Beth Kephart's Blog, page 7

Bowls + Vases. Bill + Beth. A Ceramics Offering.

Our pots will soon be on sale!

Talking Memoir and Life with Friends on the Liars Club Oddcast

What a fun conversation I had with the Liars Club a few weeks ago. I mean, they'd asked questions, I'd start laughing, and then I'd have to think quick to come up with answers.

Because, you know, the pressure was on.

We talked about memoir, Juncture workshops, young-adult literature, life, and what it means to be a writer alive in this world.

With thanks to Kelly Simmons, Jon McGoran, Gregory Frost, Merry Jones, and Keith Strunk. Great writers and people, all. It's lovely to imagine them sitting around a table, chatting. It's lovely to be in their presence.

To listen to the whole thing, go here.

And if you happen to be in Frenchtown, NJ, next Thursday evening, join us for the Frenchtown Empathy Project. Kelly Simmons will be in the house. Keith Strunk will, through our writers, on the stage. And all of those who have joined us for this memoir week will be sharing their words for the people of Frenchtown, who are so graciously hosting Juncture.

The Frenchtown Empathy Project

Next week, nine writers from across the country are joining Juncture Workshops in Frenchtown, NJ, for a week of memoir writing. We'll be discussing the works of great memoirists, reviewing the in-progress books of our exceptional writers, seeing what happens when we expand the work with new prompts, and celebrating the whole town in a Thursday evening Empathy Project event.

The event is free. If you live nearby, I hope you'll join us.

"People are so interesting." Elizabeth Strout/ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

Monday evening I headed to the Free Library of Philadelphia to join friends for an evening celebrating Elizabeth Strout. I'd seen Miss Strout, years before, in a small classroom at Swarthmore College, but that was before her great fame, before the HBO adaptation of Olive Kitteridge, before last week's New Yorker profile. I'd just had a rather unfortunate encounter with another famous writer the week before, and I was hoping, how I was hoping, that great fame had not dented Strout's original charm.

That fame had not made her immune to the questions her readers wish to ask.

Good news for all of us: It has not. In conversation with the always-delightful Laura Kovacs, Strout was smart, precise, concise. "Right," she'd say, touching her glasses, and that would say it all. Then she'd say a little more, and we were with her. The entire, sold-out audience was.

More than once, Strout commented on how interesting people are, and I could imagine her on subways, in restaurants, over coffee, listening for the odd and beautiful articulations of nearby strangers falling in and out of love, hope, despair. What we love about Strout, and what is so gorgeously apparent in her newest linked fiction collection, Anything is Possible, is her ability to marinate even the crustiest characters with moments of moving reverie and meaningful hesitations. Maybe they aren't always the most pleasant, honest, well-meaning people, but they come from hard places and they still seek the dazzle of sun-struck snow or maternal affection or a place where they might confess.

They are still so very human, so very interesting, and when they hurt, when they act hurt, we cannot blame them. We're glad to find them again, set off in different light, at a different angle, a few stories later.

It is in the seemingly smallest of exchanges that so much devastating beauty happens. Here, in "Mississippi Mary," a mother and daughter reconnect in a small Italian town. They've not seen each other for four years. The daughter, trying to be hip, has arrived in a too-tight pair of jeans. They have been thinking toward each other, these characters, but also speaking past each other. They have spent time in the ocean, the mother in her yellow two-piece suit, the daughter in her conservative one-piece. Then there is this moment. They are discussing those jeans.

And then Angelina—oh bless her soul—began to really laugh. "Well, I don't like them. I feel like a jerk in them. But I bought them special, so you'd think I was, you know, sophisticated or something." Angelina added, "In my one-piece bathing suit!" Both of them laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and even then they kept on laughing. But Mary thought: Not one thing lasts forever; still may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.

To try to define, in academic fashion, just why this hits so hard would be impossible. But we don't need to dissect it. We just need to embrace, and I can't think of a reader out there who would not embrace this book.

During the open question period, a fan asked Strout something about the other writers to whom Strout had been compared. Strout wavered, then returned to the suggested notion of Alice Munro, a comparison she liked a lot.

I'd like to share two others: Louise Erdrich, in her early books. Kent Haruf in all of his.

Small moments. Big heart. Wise writing that gets out of its own way.

That's what Strout delivers.

celebrating the art of curation, with Kirsten Jensen at the Michener

Several weeks ago, my husband and I traveled to Doylestown, PA, to spend time with the Michener Art Museum curator, Kirsten Jensen. I wanted to know what it took to curate a show. She took me, with ease and endless fascinations, into her process, her thinking, her world. I loved our time together. I wrote about it.

That story is here, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With thanks to Kevin Ferris, as always.

Clay Sale: Bill and I to sell our combined clay work for the first time ...

... ever this coming June 3 and 4, Wayne Art Center.

We'll provide more details as the days approach. Bill throws and trims the pots. I glaze them.

at work on a new F. Scott-infused book, my mother speaks to me

For the past two years I've been collecting research for a new book, a Jazz Era book, based on the life of someone I can't stop dreaming about. She knew all the stars of that time. She was a star herself. And at one point, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Zelda lived not far from her, shared meals with her, invited her to their home.

Remembering an F. Scott book my mother had given me years ago, I turned to it the other day, searching for historical detail. It opened at once to this page. My mother's words to me, when I was just seventeen.

It's as if she's speaking to me, now.

Mom, your F. Scott obsessed daughter is at last writing her F. Scott-infused novel. It took her long enough.

The Centennial Visionary Series/In conversation with the Women's National Book Association

Invited to speak to the WNBA as part of the nationwide Centennial Visionary Series, I'll be sifting back through time and my own work to create a collage of female voices. A river. A young girl deciding to keep her baby. A teen facing a progressive neurological disorder. A 1983 graffiti artist living on the west side of the Berlin Wall. A teen facing a monster storm. I may read a poem or two.

If you're near, I hope to see you. It's free, but a RSVP is hoped for.

my Chicago Tribune review of Kristen Radtke's extraordinary graphic memoir, IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS

You want to know what words and art can do? What a woman, seeking, finds? What ruins tell us about what is yet to come?

Then buy your copy of IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS, the exquisite graphic memoir I review this week in the Chicago Tribune.

My review, along with images from the book and an audioclip can be found here. This will be your best internet diversion of the day. Do it.

Music of the Ghosts/Vaddey Ratner: My Chicago Tribune Review

In today's Chicago Tribune I review Vaddey Ratner's novel of Cambodian loss and love, Music of the Ghosts. 

The entire review can be found here.