anxiety attacks. Riley was declaring to anyone who asked (and Georgia, seemingly unwisely, had begun to ask) that she did not—absolutely did not—have an eating disorder, that she was not starving herself.

I wrote the book and created the characters because I understood both conditions all too well.

This coming spring, Chronicle Books will publish two companion books—true mother-daughter stories—about a young woman's struggle to stop hearing the hectoring internal voices that left her body starving, her heart working too hard, and her future imperiled. Calories were Elena's enemies. A bite of toast was a grave mistake. Numbers were everything. And Elena Dunkle was, in too many terrible ways, dying.

In and out of hospitals. In and out of rehab. In and out of conversations with the family who loved her and the specialists who seemed incapable of hushing the terrible voices. Elena Vanishing is grounded in extraordinary medical records, journals, and conversations. It is told in a high-velocity, present-tense voice. We see Elena's world. We hear the voices in her head. We rush headlong into an illness that may have a name but still remains, for every person afflicted, a mystery. Where does anorexia begin? How is it finally controlled? Where is the key that fits the lock, that stops time from running out?

You will read, your heart pounding. You will remember a version of someone you were, or someone you loved, or love still.

Ultimately, as Clare reminds the reader in an introductory letter, "this isn't the story of anorexia nervosa. It's the story of a person. It's the story of Elena Dunkle, a remarkable young woman who fights her demons with grit and determination. It's the story of her battle to overcome trauma, to overcome prejudice, but most of all, to overcome that powerful destructive force, the inner critic who whispers to us about our greatest fears."

There is depth, beauty, horror, and beauty again in Elena Vanishing. You'll read it, as I did, in a single day. You will think not just about the story that got made, but the story as it was being made—this mother, this daughter, remembering together, writing together, reaching out to the world together.

And when you are done there is a book called Hope and Other Luxuries to turn to—Clare Dunkle's memoir about loving this vanishing daughter of hers. Both books are being released by Chronicle next May. Both were edited by Ginee Seo, who poured her heart into these true stories and, once again (in Chronicle fashion), broke new ground by deciding to publish both sides of a story about an illness that affects millions of people around the world.

I own, it seems, the first two signed ARCs of both books, for I met Clare and Elena at the Chronicle booth at NCTE yesterday morning. I would like to thank Chronicle, as I close this blog, for including me at this event, for making such a home for me, for extending your friendship so warmly. Ginee Seo, Sally Kim, Jaime Wong—you threw one heck of a party, you look so good surrounded by Chronicle blue, and I am so proud to be a Chronicle author (and a Tamra Tuller writer).

Deepest thanks to those who stopped by to say hello, who stood in line for One Thing Stolen, who came and surprised, who spoke with me over a delicious meal. Twenty-four hours at the National Harbor. Not to be forgotten. Nor are these two books, by a mother and daughter.

Philadelphia: A Love Affair (coming in Fall 2015 from Temple University Press)

A year from now, Temple University Press will release Love: A Philadelphia Affair, a collection of thirty-six essays on the intersection of memory and place. Thirty-eight of my black-and-white photographs will accompany the text.

Some twenty of those essays first appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer—pieces I was lucky enough to write for Inquirer editors Avery Rome and Kevin Ferris. Others have been written over the past few months for the book itself, taking me into and around the city on days of rain and sun to consider the streets, the architecture, the gardens, the sidewalks, the highs, the lows, and the communities that have played such a powerful role in the ways that I see, the books that I write, and the stories I teach. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, Dangerous Neighbors (1876 Philadelphia), Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent (1871 Philadelphia), Small Damages, Handling the Truth, and even One Thing Stolen all reflect, in different ways, my love for this region and the people I have met here.

My great thanks to Micah Kleit, Ann Marie Anderson, and Gary Kramer at Temple University Press for helping me to see this dream through. My deep gratitude to Kevin Ferris and Avery Rome, who made my writing about this region such a pleasure. And huge appreciation to my agent Amy Rennert, who saw the details of this project through.

Micah and I wrapped the book up yesterday, from an editorial and photography perspective. I can't wait to hold this book in my hands, to be able to tell the world again and in new ways why I love where I live.

Talking the Wall (and all those fabulous students) with WHYY Morning Edition's Jennifer Lynn

What an honor it was to join Jennifer Lynn, host of Morning Edition, at the WHYY studios in Philadelphia (listen here). We were talking about the Berlin Wall and the conversations I've been having with students at Science Leadership Academy, Downingtown West, Masterman, and Radnor High about freedom, risks, and responsibilities.

The Berlin Wall is down, but what walls still stand?

Would you risk it all for freedom?

Do you know what you desire?

Given a wall and some cans of paint, what mark would you leave behind?

Given a page, what poem would you write?

What matters most in our lives?

I loved the students I met, the stories they told me, the deep respect these students clearly have for those who nurture and teach them. I am incapable, often, of fully articulating just what my interactions with students and their beautiful librarians and teachers mean to me. Jennifer and Joe Hernandez were exquisitely kind to invite me onto their show and to work with me so that we might tell this story succinctly.

The story will air this morning at 7:45 AM. More on the work of these students and the experience can be found here:

On Teaching the Berlin Wall
At Science Leadership Academy: the Huffington Story
At Downingtown West: poems and graffiti art
At Masterman High: poems and graffiti art 
At Radnor High: poems and graffiti art
At Radnor High: photographic outtakes
Common Core Aligned Teacher's Guide
Please go here to read the teacher's guide for Going Over, a Berlin Wall novel

Note: Right now, Liz Taylor, the award-winning history teacher at Masterman (with whom I spent some time during the Wall Talks), is working toward getting her classroom ten new Chromebooks for her classroom (think of it!). You can help by following the directions below, and wouldn't it be amazing to do this for a school in the Philadelphia district, where funding is stretched and endangered?

1.  Go to https://www.thankamillionteachers.com...
2.  Select Pennsylvania from the state list and enter "taylor" in the last-name box
3.  In the list of proposals at the bottom of the page, find "E. Taylor, J.R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, Philadelphia, PA Technology in History Education!" (it's currently the only result)
4.  Fill in your email address and check the box that you're over 18
5.  Click "vote"
6.  Check your email for a message with the subject "verify your vote"
7.  Click the "verify your vote" link in that message

One Thing Stolen: teacher's guide (a first glimpse)

Once again, the Chronicle team has done an exquisite job of creating a teacher's guide.

This time the guide was created in support of One Thing Stolen, a story about dangerous obsessions, an Italian city, an historic flood, and hope, due out in April 2015 (more on the book here). We'll be posting a live link soon. This, above, is just a fragment. It moves me deeply to think of someone giving a book such close attention, pondering its heart and lessons, and crafting (and designing) a guide this lovely.

The teacher's guide to Going Over, another Chronicle masterpiece, can be found here.

Thank you, Jaime Wong and Chronicle Books.