Beth Kephart's Blog, page 75

living my own unpublished novel: a torn page

My last night was much like one I'd written of years ago, in one of the many unpublished novels that sit here, quiet.
 <blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the family room she slowly navigates toward the two-piece chaise lounge and moves it, one piece at a time, toward the window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right up against the window, facing the moon, which now hangs unobstructed in the after-hours sky—a perfect half, an orange color — amidst the vague white constellations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had always wished for a hole in the roof of her house so that she could lie, in any weather, beneath the moon, but this, tonight, is a good enough solution—the window up, the night blowing in, the mystery of the house across the street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She settles back into the thin, sleek leather cushion and twines her hands together at her waist, the posture of prayer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She holds her eyes open as long as she can, and then she closes them but doesn’t sleep and doesn’t dream, just listens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is the soprano pulse of crickets near.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A mole in leaves, making for cover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bird call, and also bird wing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps the snuffing out of a candle now, on a table, in a house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She can differentiate the sounds, but how much better is it, after all, to let them play, orchestral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div></blockquote><div class="feedflare">
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Published on August 16, 2014 04:43

Lost and Found: a poem I wrote years ago, for a neighbor I still love

Yesterday a former neighbor visited me. There are miles between us now. There's never any distance.

She has been wondering what had become of a poem I'd written for her children years ago, when our houses sat side by side.

I said I'd look for it.

Boxes, photos, so much attic dust later, I found it.

Soup, this one deserved its own blog post.

To us. To then.

Thank you.

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Published on August 15, 2014 07:51

Us. Then.

I have been hunting through old photos and treasures—seeking a lost poem for a friend.

The poem is still lost.

But this was found.

I have loved every inch of being a mother to this son. And I still do.

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Published on August 15, 2014 07:30

My husband's book: Shades of Hamlet/ceramics as still lives

This summer a quiet new book has unfolded in the studio space behind our house. Shades of Hamlet is a collection of ceramic works presented as a series of still life photographs accompanied by excerpts from Shakespeare's "Hamlet." William Sulit, my husband, made the ceramics, staged and lit them, photographed them, and designed these most exquisite pages.

I share a glimpse of that today.

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Published on August 15, 2014 04:24

In this sweet month of books, Leslie Jamison (THE EMPATHY EXAMS) thrills me, too

I said I would give myself August just to be. To read the books I choose to read. To think the thoughts I choose to think. To daydream. To celebrate the achievements of others.

To chase nothing that cannot wait until September.

To worry not about mounting bills, disappearing clients, uncertainties.

To let the world come to me, which is to say all those hummingbirds, and so many wonderful friends, and conversations with my son, and a stirring quiet thrill over the art my husband is making, which I will, in time, share with you.

And what a glorious few weeks it has been. Not just the conversations, but the books—one outstanding book after another (it all began with Anthony Doerr) after another and more and more. The tiny blue bucket of my life had gone catastrophically dry. There is the gentle slosh of water once more.

Today I read Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. Today I marvel at her precision—these memoiristic essays, these life investigations, these raw enchantments of ideas. How do we care for others? How do we respond to quiet hopes and shrill demands?

There's just so much here. But for today, right now, this, from a conversation Jamison has with Merve Emre in Paris Review Daily. The sort of thing that I must read at once to the next students I have, in the month that won't be August.

In certain ways, as a writer, you do profit off your own experiences of pain. There's an inspirational way to see that profit—turning pain into beauty—and a cynical way to see it—"wound dwelling" in some corrosive or self pitying way. For me, the honest vision dwells somewhere in between.

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Published on August 14, 2014 05:32

River Dreams: History, Hope, and the Imagination: Two Upcoming Keynotes

A few days ago, I wrote of an upcoming September 4 talk at Radnor Memorial Library, open to the public, about my ghosts (which is to say my two Chanticleer inspired books) and my river (Flow).

Today I'm posting information for two keynote addresses I'll be giving in honor of the Schuylkill River Heritage Area's 2014 River of the Year Lecture series, on October 14 and 16. Details and registration for these free events are here.

I hope you'll join us.

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Published on August 13, 2014 13:34

Going Over voted into 100 Children's Books to Read in a Lifetime: Readers' Picks

The 100 Children's Books to Read in a Lifetime/Readers' Picks begins like this: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Charlotte's Web, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Where the Wild Things Are, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Goodnight Moon, The Cat in the Hat, A Wrinkle in Time, Little Women, The Hobbit, Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Secret Garden, The Very Hungry Caterpillar....

And then, some sixty books in, Going Over, published by the ever-fabulous Chronicle Books.

To those who have read, who have cared, who have taken a moment — you know who you are. To Tamra Tuller and Sally Kim and Lara Starr and Jaime Wong and Taylor Norman and Amy Rennert and Ellen Trachtenberg ....

I am incredibly grateful.

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Published on August 13, 2014 09:28

Nobody is Ever Missing/Catherine Lacey: Reflections

I don't always agree with the conclusions New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner draws, but I am perpetually eager for his missives. He digs in deep. He reads and writes on full throttle. He doesn't look back over his shoulder. Garner's recent review of Catherine Lacey's debut novel Nobody is Ever Missing is the reason I bought the book. Lacey's spellbinding talent is the reason I read it through in a single rainy afternoon.

The novel is a no holds barred, desperate unwinding of a woman, Elyria, who leaves her life behind and tells no one where she's going. She has a one-way airline ticket to New Zealand. She has a husband, a mother, a sister who is no longer alive, a job, the trappings of an ordinary life. Trappings. That's the word. She's fleeing the trappings of her life.

She gets off the plane. She has the vaguest of plans. She wants to be alone, leave her alone, leave her to her thoughts, watch as her thoughts unwind, as she does, as she questions everything in sentences and paragraphs that go long across the page. She doesn't wish to be with people, only near them. She doesn't tell her story, doesn't even know her story, addresses her Husband, with whom, in time, over the long-distance wire, on more than one paralyzing occasion, she will briefly speak. The depth of his outrage becomes the novel's deepest silence.

One thing happens, another thing happens, Elly is a young woman taking chances, a human being increasingly alone. She was the original abandon-er. Now the world is abandoning her. She keeps trying to put a stake in the ground. She gives up on Time.

... everyone walks around thinking nothing is going to happen right up to the moment when something does happen, just like time, how it's here one minute and we don't notice it till it's gone—no, it's not like that, I would tell the tree branches if I was the type of person who talked to tree branches or imagined a monologue for a tree's branches—no, time is a thing that is always almost a thing that is never here and never gone and never yours and never anyone's and we're all trying to get a hand clutched tight around time and no one will, so why can't we call a truce, now, Time? I am not asking, I am just saying—I'm calling a truce with time. Truce.

Yes, sure, not everyone will seek out a book that unwinds and unwinds and unwinds and carries itself forward on rafts of blistering thought and sudden violence and utter lonesomeness. Not everyone. But, Lord. Let's make room for Catherine Lacey and her ferocious determination to see this story through, to not rescue it for the Hollywood ending, to take Alone to its final restless resting place. Let's make room for this young novelist, who can do just about anything with words.

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Published on August 13, 2014 04:48

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe/Benjamin Alire Saenz: Reflections

Sunday afternoon I went off exploring. Found my way to the Chester Valley Trail and walked (and walked). Found my way to a bookstore. Found myself driving home with a copy of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe in hand.

Hours before, I'd had no plans. Suddenly I had a walk and a new book.

A book I loved.

Because this novel comes from such an honest, non-exploitative place. Because I believed in these two Mexican-American boys, finding their way into a deep friendship. Because there are no gimmicks here, no oft-returning tropes, no Big Concepts that flash like advertisements in the pages. Because both Aristotle and Dante have parents who love them, parents who look out for them, parents who give them room but also make them talk, parents who care most for their children's well-being. No schmaltz. No simplifying. No plot just for the sake of plot. A real, believable story about kids trying to learn about themselves.

I was reading, and I was saying Yes. Yes. Yes. I was reading, and I was thinking: Mr. Saenz, you deserve every award you have received for this book.

Here is Aristotle (Ari) talking to Dante's mom. We have companionship. We have compassion. We have love, but we have as well the fact that love is hard. Love is ridiculously hard. To give. To receive. To keep. Saenz knows that. He doesn't have to scream it, tag it, trick it, cute it. He just calls it like it is.

"You're a part of this family," she said. "There's no use fighting it."

"I'm sure I'll disappoint you someday, Mrs. Quintana."

"No," she said. And even though her voice could be so firm, right then her voice was almost as kind as my own mother's. You're so hard on yourself, Ari."

I shrugged. "Maybe that's just the way it is with me."

She smiled at me. "Dante's not the only one who missed you."

It was the most beautiful thing an adult who wasn't my mom or dad had ever said to me. And I knew that there was something about me that Mrs. Quintana saw and loved. And even though I felt it was a beautiful thing, I also felt it was a weight. Not that she meant it to be a weight. But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

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Published on August 12, 2014 08:35

Introducing NONE OF THE ABOVE, a debut novel by my friend, I.W. Gregorio

In November 2009, Ariel Levy, a New Yorker writer, wrote an essay about the runner Caster Semenya ("Either/Or"). She was South African, a world champion, a "natural." She had a body built for speed, a body, Levy tells us, that got some whispers started:

Semenya is breathtakingly butch. Her torso is like the chest plate on a suit of armor. She has a strong jawline, and a build that slides straight from her ribs to her hips. “What I knew is that wherever we go, whenever she made her first appearance, people were somehow gossiping, saying, ‘No, no, she is not a girl,’ ” Phineas Sako said, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin. “ ‘It looks like a boy’—that’s the right words—they used to say, ‘It looks like a boy.’ Some even asked me as a coach, and I would confirm: it’s a girl. At times, she’d get upset. But, eventually, she was just used to such things.” Semenya became accustomed to visiting the bathroom with a member of a competing team so that they could look at her private parts and then get on with the race. “They are doubting me,” she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.

I remember reading this story front to back the day that issue of The New Yorker arrived. I felt compassion—that's what I felt—for a young athlete who was working hard and running fast and doubted. For a human being who'd had nothing to say about the nature of the body she'd been born with, who was living out the dream she had, who was being dogged and thwarted by questions. Caster Semenya was a runner. She had committed no crime. And yet there was her story—in headlines, in gossip. What were her choices, after all?

Later this year, I.W. Gregorio, a beloved physician, a former student of one of my dearest friends (Karen Rile), a joyous presence at many book launches and festivals, and a leading voice in the We Need Diverse Books initiative that has packed rooms at the BEA and the LA SCBWI, will launch a book called NONE OF THE ABOVE. This YA novel is about a high school runner—a beautiful girl with a boyfriend, a popular teen—who finds herself having this conversation with the physician who has examined her:

 <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"So, Kristin," Dr. Shah said, "In that ultrasound I just did I wasn't able to find your uterus – your womb – at all."</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"What do you mean?" I stared at her blankly. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"I want you to think back to all your visits to doctors in the past. Did anyone ever mention anything to you about something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS?" </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"No," I said, panic rising. "What is that? It's not some kind of cancer, is it?" </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"Oh, no," Dr. Shah said. "It's not anything like that. It's just a...a unique genetic syndrome that causes an intersex state - where a person looks outwardly like a female, but has some of the internal characteristics of a male."</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"What do you mean, internal? Like my brain?" My chest tightened. What else could it be? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Dr. Shah's mouth opened, but then she paused, as if she wasn't sure whether she should go on. I was still trying to understand what she'd said, so I focused on her mouth as if that would allow me to understand better. I noticed that her lip-liner was a shade too dark for her lipstick. "Kristin. Miss Lattimer," she said. Why was she being so formal all the sudden? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"I think that you may be..." Dr. Shah stopped again and fingered nervously at the lanyard of her ID badge, and at her awkwardness I felt a sudden surge of sympathy toward her. So I swallowed and put on my listening face, and was smiling when Dr. Shah gathered herself and, on the third try, said what she had to say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">"Miss Lattimer, I think that you might be what some people call a 'hermaphrodite.'"</span></div></blockquote>What do the words mean? What does the diagnosis tell Kristin about who she really is? How will it change her life, what medical choices does she have, who will love the "who" of her? These are the questions Gregorio sensitively and compellingly addresses as this story unfolds—bit by bit, choice by choice, reckoning by reckoning. It takes a physician of Gregorio's knowledge and skill to tell this story. It takes, as well, a compassionate heart, and Ilene has that in spades. Ilene has not written this story to exploit. She has written it so that others might understand a condition that is more common than we think, a dilemma many young people and their parents face.<br /><br />We Need More Diverse Books, and <i>None of the Above</i> is one of them. I share my blurb for Gregorio's book here, and wish her greatest success as her story moves into the world.<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family: Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Like the beloved physician she is, I.W Gregorio brings rare knowledge and acute empathy to the illumination of an anatomical difference—and to the teens who discover, in the nick of time, the saving grace of knowing and being one’s truest self. A book unlike any other. <br /><br />— Beth Kephart, author of <i>Going Over</i> and <i>Small Damages</i></span></span></blockquote><div class="feedflare">
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Published on August 12, 2014 05:43