Beth Kephart's Blog, page 81

choose happiness

On the topic of happiness, two recent essays give us up.

The first is "Rhapsody in Realism," in which David Brooks reflects on Lydia Netzer's "15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years." The theory has to do with imperfection. Fessing up to it. Facing it. Living with it. I quote:

But Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”
People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance. Politics is ironic because powerful people make themselves vulnerable because they think they can achieve more than they can. Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy. There’s an awesome incongruity between the purity you glimpse in the love and the fact that he leaves used tissues around the house and it drives you crazy.

The second piece was part of my daily Linked-In feed, a story by Bernard Marr about happiness and how it might be found. Marr has five tips for us: Live a life true to yourself, don't work so hard, have the courage to express your feelings, stay in touch with your friends, let yourself be happier.

Let yourself be happier.

He explains:

Happiness, it turns out, doesn’t have that much to do with the car you drive or the job you have or even the person you spend your life with. Happiness is actually a choice.

It’s the difference between seeing an unexpected event as a setback or an adventure; the difference between being frustrated by a delay or relishing the time alone; the difference between resenting someone for who they aren’t and loving them for who they are.

We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us. Our happiness, our success, nearly every detail of our lives comes down to choice, and we can choose to live the way we truly want to live, or spend our final days regretting the choices we didn’t make.

 We are all flawed people, that's a fact. But we still, thank goodness, have choices we can make. 

the story is what got you here: Gail Caldwell and other books of summer

I have a dream, and it is this: to make this, the summer of friendship, also the summer of books. Both things at the same time. My idea of heaven.

(Throw a few good meals in, and it would be exponential heaven.)

Recently, with readerly hopes, I went out and bought some new books. To add to the piles of books not yet read. I don't know. I could not help it. On my list:

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us (James Nestor)

All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

The Frangipangi Hotel (Violet Kupersmith)

Hungry (Heather Swain)

Sekret (Lindsay Smith)

I also bought Gail Caldwell's new memoir, because of course I had to; anyone who loves memoir must. Caldwell's truth talk is exemplary, which is to say that her stories are always bigger than herself. Caldwell never talks at us, as some memorists do. She draws us up at her table, gives us some tea, and makes room for conversation.

New Life, No Instructions is a slender volume—a story about a woman who has never married, who has no children, who has recently lost her best friend and her beloved parents, whose hip is finally giving way. What will send her living forward? What lessons are there in the intimacies of friendships that are built out of years and proximity?

Caldwell doesn't have all the answers; she doesn't pretend to. But she searches with such tremendous authenticity, she yields such simple and lovely vignettes, she honors those who have passed on, she is alive, she is on her river.

And she talks to us about telling the truth about the stories that have made us who we are. Words for all of us:

I've also been asked if I was resentful about getting a new diagnosis as late as I did, at least a decade beyond the initial symptoms that indicated my hip was failing. The answer is no, and not because I'm trying to be valiant. I think it's because of all the years I've spent in AA meetings, listening to people's stories. They can be terrible stories, full of anguish and fear and disrepair. But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

the summer of friendship

This is the summer, it seems, of friendship. Of deeply meaningful lunches with friends whose stories have evolved, so magnificently, through the years. Of an afternoon spent in the glorious Brooklyn home of a very dearest friend. Of long conversations with neighbors—conversations that began a long time ago and that pick up right where they ended, as if many seasons and much weather had not intervened. How have you been? How do your seeds grow? How is your daughter, your husband, your mom? Of reunions with high school friends. Of saving grace phone calls and long walks. Of conversations with poets. Of former students who write or who appear in bookstores; they are growing up, they are growing up so beautifully. Of new friends, too, who kiss me on the cheek as if I have known them forever, or present me with a beaded lei and an ALOHA. Of emails that make me laugh out loud or astonish me or leave me with that happy something that erupts, naturally, when another's dream has been fulfilled.

They have waited, it has happened, it is good—and I am soaring with them. I am glad to be their friend.

The summer of friendship.

I've been thinking about that. Grateful for that. And, today (and for a long time, for our friendship is a long one, too) I am also grateful to a certain Nathaniel Popkin, who writes more beautifully about this city and about books than anyone I know. The man knows things, and he is a poet. Last evening, driving home from a perfect New York City day, I found these Hidden City words that had been Tweeted out to the world, and to me. I don't know what to do about words like these but to say, again, thank you. Thank you, Nathaniel, for your generosity.

The back and forth of life. The deep listening.

Today's early morning hours bring a note from the ineffable Paul Hankins, who had found a book I'd written long ago in a pile at the Goodwill. Who picked it up. Who read. Most writers would not count a remaindered Goodwill book as a happy event. But I do. I do. A quiet book, after so many years, finds its way out of the near trash into the hands of a distant friend. That seems to me far more sweet than any bestsellerdom might have been.

Today, morning, a note from a student soon returning from a Fulbright year. What it means to me to hear her stories. How lucky, knowing her, I have been.

Today, in the mail, notes from two bright young souls. Boys I've known forever now. Boys I'll soon be calling men. I've said this before. I'll say it again. I'll sit and listen any time to what this next generation says.

Today, late afternoon, a long conversation with a dear friend. Someone who knows me. Someone of whom I can say Tell me the truth, and she will. We're not perfect people. We have to, now and then, ask another to adjust the mirror so that we might look, again, at ourselves.

The back and forth. The deep listening. A fluid life. A day in summer.

Let us be honest: A New Directions in Writing Workshop, Pentagon City, VA

Because the program intrigues me, because I believe good things can happen when like-minded people gather around a table to think about the past and what it means, I said yes to Kerry Malawista when she kindly invited me to conduct a full-day workshop on behalf of New Directions next spring.

We'll focus on senses—not just what we see, taste hear, smell, touch, but the power of heat and its absence, the causeways of pain, the prerequisites of balance and bodily awareness. I'll share the works of favorite poets and memoirists, launch small exercises, listen carefully to the emergent memories, help shape them.

Each participant will move, throughout the day, toward a single, honest, well-rendered moment—a memory that lives rightly on the page. We will, together, build a community. We'll reflect on some of the memoirs I discuss in Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir , and why they are essential to a writing life; we'll reflect on some brand-new titles, too.

A handful of personal critique sessions on manuscripts-in-progress will be offered during breaks. 

If any of you are interested in participating, please leave a comment or send a note. I'll have more information shortly. For now:

Let us be honest: A Memoir Workshop
New Directions in Writing
http://newdirectionsinwriting.com
Residence Inn, Pentagon City, VA
April 23, 2014
9:00-5:00

 More on New Directions in Writing:

 . . . an innovative three-year postgraduate training program for writers, clinicians, and academics who want to develop their skill in writing with a psychological perspective.  We have been of help to  students who were novice writers and to others who were well-published authors, and to all those in-between.  While most of our students have been psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, our student bodies have also included journalists, authors, and university faculty, among others.

In seasonal weekend conferences and optional summer and winter retreats, our community of students, alumni, teachers, and guest faculty come together to explore topics of psychological interest which stimulate our minds and enrich our writing.  Each weekend has a specific topic focus, such as memory, play, trauma, gender, writers block, mourning, revenge and forgiveness, religion, boundary, children’s literature, evil, the body, music, neuroscience, projection, and imagining a life.

Writing helps us to think. Thinking helps us to write. But writing is the focus of the program.

What, in the end, is enough? Reflections in the Philadelphia Inquirer

All week long I am thinking about ambition. The things we want and why we want them. The adjuration of enough.

I sit in the home of a poet and listen to him speak about choosing family over notoriety, quiet meals over the blustery pursuit of being widely known. I count the consequences of yearning for more - more opportunity, more visibility, more success, whatever success actually is. I think about how much more honest and unthwarted friendship means than a you-are-the-winner life.

Blustery pursuits. More and more. It can be dangerous stuff.

I'm still pondering Saturday morning, when I set out for the Bryn Mawr Farmers' Market, one of a number of marketplaces in the Farm to City network that celebrates local farmers and food artisans. (Farm to City markets can also be found in Rittenhouse Square, University Square, on East Passyunk, Girard, and Moyamensing, and in Havertown, Chestnut Hill, Swarthmore, among other places.) The temperature is a rare 70 degrees. The skies are blue. The air is breezy. The white tents in Bryn Mawr's Municipal Lot 7 have about them a carnival mood.

Read the whole story here, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Upcoming FLOW events, and a chance to win a copy of the new paperback

Yesterday the Temple University Press fall catalog arrived and Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, now released as a paperback all these years after it first appeared in hardback form, is featured among the pages.

Later this year, on July 15th, I'll be with my dear friends at the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center, leading a river-oriented writing workshop. On September 29, I'll be joining Stephen Fried and Neal Bascomb at the Pennsylvania Library Convention, for a nonfiction panel; Flow will be part of that story. On October 14 and 16,  I'll be giving two keynote addresses in honor of the Schuylkill's place as 2014 River of the Year, at Montgomery County Community College and Trinity Urban Life Center, thanks to my friends at Schuylkill River Heritage Area. Next year, in April, I'll be traveling to Washington DC, to meet the 7th and 8th graders of St. Albans Lower School, where Flow is the required summer read, and, later, to Pentagon City, VA, to conduct a writing workshop (Flow and Handling the Truth inspired) for New Directions in Writing (more on that soon). Other events are in the making.

In celebration of this paperback dream fulfilled, I would like to extend an invitation to you. Write, in the comment box here, a favorite memory of a river—any river, any state. Your comment doesn't have to be long. It just has to mean something. Three of you who comment here (and who live in the United States) will win a paperback copy of Flow. The contest ends June 27th.

The Temple University catalog page, in full:

Flow: 

The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River
Beth KephartListen to a podcast, of Beth Kephart's keynote address at the Bank Street College of Education, 9 November 2013.

"Beth Kephart's Flow is just a sumptuous book — haunting, poetic, lit up with gems of beauty and history. We engorge ourselves on materialism. The legacy of our generation will be our consumerism. But Flow and its exquisite evocation of the Schuylkill River reminds us that nature still trumps everything. Which makes the book all the more beautiful and all the more rare."
—Buzz Bissinger, author of A Prayer for the City and Friday Night Lights

The Schuylkill River — the name in Dutch means "hidden creek" — courses many miles, turning through Philadelphia before it yields to the Delaware. "I am this wide. I am this deep. A tad voluptuous, but only in places," writes Beth Kephart, capturing the voice of this natural resource in Flow.

An award-winning author, Kephart's elegant, impressionistic story of the Schuylkill navigates the beating heart of this magnificent water source. Readers are invited to flow through time-from the colonial era and Ben Franklin's death through episodes of Yellow Fever and the Winter of 1872, when the river froze over-to the present day. Readers will feel the silt of the Schuylkill's banks, swim with its perch and catfish, and cruise-or scull-downstream, from Reading to Valley Forge to the Water Works outside center city.

Flow's lush narrative is peppered with lovely, black and white photographs and illustrations depicting the river's history, its people, and its gorgeous vistas. Written with wisdom and with awe for one of the oldest friends of all Philadelphians, Flow is a perfect book for reading while the ice melts, and for slipping in your bag for your own visit to the Schuylkill.
BACK TO TOP—Sy Montgomery, author of The Journey of the Pink Dolphins and The Good, Good Pig
"Kephart...provides an intimate meditation on the Schuylkill’s story."
—Philadelphia Style
"In this autobiographical treatment, Kephart uses short lyrical essays and black-and-white photographs to let the Schuylkill River recount its life, it’s origin in creation and geography, its place in history, the famous personalities who graced its shores and crossed its water and its place in the hearts of Philadelphians who rely on it for water, recreation and solace."
—The Patriot-News
"Flow is a poetic meditation on the Schuylkill River’s place in Philadelphia’s history, transporting you back in time."
—Filmbill
"In her new book, Devon’s Beth Kephart poeticizes Philadelphia through the keen observations of its eldest resident, the Schuylkill River, which has long served as the city’s source of water, power, industry, and beauty. Flow adapts the river’s motion, winding past local events and retelling them with an imaginative and poignant voice."
—Main Line Today
"Kephart's well-researched essays provide historical nuance...a prescient contemporary account of the city's history. But it is the narrative poetry, in the taut female voice of the river, which makes this a book to descend into, slowly, with all senses at the ready....Kephart is a master not only of descriptive memory, but of constructing an existential vocabulary."
—The Philadelphia City Paper
"[I]t goes proudly on your coffee table to advertise your intelligent indie reading."
—aroundphilly.com
"I’ll see the Schuylkill differently on my ride home tonight, and maybe it’ll be a closer friend now."
—UWISHUNU
"From the first footsteps of Native Americans, to wars, progress, industrialization, and beyond, the river serves up commentary with a mix of plain-spoken facts, dramatic embellishments and historical illustrations. The result is an engrossing and unusual take on the area."
—Arrive
"An admirer transforms her glimpses of the life of the Schuylkill — once wild then pressed into human service, and now rediscovered for its remnant beauty— into spare prose that is often moving, whether or not you live in Philly."
—Orion
"In this autobiographical treatment, Kephart uses short lyrical essays and black-and-white photographs to let the Schuylkill River recount its life, its origin in creation and geography, it’s place in history, the famous personalities who graced its shores and crossed its water and its place in the hearts of Philadelphians who rely on it for water, recreation and solace."
—The Patriot-News
"I can’t imagine a more beautiful book about a river than Flow."
—University City Review
“Kephart gives the Schuylkill a voice, a memory, a melancholic sensibility. She has given us a finely-tuned and moving work of art, an exquisite book of loss and wanting. In 76 narrative poems and nearly as many short historical essays, Kephart returns the ‘hidden river’ to its place in our hearts.”
—Context
"What a gem!... I could not have asked for a more beautifully written, poetic and personal story of the Schuylkill River.... You may want to read this during the summer, when you can relax and absorb its powerful tale."
—St. Albans Lower School blog

The end of noise: how Feldenkrais (which is to say Valerie) saved the day

Readers of this blog know that, beginning in early March, a drummer took up residence inside my right ear and rarely ever left. Sometimes I called it a jackhammer. Doctors called it a geiger counter (they could hear it, apparently, with ease). It was loud. It was mean. It was endless, save for the four or five hours each month when it miraculously stopped, only to gear up and start again. Sleep was a challenge. Thinking, writing, reading—the tools of my trade—required enormous I'm-not-listening focus. And it was exhausting.

A week ago I mentioned, on Facebook, that I'd been granted a few sweet hours of silence. A friend—Valerie Grant—commented quickly that I should come and see her. Valerie Grant, the award-winning posture coach of the Philadelphia area, a pilates instructor, the mother of two sons who went to school with my own. Valerie Grant, neighbor and friend, who traveled to Nepal not long ago to help peasants straighten their spines and ease away from their pain.

"Come see me," she said, and I—who rarely make time for those parts of me—said yes. I was desperate. I couldn't think. I had used up all the noise on the white-noise machine. And I know Val. I know her. If anyone could help me, it was her.

In addition to her many skills, Valerie is a practitioner of Feldenkrais, a method of somatic education. From the web site: 

The Feldenkrais Method is for anyone who wants to reconnect with their natural abilities to move, think and feel. Whether you want to be more comfortable sitting at your computer, playing with your children and grandchildren, or performing a favorite pastime, these gentle lessons can improve your overall well being.

Learning to move with less effort makes daily life easier. Because the Feldenkrais Method focuses on the relationship between movement and thought, increased mental awareness and creativity accompany physical improvements. Everyone, from athletes and artists to administrators and attorneys, can benefit from the Feldenkrais Method.

I deliberately read nothing about the Method before I arrived at Val's. I wanted to hear from her about it. I would submit. I will tell you now that this method involves quiet touch. Unobtrusive touch. Fingertips that speak to muscles that speak to the central nervous system.

Five hours later, the noise inside my head was gone. Gone. It threatened to return a day later, but soon it was off again. On this third day post-Method, there is still silence in my head—unbelievable silence—so much so that I just called the third specialist who was to see me Friday and said, I'm not sure I need to come; the noise is gone. I told that specialist about Valerie. Please, I said. Tell others who might be suffering.

As I am telling you. If the noise returns, Val will be there. Even without the noise, I will be returning to Val. There are plenty of ways that my body is out of sorts (let's begin with my posture). Val is going to give this vessel of mine a gentle talking to.

a robust and thoughtful tween list from Sarah Laurence; some nice news for GOING OVER

I got behind on this day—a book to read and review, some client care, a trip to the dentist, some forever inadequate taming of the jungle of my garden (oh my), and lunch with a friend whose capacious mind is thrilling, frankly, to be near. What he knows. What he thinks. I sit back and listen.

It is not until just now, then, that I have a moment to thank Sarah Lamport Laurence for a list of tween books that has a lot of people talking. People are looking for Sarah's kind of thinking about books all the time, and today she put together a most valued collection of recommended reads for tween readers. I am honored to find both Dangerous Neighbors and Undercover included.

Additionally I am grateful to Junior Library Guild for making today its Going Over day. And I am thankful to Indigo for placing my Berlin novel on its Best Teen Books of 2014 So Far list.

Great Teen Reads. June 24. Books of Wonder. New York City. I'll be there. Will you?

How entirely psyched am I to visit the Big Apple next week?

Entirely psyched.

It will be a day away among people I love in a city I've got a thing for.

It will be a privilege.

I'll spend the day in Brooklyn, with my dear friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto and her pottery-brilliant Ming. I'll see my son, who has just taken on a second job and (in addition) been elected a co-vice president of Marketing for his NYC Alumni Association (love. that. young. man. and I have to give him a personal high five). And I will spend the evening hours among wonderful YA talents, in the Great Teen Reads event at Books of Wonder.

I'll be there with gratitude.

Speaking of gratitude, I have this photo in my possession because of one Dahlia Adler, who so incredibly kindly wrote of Small Damages and Going Over here, and who, rumor has it, I will meet at the store! Speaking of gratitude (again), might I also mention that I will meet, at Books of Wonder, a certain copy editor, Debbie DeFord Minerva, who wrote to me after she worked on One Thing Stolen, the Florence novel—words I will never forget.

Join us?

Books of WonderTuesday, June 246 - 8 PM18 West 18th StreetNew York, NY 10011