Beth Kephart's Blog, page 93

My river wins an award, and my FLOW heads toward a paperback edition

You know that I can't stop talking about her, dreaming about her, visiting her. And so here she is, my river, winner of the 2014 Pennsylvania River of the Year award, written of today, for North Philly Notes.

And (ladies and gentlemen), I have some news: FLOW will be relaunched this fall as a paperback, thanks to Temple University Press.

I could not be happier.

Extended wakefulness may equal neuronal injury. Get some sleep. Please.

One week from now, I'll officially be one year older than I am this very second. No pride in that. Just a fact.

But here is something I will boast about: I have finally learned, after far too many years, a few things about life and myself. I won't bore you with all the details. Today I'm simply sharing this: I'm in the process of teaching myself how to sleep. To get more than the three or four hours each night that I got since the day my child was born.

There was always so much to do, you know? (You know; you've been there; I'm hardly alone.) Being a full-time mom, while trying to make an honest freelancer's wage, while trying to work on that writing hobby of mine, while painting the woodwork and making the dinners and writing the bills. Who could fit all of that into a mere sixteen hours a day? I'm not that smart, I'm not that fast, I needed time. Sleep is what I sacrificed. Sleep—until a temporary choice became a locked-in pattern became an insomnia I could not wrestle down.

Until the insomnia nearly consumed me.

This insomnia cannot consume us. This insomnia is dangerous—not just in temporary, wow, why-do-I-keep-bumping-into-tables-and-forgetting-her-name fashion. "Extended wakefulness," as a new Penn Medicine study published in The Journal of Neuroscience reveals, "can result in neuronal injury." From the news release:

PHILADELPHIA — Most people appreciate that not getting enough sleep impairs cognitive performance. For the chronically sleep-deprived such as shift workers, students, or truckers, a common strategy is simply to catch up on missed slumber on the weekends. According to common wisdom, catch up sleep repays one's "sleep debt," with no lasting effects. But a new Penn Medicine study shows disturbing evidence that chronic sleep loss may be more serious than previously thought and may even lead to irreversible physical damage to and loss of brain cells. The research is published today in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Sure, the early science here is built upon a mouse model of chronic sleep loss. Sure, more work needs to be done. Still, read these words, and then ask yourself if you are sleeping enough, if you can give yourself a break, if you can find a way to lengthen your dreaming hours:

The team also plans to examine shift workers post-mortem for evidence of increased LC neuron loss and signs of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, since some previous mouse models have shown that lesions or injury to LC neurons can accelerate the course of those diseases. While not directly causing theses diseases, "injuring LC neurons due to sleep loss could potentially facilitate or accelerate neurodegeneration in individuals who already have these disorders," Veasey says.

While more research will be needed to settle these questions, the present study provides another confirmation of a rapidly growing scientific consensus:  sleep is more important than was previously believed. In the past, Veasey observes, "No one really thought that the brain could be irreversibly injured from sleep loss."  It's now clear that it can be.

Me? I have stopped jumping up the second my eyes flutter open to get some work done. I have allowed myself mid-day naps. I have stopped chasing so many deadlines. I have acknowledged all those things that make me anxious—reviews of my work, inequalities I can't change, broken things around the house—and I have dealt with them, in one way or the other—avoiding the reviews, fixing what is broken, not obsessing over the irreversible.

I'm just trying to save my brain. I want you to save yours.

Talking Clay, Talking Life, in Today's Inquirer

My Inquirer story about the life lessons learned through clay and among real artists can be found here.

Outtakes featured above: a recent release from the kiln (a gift, shhhhhh, in celebration of the forthcoming launch of Going Over) and a photograph taken in the Wayne Art Center's lobby, where the work of the extraordinary young glass artist Madeline Rile Smith (daughter of my good friend Karen Rile, about whom I once wrote here) is currently being featured.

celebrating the pottery ladies (and the honorary pottery ladies) (and the Wayne Art Center) in this weekend's Inquirer

What glorious work Inquirer page designer Amy Junod does. I'm always so lucky when my stories arrive on her desk. Grateful today to be able to sing about the Wayne Art Center and the friendships I have made among people who actually know what they are doing with clay (and apparently do not mind that I don't).

This is also my first piece with a Going Over byline. The time is soon for my Berlin.

As always, a huge thanks to editor Kevin Ferris, with whom I have such fun working.

more proof that it is spring (let's take care of our planet)

(putting my rudimentary pottery skills to work)
That sound I hear overhead is the sound the roofers fixing the roof that has sat miserably broken since November, letting winter weather in.

(Oh, I cherish these new contractors, who arrived precisely when they said they would and speak of multi-year guarantees.)

That sound I hear at my feet is the sound of seeds waking and cracking.

We have come through darkness together. We have sun within reach. It is our responsibility to take much better care of our besieged planet so that we may, years hence, welcome a perpetuity of Springs.

My prayer: that the harsh winter taught us all something, that it forced us to pay better attention to the resources we love, need, depend on, tax.

We're having a GOING OVER party! (do you want to come?)

And then Pamela Sedor said, she said:

But if there's a book there must be cake!

And I said, Are you sure?

And she said she was sure, very sure.

And so, my friends, there will indeed be a real-live-cake-for-all party for Going Over, the book that is launching on April 1. I invite any of you near and not so far to join us at:

Radnor Memoir Library
Winsor Room
April 30, 7:30 PM
114 W. Wayne Avenue
Wayne, PA 19087

Bring friends. Bring your sugar appetites. We'll talk about the Wall in this, the 25th year since it fell. We'll talk about walls in general—around a world that is suddenly looking a little Cold War grim.

I look forward to seeing you. For those who cannot be there in person, there is a multi-stop blog tour gearing up (thanks to Lara of Chronicle). Book giveaways, interviews, and revelations all on tap. More on that soon.

Flora and the Flamingo/Molly Idle: Reflections

Flora and the Flamingo, a 2013 Caldecott Honor Book by Molly Idle (Chronicle Books), arrived at my home yesterday—and how happy was I to see it. Like all truly outstanding picture books, this story about a flouncy girl and an elegant bird needs no words. On bright expanses of white, these two mostly pinkish creatures posture and pose, pursue and retreat, provoke and mimic—which is to say, they forge a friendship.

The flamingo stands on a single webbed foot. Flora does too. The flamingo rearranges its skinny leg. Flora flexes her own rather less skinny one. The flamingo stretches its wings, and look, Flora has wings as well. But soon things get complicated—the flamingo so happy to be looked at, so unto itself, that Flora (trying too hard to emulate the bird's strutting configurations) takes a tumble. Feelings get hurt. The flamingo turns, Flora turns. The you-do-as-I-do changes to a let-us-do-together. The two dance now, face to face.

What is remarkable about this book is how emotional it all becomes. How everything is said without the expenditure of a single letter. But also: how much like dance this really does become—graceful, exuberant, joyous, each character bigger by far within the wingspan of the other.

A better Beth would take this book to the nearest child as a gift. But I'm just going to have to buy a copy for the next little one in my life (and I know precisely who that is). I'm keeping this copy for me, for when I want to be reminded of the power of friendship and the necessary glory of dance.

For those who wonder, that is Scott Lazarov and Magdalena Piekarz, as I photographed them back in 2009 at DanceSport Academy in Ardmore.

That Florence novel is also a West Philly novel

That Florence novel of which I have so often spoken is also (I now confess) a West Philadelphia novel—infused with the fringe beyond the campus where I work. Yesterday, the air finally warming, I returned to those old haunts and photographed this plot of land, where a pivotal scene takes place.

That Florence novel is also, thanks to the great (loving) patience of editor Tamra Tuller and the impeccable copy editing and exceptional kindness of one Debbie DeFord Minerva, done. Oh my goodness, it is done. The hardest book I ever wrote. The fear that it would not be "good enough," finally ebbed in full this weekend, as I took one last crack at the pages that had resisted me for many months. In the midst of that work, a note (and then more notes) from Debbie filtered in.

Sometimes the impossible is not finally impossible.

And we are rarely alone.

It's almost spring, or should be soon. The hard husks inside the earth are softening. The nests are wanting eggs.

My Florence novel is also a West Philadelphia novel.

That novel is finally done.

Thoughts on Adjuncting

Over the past many days, in a quiet house, I have been reading and re-reading my students' memoirs. Turning their considered pages with care. Filling the margins with notes. Reminding the students' of their own aspirations for themselves. Saying yes, or how about this, or what if, or ....

There could be no higher privilege.

What stretches me, fulfills me, energizes me? Teaching. What campus feels like home? My alma mater, my employer, the great and glorious University of Pennsylvania. I am lucky to teach and lucky to teach there. But I am an adjunct, plain and simple, and as an adjunct I am aware of the concerning status of the job.

Yesterday a friend pointed the way to this story in Salon.com, about the challenges faced by adjuncts. Becky Tuch wrote the piece (which first appeared in Beyond the Margins). It was titled: "Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts." It presented a conversation Tuch hoped to have with AWP, which did not (apparently) address the adjunct crisis that has thrummed for many years across American campuses during AWP's recent Seattle gathering. From the story:

Here’s the thing, AWP. The percentage of teaching positions occupied by non-tenure-track faculty has more than tripled in the past four decades. According to the Adjunct Project, “Two-thirds of the faculty standing in front of college classrooms each day aren’t full-time or permanent professors.” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “the shadowy world of would-be academia is filled with people cobbling together five or six such teaching gigs at once. That’s possible because some 70 percent of college courses offered are now taught by adjuncts — part-timers who are paid a pittance and have no job security.”

Dig deeper into the adjunct story (as I often do) and you will discover stories of heartache—stories about teachers who changed the lives of students but who lived, and died, as paupers. Stories about teachers who must drive and drive and drive—from one post to another—just to bring a sustaining wage home to a small room. The job of a teacher is to give—the right lessons, the right hope, the right instructions, a listening ear. It is so very difficult to be a giver—to have the energy to care—under grueling circumstances.

I am lucky. I work—as an author, as a consultant—so that I might teach one course one semester each year. I go to a campus that I love in a city that I love and work among colleagues for whom I have great respect. I meet students who change my life. I learn from them.

I am hardly alone in loving this job. But I am cognizant, as we all must be cognizant, that others who love this work as much as I do are struggling, mightily, to be able to do it. Struggling to afford to be able to do it. Struggling to buy the gas for the car, the ticket for the train, the cup of coffee for the student who needs to talk.

(More information can be found at The Adjunct Project.) 

If all the underpaid teachers in this nation just one day up and quit, what would happen then? What would become of our students, our campuses, our planet? Sure, there are new ways of learning—online courses that get some of the teaching done. But what matters, too—what adjunct teaching can and often does provide—is that  teacher who knows your name, that teacher who sees if you've gone missing, that teacher who searches for you and says, Are you okay?, that teacher who says, Do I have a book for you.

We need our teachers—it's obvious, I think.

And we need our teachers to be okay.

What Word Would You Contribute to the English Language, If You Could (reflecting on Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue)

Among the many sweet things that happened to me during my trip south last week was Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. I'd found the book at my favorite used bookstore near the Penn campus a week before. I'd tucked it into my bag last minute. It kept me all kinds of company in airport lounges and sleepless stretches. It became my very dear friend.

Published in 1990, superceded, but of course, by newfangled research, Mother Tongue still felt fresh to me, unencrusted. Where did our compunction to speak come from? Why is English so pervasive, and so challenging? What is good English and what is bad? And where do words actually come from?

The facts, the trends, the particulars are frankly delightful. Especially to one such as me, who—out of boredom, lack of proper education, corroded memory, or (let's be honest) poor eyesight—can't seem to stop herself from stretching language in every conceivable direction.

Here is a bit of trivia that I'm sure Bryson hunted down just for me: "Shakespeare used 17, 677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original."

Love that? I love it.

Among Shakespeare's contributions, according to Bryson, were "barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and 1685 others."

Where would we be without those words? What would I, personally, do without both lonely and hurry? And what can we do to keep our language alive?

It all makes me wonder, on this snowy St. Patty's Day: What word would you contribute to the English language, if you could?