new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Handling the Truth, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 41
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Handling the Truth in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 3/21/2013
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Books of Wonder,
Drexel University,
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent,
Harleysville Books,
Free Library of Philadelphia,
BookPassage,
Corte Madera,
Handling the Truth,
Hooray for Books,
Add a tag
Friends of this blog know how much I love California—the sun, the ocean cliffs, the people. I was so happy, therefore, to be invited to conduct a memoir workshop at the great BookPassage in Corte Madera. I'll be out there in early September, and I'd love to see you there. The details are here, below, along with a few other events that have cropped up in the meantime—events that will touch on everything from
Small Damages,
Dangerous Neighbors, and
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent to memoir writing, Philadelphia, and the boutique marketing communications firm I run.
Please join us if you can.
March 22, 2013, 5 - 7 PMPost-Penn Perspectives Panel
Sweeten Alumni House
University of Pennsylvania
March 24, 2013, 1 - 4
No-Foolin' Mega-Signing At Books of Wonder
New York, New York
For Details click here.
April 10, 2013, 7 PM
Feature Author Book Club Dinner
Harleysville Books
Harleysville, PA
May 22, 2013, 2 PM Strange and Familiar Places in YA Fiction (a panel)
Drexel University Week of WritingPhiladelphia, PA
July 27, 2013, 3:30 - 5:00 PM Launching Small Damages paperback/Memoir Workshop
with Debbie Levy
Hooray for Books
Old Town Alexandria, VA
August 6, 2013
Launching Handling the Truth
with a memoir workshop
Free Library of Philadelphia
(details to come)Philadelphia, PASeptember 7, 2013, 10 AM - noon
BookPassage Memoir Workshop
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925October 20, 2013
Talking Memoir with Linda Joy Myers @
Rosemont College
(details to come)
Among the many memoirs nested into
Handling the Truth is Buzz Bissinger's own extraordinary fatherhood story,
Father's Day. I wrote about it because I love it. I teach it because it matters.
Buzz's kindness to me through the years has been remarkable—his support of my work, his faith in my small books, his encouragement about my sentences. Buzz wrote the beautiful words on the jacket of
Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. And today he has these words for
Handling the Truth:
Beth Kephart has done something extraordinary with this huge and messy thing called memoir—roping it into submission with her typically beautifully writing. There is authority here, scholarship, challenge. In this well-organized book, every example is a precious stone to turn over and to learn from, particularly in terms of crafting a voice and finding one's way in. Too many students think memoir just happens. Nothing ever just happens. Memoir is an academic field. This should become the seminal text.
Buzz Bissinger, author of Father's Day, A Prayer for the City, and Friday Night Lights
For more about Handling the Truth, please
visit this page.
Gary Kramer, beloved publicist for my river book
Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (Temple University Press) as well as the forthcoming
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, just sent word that
Library Journal kindly featured
Handling the Truth in its
Nonfiction Previews for August 2013.I am so happy to have this book of mine be placed among other true memoirs. I'm so grateful to Barbara Hoffert, who wrote:
Not a memoir proper, this book fits nicely with the others on this list because it’s about writing memoir. Kephart has penned five.... She’s also mastered the fiction and essay forms and currently teaches memoir writing at the University of Pennsylvania, so she’s got the skills to explain every facet of the writing process, including that crucial issue for memoirists: where does imaginative shaping stop and disregard for truth begin.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
A few minutes ago, while searching for a slip of paper I had carried home with me from Florence, I found a folder full of exercises I'd given a private student years ago. We'd had a week together, eight hours each day, and I had given every day a name—Childhood Remembered, Place as Poetry, Beyond Life Itself, that sort of thing. The readings I'd assembled for each day were to serve as both inspiration and prompt.
Oh, I thought, as I rediscovered this folder. I should write a book about teaching, a book that would allow me to celebrate all the books I've loved. Or at least some of them. A fraction.
And then I remembered: I already did.
So here, for those of you seeking a prompt on this day, is a small simple thing. Return to your favorite passages in books (fiction or memoir, even poems—in this case it doesn't matter) that limn an early childhood scene. For my student I chose the early pages of Paul Horgan's
The Richard Trilogy, A. Manette Ansay in
Limbo, and Sue Monk Kidd from
The Secret Life of Bees. We read the pages together and then considered:
* the physical details that surfaced most quickly when my student was asked to remember his childhood home;
* the nature of childhood memories that he considered most dear; and
* the first event in his life that he considered tragic.
He then wrote a fragment of memoir that returned to that time and place.
Here's a paragraph from Sue Monk Kidd to get you started:
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
Yesterday in class, after teaching ourselves the memoir
Drinking: A Love Story (Caroline Knapp), we allowed music to take us on a journey. Three different pieces—a touch of Cuba, a touch of tango, a touch of reggae. I wanted the students to find within the rhythms some memory of movement—of their own bodies taken across place and time. What is it to walk, to run, to drive, to jolt, to slide forward? How do we find the language that moves a passage ahead while at the same time unblurring the particulars of place, weather, mood? It was, in part, a lesson in verbs, or it might have been.
Later, coming home, I tried to remember my own journey language. How might I have attacked the assignment I gave to my own students? I recalled this passage from my third memoir
Still Love in Strange Places. It is an odd thing to read your own work, years on. But this day at St. Anthony's farm, my husband's home, is still alive in me.
Wanting time to myself before I surrendered to the Spanish, I slid out of the tree and set off across the courtyard and out through the crooked, metal gate, calling to no one in particular that I wasn't going far. I went down the dirt road between the two dug-out walls of earth that towered above my head. Hiking up the road while I was hiking down came two brightly dressed women, their hair the color of ink, their postures accommodating the pitch of the road as well as the woven baskets in their arms and the plastic water jugs that sat on the yaguales upon their heads. One jug was blue and one was orange, and the women kept their eyes low as they passed, not meeting mine, not inviting inquiry, not keen, I sensed, on my camera.
I hadn't gone far before the dogs found me, an ugly, snarly pack, half starved and probably only partly sane, three or four, maybe, I can't remember. Mongrels. Their coats short, sparse, bristly as a wild pig's hide, their ears angered flat against their heads. They had nothing between them but their hunger, no reason not to attack the thin, white American girl-woman who had come among them accidentally and who now stood, grossly transfixed, as they blasphemed her through yellow teeth. I was aware of a broken tree limb on the road. I picked it up. I heeled my way up the incline, holding the stick out before me like some kind of Man of La Mancha warrior. I inched backward. Jowl to jowl, the dogs howled forward. I wondered if Bill would hear, if I'd be rescued, if I should turn and run like hell.
But before I could act, I was saved by a barefooted boy who out of nowhere appeared with a fistful of dog-deterring rocks. He hurled. The dogs scattered. The dogs returned. He hurled again. In the dissipating dust, I gestured my thanks, then half walked, half ran to the place I'd come from. I held the camera tight against my chest. I cursed the country, and I blessed it. I hurried past the gate of St. Anthony's, past a herd of wild chickens, past more women bearing jugs. I kept on walking until I came upon a path cut into the high wall of earth beside the road. The path rose vertically on tight, hard, dirt steps, and it was at the end of this path, as I'd been told, that the peasant dead were laid to rest. I swung my camera onto my back and pulled myself toward them with my hands.
To be among the dead at St. Anthony's is to enter into communion with wild turkeys....
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
"I read
The Lover to be Marguerite Duras writing about herself," Maxine Hong Kingston posits in her introduction to this classic book labeled "Fiction." Vivian Gornick, too, writes of the book as if it is a memoir, of course a memoir, and everything we know about Duras suggests that memoir was the author's madness and method.
This is, after all, the story of a young, nearly impoverished French girl, fifteen, who conducts an illicit affair with a much older Chinese lover—determinedly, provocatively, in full awareness of the costs, just as Duras did. It involves an unstable mother and two brothers, one of whom Duras refers to as the murderer, the other as the martyred; here biography again asserts itself. The setting is prewar Indochina, where Duras was born and lived until she went to France to study. And a returning, angry, consoling theme is the unnamed narrator's wish to be a writer.
Labeled fiction. But.
I will take this as memoir, too. I will take it as memoir and I will add it to my list of books that teach those who seek to wrestle the form (in past tense, in present tense, in third person, in first).
The Lover is a fierce, slender book—forthright and obscuring, declarative and confused, angry and proud. It feels like a book written in a single rush, a mirror of the remembering mind at work. This could be true, this may be true, this was true, and that was me, but that was me then. We haul our past lives forward in this life. We look around and there are multiples.
And once we were young. And once we thought we would not have to forgive or not have to love any one person more than we love ourselves. Among the many things
The Lover is about is the knowledge we gain too late in life.
Which is why this book should be read by the young.
An excerpt from a story that folds in upon itself, then unfolds, that yields genre-less wisdoms like these:
People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it's happened before and it happens still. It doesn't ever announce itself as such—it's duplicity itself.... It's while being lived that life is immortal, while it's still alive.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
Later this year, on August 6th,
Handling the Truth, my book about the making of memoir, the students I've taught, the many memoirs I've read, and the lessons I've learned, will be released by Gotham.
I'll be celebrating its release on launch day at the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, where I will be offering not just a reading but a workshop opportunity.
Between now and then I'll be blogging about the new exercises I'm giving to my current University of Pennsylvania memoir class, the new/old memoirs I'm reading, and the debate that continues to swirl around this form. I'll notch these new exercises, reviews, and commentary onto the dedicated
Handling page after they appear here, so that that page will then serve as a supplemental repository.
Because no book about writing, especially, is ever really done.
Years ago, I wrote a book in the voice of a river—
Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River—and felt it to be my truest book—my least defended, my most vulnerable. I was speaking in the voice of another, and so I was speaking with undiluted honesty about how I lived lonesomeness, forsakenness, slow faith, trust, and love.
Ever since
Flow, I have encouraged my students to write in the voice of another so that they might better see themselves. Autobiographies of the inanimate have ensued. Autobiographies of the comb, the toothbrush, the flashlight. Autobiographies of the ID card, the pink sweater, the dandelion-tattooed iPhone case, the glass horse, the pipe, the yellow post-it (one year old). While in Miami with the two dozen YoungArts writers, we talked hairography—the pieces I'd asked them to write in the voice of their hair. We reviewed questions of gender, tense, knowledge, research. We talked, specifically, about empathy—about how, forced to see one's own self through the eyes of a constant, silent witness, we grow. Our language changes. Our understanding steeps.
And so: Choose an object or a thing that is always nearby. Imagine yourself into its perspective. See what it teaches you.
Here, for example, is my own hairography. It is speaking to the twenty-four. It is speaking to you.
Hairography
Language like fumes. Language particulate and strange—the caper of a thought, cleaved. Here are some words: Efflorescence. Interjacent. Lagniappe. Rune. Here is the vast task of my existence: to listen. I am electrostatic frizz, I am frump, I am inconvenient. I am fallen, twisted, clawed, resisted, shamed. There are one hundred thousand of me. But in the spaces in between, I breathe.
What I’ve learned (we):
Language is larger than words. Language is song and pace, hurry and pause; take it one shivering um at a time. Language wants to participate and it is afraid and it waits for a sign. Language bends, and any sentence studied might be a poem. Make the poem. Defy the easy tease of ordinary-ness. Live language large. Look at me hanging here, desperate here, curling. Appease me.
You will have noticed some things: In the making of the new there will be consequences. In the struggle to know there will be pain. In the urge to emerge there will be casual disregard. In the arsenal of punctuation, on the snowbanked page, in the sudden silence, answers will be found. Against chemistry, machines, mongers, fads, grandiose insensitivities, and regrettable excess wage war.
Corrugated, coruscated, unfit: Your eyes, through the years, have accused me. Brittle, broken, lied to, lied for, left to wind and winter, smoke and cure, delusion, bedsheets: I yet remain. (We.) I grow old. I wait.
Language like fumes—did you hear me? Language particulate and strange. If my gift is how I listen, your gift must be how you talk into the page. How you tunnel through—cuticle to follicle to brain blood heart. How you—somehow—remain.
What did you say?
For more thoughts on memoir making and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
A dozen years ago, Paula Fox published
Borrowed Finery, her memoir of a fractured childhood. She had reached her mid-seventies. She had long before attended Columbia, published adult novels deemed "brilliant" and "devastating," gained a reputation (and many awards) as a children's book author (
Maurice's Room debuted in 1966; some twenty books for younger readers later, in 1999, she was publishing
Amzat and His Brothers), and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, my own alma mater, though I, never believing myself worthy of a "real" writer's education, foolishly lost out on the opportunity to learn from her.
She wrote
Borrowed Finery to tell the story of her young life.
It could not have been more lonesome, nor more confusing, the life that Paula led. She was the daughter of two self-consumed parents who left her to a series of caretakers while they tooled around the world or lost themselves to a miasma of their own making. Paula's happiest years were her earliest years, when she grew up in the gentle care of a pastor/local journalist who introduced her to books, encouraged her curiosity, and gave her a safe haven. She had continuity then, love—two things that would soon elude her as she was moved from the pastor's home to Hollywood to Long Island to Cuba to New York City to Florida to Montreal, among other places. Often she was left to her own devices. Sometimes her mother appeared and made demands, or her father reached out, then snapped. There were good uncles and bad uncles. There were friends who came and went, a stint among plantation workers, a teacher whose kindness mattered until it, like all else, vanished.
Borrowed Finery of is a memoir fashioned out of scenes and white space, painful particulars, gorgeous lines, stunning autobiographical cliffs and plummets. Sometimes all that is remembered is a story half-told. Sometimes it's a detail—flowers that smell of subway stations, a great grandfather who counts priests in Barcelona, the awareness (Annie Dillard like) of becoming aware. Sometimes there are long exercises in trying to remember, confessions of gaps, delays in understanding, whorled what-ifs. Maybe this. Maybe that. How could she know?
As her readers we admire her self-constraint, her implied theme making, her way of finding answers for herself—or, if not answers, a way of moving forward, and not back.
Paula Fox is brilliant. She writes of her early life with her minister benefactor like this:
I can still recall the startled pleasure I felt that Sunday in church when I realized his sermon was indeed about a waterfall. I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood—that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.
For more thoughts on memoir making and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
Yesterday was a celebration of my father on his birthday—a surprise cake among his many friends at his church, a lunch at his favorite, cafe, a somewhat disorderly assemblage of preferred foods from the Farmers' Market, organized into sub-specialty themes (here we have our cheeses and crackers, here our apple fritters, here our quiche, here our pecan pie), tickets to an upcoming high school production of
Grease.
None of it being close to enough to honor the man who has always done so much for his wife (whose grave he still visits daily, even in blasts of winter cold), his three children and his three children's children. Kep Kephart has been a stealth benefactor, a man who has given without the slightest expectation a quid pro quo. Where there has been need, he has stepped in. Where there was college to pay for, he did. Where there were little TVs or kitchen pots that might have helped ease the lonesomeness of first studio apartments on Camac Street, say, little TVs and kitchen pots materialized. Where a trip away was precisely the cure for the tedium of too much stuck in a rut, a check arrived in the mail."Your father is a very good man," I was told, time and again, as I planned his surprise moment at the church. "We don't know what we'd do without him."
I was thinking about Kep Kephart, a Penn grad, devoted Presbyterian, retired businessman, and active consultant, while I was reading about Abe Trillin, the Jewish grocer of Kansas City, in Calvin Trillin's memoir
Messages from My Father. Trillin's slender memoir never pronounces its guiding questions, its framing themes. Rather, it begins with a declaration—"The man was stubborn."and proceeds to limn the life of a father who may not have made a strong first impression, with his "unprepossessing name," his "prominent nose," and his "negligible chin," but whose manners, values, and behaviors were of presidential caliber and consequence.
The contempt Abe feels "for people who felt the need to pump up their own importance" was encapsulated in a term; "that sort of person was "big k'nocker" (a phrase that would have fit nicely in with the recent
New York Times story about parental boasting
"A Truce in the Bragging Wars"). The fun he had with simple things—silly phrases, songs, marching tunes—seemed more important, looking back, than anything money might buy. His tenderness in letting an employee go, his admirable work ethic, his decision to be remembered, most of all, by his choice of yellow-tinted ties—all this gentleness, all this manliness, all this fatherliness. Calvin Trillin may have inherited his father's stubbornness, but he noticed, and absorbed, the bigger lessons his father taught.
Perhaps for Abe, and therefore Calvin, it all came down to a single phrase: "You might as well be a mensch." I hadn't seen the phrase before (the word, of course, but not the phrase), but I think I'd like to make use of it now—to seed my thoughts with its power. Here's Calvin in his trademark simply meaningful prose, parsing the line for the rest of us:
Even the words to live by that I have always associated most strongly with him—"You might as well be a mensch."lack grandiosity. The German word Mensch, which means person or human being, can take on in Yiddish the meaning of a real human being—a person who always does the right thing in matters large or small, a person who would not only put himself at serious risk for a friend but also leave a borrowed apartment in better shape than he found it. My father clearly meant for me to be a mensch. It has always interested me, though, that he did not say, "You must always be a mensch," or "The honor of this family demands that you be a mensch" but "You might as well be a mensch," as if he had given some consideration to the alternatives.
I take mensch to mean a sweep of things, and also these essential things: Remember others. Acknowledge others. Be happy for what they achieve. Listen more than you talk, if you can. Don't make too much of your own glory.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
A flight of unexpected corporate work came in, and I was awake most of the night getting it done. At 5:30 AM I thought it might be best to close my eyes for an hour or so, today being a teaching day at Penn. I pulled two blankets to my chin on the downstairs couch and didn't sleep until, suddenly, I was trapped in the net of a flash dream. It went something like this:
I was at a crowded bookstore, doing a
Handling the Truth event, which is to say teaching a memoir workshop. A pretty young writer approached, clutching Jane Mendelsohn's magnificent
American Music to her breast.
"I so loved this book, thank you for writing it," she said.
"Oh," I said. "It's a lovely book, a beautiful book. But I didn't...."
Interrupting me, the young writer began to speak, in detail, of her book love. I nodded—of course, of course; I had raved about it endlessly myself. "But," I kept saying. "But...." Thwarted time and again in my desire to disclose as she went on and on. Then, interrupting herself, she said, "I guess some author is here for the
Handling the Truth event."
I nodded.
Leaning close, she confided, "I'm not staying for that. The book seems a tad overdone."
I never got to say what was true—about
American Music, about
Truth.
I hate that.
Last evening, at Bryn Mawr College, the multi-media legend Patti Smith was given the 2013 Katharine Hepburn Medal at an absolutely beautifully orchestrated event.
And oh, did she make us cry. From her heart, without prepared words, she spoke directly to us from the stage above about
Little Women, Jo March, and a certain season when Patti was twenty-two years old and Katharine Hepburn herself came shopping at Scribner's, where Patti was working. Ms. Hepburn had tied an overlarge man's hat to her head with a green ribbon. She asked for help in locating books. While Patti escorted her down the aisles, Ms. Hepburn would note that Spencer (Tracy) would have loved this book or that, giving Patti (she said, so eloquently, so flawlessly) permission years later to shop for her own husband, even after he had passed on.
Sometimes people really are who they are on the page, and I have never doubted that Patti Smith is the Patti Smith of
Just Kids, a book
I loved so much (for its integrity, its soulfulness, its ungreen love, its sentences) that I forfeited meetings with writers at a certain Orlando, FL, event so that I could stay in my hotel room and read it.
Woolgathering, too, reveals the Patti Smith we met last night.
Patti Smith has, she herself has said, always sought to lessen the distance between herself and her audience. She does. She did. Taking on the obvious questions from passersby during the cocktail and dessert hours, allowing us to exclaim over her, noticing us.
"I like your dress," she said, as I stood near, photographing my friend, Elizabeth Mosier, second photo down, above.
I very rarely like my own clothes. I will always love this dress.
Oh, and in case you are wondering? That bit of graffiti up there does in fact belong to me. I try to stay in the background, whenever I can. But sometimes you just have to tell someone how much you love them.
Earlier today I finished reading
The Same River Twice, the magnificent, wild, violent, terrifying, sometimes vulgar, sometimes gentle memoir (about the author's hobo years, about his impending fatherhood) by Chris Offutt. I sat on a panel with Chris once, years ago. I celebrate his
No Heroes in
Handling the Truth. I've watched him go on and write for Hollywood (
True Blood, Weeds, Treme) and I've been glad when I've heard him (recently) speak of his return to literature.
You'll be glad, too, once you read this
River excerpt, below:
I have never worn a watch. Time is a Rorschach folded into a Mobius strip turned inside out, upside down. Time is the name we give to the living. Modern science presents us with kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—designating every organism on the planet. Once identified, it is ours, as with a nickname known only to a private few. Quantum physics has taken to naming the theoretical, much like concocting a name for an unborn infant. Nothing exists that is not labeled; like killing, it is our assertion over the world.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
Every year we lose twice the number of parents, children, grandparents, friends, neighbors, colleagues to suicide than we lose to murder. "Murder attacks the future, suicide the past," a brilliant writer offered to me, just this week, in email. Yes.
When Joan Wickersham's father decided to end his own life early one morning—he had dressed, collected the paper, made a cup of coffee for his wife, sat down in a favorite chair, crossed his feet on the foot rest, and fired one shot. He left behind the unsolvable riddle, the countless mathematically imbalanced paradoxes that all suicides leave in their wake. For years the author tried to sort the facts and un-numb, tried to understand who her father really was and how to make the entirely unacceptable somehow acceptable, so that she could live not past it, but with it. Hadn't he loved her? How could he? Hadn't he himself been against suicide as a philosophical concept, a life choice? So then what happened? Didn't he know that taking his life in his house would make so much impossible for the wife, and was that the point, after all, and why, in the immediate aftermath, was there so much strange conversation among the family members, so many wrong things first noticed, a hint, even, of laughter?
Wickersham wrote her book in pieces. She wrote it as fiction, she wrote it as memoir hung on the hanger of chronology, and finally she wrote it as an index,
The Suicide Index: Putting My father's Death in Order. The book was a National Book Award finalist in 2008. It wholly deserved the citation.
Chapter titles:
Suicide:
act of
attempt to imagine
bare-bones account
immediate aftermath
anger about
attitude toward
his,
mine,
belief that change of scene might unlock emotion concerning
You understand. You can image that Wickersham moves across pronouns, point of views, facts, assertions, incompatible parallels. You can trust that this book is honest and also unsparing—because a book about one person's suicide is also necessarily a book about the people who either did not anticipate or somehow caused (does anyone cause? can anyone anticipate?) the terrifying, tragic act.
There are lessons for memoirists in this book about structure and form. About lacerating honesty, as in: If you are going to be laceratingly honest, you must also be lacerating about yourself. About not making life too orderly for the pages of a book. Here is Wickersham, for example, offering instruction by way of notes to herself:
Biography, in the case of someone who commits suicide, is particularly dangerous, misleading. It looks at a life through the lens of a death. Every time a bad thing happens, the temptation is to say, "Aha!"
I have to be careful not to make it too orderly.
Here is Wickersham offering instructions on life:
I am convinced that in real life suicide can't be the backdrop, dwarfed by something else. It is the foreground: itself inevitably the thing that changes people's lives. There is no other plot, and no resolution. And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the absorption of a bruise.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 9/5/2012
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
James Martin,
Cynthia Kaplan,
Mainline Media News,
Buzz Bissinger,
Bruce Springsteen,
Kelly Writers House,
Small Damages,
Philadelphia,
Ryan Richards,
John Prendergast,
Handling the Truth,
Philomel,
Add a tag
Late yesterday afternoon, I took a quick dance lesson then hurried to the train to see my kid, city side. I have been down there untold times of late—checking out apartments, moving boxes in, arriving, breathless, to help with something, and of course, this young man (
not a kid) needs no help at all. I'm just drumming up excuses to spend an hour here or there with him.
So that I have seen the city under sun and the city swollen with rain, the city just after dawn, the city late at night. And I have felt more energized and alive than I have felt for a long time. Philadelphia does that to me. And so do snatches of conversation with my guy.
This morning a text comes in, six a.m.ish.
I'm working on my story, it said. Because my son shares this with me, this love of words. This pleasure taken in filling the silent hours with vivid fictions. By now, he's off to work, first day. And my happiness for him is giant.
Meanwhile, Ryan Richards of Main Line Media News interviewed me yesterday morning at 8:15 a.m. (not-ish) and, 13 hours later, this
Springsteen-infused story (which is also about the making of
Small Damages for Philomel) had been posted. Tuesday is day-before-pub day there at Main Line Media News and Ryan plays a central role in getting all stories out and prettied up for show. I have no idea, therefore, how he wrote such a nice story in the midst of all that, but I thank him. I hope he got some sleep last night.
Finally, tucked into the day was this formal announcement from Penn about the Homecoming Weekend Panel I'll be sharing with my friends Buzz Bissinger, John Prendergast, and Cynthia Kaplan, as well as James Martin, whom I am eager to meet. Join us if you can.
October 27, 2012/Saturday 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Memoir: Methods and Meanings
Kelly Writers House
Arts Cafe
3805 Locust Walk
Join alumni authors at Kelly Writers House as they read from and talk about their work in memoir. Panelists include Pulitzer Prize-winner Buzz Bissinger C'76, whose latest book is Father's Day: A Journey Into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son; essayist and performer Cynthia Kaplan C'85, whose 'true stories' are collected in Why I'm Like This and Leave the Building Quickly; Beth Kephart C'82, author of multiple memoirs and young-adult novels, and of the forthcoming Handling the Truth; and James Martin W'82, author of In Good Company, which tells the story of his conversion from GE executive to Jesuit priest, and eight other books. Pennsylvania Gazette Editor John Prendergast C'80 will moderate the discussion. Advance registration is not required, but seating is limited. RSVP to whhomecoming@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM.
Last evening, as the sun went down on the Main Line mecca, Wayne, I claimed an outside restaurant table with a former student and shared a glass of wine. You'll meet her through her words next year, when
Handling the Truth comes out, but last evening she was all mine—bright, succeeding, independent, adventurous, the sort of daughter and sister who would make any family proud. Certainly she makes this professor proud.
I returned home to a late meal prepared by my husband and to text messages from my son who had completed his first day at the new job and was ecstatic.
I am so happy here, he wrote, and what parent is not made whole by those words?
I don't know when it happened to me, but somewhere along the way the horizons changed, the coasts, the possibilities, and I now look back toward others who stand just ahead of their dreams. I am
moved by youth. I remember, sift, and sort it. But it will not be mine again. I have used up some chances and smudged some lines and achieved a few spare things while not achieving many others. I have let my own self down, or not lived up to my potential, or not risked enough, and all that, far more than age, marks me. All that
delimits me.
So that my greatest happiness now is what glimmers for the young people in my life—my exquisite son, my tremendous students, my friends' sensational children, my cherished young friends in publishing, and those of you who, just setting out on this life, visit this blog telling your stories. I want no smudged lines for you. I want the rewards that come from risks for you. I want more than a few spare things.
I want it all, for your sakes.
And soon I will sit and read again and hope that all I meant to say, all I need to say, is here, and here clearly.
Thank you, Lauren Marino and Susan Barnes of Gotham for seeing this book through.
Tomorrow I'll be at my alma mater and spring employer, the University of Pennsylvania, joining in on the
alumni memoir panel being hosted by Kelly Writers House for homecoming weekend. I'll be reading from
Handling the Truth (Gotham) and talking about the prickly enterprise of truth telling. I'll be answering questions. But what is making this already wonderful opportunity even sweeter is that I'll be seeing some of my past students.
This morning, for example, I woke to a glorious long email from Katie, who brought such golden light to the classroom this past spring and who emerged, during those Tuesday afternoons, as a real writer. If you're lucky someday, you'll meet this Katie of mine (of ours), whose email included the news that she has been accepted into top-choice medical programs. Katie is spending her gap year at a health ministry in a city that needs hearts and minds like hers. In the off hours (though it sounds as if there are no off hours), she is enrolled in photography classes at an art school. Katie has stories to tell, things to share, and this weekend she's returning to Penn, and if I'm lucky, I'll get to stand in her shimmering light for a while.
Nabil Mehta will be there, too, that engineering student and child actor whose highly poetic work enthralled us and whose
essay appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette not long ago. And perhaps Liz, supremely wonderful Liz, on her way from the west coast to the east. And among those who may join us that afternoon is my just-named spring semester apprentice, Alice, who will be working with me as my Florence novel unfolds—conducting research, interviewing doctors, discovering how fact becomes story.
We adjunct teachers out here teach because of the doors that open when we do. We teach because our students keep us young, and keep us whole. This morning, when telling my husband of Katie's news, tears fell. When I read Nabil's essay in the
Gazette, or
Joe Polin's Gazette essay before that, when I saw
Rachel dance in Red Dot Dreaming, when my
Kim celebrated her engagement, when my
Moira got married, when Jonathan challenges me (with a smile), when the letters from galentines and searchers and doers enter in, joy breaks through.
That's the power of our students over us.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 11/29/2012
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
David Levithan,
Jessica Shoffel,
Doris Janhsen,
Dennis Abrams,
Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church,
Gotham,
Help Thanks Wow,
Handling the Truth,
Eliot Schrefer,
Francine Lucidon,
Anne Lamott,
Add a tag
New York City was at its hospitable best yesterday. Through the windows of a train I watched the sun both rise and set on Manhattan. In between
I opined on the future of YA at the Publishing Perspectives Conference, saw old friends (Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Jennifer Brown, Laura Geringer, Melissa Sarno, Dennis Abrams, Ed Nawotka), made new ones, did a little Amen shout as Doris Janhsen, David Levithan, Francine Lucidon, Eliot Schrefer, and Dennis Abrams (pictured above), reminded people what publishing is really about, or should be about: good books. By mid-afternoon, I was sitting with the remarkable team at Gotham, discussing the future of
Handling the Truth. I was thinking—truth—how lucky I am. (Then got even luckier sneaking in a little stolen time with Jessica Shoffel of Philomel and my own son, at 30th Street Station.)
It took every bit of driving craftswomanship I have (and there isn't much) to get to Anne Lamott's talk (and promotion of her new book on prayer,
Help Thanks Wow) at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church by the 7:30 start. My father had saved a seat for me in the balcony, and a lucky thing that was, for there were at least 1,000 people gathered in this church where I grew up, wed, and baptized my son. Anne does what I cannot do. Talks without a plan ("I have prepared nothing," she began), works her way toward a theme, gets grace right out there, where it belongs, and triggers a bout of group hysteria with a single word (
Okay) and a prop (my father's pen).
And so we laughed. And so it was ten before I finally got home, after a day that had begun at 3 AM. The mail had been brought in. There was a card, the smart, precise handwriting of an amazing writer whom I love. Alyson Hagy, you of the million things to do, you of the bad bronchitis, Good Lord, girl, you didn't have to. But I love this from you. I will treasure it, always.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 12/11/2012
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Luke D. Hyde,
Barack Obama,
Ken Burns,
Katrina Kenison,
Calhoun Inn,
George Ellison,
Bryson City,
Horace Kephart,
Handling the Truth,
Great Smoky Mountains National Park,
Add a tag
I have written of my great grandfather here on this blog and elsewhere (
Tin House magazine) many times. Horace Kephart has been credited with helping to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He was an author and a campcrafter, a brilliant librarian who left academia to live among the Appalachian people, to understand them. He has been the subject of countless articles, at least one
novel, a stunning song cycle, a lengthy segment in the recent
Ken Burns series of National Parks, theatrical productions. He is celebrated yearly during
Horace Kephart Days (an event largely organized by my cousin, Libby). He has been
praised by Barack Obama. He has been lovingly attended to by
George Ellison, a biographer of heart and intelligence. He has been discussed, parsed, debated, and he continues to be the subject of ongoing scholarship and interest.
I had never had the opportunity to visit Bryson City, where Kephart lived for many years and where he is buried. I hadn't been able to go, in fact, until this past Sunday, a misty day in the Carolinas. We had been in Asheville for
a glorious wedding. My husband drove the mountain roads. When we found Bryson City, we stopped and walked. Seeing the
Historic Calhoun Hotel and Country Inn, I made the decision to be bold. To knock on the door and see what might happen, for I had heard that this innkeeper had a Horace Kephart library and a respect for Kephart's work.
We were in the south, and so politeness ruled. Mr. Luke D. Hyde, the Calhoun innkeeper and a key player in the ongoing sanctuary that is the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, didn't just open the door; he invited us in. He told us his stories, shared images, took us up to his Kephart library (see the portrait of my great grandfather on that wall), even gave me a copy of Kephart's work on the Cherokee Indians. Then he sent us on our way, and I will always be touched by the time he took and the generosity he showed.
Kephart is buried on a hill beside a small church. He is buried no more than a half mile away from one of my best friends' childhood homes. I heard from Ann as we were walking the incline. I saw her home in the near distance. I felt her spirit beside me. Ann has visited Kephart's grave for many years; members of her family are buried nearby.
I wish I was with you, Ann wrote. And how I wished, too.
Finally, as I was making my way through Bryson City, I heard from my dear friend
Katrina Kenison. I have known Katrina since the beginning of my publishing time (truly) and written of her often here. Once, years ago, Katrina, who so deeply understands and loves the natural world, sent me a copy of Kephart's
Camp Cookery, which sits right here on my shelf. I had written of
Katrina's gift when it came. On Sunday I was the recipient of yet another kind of gift, for Katrina was reading
Handling the Truth and there in the hills of Bryson City, I read her thoughts about its early pages for the first time.
Blessed.
Tomorrow morning I am going to share a video here that will quiet you, inspire you, make you want to know my friend, Katrina Kenison.
But this afternoon I am privileged to share Katrina's words about
Handling the Truth. She received this book and read it at once. She sent me notes as I stood near my great-grandfather's grave in Bryson City, North Carolina, and then notes again, through a dark week. And even in the midst of all she is doing in preparation for the launch of her own book,
Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment (look for it!), she took time to craft these words.
They are the first "official" words for this book:
With infectious passion and hard-won wisdom, Beth Kephart eloquently celebrates the rigors and rewards of the creative process and – equally necessary – the art of crafting a meaningful life. Part memoir and part memoirist’s manifesto, this small, urgent book inspires on many levels. Read it and learn how to tell your story. Better yet, read it and begin to understand why your story matters.
Katrina Kenison, author of Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Readers of this blog may not be able to guess that I am a lover of books not just about words, but about their placement between marks of punctuation. From where I sit I see (on my shelf) Karen Elizabeth Gordon (
Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness,
Torn Wings and Faux Pas), Roy Blount Jr. (
Alphabet Juice), Roy Peter Clark
(The Glamour of Grammar), Patricia T. O'Conner (
Woe is I), Kitty Burns Florey (
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog), Peter Bowler (
The Superior Person's Book of Words), and all manner of thesaurus and dictionary. I've actually read these books. I have learned from them.
I also own three Ben Yagodas:
When You Catch an Adjective Kill it, Memoir: A History, and, as of two weeks ago,
How to Not Write Bad. A professor at the University of Delaware, an historian of
The New Yorker, a man who can talk knowledgeably about many things (we have shared a place at Elizabeth Mosier's table, we have chatted over Facebook, we have talked about truth and my own long-in-the-making
Handling the Truth), Ben is a conversationalist of the first order. He has stories to tell, and he tells them wit-fully.
(There I go, making up words again.)
Ben's new book is an advice book aimed toward those who hope to "not write badly." It was inspired by his students' work, he tells us—by their penchant for using misunderstood words, dangling clauses, spliced commas, homophones, and poorly placed possessives, among other things. Ben has seen bad writing flare. He has returned to tell us about it. He is asking (mostly politely) if we could please do better.
How to Not Write Bad is intentionally full of the basics, in other words. That little reminder to set the right apostrophe in the right place. That hope that we will put "lie" and "lay" to proper use. That gentle corrective regarding I, myself, and me. It is a book that asks us to be mindful, to look back over own shoulders at the language trail we leave, to be our own best copy editors, to read, to look things up.
My favorite parts of the book are those that trace the history of phrases or words. Those parts that decode what was once wrong but is not necessarily wrong now, or could be right tomorrow. It is the transitional nature of language that gets us most confounded, I would suggest. The "certain grammatical constructions [that] are considered okay by some or most authorities but retain an offensive odor for many readers (and, crucially, for teachers and editors), and should be avoided." Ben is well aware of the pitfalls and the trapdoors, and he leads us through his understanding of both in a way that could be helpful when talking with a client, say, about that word "alright," or the streamlining of adjectives, or any other number of things.
Packed with student examples, percolated with Ben's trademark style, easy to read and easy to remember,
How Not to Write Bad will now join the other word books on my shelf. I will hope to get more right here in the future—despite my penchant for longish sentences and odd little words, despite my tendency (I'm sorry; there are pressures; I will do better when I can) to blog too fast.
I am grateful to the famous professor and Kelly Writers House leader Al Filreis for sharing this clip with me yesterday. It brings back a beautiful day, late last October, when I first read from Handling the Truth and joined Cynthia Kaplan, James Martin, and John Prendergast in a conversation about the making of memoir.
Yesterday I noted that
my story about The Woodlands and the students I teach appeared, with my photographs, in this Sunday's
Philadelphia Inquirer. The link is now live and can be found
here. The story begins like this:
When did we become what we, on our worst days, seem to be? This nation trampled by poor compromise and misplaced screech, this drowning swell of hyper-caffeinated opinion, this landscape of the random and the ruined. We are increasingly disinclined toward rational debate. We rage about the inconsequential. We want to be heard, but we don't want to listen. We're quick to deplore the mess we're in, and tragically ill-equipped to fix it.
Impotence has never been my thing. I believe in the kids I teach, the small heroics of neighbors, quantum generosity, anonymous kindness, in doing something, making something, being something. I believe in the idea of what lies ahead, what takes us forward. We are. We can.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 1/28/2013
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,
Patricial Hampl,
The Duke of Deception. House of Prayer No. 2,
UPenn,
Running in the Family,
Lucy Grealy,
Handling the Truth,
English 135.302,
Autobiography of a Face,
Add a tag
Each teaching semester at Penn I choose the memoirs I want the class to dwell on, learn from. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Duke of Deception. House of Prayer No. 2. Running in the Family. Slices from Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, the memoiristic poetry of Pablo Neruda. More.
This semester we're reading three, and this weekend I was preparing my notes for our coming discussion of Lucy Grealy's
Autobiography of a Face, a book with so much to teach that I filled six pages with citations and notes and sent my students more
consider-this questions than perhaps a teacher should. As a child, Lucy has cancer. As a teen and young woman she endures more than thirty surgeries—first to remove the tumor from her jaw, then to try to resurrect her face. That's the back story, but it isn't the reason this is such teach-worthy memoir. I will teach Lucy Grealy tomorrow because of her reach—her attempt to make sense, her generosity, her thematic juxtapositions.
Autobiography is full of passages such as this:
By the end of my freshmen year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona. How trivial to actually think about one's appearance. The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes. But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly. Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.
This is my home, my table where I sit with family and friends. Tomorrow I'll take this spirit of community (pretend there are flowers, pretend there are candles), and we'll talk.
View Next 15 Posts
Looks like the Alexandria event is on a Saturday! I may just make the trip to see you!
I went to Amazon to see if I could find "Truth" -- not realizing its publication date is a ways off -- but was able to pre-order it.
whaaat. I wish that was closer to me :/
I've been meaning to respond to this for days (and I'll e-mail you as soon as I can), but right now, I just had to tell you that I may need to figure out a way to get up to Northern California for that workshop--good thing it's on a Saturday!