Beth Kephart's Blog, page 79

publishing my first adult fiction in many years, in Clockhouse

Years ago, when I was a young mother desperate to find more hours in each day, all there was for me was fiction. Short fiction. Published in journals like Sonora Review and Alaska Quarterly Review and International Quarterly and Rosebud. Publishing was my conversation with the world. I had yet to meet an actual writer. I'd taken no classes. I was naive. My critiques came in the form of letters from the editors.

Later there would be attempts at "adult" novels, but always something intervened. The El Salvador novel became the El Salvador memoir (Still Love in Strange Places). The adult novel about southern Spain became, after nearly a decade, Small Damages, a novel for young adults. And so on.

In the meantime, through other projects, panels, moments, rides on subway trains, I met so many special people, including Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, who remains my dear friend today; indeed, I recently spent a blissful Brooklyn afternoon in her company and missed her for days afterward. It was Reiko, a beloved faculty member at Goddard College, who suggested to the Clockhouse team that I might be a right contributor for the second issue of this new and beautiful magazine. An essay, they suggested. How about a poem? I suggested back. But in the end, we went with fiction.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see this first sliver of adult fiction, an excerpt from a novel in progress, appear in a magazine produced by such an incredibly kind team, including Julie Parent, Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, and Stacy Clark. I am equally happy that Reiko is the angel on all our shoulders. And I was touched to learn, a few weeks ago, that Heather Leah had been asked to read my story aloud to a gathered few as the printed journal emerged from the press. I wish I could have been here.

There are excerpts from a number of pieces here.

The list of contributors can be found here.

Thank you, Clockhouse.

from Beth Kephart’s The Velocity of Wings:

“Oh, Love,” Becca said. “Oh, God. Kate.” And she couldn’t lift her, couldn’t hold her, had to keep herself back, no harm, she kept thinking, no harm, and she ran her finger just as gently as she could up and down Kate’s one whole arm, singing a song she remembered from long ago, some idle tune from Prague that Kate had loved, that Kate remembered, she could tell that Kate remembered it now; it was the right thing to sing, it was all Becca could do—no questions, don’t make Kate talk, no harm—and now, at last, from around and above, from a place far away but growing near, there was the sound of sirens.

Blue, Becca thought. The sound of blue. A hard scream into a spring day until the macadam crackled and a van door slammed, and there were two pairs of boots coming, a stretcher between them, Becca calling them around to the rear.

Weird Al Yankovic explains my job. Somebody had to do it.

Those of you who wonder what I do all day, I present you with this explanation, courtesy of Weird Al Yankovic, also courtesy of Charlene McGrady.

I know. Right? You thought I was special?

Naaahhhhhhhh.

(Kidding, my dear, necessary clients! Kidding! I need you, and, I hope, you need me to help you monetize your assets and operationalize your strategy.)

One Thing Stolen, the Florence novel, has a PW moment

So grateful to have ONE THING STOLEN included in this Spring 2015 Children's Sneak Previews from Publishers Weekly :

CHRONICLEChronicle channels the Force for Star Wars Short and Sweet: A New Hope by Jack and Holman Wang, a 12-word retelling; I Wish You More by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illus. by Tom Lichtenheld, celebrating everyday moments of abundance; The Water and the Wild by Kathryn Elise Ormsbee, a fantasy debut featuring a portal in a bejeweled tree; One Thing Stolen by Beth Kephart, about a girl who develops strange behaviors when she moves with her professor father to Italy for six months; and Vanishing Girl by Elena Dunkle and Clare B. Dunkle, a mother-daughter memoir featuring daughter Elena’s struggle with anorexia.

the next books are the books I've wanted to read forever, and couldn't

I am focusing hard on the corporate work these days—doing the projects that arrive, finding the projects that don't even know they need me yet. Beth the Marketeer. Beth (yes, some of them call me this) the Machine.

We do what we must.

There'll be little time for my own literary work during these days, and so I look forward to easing my mind away from work pressures with books I bought or acquired long ago and never had the time to read. Books like Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, Louis Greenstein's Mr. Boardwalk, Jayne Anne Phillips' Quiet Dell, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Violet Kupersmith's The Frangipani Hotel, Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife.

I owe these writers my time. I feel like less than me because it has taken so long. If it still takes me a terrible (not beautiful) forever to report back on these books, know that I am doing all I can.

So far, I can tell you this: 50 pages into Kushner and I'm in awe.

Life Drawing/Robin Black: Reflections

Think of the artist at work—the fits and starts, the long, unhappy spells, the sudden epiphanies that shrink pitiably with the light of the next day, the not knowing, the not ever actually knowing, the blind and buoying faith, the fissures of faith.

Think of a partnership of many years—the slow or sudden love, the deep and necessary trust, the private needs that are not spoken, the small infractions that are, perhaps, lies and isn't any lie a betrayal, and doesn't every betrayal hover afterward, shift the scene and change the light? Doesn't every betrayal threaten a cascade of betrayals? Where will they come from? Will we be ready?

Think of friendship—the tricky, sticky slopes, the little envies, the perfect hours, the grave misjudgments, the accusations, the cowering aftermaths, the ones left wounded on the path. Think of how easy friendship seems, and how utterly fraught, and how nearly impossible to heal when it shatters.

Think of the spooling away of memories—of a mind lost to a disease, of a man and his memories remade, of conversations that have little footing in reality, even though, of course, they are reality, they are what is happening right then. The Alzheimer's father talks. The daughter listens. Nothing is irrefutable, except for how it feels in present time.

In her penetrating and perfectly calibrated first novel, Life Drawing, Robin Black plumbs the depths of art, love, friendship, and memory and surfaces with a book of transcendent clarity. Life Drawing is a book about consequences—the consequences of an affair, the consequences of instinctive but perhaps not well-placed trust, the consequences of honesty, and anger.

Gus, the artist, and Owen, her writer husband, have retreated to a quiet country home in a land of spectral greens; the pond before them is perfectly round. The two are at work on their respective canvases. They abide by conversational rules laid down to protect each other from the things that must not be said or discussed in the aftermath of the affair Gus had several years before. They are interrupted by a neighbor who has escaped a violent husband and whose daughter, Nina, will show up before too long. Gus has a father with Alzheimer's, whom she frequently visits. She has a student, a young woman, with whom she has formed a meaningful connection.

The book is taut, smart, a closed and inexorable world, a stunning page turner. We know from the outset that Owen is dead, and so we want to know why Owen is dead, but even more compelling, at least to this reader, are the questions: Does anyone survive the wounds they have inflicted? Is love bigger than the past?

We turn the pages because we trust Black to know. Because we believe that she has something to say—inside the novel but also outside of it—about how we live our lives. Black is an intensely intelligent writer—nothing superfluous here, every thread that rises needled back down to the open-weave cloth, every color in the tapestry checked for what it tells us about lived entanglements. Her book, deeply emotional and resonantly rendered, is, remarkably, complete. No stone unturned.

We who write, we who create, we who live—we know how elusive, how difficult, how nearly unattainable completion is. A completed conversation. A completed work of art. A completed story, told.

Life Drawing is complete.

I loved it as much as I loved Black's collection of short stories, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, which I read while I was in Berlin several years ago and reviewed here.

we were then: happy birthday to my husband

Thirty-plus hours into labor twenty-five years ago, the hour ticking slowly toward midnight, I had a choice—deliver this baby of ours on July 19th, so that his special day would always stand alone, or deliver him a few minutes later, on July 20th, so that he and his father would celebrate the big day on the same day each year.

We opted for separate birthdays.

The baby was born, and then, minutes later, just after midnight, I said happy birthday to my husband.

A baby now 25 years old. A marriage 29 years old. An ageless husband.

Happy birthday to the artist I love.

my baby turns 25

and love is never a big-enough word.

To the handsome young man who has taught me everything about what it means to live right, to be kind, to forgive, to go on—thank you, and a very happy birthday.

what the inside of my brain looked like, earlier today

How cruel, the migraine.How glorious, southeastern Alaska.

every story we write is a gigantic leap of faith

It is possible to write nearly an entire novel and not know precisely who that mysterious character is until the last late night before the novel is due.

I know that. I'm living proof.

There this character has been all along, a mystery to the others in the story, too, but, hey—she's not supposed to be a mystery to you. You created her, after all. You put her down on the page. You fell in love with her, just a little bit.

Shouldn't you know who she is?

Late last night, which was really early this morning, which is to say 3:30 AM, however you'd like to classify that, the final piece of the novel I've been writing came into view, and I seized it. I said, Yes. I let a small tear fall, maybe another tear, what did it matter? No one was watching.

Every story we write is a gigantic leap of faith. Every sentence is up for rearrangement. But you know a book, even a novel, is true when it surprises you, when the surprise makes you cry, when you think that, at last, you've earned a night of sleep again.

Maybe you can stop obsessing because you know something now. Something new. You know it, and it belongs to you.

Tamra Tuller.

Tamra Tuller.

Thank you for reading so quickly.

GOING OVER: The PW Review

Among the things that happen when you don't Google yourself is that you can sometimes overlook very kind words for which you should have long ago given thanks.

Publishers Weekly, I apologize for not knowing of your generous review of Going Over sooner. I share it here now, utterly grateful.

Kephart (Small Damages) crafts an absorbing story of young love and conflicting ideologies set in 1983 Berlin. Ada, 15, lives an impoverished life in West Berlin with her mother and grandmother, while 18-year-old Stefan—who Ada has loved for years—lives with his grandmother in dull Friedrichshain on the other side of the wall. The plot shifts between Ada's life, which includes "graffing" scenes of heroic escapes on the Wall itself and visiting Stefan when she can, and Stefan's dissatisfied days spent working as a plumber's apprentice while developing tentative plans to attempt to overcome the wall, despite the potentially fatal consequences. Kephart alternates between the two teenagers' voices, with Stefan's voice written in second-person; deeply held desires for freedom and escape, both physical and artistic, radiate from each narrative. A subplot involving a Turkish boy in need of help gives the novel additional depth, and the sharpness of the lovers' separation is as deeply felt as the worry that they will never reunite. Ages 14–up. Agent: Amy Rennert, the Amy Rennert Agency. (Apr.)