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Last semester, in my classroom at Penn, we focused on home—how the stories of our lives (and how we tell those stories) ultimately tangle with this construct.

As part of the Beltran Family Teaching Award program, I invited my current and past students to write of home for a special publication my husband and I designed. When Anthony Ciacci, a student from a previous year, responded with his essay, I was thrilled—loved the piece so much that I whispered its existence into the ear of Trey Popp, a Pennsylvania Gazette editor and friend. (Trey kindly visits my class each year to talk about editing and publishing, and I've been blessed to find my students' work appear in the Gazette pages, including these pieces.)

The rest, as they say, is history. This week, in the ever-gorgeous Pennsylvania Gazette, Anthony's piece, modified slightly for print, appears with its own lovely illustration and shine (read the full story here). I could not be more proud—nor more happy. Anthony is a big-souled guy, an extraordinary brother, a faithful son, and a talent. We need hearts like his at this time.

Congratulations, Anthony.

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I felt blessed when Pennsylvania Gazette editor John Prendergast invited me to write a 3,000 word story about Greg Djanikian, who trusted me to teach at Penn, who talks with  me many spring-semester Tuesdays when I arrive early to teach, who inspired a key character in my forthcoming Florence novel One Thing Stolen, and who writes some of the most gorgeous poetry anywhere. I wrote of his most recent book, Dear Gravity, here.

To write this story I spent an afternoon in Greg's beautiful home (filled with the artistry of his wife), interviewed Stephen Dunn, Julia Alvarez, Al Filreis, and others, and returned to a dear student, Eric Xu, who brought valuable insights to the Greg's beloved teaching.

The story can be found here.

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We could not take photographs until after the show. We simply had to take it in, to be there for it, in the present now.

It was the Pan-Asian Dance Troupe's presentation of "Spirit: The Four Elements." It was Christine Wu, my former student, who had once written, memoiristically, of choreography and dance, and who now stood as troupe president on that stage in all her gorgeous tendernessfiercenessjoyfulnesstalent. In a show that was surprisingly wide-ranging, elevated, clever, classic, and contemporary, Christine and more than two dozen others gave us the world according to movement.

They drove a raucous audience toward congratulatory crazy.

There was "Ti Cao! Morning Exercise," inspired, as the program tells us, "by the early morning fitness routines of Chinese school children." There was the wildly inventive and rhythmic "What Does the Nut Say?," a piece featuring "nuts, coconut bras, and half-naked dudes." There was "Road to a Geisha," which began with the flicker of paper umbrellas and ended with loose hair and Korean hip-hop. There was a stunning water dance that quieted the crowd—water in cups on heads, in cups in hands, in transporting stillness.

In between these and so many other pieces were glorious film fragments—the big steaming earth, in some footage, flickers of the dancers themselves in the rain, on a bridge, near a pond, by the big doors, even at the ice rink of the Penn campus, in others. There the dancers were, doing martial art. There they were stomping on puddles. There they were doing wickedly fast scratch spins.There they were—costumed and smiling.

To my right, in the pews of Iron Gate Theater, sat the ever-gorgeous Chang, also a former student—an intensely intelligent straight A (so far, she says) engineering student, who once brought me hot chocolate, drew me pictures, and this week remembered my birthday with a gift. To my left sat poet-bio-engineer-er Eric, whose gentle nature belies the brilliance of his academic career. Elsewhere in the pews sat our beautiful, talented, headed-for-a big-writing career Angela. We were there for Christine, we were there for the troupe, we came to see, and oh did we ever.

Christine, the intelligence and quality of your show was not unexpected, coming from you and your troupe, but it was so fully rewarding. Chang, Eric, Angela—thank you for being you. And Katie Goldrath, my Katie of an earlier year, my Katie of the Pennsylvania Gazette story—how wonderful it was to walk with you through the Penn campus and up to Manakeesh, before the show. You are going to make such a huge difference in the lives of others when you graduate with your medical degree. Indeed, you already are.

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Life: It gets all tangled up. Those of us who want to write about it have to separate the skeins.

The students of English 135.302 (University of Pennsylvania) are now hard at work on their memoirs, and I cannot wait to read them. While I wait, I look back and honor the work of my former students—excerpted in Handling the Truth.

Speaking of former students—Daniel Blas, whose fine memoir was adapted for the Pennsylvania Gazette last year, will be returning to class today to speak with Trey Popp, one of the Gazette editors, about the process. If you didn't get a chance to read Dan's work the first time around, here's your chance.

Now from Handling the Truth:

Sometimes you can get at [the life questions] obliquely, through structure and white space. Sometimes you do it by rubbing the now against the then. Sometimes we accentuate the terrible discrepancy. Sometimes we are writing toward forgiveness—of ourselves, of others. This is the beauty of memoir. If all your memoir does is deliver story—no sediments, no tidewater, no ambiguity—we have no reason to return. If you cannot embrace the messy tug of yourself, the inescapable contradictions, the ugly and the lovely, then you are not ready yet. If you can’t make room for a reader, then please don’t expect a reader to start making room for you.

Kim, my dark-haired student with the Cleopatra eyes, chose to write her memoir about luckiness, unluckiness, and love. My favorite paragraph:

Love makes you dependent; pain pushes you to the breaking point of self-actualization. My parents’ support and the stability they provided for me is something I’m still trying to justify by replacing their hands with my own, finger by finger. Every day I lift a barricade to get through hermitage and extroversion, harmony and entropy, my mother’s love and my mother’s illness, innovation and inundation. I was lucky, I was born an American, I was born healthy, I was born into a loving home. I was unlucky, I was born judgmental, I have seen terror, I have seen desperate cries for life. So we continue: surprised, derisive, and awake by intuition.

Jonathan wrote about prayer as hobby, and about religious fanaticism:

Prayer was my new hobby, easily eating up an hour of every morning. My religious observance became systematic: I had to make sure experimental conditions were optimal. Experiments fail if they aren’t perfectly calibrated—perhaps my prayer was similarly ineffective because I was ignoring some ritualistic detail. Scientific precision was giving way to religious fanaticism. I was too skeptical of reality to reject superstition so quickly—and I had so much to lose. For two years, I was blinded by minutiae. Then I found academic biblical analysis.

Gabe wrote about surviving a heart condition; more than that, though, he wrote to imagine what a son’s illness means to a mother:

This was also probably what she begged for when, after I had gone unconscious in the hospital that day in February, the doctor spoke with her and told her that her son was very sick and that every effort was being made to save him. She had flown to Peru the night before to be with her father who was on his deathbed. She must have hung up the phone, heard the echo of the handset hitting the cradle resounding in her head, and felt her knees buckling beneath her. She somehow gathered strength, said what she thought was a last goodbye to her dying father, and boarded a plane towards Philadelphia. Those eight hours of flight must have been claustrophobically helpless. No jet plane could have flown fast enough to make this trip bearably short. No altitude could have brought her close enough to God so that she could scream loud enough in his ear to please save her son.

Responsibility—to one’s self and to others—was the theme that engaged Stephanie.

How much of your life, the life you know, is actually your own? We all do things for others, stretching out limbs like a thigmotropic plant clinging to the structure of another to both give and receive life-sustaining supplements. But what do we do for ourselves that we do not do for others? What moments are we robbed of, what people do we give too much to? And when, if ever, are we truly independent?

No one can or should tell you what to write about. But if you don’t know where the memoir impulse is coming from, if you can’t trace it, can’t defend it, can’t articulate an answer when somebody asks “Why’d you want to write a memoir anyway?”—stop. Hold those memoir horses. Either the mind has been teased for years upon years, or there’s that small thing that won’t be refused, or there’s something else genuine and worthy. But nobody wants to hear that you’re writing memoir because you need some quick cash, or because you think it will make you famous, or because your boyfriend said there’s a movie in this, or because you’re just so mad and it’s about time you get to tell your version.

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Not long ago you heard me boasting here about my dear friend Karen Rile, uber Penn prof (check out this article in the Pennsylvania Gazette on a recent award Karen deservedly won and what she did with that honor) and (with her daughter Lauren) lit magazine maker.

Today, I'm again privileged to share the news that the first true issue of the magazine has been launched (the last issue was the meta issue, or the half issue, or the .5). It's called Issue No. 1. It features some astonishing work by talents new and established, and it's worth every second you will now spend reading it.

I insist. You will stop now and you will read it.

There are, I warn you, chickens afoot. But I had nothing to do with that. Almost nothing to do with that.

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Okay, so call this a Beth loves her students blog-athon day, but I am not going to let the moon get any higher in tonight's sky without celebrating Maggie Ercolani, a student from two years ago, who has her first published piece in the current issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. She joins my students Moira Moody, Joe Polin, and Nabil Mehta on these pages, and her story is a triumph—a telling triumph and a living triumph.

Let me explain.

Toward the end of this past summer I received an email from Maggie who I knew, from an earlier exchange, had been looking forward to a summer internship at Macy's with Maggie-style enthusiasm. I saw her name in my in-box, opened her note, then recoiled. It wasn't the story I'd expected. Indeed, Maggie was writing to tell me that she had suffered a stroke in the first hour of the first day of that internship. That she had spent the summer in hospitals and rehab. That she had a new understanding of the father about whom she had written in my class—a father who had experienced a traumatic brain injury when he tumbled from a bike. Maggie wanted to write about what had happened so that she might understand. Would I help her? Of course I would. But oh, Maggie, I said. Oh. Maggie.

But the reason Maggie's piece is in the Gazette is because Trey Popp, an editor there, took Maggie's story on and worked with her to develop it more fully. They went back and forth, Trey and Maggie, until the piece is what it is today. I am so grateful to Trey, and I am so proud of Maggie—for her perseverance, for her attitude, for the textures in her life.

Please click on this link to read Maggie's story for yourself.

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I do go on about those University of Pennsylvania students I have the privilege to teach, but why shouldn't I?  They are brave and beautiful and bold and lovable, and they have talent coming out of their ears.


I'm not typically able to show you that talent, but today I can.  That's because Mr. Joe Polin, an engineer (mind you!) who was enrolled in my class last semester, has just published this beautiful piece, his last work in our class, in the magnificent Pennsylvania Gazette.  It's called "Off the Rails."  It's about Joe's Cuban grandfather.  It starts like this, below, and to read the whole, simply click on this link here:

Santiago de Cuba, 1933:

The doctor examined the newborn twins, his forehead wrinkled with concern. He bent over the nearer one to listen to his breathing.

“Are they okay? Are they healthy?” the father asked.

The doctor finally straightened up, meeting the father’s gaze. After a moment of consideration, he said, “Give this one your name, he is perfectly healthy. This one”—he pointed to the smaller of the two twins—“isn’t going to make it. He’s too weak to survive.” 

I miss those students as fall gets underway, but in the spring I will be back.  If I see Joe Polin while he's rambling down Locust Walk some Tuesday, I'm going to give him a hug, whether he likes it or not.  For that matter, if I see any of those students .....

Thank you, editor John Prendergast.

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I wrote, a while ago, about all the babble that goes through my brain when a camera is pointed in my direction.  I am not, within, what I am without.  Do any of us achieve that perfect correspondence?

But for the recent Pennsylvania Gazette story about the life I've lived through books, I was invited to a enter the cinematic world of Chris Crisman, another Penn grad who has made it his business to appease and to ease and (somehow in the midst of it all) to make art.  You would never know it, by looking at this shot, but the lens was so close to my face when this picture was made that I suspected Chris of doing a study on the tangle of my eyelashes.  (Lancome, next time, I was thinking to myself.  And also:  I wish I'd gone to bed last night.)

Clearly, though, Chris knows what he is doing, and I share this outtake from the shoot today because Chris made Memorial Hall, a Centennial-era building, the true and deserving subject of his shot.  It's a beautiful place, newly and justly restored, and can't you just picture it back in 1876—the crowds massing in the high heat of summer, eager for the art within?

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