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The days are rarely what we imagine they will be.
The news comes in. The shock. The losses. Ordinary days, as my friend Katrina Kenison has written, are, often, the greatest gifts of all.
One of the greatest gifts I've been given in recent months is the chance to write an occasional piece for the
Inquirer—pieces about the city I unashamedly love. I don't write journalism, don't know how. I just write my heart. And I take my camera out there, too, because sometimes my lens writes the stories better than my handful of words.
This past weekend I was blessed by
the publication of a photo essay about that part of Philadelphia once known as Bush Hill. I wrote about my travels through that area years ago and the revival of Eastern State Penitentiary.
You can write all you want, take whatever photos cross your path. It's nothing without an editor and a designer. And so today I thank Kevin Ferris and his team for the layout that they chose for the front page of this past Sunday's Currents section.
In just a few days,
Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial Philadelphia novel, will be released by Egmont USA as a paperback, with a bound-in teacher's guide. A few weeks after that, in mid-February,
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an 1871 Philadelphia novel that features
Dangerous Neighbors' own best-loved boy, William, will be released by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.
Dr. Radway's introduces, among many other Philadelphia places, Eastern State Penitentiary. In this scene (below) William and his best friend, Career, are making their way toward the old prison, which was known back then as Cherry Hill. They're going to keep William's father company, in the only way they know how.
The image above was taken two years ago, when I was in the midst of my research for this book.
Career pulls a stone out of his trouser pocket, drops it to the street, and kicks it ahead to William, who smacks it crosswise and up, stepping back to let two twin girls in dresses like pink parasols pass, their mother stern in blue. Career lopes and knocks the stone to where William would be if he wasn’t still staring at the girls, both of them with the identical ginger hair and jewel eyes, neither somehow like the other. Neither, mostly, like the mother, who casts her opinion on William and hurries her exotic procession along.
William feels the heat in his face and runs for the stone. He smacks it hard Career’s way. The game stays good between them now—past Spring Garden and Brandywine, Green, Mt. Vernon, Wallace, all the way to Cherry Hill, where finally they stop and stand in the long skirt of the prison’s shadows, its massive gothic gloom. Cherry Hill runs the full block and back, two-hundred feet in the east-west direction, four crenellated towers on its front face and a watchman high, looking for trouble. Career works another match into the shallow bowl of his pipe, and it takes. The tobacco flares sweet.
“You going to call to him, then?” Career asks, after a while.
“Walls too thick.”
“You going to try it anyway?”
“Your whistling,” William says, “goes a longer way.”
Career blows the smoke of his pipe through the spaces between his teeth. He clears his throat and finds his song, and it carries. William closes his eyes and imagines his Pa inside—past the vaulted doors and the iron gates, beneath the eye of the warden, and of God. People are puny at Cherry Hill. People are locked away to consider what they’ve done.
“You think he can hear that?” Career asks now, stopping his song.
“Keep on.”
Career picks the song back up, and William stands there in the shadows, at his best friend’s side, trying to see Pa in his mind’s eye. “Don’t do it, Pa,” Francis had warned him, Ma, mostly. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
Career whistles a professional melody. William hears what he thinks is the wind, but it’s that bird winging in close, that dove tucking its wings then letting them go, its rise and its angling in effortless. Career stops his song and looks up. The bird goes on, north and west—a free line across the prison wall and out, toward the river.
Cherry Hill still locked up tight as a vault.
I returned from Asbury Park and Bruce Springsteen Appreciators to an email from Quinn Colter, a young friend destined for a big career as a copy editor. I had invited Quinn to join the
Dr. Radway editorial team, and she had—plying my text with wonderful questions and delightful commentary (it seems that Career, one of my primary characters, has won our Quinn Colter over).
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 Philadelphia novel about Bush Hill, Eastern State Penitentiary, Baldwin Locomotive Works, Schuylkill River races, George W. Childs, and two best friends, now goes into design and will be released next March by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.
I left the desk at last to take a walk. Meandering through my streets, I discovered Kathleen, a very special green-eyed woman, who had, she told me, read
Dangerous Neighbors a few weeks ago. Kathleen grew up in Philadelphia at a time when circus elephants walked the streets of Erie and Broad, and in
Dangerous Neighbors, a book about Philadelphia during the 1876 Centennial, she discovered many details that resonated with her. Standing there in the glorious afternoon sun, Kathleen told me stories about the Oppenheimer curling iron, the fifteen-cent round-trip trolley, the ferry one took from Philadelphia across the Delaware, and the shore years ago. Kathleen's grandmother was an eleven-year-old child during the time of the Centennial, and so Kathleen remembered, too, whispers of the great exposition.
I had published
an essay about the Jersey shore in the
Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago, and that story prompted for Kathleen memories of her own trips to the sea as a child. We spoke, then, of this, too—this shared geography that has been transformed by time and yet remains a signifier, a home.
As much as I often wish I were back in the city living the urban life, I am tremendously grateful for the streets where I live. I am grateful, too, for the people who enter my life—for Quinn now on the verge of her career, and for Kathleen with her storehouse of memories.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 8/17/2012
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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Many years ago I wrote an odd book called
Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. Flow had grown out of my love for my city, was supported (in all its strangeness) by a
Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and was published by the best possible house for a book such as that one:
Temple University Press. Micah Kleit, my editor, gave the book room, while Gary Kramer, a savvy and delightful publicist with deep Philly roots, gave it wings. Not so run-of-the-mill in tone, structure, and voice, but always Philly true,
Flow sits today—slender and alive—on my shelves, thanks to Micah's picking up the phone when I called.
From
Flow grew
Dangerous Neighbors (Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA), my 1876 Centennial novel. Katherine, a bereaving twin, stands at the heart of that story, but just one step to her left is a character named William, a young man from the poor side of town who rescues lost animals for a living. William was a character who never left my thoughts. He lived with me long after
Dangerous Neighbors ended.
Soon I was conjuring William as a young adolescent living among the machines of Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1871 Philadelphia. His brother has been murdered by a cop (the murder based on a real Philadelphia event), his father is in Eastern State Penitentiary, and it is up to William to protect his heart-and-soul-sickened mom. William gets some help in this from his best friend, Career, who has a job with the newspaper man, George Childs. He gets help, too, from a prostitute named Pearl, and from the little girl next door. He thinks he's getting help from the variety of medicines (that sarsaparilla resolvent among them) that were being pedaled at the time. And those ginger-haired twin girls from
Dangerous Neighbors? They're in and out of his poor neighborhood, thanks to their feminist mother.
After I'd finished writing this novel, I sat and thought for a time about publishing options. I wanted a true Philadelphia home for this book. I wanted an opportunity to work with a house that might connect this story to Philadelphia school children, museum goers, history buffs. It wasn't long before I was writing a note to Micah at Temple University Press, who thought the story sounded interesting and encouraged me to send it on to his colleague, Stephen Parks. Steve is a Syracuse University professor who also runs
New City Community Press. NCCP began as a literacy project in the public schools of Philadelphia, won a major national grant in support of its ethos, and remains today committed to telling community stories. I liked the sound of all that, and so, last February, I met Steve in Chestnut Hill and we talked. There's been no question (in my mind) about this book's future ever since.
Today I can officially announce that
Dr. Radway's Sarsparilla Resolvent will be released next March from New City Community Press and distributed by my friends at Temple University Press. It will be illustrated by my husband, William Sulit, who also designed the book's cover, revealed for the first time here; for a glimpse of interior art, go
here and for more of Bill's a
I've worked with my artist husband on two previous books—
Ghosts in the Garden (New World Library) and
Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business (Berrett-Koehler). This past year, we've been collaborating on a third—
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an illustrated teen novel that features Philadelphia's own Baldwin Locomotive Works, Eastern State Penitentiary, the great Schuylkill River, a blowzy named Pearl, and my hero George Childs, among other places and souls. It features, as well, the odd tonics and medicines of the time—the strange promises and possible powers of herbal concoctions and flowering vines. William of
Dangerous Neighbors fame stands at the center of this novel. Two twins waft through.
This morning, my husband has completed the design of the book's cover (he has also created nearly a dozen interior illustrations), and while I cannot unveil the whole, I am happy to share this small corner of an image that perfectly captures 1871 and, at the same time, suggests the story's very modern spirit.
I am ridiculously happy about all of this. Not just that the book will exist (spring 2013). But that my fictional William was rendered by my real-life William, and that a very kind press is giving both a home.
Less than a year from now,
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, the 1871 prequel to
Dangerous Neighbors, will make its way into the world. This is William's story; this is his world, Bush Hill. Look for more here on the particulars in a few weeks.
But before any book can go out into the world, it has to be a book we love. It had been a while since I'd read the "final" book through, and as I did (a few days ago) I felt uneasy. Work needed to be done. I wanted to do it. And so, today, my travels finally done, I am at work on the story—rebuilding its opening pages to heighten tension and momentum, deepening a character I named Career, and revisiting my notes on Eastern State Penitentiary, where much of the story takes place.
This is a photo of the room about which I write, taken a year or so ago.
For much of last year I worked on a book that took me deep inside the world of 1871 Philadelphia—the clank of Baldwin machines, the boats on the
Schuylkill, the innards of Eastern State Penitentiary, the rattle of a newsroom, the world of William, first introduced in
Dangerous Neighbors.
I wrote a book. My husband made drawings. And then I stood back and thought. What next?
Today I am having a preliminary meeting about this book of mine, this character I love, this Philadelphia to which I will always be true. I don't know what will happen, but I do know this: Sometimes we have to step away to know what it is we should be stepping toward.
Beth, I enjoyed your article and pictures of Eastern State. I was a social worker in the Pa. System and was very familiar with Eastern State.
Eastern State was the first Penitentiary in the world and copied by others. The city of Ushuaia, Argentina copied our Philadelphia Plan at their local prison. Now the prison is a museum and within each of the cells are pictures of other prisons, but none of Eastern. Your pics are great and I was hoping you could help me acquire some more for the Ushuaia museum? Thank you,
Stephen Ettinger
Stephen,
Thanks so much for sharing this information about the prison museum in Ushuaia. It would be great if Eastern State were included. Hi-res images can be downloaded from our online press room - http://www.easternstate.org/contact/press-room/photos
Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!
Best,
Nicole
___
Nicole Fox
Senior Specialist, Marketing & Interactive Media
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site
[email protected]