Beth Kephart's Blog, page 66

the addicting, educating genius of "Breaking Bad"

So I'm late to the party. So it took me awhile to catch on. Still, it is impossible to avoid reporting on my awe.

"Breaking Bad," the AMC TV show that won all those Emmys, all that acclaim, all that morning gossip, has snared me.

The moral genius of it. The propulsive force of it. The entangling tangling complex complete story line. The text and subtext and collaborative creatives. Aaron Paul (MisTer WhiTe). Dean Norris (it was you). Betsy Brandt (acres of purple). RJ Mitte (give that guy a good car). Anna Gunn (New Mexico in her blood). Giancarlo Esposito (because he's a man.) Bryan Cranston (I am the danger).

And Vince Gilligan. A million Heisenberg hats off to Vince Gilligan, the guy who didn't study chemistry but who compensated for that by reading Popular Science and hiring consulting experts and believing in the color blue.

Any writer out here, wondering how story gets done: Take the time to watch "Breaking Bad." Binge it, as I have. Banish your bedtime. Chart the course and count the risks. Consider all the "rules" you've been taught and how this show leaves them in shambles. You think the hero of your story needs to be likable? Think again. You want to give your characters a really long time to swat at a fly? Go right ahead, so long as you interlude and conclude with confessions that fall just shy of getting heard. You want to assert a theme without ever explaining a theme? The path has been laid. You want to go hog wild with the color purple? Tuck it into nearly every scene.

I had no interest in writing while binging on "Breaking Bad." I stopped serving real meals so that we could sandwich up and watch the Cook. I stopped thinking I knew something about poetry.

Taking GOING OVER to the schools

In just a few days the world will turn its eyes to Berlin, which will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall.

In the days to come I'll be taking that story, and GOING OVER, into a series of schools—Downingtown West, Masterman, Radnor, others—to look back, through, over walls. Why was the wall there? What did it mean? What did it do? What stories has it left behind?

Readings and workshops. Conversations and research. A few poems, a few songs, an animation. I look ahead with optimism, as I always do when I am about to meet with teens.

(With thanks to the ever gracious Ellen Trachtenberg for her great help in all of this.)

In the meantime, an utter surprise, Sister Kim of Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls, will be teaching the book in the third semester this year. A joy for me.

Also in the meantime, unbeknownst to me, GOING OVER was found in the window of the University of Pennsylvania bookstore by a friend not long ago. Thank you, Kathye, for stopping to take this photograph.

What does success do to a writer? Florence Gordon/Brian Morton: Reflections

Brian Morton (Starting Out in the Evening, among others) writes about writers. The hopes, the blockades, the pretenses, the indignities, those rare moments of glory. He writes as one who has struggled and one who has taught, as one who has come to believe in stories first, and also in patience, as he noted in this Ploughshares interview:

Nabokov said that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. More and more, my only goal in writing is to tell stories—tell stories and bring characters to life. If there’s enlightenment or enchantment to be had in what I write, I’ve come to believe that I can’t force it; it’ll show up or not show up on its own. 
 
But of course, patience is still the most necessary thing. Patience, tenacity, perseverance, stubbornness, devotion—in terms of the writing life, they’re all different words for the same thing. I think the only way to keep going as a writer is to find a way to love the writing process in its every aspect: to take pleasure not only in the moments when it’s going well, but to find pleasure even in the difficulties.

Morton's new novel, Florence Gordon, is about an aging feminist who has just received an astronomical New York Times Book Review, her dangerously affable and endearingly well-read cop son, his perched-to-leave-him wife, and their feeling-guilty-to-grow-up-but-is-growing-up-and-how-we-like-her daughter who is, at the moment, between colleges and assisting her prickly grandmother with research. It's also, as Morton's books are, about New York, where those who master the Manhattan walk may just decide to call the place home.  

Florence Gordon (which was sent to me by my good friends at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a decisive, deliberate, quick beat of a novel; the pages quickly turn. It is also a novel that slyly defies convention, leaving the reader to imagine conversations and to knot (or unknot) story threads. It made me laugh when I desperately needed to laugh. It put me in mind of writers I have known, of conversations overheard. It is a bright mirror of a time and a place and, also, a career, which is hardly the same as a profession.

It is about success—insidious, embittering, disorienting, impossible, and never enough. From Florence Gordon, just after Florence has received that glorious, late-career-changing review:

Vanessa was a psychotherapist who worked with people in the arts. She proceeded to give a few examples. A painter who, after selling one of his works to the Whitney, began to speak of himself in the third person. A writer who'd so long suppressed her desire for fame, so long suppressed the narcissism near the root of every creative life, that when she finally achieved a bit of recognition, all her hunger for it had come bursting out—a ferocity of hunger that no degree of success could satisfy—and she was plunged into a depression that took her months to recover. Another writer, a woman who'd always seemed a model of tolerance and tact, who, after finally writing a book that brought her a degree of acclaim, felt nothing but anger toward all the people who were celebrating her. Late recognition, Vanessa said, was the stage for the return of the repressed.

Alexandra too believed that success could make you crazy, and she too had a theory. Buried deep in the psyche, she thought, is a sort of lump, a creature that craves nothing except stability, and as far as the lump is concerned, change for the better is just as bad as change for the worse.

What we said about YA at Penn's Kelly Writers House

Yesterday's bleak rain had nothing on Kelly Writers House. Indeed, as it so often does, the old house on Locust Walk sheltered the alums and prospective students, the local community and faculty who braved the weather and found their way in. It sheltered and fed them.

We were there to talk about the making of books for younger readers. We were ably, intelligently led by Liz Van Doren, Editorial Director of Book Publishing for Highlights for Children and Boyds Mills Press. We—Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, Lorene Cary, Jordan Sonnenblick, and I—were, perhaps, as different as four writers could be.

Where do books begin?, we were asked, and one said with an image, and one said with tone and sound, and one said with a plot, and one said with an idea about the world, an idea about books as vehicles for getting something done.

What do we do about those adult figures who figure in books for the young? Make them real, one said. Don't let them overwhelm the story, one said. There's a reason why Harry Potter was an orphan, one said.

How do we make historical fiction pop?, we were asked. By making the characters gritty (a graffiti artist, a thief, an angry pregnant girl), one said. By not worrying about whether or not the story pops, but about whether or not it feels lived in and true, another said.

How do we maintain authenticity in the voices of our young characters?, we were asked. By hanging out with teens and listening to how they talk, we all said. By testing our work in laboratories made of child readers, one said. By not being afraid to write differently, one said, for not all teens sound the same, not all fit the currently popular formula of some parts ironic softened by some parts tender.

And so we went—building on each other, challenging each other, defending one's own cover art as being fully born of the book itself (okay, Jordan, that tag is for you). A rigorous conversation moderated by a woman with great knowledge. So many in the audience with leading questions of their own.

Respect for the form, for the art, for all the ways that we can write to the music in our heads—that was what was on display yesterday. Different instruments. Different beats.

With great thanks to Jessica Lowenthal, for making this event possible and for doing such consistently fine work at the Writers House (Jessica has made it possible for former New Yorker fiction editor/former Random House editor/author of the fine My Mistake Daniel Menaker to visit the House next February 24, but more on that soon). With thanks to Ilene Wong, for this photography, above. With thanks to all who came. (Kathye, Chelsea, so many — I'm looking at you.)

looking back at the photographs (for a new project)

For a new project due out next fall, I just reviewed some 25,000 digital photographs taken over the last fifteen years.

I skipped the gym.

Tomorrow, in the company of John and Andra Bell (and my husband), I will watch slender young things dance their hearts out in Bethlehem, as part of the "So You Think You Can Dance" tour.

I will wish, watching them, that I'd gone to the gym.

A page from FLOW whisks across the face of the Water Works

FLOW Festival 2014 / Architectural Projection Model from Greenhouse Media on Vimeo.

When the good people of the Fairmount Water Works asked if they might borrow the first prose page from Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River for a festival finale, I said yes, of course. This movie (rendered here) was projected onto the entrance house facades of the Water Works building as night fell a few weeks ago. The words come from the prose poem, "Rising."

Credits:
Habithèque Inc.— Creative Direction
Greenhouse Media— Video and Editing
refreshtech and LUCE Group— Lighting
Blair Brothers Music— Original Soundscape
Beth Kephart—The poem "Rising" from her book Flow

Cicero's peeps throw a book party (or, authorial self-promotion is hardly new)

In Cicero's day authors ready to launch their newest work would gather their friends at home or in a public hall for a spirited recitatio, or reading. Audiences would cry out when they liked a particular passage. Nervous authors enlisted their friends to lend support, and sometimes even filled seats with hired "clappers." They were keenly aware of the importance of networking to get influential acquaintances to recommend their works to others. The creation of books started off as something both personal and social; the connection embodied in that dual nature is at the heart of what makes books so good at refining and advancing thought. It was just that the practicalities of publishing in the printing-press age made the personal connections a bit harder to see.

"From papyrus to pixels: The digital transformation of the way books are written, published, and sold had only just begun" — The Economist, October 11, 2014 

(This fascinating in-depth reporting on self-publishing, book formats, and sales figures can be read here.)

you know that super smart brother of mine?

He's helping to lead the IBM team now at work on this revolutionary technology in the Cognitive Environments Laboratory. When Jeff describes this to me, he asks me if I remember the film Minority Report, the technologies for which were conjured a decade ago by fifteen scientific researchers during a three-day, Spielberg-assembled think tank.

From the Yahoo Finance article where the video above appears:

Using the capabilities of IBM's pioneering Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL), Repsol and IBM researchers will work together to jointly develop and apply new prototype cognitive tools for real-world use cases in the oil and gas industry. Cognitive computing software agents and technologies will be designed to collaborate with human experts in more natural ways, learn through interaction, and enable individuals and teams to make better decisions by overcoming cognitive limitations posed by big data.
Scientists in the CEL will also be able to experiment with a combination of traditional and new interfaces based upon spoken dialog, gesture, robotics and advanced visualization and navigation techniques. Through these modalities, they will be able to learn and leverage sophisticated models of human characteristics, preferences and biases that may be present in the decision-making process.

Jeff, who was
If you watch this video, you'll see my brother beginning at minute 2:20 in a blue shirt at a long table, thinking. He has blue eyes, light hair, and a brain that is also seemingly unrelated to me.

Thanks to Donna, Jeff's wife, for sharing the article and video, and to my father who was on this news early today.

on book dedications (and One Thing Stolen)

There comes that quiet time, in the life of a book, when we must make a decision or two about dedications. My son, my family, two editors, my agent, my students. I have had my reasons.

Yesterday, home from Hilton Head and binge-watching "Breaking Bad" in the late dark after a long work day, I stood, went to my office, and retrieved a galley copy of One Thing Stolen. I opened it to an early page, turned on the light, called to my husband.

I keep meaning to tell you, I said.

South Carolina light, in late October

... with all gratitude to my generous father, who shared his Hilton Head Island home with me for a few brief glittering days.