Beth Kephart's Blog, page 78

Astonish Me/Maggie Shipstead: Reflections

I ache this summer for stories that move me. I have a nearly insatiable need. Prove yourself to me, I dare each book that I encounter. Prove to me that fiction, literature, this whole business matter.

Maybe it's the news. Maybe it's my age. I am looking for something particular in books. Urgency, not casual entertainment.

I went in and out with Astonish Me, Maggie Shipstead's second novel about dancers, love, entanglements, second generations. In because Shipstead's command of the ballet seems pressing and real. Out because the story itself seemed perhaps too small, too familiar, too readily anticipated. In because Shipstead can write so beautifully. Out because of my own selfish need, just now, for more. In and out, for the writer in me knows how terribly difficult it is to craft a book, to finish one.

I choose, on this blog, to celebrate the good. To whisper back, over these silent airwaves, the sentences or emotions that appealed to me. Here, then, is Shipstead writing of a young woman, Joan, who is an incomplete ballerina—good enough, but not great. It is early in her life. She has discovered, on a stage, a young man who dances like she never will. She leans across the aerie and thinks:

The choreography is old-fashioned, but as Rusakov circles the stage doing high, perfect coupes jetes en tournant, his technique is not fusty but pure. His movements are quick but unhurried, impossible in their clarity and difficulty and extraordinary in how they seem to burst from nowhere, without any apparent effort or preparation. But the beauty of Arslan's dancing is not what moves Joan to cry in her red velvet aerie: it is a dream of perfection blowing through the theater. She has been dancing since before her fifth birthday, and she realizes that the beauty radiating from him is what she has been chasing all along, what she has been trying to wring out of her own inadequate body. Forgetting herself, she leans out over the railing, wanting to get closer. Etonnez-moi, Diaghilev had said to his dancers in the Ballets Russes. Astonish me.

I feel that chase. I understand it.

Free today: Nest. Flight. Sky., my Shebooks memoir (or any Shebook, for that matter)

Today and tomorrow, my friends, you can download one Shebook for free.

Go to the site. 

Use FREEBOOK as the promo code.

Find a shady spot.

Read.

I'd be so honored if you chose my memoir, Nest. Flight. Sky. But any Shebooks book will do

On writerly risk taking: M.T. Anderson and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto talk

I stole upstairs with Clockhouse in hand and read the conversation between my friend Rahna and the ever-interesting M.T. Anderson (Octavian Nothing, Feed, etc.). It's the sort of interview the whole world should read—two very smart people talking, unexpected tangents and revelations, deep questions, unvarnished (which is to say actively honest) responses.

I share just a snippet here, but oh my. The whole is New York Times quality stuff.

RRR: What is the biggest risk you ever took as a person and as a writer?

MTA: Every big work is a risk. One thing I found is easy enough to tell my students, but now I am having to tell myself is: every time you write a new book, you should try to write something that is impossible for you. You should try to write something at which you think you are going to fail. Because it's only then that you actually realize that you've succeeded in new ways you've never dreamed of before. Now that obviously a nice adage to tell students when they are facing trouble, to say, look, you just need to lean into this, and trust that you can do it and seek solutions because if you don't feel like it's impossible for you then you aren't re-envisioning yourself as much as you need to be. On the other hand, it's very difficult to do that for yourself....

The photo above is of too long ago—my husband, my son, Reiko's Ming and her boys, then Reiko herself at Hawk Mountain. Reiko sees things others don't. This interview (and her books) are proof of that.

Clockhouse arrives, wrapped like a gift

Last week I wrote about my gratitude for Clockhouse, which published my first long piece of adult fiction in many years. I'd found a snippet of my story on the Clockhouse web site.

Today the magazine itself arrives—wrapped like a gift, endlessly cared for, across its many pages.

I celebrate again. Because when a team of editors takes this much time to do things so right, two words bear repeating:

Thank you.

Give yourself time

We saw the brown bear from the boat's prow. We saw it watching us. It seemed in need of a good grooming (weren't we all, at that point?) and hungry (we were not).

I think of that bear now, these few weeks past our Alaska excursion. All alone on a rocky shore, turning the stones with its nose, looking for sustenance, finding only us at an unavailable distance.

At the close of one project and another chapter, I will soon be turning stones, too. In the meantime, I am happy to feel the breeze, to think without hurry, to explore quietly.

Give yourself time, Beth, my father says.

Three simple words.

The right ones.

My Life's Work, My Actual Calling: Project FLOW at the Water Works and in the Inquirer

We reach a certain juncture in life and we realize that there's only so much time left to us now. We look back and ask, Have we done enough, loved enough, been enough? We look ahead and ask, What now?

I have always been real with myself; I have known the me within. What are my passions? Children and stories. What have I done? Raised a son I love more than any story can tell and written books that a handful of kind souls have read. I've been flat-out lucky to publish as many books as I have, given the sales that I've had. I've been unimaginably blessed to be given the chance to take my stories into classrooms and into the open hearts of the young. I learn from them, again and again. Frankly, I love them.

Two Tuesdays ago I taught at a multi-week camp for young scientists and activists at the Fairmount Water Works. The camp is called Project FLOW. My privilege is to get the children thinking and writing about the soul of the river, akin to my own work in Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (Temple University Press). Kevin Ferris and the Inquirer team made the moment even brighter when agreeing to publish my photo essay (which includes the work of the young people) about that morning.

I'll provide the link when it goes live tomorrow. A few more photos from last week's post are here.

In the meantime, below, all of the children of the 2014 Project FLOW. Here they are listening to Sashoya read from her brilliant river creation myth.
Finally, thanks to my friend, the poet Kate Northrop, whose poem "Things Are Disappearing Here" got us all started.

hummingbird visitations

What a privilege, today, to work beneath the canopy of hummingbirds.My husband and father keep threatening to remove this overgrown trumpet vine.But then there are moments like these.

For good and for bad, I am still me.

My love affair with Philadelphia began long before I settled on the University of Pennsylvania as my undergraduate home. I was my mother's daughter, already convinced. I believed in that city.

As a student at Penn, I left the campus alone, prowled the streets of West Philadelphia, wrote poems upon my return. As a new graduate I took a job as a marketing coordinator for an architecture firm, where I, in part, researched and wrote history-rich installation placards for projects at Penn's Landing and elsewhere.

But it wasn't until I was selected, in the mid-1980s, by the team at Center City District to write a series of "permanent" installations about Philadelphia's history that I felt fully fledged and entrenched as a Philly girl. Those permanent installations, created with the graphic designer Lynda Cloud Weber, hung block by block, east by west on Walnut Street until they were not visible any longer.

The permanent installations had disappeared permanently.

Yesterday, however, while researching a series of new stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I discovered one of the long-lost  panels—came upon it quite unexpectedly. It was as if a story I'd written had been lost and then returned to me. I waited to be alone with the panel. Read it while no one was watching. Shook my head.

I haven't changed much, all these years later. Not in what I write about, nor in how I write it.

For good and for bad, I am still me.

The Flamethrowers/Rachel Kushner: Reflections

With every book I read, I learn not just more about the world but more about my mind and how it receives or won't receive language. Some books rushing through me like a wind, some pooling in my soul, some remembered not at all for plot but for their mood. Some saying, Stay awake, stay awake, there's so much here.

Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers challenged me. I was in awe of how deeply Kushner had imbibed her material—motorcycle racing, 1970s art, rubber trees, Italian gangs, ennui, Nevada salt flats. I was perpetually aware of a story happening at some distance, beyond me, beyond my full capabilities as a reader. Long passages of extreme brilliance. Some interludes with their own internal logic. A study of a time and a place and a certain kind of people. A triumph, in many ways, this book. But perhaps I more fully admired its parts than its whole.

I would like to share here a block, a favorite part. Kushner can write magnificently about almost anything. Here she is writing about the process of becoming. Her acuity is breathtaking. This passage, and many others, reads like notes to a novelist. I study it. I value it. I share it.

... he also drew from me, that night in the Italian restaurant, things I hadn't spoken about to anyone before. What I thought about as a child, the nature of my solitude, the person I was before I went through puberty and became more readably "girl." The person I was before I became more readably "person." We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal "me." I wasn't so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.

on holding our own tongues, and the movie "Chef"

Maybe I am one of the last people in America to see that delicious movie, "Chef," but maybe that's okay: I saw it when I most needed to. It's a Jon Favreau concoction (he wrote it, directed it, stars in it, produced it). It's Roy Choi influenced, cubano-sandwich powered, infiltrated by actors I love—Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey, Jr., Dustin Hoffman, Bobby Cannavale, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Sofia Vergara. It yields wide patches of time to the fabulous young actor Emjay Anthony. It explores what happens when one's safe world implodes and there is nothing left to lose. You have a job as a chef in a fine restaurant? You have a beautiful girlfriend, an ex-wife who loves you, a little boy who thinks the world of you, security? It all blows up after a bad restaurant critic's review, and you fought back over Twitter? Boom. What are you going to do? Maybe you'll go small. You'll start a food truck.

Affection, humor, tenderness, food you can practically eat off the screen—it is abiding in "Chef." But resiliency is the film's primary theme. Getting back up after someone's been unkind to you, after the unfair thing has happened, after you lose your decorum, your reputation, your holdings in the blink of a Twitter eye. What is the trajectory of second chances? That is what "Chef" is about.

We're out here as writers, and some critics will be unkind. We're out here doing our service jobs, and the person on the other end of the phone has demeaning attitude, that power that comes from being the one in charge, that edge in the curl of their words. We're out here letting the lady at the ATM yell at us because she's having a bad day. We're endlessly holding our own tongues, being the better guy, stepping aside, or stepping up. But, who knows? Someday we may just blow. We may just speak our equalizing minds.

"Chef" is about the guy who blew and the guy who got it back.

It's about hope of another kind. Hope that we can be our best selves again. Hope that the world will make room.