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In short: Karen Rile amazes.

In long: Karen Rile is a creative force, a tireless teacher, a super-human funny one, a jaw-dropping mom, a friend. She paved the way for me as an adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania (Beth: Karen, where do you file the grades? Karen: I will call you and explain. Beth: What do you do with jubilant procrastinators? Karen: I will call you and explain. Beth: What do you do if your students don't all fit in your room? Karen: I will call you and explain.) She joins me in writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer (Karen's stuff goes viral while my stuff remains rooted in a petri dish). She had four children to my one and every single one of them is a star, with no little help from Karen, who has encouraged, driven, photographed, packaged, and web sited up their dreams. She sends hysterical, private riffs regarding various Facebook commentaries that upend my dark moods of injustice. For that alone, she's priceless.

Karen Rile and me: we're friends.

When she told me that she and two of her daughters (Lauren and Pascale) were launching a new literary magazine (Cleaver: cutting-edge words), I had two thoughts:

* now Karen will never sleep, and
* this will be outstanding.

Friends, I was right. This inventive, thrilling, wow-whooping magazine has just been released in its .5 preview version and it crosses many spectra—art, poetry, fiction, essays, and the chop-chop stuff in between—while featuring my own other personal friends like Elizabeth Mosier, Lynn Levin, and Rachel Pastin. It's also beautifully designed. It's also technologically advanced. Choose your channel (HTML, Text, Mobile), sit back, and receive.

Also, judging from the fact that Karen is sending me emails at 3 AM and I am answering shortly thereafter, I was not exaggerating the no-sleep stuff.

I was lucky enough to be included in this first issue (click click). I like this, Karen wrote to me, when she received my piece. But, um, what is it, exactly?

I don't actually know. You'll have to judge for yourself. It starts like this, below, and it ends here.

I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it:  nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please.

Go chill with Cleaver.

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I have to admit that I did not see this coming. There I was at the gym, at Teresa's Body Pump, aching (and I mean aching) between the shoulder rotation and abs, wondering how in the world that Teresa can sing—sing!—while we're all lifting that bar again and again, while we are all shaking and trembling, when I saw my phone blinking. It was a note from my friend Lynn Levin, congratulating me for a review of Nothing but Ghosts, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

I pretty much figured that the work-out had gotten to me, that I was seeing things.

But no. In fact, Katie Haegele, who writes such tremendous reviews of young adult books, had included Ghosts in her fall YA round up, along with titles like I Can't Keep My Own Secrets, Murder at Midnight, and Pop.

This is what she says. This is why I am so happy right now, while I type up this post. I can't help it. Ghosts, which like all my books celebrates this community in which I live, has been noticed in my own hometown. It has been seen.

Nothing But Ghosts
By Beth Kephart

Harper Teen. 288 pp. $17.99

Well, this is a treat. Beth Kephart, whose memoir A Slant of Sun was a National Book Award finalist, has written another one of her beautiful YA novels - this one set locally, with references to the Devon Horse Show and little kids in Phillies T-shirts. And ghosts. Katie lives with her father, an eccentric art restorer, in a big and otherwise empty house; her mother has just died, and Katie, only 16, throws herself into busyness to cope. She takes a summer job working with the grounds crew on an unusual building project at the estate of a reclusive heiress whom no one in town has laid eyes on for years, and soon finds herself preoccupied with the woman's secrets. The lovely things in these characters' lives - pebble gardens and groves of apple trees, an old painting of "a metropolis" that her father restores (or, as he says, "resolves") late at night in his studio-shed, an honest-to-goodness riddle-filled mystery - are like something from a dream, but Kephart's writing isn't what you'd call dreamy, poetic as it is. It's solid and serviceable, beautiful in its well-madeness like an antique chair.

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A few weeks ago, I prematurely loaded this brief excerpt from a much-longer interview conducted by the extraordinarily gracious Paula Marantz Cohen on behalf of The Drexel InterView, a nationally distributed cable show. My thanks to Lynn Levin for clearing the way for this permanent posting.

The conversation was held last autumn. During this segment I speak of the blog, the dance world, and next projects. I had not yet started on the book that preoccupies me now when this taping took place. I did not yet know that Dangerous Neighbors, my fifth novel for young adults, would find its way to Egmont USA.

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Last fall, I received a note from Lynn Levin, the executive producer of The Drexel InterView, who was inviting me to spend some time in the company of Dr. Paula Marantz Cohen, the popular author and Drexel University Professor of Literature. Would I join poet Gerald Stern, Chuck Barris, Craiglist's Craig Newmark, astronomer Derrick Pitts, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney, social critic Steven Johnson, and others in the Season Six line-up of interviewees, she wondered. I said yes, but of course.

(Then worried for days about lack of appropriate wardrobe.)

In early October, on the second floor of a fabulously ornate 19th century building, Paula and I spoke of many things. Of the writing heart, of a career (my own) that has moved from poetry to short story to memoir to poetry to history to novel and back again to short story and poetry (and what, you ask, is this blog? A bit of everything, I guess, and too much of all, as someone just told me). The genesis of Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill River, was discussed, as were my three young adult novels to date, Undercover (soon to be released in paperback), House of Dance, and Nothing but Ghosts. If memory serves, we also discussed my short story, "The Longest Distance," soon appearing, along with work by An Na, M.T. Anderson, Chris Lynch, Jacqueline Woodson, and K.L. Going, in the HarperTeen anthology No Such Thing as the Real World. Young adult literature—where it came from, where it's going, what it might someday be—was very much on our agenda.

Lynn (a poet whose work you should seek out) has just written to let me know that that conversation will premiere this Tuesday, March 31, in the Philadelphia area at at 8 p.m. on DUTV (Comcast channel 54; in West Philly 62), then air four more times that week at 10 a.m. (Wed, Sat, Sun, and Mon). On April 5, it will air again on MiND (formerly called WYBE) at 10 a.m. In subsequent months, the interview will be available in other cable markets across the country.

I invite those of you who have the time and interest to listen in.

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