Beth Kephart's Blog, page 98

Looking for Me/Beth Hoffman: Reflections

I'll be honest: You can lose your hope out here. You can stare at the pile of books you've written and wonder about the smallness of it all, wonder how anyone still lets you publish, given the miniaturizing nature of the journey you've been on, given how some people say, sometimes, that you might do a better job of figuring out just who you're writing for.

You keep working because words bind and heal you, because you can't stop yourself, because some part of you still hopes, you won't deny it. You keep working because along the way you make friends you are ever so grateful for, because you sink into conversations you can't believe you're having, because an editor, generous, says she believes in you, because the readers who have found you cloak and care for you, steady you up, throw you a line.

A few weeks ago I published a mini-memoir called Nest. Flight. Sky.: on love and loss one wing at a time with Shebooks. I'd written my heart out on this first work of memoir in years; I'd gone so far; and as soon as the e-book had gone up for sale, as soon as I'd (blushing) sent my announcing note around to friends, I thought, Oh, Beth. What did you do that for? The making of the thing is gift enough. Let all else be. Leave them alone.

Then came Beth Hoffman over Twitter, sending me a photograph of Nest. downloaded on her device. Beth Hoffman, author—I'll say, though of course you know this, of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and Looking for Me. I hadn't sent a note to Beth. We'd never talked before. Somehow she had found me.

Generous? Absolutely. Kind? She does have the southern in her. She said we had birds in common. She said, Read Looking for Me; you'll see.

Well, I have just finished reading Looking for Me, this enchanting novel about southern legacies and the things that get passed down over time. I have slipped into Beth Hoffman's world of feathers and bald eagles and goldfinch shimmer and raven wisdoms. I have given my imagination over to Teddi, who tells this story about growing up on the edge of a national forest, on a large stretch of land, with a brother determined to save the wildlife from the people who do wildlife harm. That brother, Josh, will get lost in time. Teddi, now running an antiques shop with a sure hand in Charleston, will keep on believing he's alive. Signs will float toward her. Skies will speak some truths. She has to know. She can't know. She worries her secrets in private.

Hoffman's story is fluidly, so engagingly told. Her characters are the kind of people we'd like to know—good, but hardly perfect; occasionally jittery with shoulders up, but capaciously tenderhearted, too. Hoffman, who was an interior designer before her first book debuted, knows furniture and odd odds and ends. She knows rare books. She knows birds. Here, in one of my favorite scenes, she introduces a part-albino hawk:

In a powerful rush and flash of feathers, Ghost lifted into the air, building speed as he flew over the field. He flew cockeyed at first and then straightened out, gaining altitude until he became a perfect silhouette in the sky.

But Hoffman also knows the landscapes both of old southern shops and deep forest crevices, and I found her evocation of place transporting, enveloping. I went right there and stayed. I also kept thinking, as I read, of all we have in common—not just those birds, but ballroom dance as well (you'll see), and a deep curiosity about men who go deep into the woods and don't come back out, for that is precisely what my own great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, did years ago—leaving his family behind in St. Louis so that he might travel into a part of the world he would ultimately fight to preserve as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Smoky Mountains aren't far from Hoffman's Daniel Boone National Forest. The spirit of her renegade Josh and my renegade great-grandfather could be the very same, one spirit.

My life is full of books I mostly have to read—as a reviewer, as a teacher. I rarely get to stroll through bookshops and say, Yup. I'm reading this one through. I'm so glad, for so many reasons, that Beth Hoffman somehow (inexplicably) found my own small treatise about my obsession with birds in the wake of a major loss and that she (so graciously) wrote to me.

Beth, that photo up above is taken on the hill about Bryson City, North Carolina. It's my great-grandfather's grave. He's watching over your Josh.

 

Wonderland/Stacey D'Erasmo: Reflections

Stacey D'Erasmo: She did me in. She wrote A Seahorse Year, and I loved it. She wrote a new novel called Wonderland that I've been aching to read ever since Stacey and I talked—privately and then publicly—in Decatur, GA. I was already a huge fan, as readers of this blog know. I became a forever fan in Decatur. There are just some people who know more, see deeper, write better. Stacey, who teaches at Columbia, is one of them, and she brings no arrogance to the aura of her appreciable talent.

But Wonderland—oh, what a book this is, a book richly steeped in the twin geographies of movable time and malleable possibility. It's the story of a rock star of sorts—of a singer named Anna who had once made it quasi big, whose second album bombed, whose chance at doing it all again is now or never. She chooses now. She chooses life on the road, strangers in her bed, the elusive high of a song sung right, an audience discovered. She is the idiosyncratically trained daughter of a sculptor of some renown, and she has been married and she has loved and she has lost, and she's only getting older; she will be forty-five when we see her last. She dyes her red hair now. She loses lines. She sleeps with the wrong guys, or maybe they are the right guys—it can be hard for her to tell. She remembers what she was, others remember who she became, but also, always (beautifully, tragically), she imagines what and who she might have been had she made different choices. When we meet her in Wonderland, she is running out of choices.

I read this book in exile from a storm that had darkened my corner of the world. I read it rivered through with that joy I feel when I've encountered art—real and actual. D'Erasmo doesn't just write gorgeous sentence after gorgeous sentence. She takes an enormous number of structural risks—forges a novel out of wildly imagined fragments without ever losing an ounce of coherency (do you know how hard that is?). Readers of this book get not just a vivid character, Anna, but a full-fledged story and a brilliant meditation on second chances, second-tier careers, secondary love affairs, and fame (borrowed, tenuous, earned?):

And why was I famous, anyway? Fact: I wasn't famous to everyone. I was famous only among certain people. The smart people, the people who pride themselves on being smart. Part of it—let's be honest—was the glamour of my pedigree, and the history to which that pedigree alluded. Everyone knew who my father was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that everyone who loved my music also loved who my father was. You can't separate the dancer from the dance, and anyway, I never tried. 

The other day, in class, I showed two portraits to my students, asked them to write a single sentence about each that told me what they saw. Capturing the physicality of another is hard stuff; we'd already determined that. Going beyond the obvious, tripping away from cliches, digging in. We want language to be equally alerting and clear. Wonderland is so alerting, so original, so improbable, so spring-water clear. I envy the readers who look forward to reading the novel for the first time. I envy the writers who will study it to shake loose new truths about structure, sentence, form.

And my students? I'm excerpting this, below, for them. Look at how physicality gets done. Look at how much room there still is, if we are patient enough, to render another fully see-able.

Ezra, chatting, laughs his famously peculiar laugh, a kind of Aussie Woody Woodpecker sound. I can't see the stroke on him, the overdose. He looks to me so unmarked, or, more accurately, he is already so marked that I doubt I could tell the recent marks from the older ones. He is not a handsome man, never has been. His face, in the half-light, has an ursine, lumpy quality. What can be seen of his hairline plunges, Ben Franklin style, nearly to his ears; his fringe of hair is wispy, of indeterminate color, and coarse. His face is pitted with acne scars. His eyes are small, tend toward the red. His magic emanates in part from that, from his unregenerate ugliness. He looks like a creature of the night who can hold his own with creatures of the night.

Stacey D'Erasmo, congratulations. This image, taken in Berlin of a young metal-working artist, is for you.

Wonderland will be released from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 6. I received this galley at the ALA Midwinter event. Begged for it, basically.

While I was gone: a misbegotten fireplace fire, and kindness

Winter hit hard in these parts—as snow became rain became ice, trees keeled and broke, and hundreds of thousands lost power. The world was dark, dystopian, empty-seeming. We lasted for two days here, until a carefully tended fire in our own fireplace smoked out the house, thanks to an invisible, inoperative damper. Staying close to the burnt hearth was not an option.

And so we slipped away. I read three incredible books over those two days and am eager to share my thoughts with you here. (And will soon.) For now, I want to thank a few people who buoyed me through the storm.

First, Beth Hoffman (of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and Looking for Me), for so generously sharing her thoughts about my memoir Nest. Flight. Sky. with her legions of fans. This unforeseen generosity was such a huge surprise and so very welcome in the life of this mini-memoir. It was a gift.

Also, all thanks to Serena Agusto-Cox, who reviewed Nest. Flight. Sky. so kindly. Serena bought this $2.99 Shebook at once, read at once, and stopped to share her thoughts. That makes a huge difference, and I'm so appreciative. (I'm also so appreciative to Susan Tekulve, who was the very first to read and to write to me of this.)

Deep thanks as well to Ed Goldberg, who received an early copy of Going Over and wrote so beautifully about it in a review that touches on my work over time—all those themes that have held me in their grip. Ed, your shared faith in the intelligence of readers and their willingness to go deep means so much to me. You posted your review at just the right time.

Finally, Jessica Keener and Jamie Krug, big thanks to you—for sharing word of Handling the Truth with those you feel might learn something about confession and language, search and story in those pages. Books like mine survive through word of mouth. You keep giving Handling wings.

Two dear people read Going Over, and make this gray day bright and —

we are very happy. We are more than happy.

First, from my long-time friend Lorie Ann Grover, whose own forthcoming YA book, a fantasy novel called Firstborn, just received a Kirkus star. Lorie Ann and I bonded through our love for young people and young people books by way of Readergirlz, where I was the inaugural writer in residence (and we had so much fun, we really did). We have remained friends ever since. Lorie Ann came to my city for ALA Midwinter and somehow—somehow—I missed her. It was astonishing today to read her words about this Berlin novel. Astonishing, and danceworthy, and no excuses next time: We must meet!

And then there is amazing Pam of Bookalicious, whom I have also never met, though we believe that we once brushed shoulders at a BEA event and managed not to realize whose shoulders we'd just brushed. Pam has been such an incredible advocate for my work. Her words—so potent—sit, among other places, on the jacket of the Small Damages paperback. Pam was one of the very first people (outside the Chronicle team) to read Going Over. She shared her copy with a gentleman on an airplane and told me the story while I was sitting in a very cold hotel room in a far-away town, while on assignment. Here are her words about the book. They are, well, Pam-alicious. And there is a giveaway.

Thank you, Lorie Ann. Thank you, Pam. Very much.

In English 135.301: Not Black. Not White. Mary Karr and Janet Malcolm on Writing Truth

This was the yard as we pulled up last evening, following a just-right birthday celebration for my dad. It was this black and white (I've done nothing to the photo). It was clear, and cold.

But real life isn't like that. Real life is ambiguity and surprise, rubbed away places where righteous rightness once made claims. Memoirists live inside the gray scale. We battle with ourselves. We rarely win.

Today, my Penn students will be discussing Mary Karr's memoir The Liars' Club, a classic "traumatic" memoir, to use Sven Birkerts' term—equally scathing and tender, explosive and cohering. They'll be learning about each other through a muffled-sense assignment that was inspired by a Greg Djanikian poem ("My Uncle's Eye"). And they'll be debating these two assertions—one from Karr herself and one from Janet Malcolm, who visited Penn last spring as part of Al Filreis's much-loved Fellows class. Karr is writing about the impact of her memoir—which certainly exposes the rough edges of people she loves. Malcolm is talking about journalists. The passages still stand side-by-side, ready to be dismantled.

As certain facts had once scalded all our insides and almost decimated our clan got broadcast a thousand times, we got oddly used to them. Call it aversion therapy, but the events seeped in a little deeper. We healed more—though that had never been the point—through exposure. Our distant catastrophes became somehow manageable. Catharsis, the Greeks call it.

Mary Karr, Introduction to The Liars' Club, anniversary edition

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

The Going Over Goodreads Giveaway is live! (and ends February 15)

One day Lara Starr, the Chronicle Kids publicist, wrote to ask me if I could post some Goodreads code on my blog. I wasn't sure I knew how to do that (being the techno idiot that I am), and I wasn't even sure what I was posting, but I trust Lara completely, and I figured out a way.

It was in the midst of my ultimately successful techno-journey that I came to understand that Chronicle was sponsoring an early February Goodreads giveaway of my forthcoming Berlin book, Going Over. Twenty-five copies, to be precise, are being offered. There are eleven days left, and counting.

I love the blend of imagination, pluck, and modesty that continues to define team I've been blessed to work with at Chronicle. I'm grateful to be in such good hands.

Details on the giveaway can be found here.

writing about home, on the Psychology Today blog "One True Thing"

I have waited a very long time to share this photograph. The post had to be special. It had to mean something big.

Today feels like big. This piece, that I am sharing, feels like something. It is called "Our House Is Still His Home." It appears on the Psychology Today blog, One True Thing, created by fellow Shebooks author, Jennifer Haupt. I'm so grateful to Jennifer for this chance to speak on her lovely blog and for sharing my enthusiasm for spreading word about Shebooks.

My own Shebooks was launched yesterday. Here's more on that.

Nest. Flight. Sky., my first memoir in years, now available through Shebooks

When the invitation came to write a mini-memoir for Shebooks, I was in the midst of many things but stopped. This, I thought, is what I want to write most right now. This story—about loving and losing my mother, about a slow-growing, ever-deepening obsession with birds and wings—is where my heart is. And so I wrote Nest. Fight. Sky.: On Love and loss, one wing at a time for a new publishing company, and model, that I have, in the intervening months, grown to respect hugely. I have now read many Shebooks. I have written of some of them here. I am very proud, today, to join this family of writers—feel honored to stand among them.

This mini-memoir, available through Kindle and, soon, Nook, is just $2.99. (It will also soon be posted on the Shebooks site, but I'm just so excited that I am sharing this now.) Funny to announce the price of a book in a blog post, I know, but I slip that fact in here because I hope it will help persuade you to download not just Nest., but some of the other remarkable offerings through Shebooks.

If you have the time and inclination, it would be so wonderful for you to help spread word.

Dear Gravity/Gregory Djanikian: Reflections

Gregory Djanikian's new volume of poetry, Dear Gravity (Carnegie Mellon University Press), arrives cloaked in shimmer colors on a brutally cold winter day. Sun, I think. I open the book to a random page and I read "Why I Have The Radio On." It starts off easy: The family has gone off for a week. It quickly turns: and I've stayed back to do/significant work which might crank/the century a couple of notches forward,/something with the wild odor/of the unsayable in it The poem commands my attention all the way to its final lines, and this is something, this is truly something, for my mind had been messy with so many other things and had not known itself open to a poem.

But that is the power, I discover in the very early hours of this morning, of all the poems in Djanikian's new collection. They override the muck in the reader's mind. They knock, step in, and stay. They assert the familiar in unfamiliar ways without relying on games or smug pretensions. They feel winnowed down, therefore essential, therefore as close to true as language gets. They are as accessible as they are quietly electrifying.

Dear Gravity offers five groupings of poems, each named solely by a roman numeral. They move from stories about violence and impossible yieldings, to the cherished-haunted memories of childhood and adolescence, to confessions about the writing or not writing of poems, to the hard fix and sweet breath of the natural world, to sometimes sparring, sometimes relenting reflections on the passing of time. There are poems here about a mother's old car, about a high school bully, about a pre-induction physical during the height of the Vietnam War. There is the story of a roadside accident, the story of a near accident, the story of loved people dying or perhaps soon dying, the story of first loves and enduring ones, a red-haired wife on a horse. There are lines like these:

The dark was unfolding its many hands. ("Song of Imponderables")

The wind today is a woman with long hair/entangling all she loves. ("Arizona Wind")

I teach memoir. I don't know the vocabulary for poems—the word, for example, for that long rushing comma-less poem that revealed itself so beautifully that I knew precisely where to stop the sounds in my head, where to pause ("The Book of Love"). But it occurred to me, as I read this morning, that I would like my students to know this work, to see what can be done with honest language, and to see for themselves how talented this Greg Djanikian is, this director of the undergraduate creative writing program at my own University of Pennsylvania, this man whose office sits above the room where I teach during second-semester Tuesdays.

In "Writer's Block" Djanikian is both teacher and poet. I leave you with the final two stanzas:

Whatever you choose, the hope is
to begin with something open-ended,
some small parabola of thought
which might suddenly zoom you
in a gust of inspiration
upward on hoof and wing

where you might rarely travel
in your prim and Sunday clothes,
but from under whose sleeves
there might appear
in one epiphanous moment
the utter stranger
you have always been.

a flock of robins invade the nearest tree as another night of deep cold sets in

I wonder how they stay warm.I wonder what songs they wish to sing.


The winter is starting to take its toll. I send hearth thoughts to you all.