My friends, the hour is soon. The chance to see if Beth is smarter than she ever manages to look on "Articulate," that glorious WHYY art show that Beth (still speaking of herself in the third person here) can hardly believe she'll soon be on.

(All thanks to Gary Kramer, by the way, for forging the bridge.)

As part of that program, three of my books will be offered to lucky giveaway winners on three separate social media platforms:

Love on Facebook
Flow on Twitter
Handling the Truth on Instagram 

Look for them and enter in, if having a free signed copy of one of these books is on your wish list.

Speaking of wishes: Wish me lots of luck. By which I mean: Wish me luck in surviving the panic that is slowly creeping in.

Show times on Philadelphia's WHYY:

Thursday, February 25, 2015, 10:30 PM
Sunday, February 28, 2015, 1:00 PM

Finally, can I just say, again and forever, how nice the entire "Articulate" staff is? And what fun it is to spend an hour talking to Jim Cotter. Even when you do just blow in from a storm. Sit down. And start speaking. Looking up minutes later to ask, Wait. Are those cameras actually on?

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Last year I shared the extraordinary news that my river autobiography, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, was selected as a core element in a William Penn Foundation-funded program designed "to improve environmental education in Philadelphia middle schools."

The first sweep of teachers is now meeting every Saturday morning at the Water Works (pictured above) to build the sweeping curriculum that will change the way children learn in my city. This morning, I'm joining my dear friend Adam Levine there on site to contribute to this program. Adam will be sharing his huge knowledge of secret city water ways and streams that have become sewers. I'll be teaching the teachers how to teach Flow, giving them writing exercises and critiquing ideas.


And so into the frosty cold we go....

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FLOW Festival 2014 / Architectural Projection Model from Greenhouse Media on Vimeo.

When the good people of the Fairmount Water Works asked if they might borrow the first prose page from Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River for a festival finale, I said yes, of course. This movie (rendered here) was projected onto the entrance house facades of the Water Works building as night fell a few weeks ago. The words come from the prose poem, "Rising."

Credits:
Habithèque Inc.— Creative Direction
Greenhouse Media— Video and Editing
refreshtech and LUCE Group— Lighting
Blair Brothers Music— Original Soundscape
Beth Kephart—The poem "Rising" from her book Flow

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My collaboration with the Fairmount Water Works is long and rich, and today I'm pleased to share the news that that relationship has now been extended through a fantastic new program funded by the William Penn Foundation.

The program, designed to "improve environmental education in Philadelphia middle schools and to engage new audiences in art," is fully described below. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, a book I've taught to the children of Project FLOW, will be an integral part of this program—a copy given to each participating student and teacher. I'll also be meeting with the teachers to conduct a writing workshop based on the book.

I am, of course, delighted.

The release about the broad program, as it appears in today's Philly.com:

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A pair of grants from the William Penn Foundation will allow the Fairmount Water Works to improve environmental education in Philadelphia middle schools and engage new audiences through art.


The Foundation awarded the Fairmount Water Works $506,000 to launch a three-year Middle School Teacher Fellowship Program to develop a curriculum that integrates urban watershed education with core science and English standards for sixth through eighth grade students. It also awarded an $82,500 planning grant for the Fairmount Water Works to prototype an interactive and kinetic sculpture near the river and the Water Works’ historic building.

Middle School Fellowship Program
Fifty-four Philadelphia School District teachers will create and test lessons in their classrooms and receive monthly training, classroom support from environmental educators, curriculum specialists and experts from the Philadelphia Water Department, and funds for supplies, staff development and bus transportation for field trips. The program is based on the Fairmount Water Works’ existing program, Understanding the Urban Watershed Curriculum Guide, a framework for lessons on watershed, and water use in the context of an urban environment. More than 1,500 students will be reached in the program’s first three years.

“We’re developing this curriculum at a time when the need for high-quality environmental education is critical so students can understand the issues we face in Philadelphia, and across the United States,” said Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works. “Our goal is to help teachers increase engagement and academic achievement by integrating real-world environmental experiences, hands-on exploration and project-based learning into the classroom.”

Student teacher volunteers from Temple University’s TU Teach program, University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and Bryn Mawr College’s Community Praxis program will also support the teachers.

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and, always, there, I find what I didn't know I was searching for.

In the dark hours of this cloudy day, just ahead of the morning I will spend with the seventh graders of Project Flow at Philadelphia's Water Works, I turned to Kate Northrop, Stanley Kunitz, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, and Greg Djanikian and found:

* a title that leads me toward a game
* a scene that leads me toward a prompt
* a pair of divine metaphors
* a myth that will inspire myths

Whomever thinks poetry is superfluous has not spent a morning with children.

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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.

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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.

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