How to use this Page

At this point in this day I'm giving this blog post up to Nick Daniels, once the neighbor boy-wonder who cut all our lawns, now out on his own working with his dad in a thriving auto shop by day and still taking care of the rest of us by any other available hour. In the summer, Nick helps me reach the branches of the trees that have grown too tall for my own pruning. In the fall he takes away the leaves. In the spring he helps me mulch, if I need mulch, for a garden that (I admit) is ambitiously sized. Once I had a new front door put onto the house but it had a mind of its own. Nick stopped everything to help me get it closed. Took screws out, put them back in, joked around the entire time.

Yesterday, the snow, as you might have heard, came in high and heavy here in the east. This morning, having finished the first draft of a client project round about 9:30 a.m., I trekked outside to begin the business of clearing the path and the drive. An hour or so later, Nick drove by in his plow-outfitted pick-up.

"Hey, lady," he called. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I need to get the car out," I said. "Snow's in the way."

"Well, then," he said. "You step aside."

I was willing. Believe me, I was.

"Don't go anywhere, Nick," I told him, after a moment of watching him work.

"Why not?"

"I'm going in the house, to get my camera."

"What for?"

"So that people don't think I'm imagining things. So that they know you are real."

Those of you who read House of Dance and encountered a certain blue-eyed, car genius named Nick? Same guy, just grown up now.

The second readergirlz contest asked writers to think out loud about the way their own work is choreographed—how it moves across the page, and from sound toward meaning. Our winner is Q. Here is her poem, and her reasoning. Q receives a signed copy of House of Dance.


Tinged with regret
The girl in the bus
window
sees me on a park bench,
me with all my waiting and
watching her,
too.

I might have known her
once,
and I wonder if she saw me
for who I was,
for who I am,
or for who I'd like to be.

And how do I see
her?

She is a sheet of
paper,
breezing by on the wind
of the bus she sits in.

(Maybe I should have
sung
when I had the chance.)

When I write a poem, each sentence is its own stanza. I break lines where the next word should be emphasized more, leave a word on its own when it should be said slower and more alone, and leave lines together where they ought to be said faster. That, however, is just the basic structure.

I imagine this speaker thinking about the direction her life is taking and, perhaps, not really knowing where it leads. The girl on the bus could be anyone--like the sheet of paper, she is generic and fleeting. Yet, the poem starts with her perspective because it ends with the speaker's. She allows the speaker to build to a climax at the end of the second stanza, and then draws the speaker to her regretful conclusion, all without saying a word.

For the second readergirlz contest, I've chosen a topic close to my heart—choreography—and called it The Story Song. Please find the details below:

I read books to meet new characters, to go new places, and to find out what happens. I also read to learn how the author has chosen to choreograph the narrative. Is it a straight-forward telling, or a book that turns round on itself? Does the story speed up and slow down, are there embedded refrains, which themes recur, which details, and why? Watch this video, then share with me one of your own poems or short (up to ten lines) pieces of writing. Tell me, with your submission, just how you thought about the piece as lyric. What, in other words, was your choreographic strategy?

Send your entry to me at kephartblogATcomcastDOTnet by October 25, 2009. The author of the winning paragraph will receive a signed copy of House of Dance, a novel about a young girl who, in taking care of her dying grandfather and learning about the life he once lived, decides to offer him one final gift. The winning work will also be posted on my blog.

Dance studios bring together the middle of this country and the middle of another, guys who aren't precisely big on books and guys who are, mambo kings and samba sensations. In other words, they bring together people like Scott Lazarov and Jean Paulovich, who are pictured here. Scott is the artistic force behind DanceSport PA and one of the best choreographers anywhere (on Tuesday afternoons my husband and I dance Scott's brilliant tango; when I wrote House of Dance, I used Scott as the model for Max). Jean is the champion ballroom dancer, dear friend, and teacher who thinks I can pull off a Broadway/foxtrot/quickstep/Charleston/lindy hop/jive routine in time for a late-October showcase.

I'm not quite sure whom Jean thinks he's kidding, but I will tell you this: Yesterday, when fellow-dancer Julia was watching Jean and me kick slam our way through the routine, she suggested (with that merry twinkle in her eye) that Jean turn me loose on the stage alone so that I can do what I was already apparently seeming to be doing, which is to say, making it all up as I went along.

In any case, we do spend a lot of time with the good people at DanceSport, and the photos I sometimes post from there were all taken as part of a big web project—photography, design, writing, programming—that we have undertaken here, at the company that I run with my husband. Late last night that DanceSport web went live.

I was at the dance studio today when word came in that House of Dance was named a 2009 Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book.

I am, of course, entirely grateful. House joins books written by some of my literary heroes and heroines—Sharon Creech, Jane Yolen, Louise Erdrich, Avi, Neil Gaiman, and Mary Engelbreit, among others.

New: I close the day with these words from dear Priya, about Undercover.

House of Dance has a slightly modified cover in store for its release next March as a paperback; thank you, Carla Weise and Jill Santopolo.

In this trailer (the last of the three that I've been creating these past few weeks), we go through the streets of Ardmore and up into the Dancesport Academy studio, where it has taken an entire planet's worth of gifted dancers—Scott Lazarov, Jean Paulovich, John Villardo, John Larson, Jim Bunting, Cristina Rodrighes, Aideen O'Malley—and one very fine manager (the lovely Tirsa) to teach me a few things about the box step. This is the studio that inspired this novel, which was named one of the best of the year by Kirkus in 2008.

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.

We've been talking about outlining, not outlining. Below is a scene from a novel-in-progress that emerged from nowhere, then set a tone.

Before I get to that, though, may I extend enormous gratitude to The Shelf Elf, for her truly dear and generous words about House of Dance. I've been working through the deepest dark of this night (rain outside, a drumming in my head). I found her post by almost accident. I am so grateful.

The agent left us there, outside the locked-door of our graduation house. “To the sea,” Tim said, taking the lead for once, spinning an imaginary umbrella in the spitting-with-winter air. We drew our plastic hoods over our heads and when we got to the beach, we took off our shoes and ran. Ellie got to the water before the rest of us could. She stomped down a wave, and then I joined her, and Robb did, and the waves were freezing—oh God, the whole beach was. When I turned I saw Tim and Kevin in the distance, walking the rusted pipe that stretched parallel to the shore. “All the way to Cape May,” Tim directed, and now we were running toward Tim and Kevin, our shoes in our hands, clambering up the pipe, catching our balance, marching south.

The wind blew the salt into our skin. Robb’s hair rose and fell like it might fly. We walked single file, the rust beneath our feet, until the skies grew dusky and Kevin jumped from the pipe and reached his arms toward me. I leapt high and up and down, and I knew he’d catch me. I knew that he’d hold me, and he did, and then we both turned and saw Ellie still high on the rusted pipe, Ellie alone, and Kevin put me down and reached for her, and now Tim was taking Robb into his arms. Then we all stood just inches from the first froth of waves and tossed clamshells until real darkness fell.

I owe some very big thank you's to some very dear people, and I won't waste your time with preliminaries, except to say that this photo was taken last Thursday, at DanceSport Academy, the inspiration for many scenes in House of Dance. That's Aideen O'Malley (who inspired some aspects of the grandmother in the story). And if you look really hard, toward that slice of mirror, you'll see Scott Lazarov. Scott runs the studio (the very best anywhere). He was among my first teachers, and still teaches me tango, lindy hop, jive, bolero, and salsa when he can. It was Scott's wisdom and patience that inspired the character, Max, in the novel. Scott who made the dance scenes live.

All right, I've said more than I meant to for someone promising few preliminaries. What I came here to do was to say thank you to Laurie and Betty and Boo's Mommy, both, for their recent exquisite reviews of House. I meant to thank the always-wonderful Miss Em, for highlighting Undercover in her recent (gonzo) Winter Book Giveaway. And I meant to thank Anna Lefler, the comedienne extraordinaire (I was just watching one of her Hollywood gigs on YouTube; she's incredibly feminine and hysterical at the same time; get to know her) for well, hmm. Let's see. For the mug and for the postcards, both. For the mid-week pep talk when stuff was getting me down. For putting together an ad—an ad, I tell you—for my own little Beth Kephart blog.

Someday I'll throw a party for all the special people in the world. Hopefully all you will come. And when you come you'll get to meet all those other special people. (You know who you are.)

A short (just over a minute) story about a dance lesson, a life lesson, and another coming to terms.

Thank you, Miss Em, for naming House of Dance one of your top ten reads of the year. I know how much you read. I know how graced that recommendation feels.

Mari, thank you for naming House of Dance as one of your favorite books of the year. I am in such tremendous company in your list. I'm ... astonished!

To Becca, who writes one of the smartest book blogs in cyberspace—her idea of a review being my idea of a review, her tastes often mirroring mine—thank you for giving me a set of butterfly wings in your latest post. To Lilly for so sweetly acknowledging me in her own blog, and for entering this community so gracefully. To Tapestry100, for being such a kind supporter of Into the Tangle of Friendship, and for naming it one of his favorite books of the year.

To Sherry, who not only raised the remarkable Miss Erin we all love, but who also leaves exquisite comments on this blog—thoughtful comments.

And thank you, Lenore, for your rocking yesterday honor. You are your own tour de force in this wide web world. I'm honored to count you as a friend.

Earlier today I was walking the beach alone. The sky was (at last) blue. The ocean was frisky. The gulls paid me no nevermind. Fervency had replaced the fever of a pent-up winter.

I have been gone just 24 hours and my back isn't aching as much as it had, and I read a book, and I saw the sea, and I did nothing I was supposed to be doing, and it was good.

But two friends—a bookseller, a librarian—had happy news for me upon my return to reality, and I thank them both here. Em for telling me about how The Happy Nappy Bookseller has put in a long-shot Newbery wager for House of Dance. Charlotte for discovering (and then passing on the news) that Chasing Ray has today expressed hope for Nothing but Ghosts in her provocative (and wonderful) scouring of upcoming YA titles. I'm honored to be noticed by both reader-bloggers (and to have the friends that I do).

I have noted before that House of Dance was written in the wake of my friend Sandy's passing—that it began as a search to understand the gifts that might be yielded in a friend's final days.

I have not said this: After Sandy's sudden, inexplicable illness and death, her daughters celebrated her in a thousand ways—throwing parties in her name, upholding her traditions, giving gifts, insisting, Sandy would have wanted.... Among those gifts to me was a peach-colored sweater drawn from Sandy's closet, which evoked (through its color, through its spangling of beads) the glimmer of Sandy herself.

I bought the Christmas cactus that I've been photographing these past few days in honor of that sweater and in memory of Sandy. I thought it would be nice to have her color near. But ever since I moved the plant to a warmer spot in my window, it has been putting on a show—blooming in triplicate, deepening in color, yielding fuchsia, of all colors. Fuchsia. I wouldn't have thought these daring stigma possible, except that Sandy was just like that—always the first to notice (to celebrate) the thing that mattered most to you just then, forever bringing the birds to her garden and inviting you in.

Christmas is the creche scene we restore to the hearth. It is the blue lights on strangers' trees. It is last night's party at a neighbor's home, the late-night laughter of a home-from-college son, the right thing—found, wrapped, mailed. Christmas is the abundance of color and also the way that color returns us to old friends.

I went looking for W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz yesterday, and of course it was buried. There are thirteen bookshelves in my diminutive house and all of them are double stacked—triple, if physics allows—and this despite the fact that I take an alarming number of books to the local library for broader circulation. Even more alarming, I don't consider myself to be sufficiently well read. Or perhaps I read too many genres to have ever specialized in one. I love experts. I wish I were one. I'm not.

In any case, in the course of hunting for Austerlitz, I fell upon The History of Love, the Colum McCanns, the Rebecca Solnits, the complete Cathers, The Book of Salt and The Night Watch, The Optimist's Daughter, The Awakening, and I was Amelia Earhart, and when my husband found me fortressed in by a tower of books and asked (inevitably), "What are you doing?" I looked up and said, "Oh, Bill, I love these books, I love these books." With tears in my eyes that I had not known were there.

Tears because some of my dearest titles have grown slightly vague in my mind. Tears because I can no longer recite some of my favorite lines. Tears because I've just bought three new books for me along with so many books for others—books I have not, in some cases, yet read. Tears because I'm reading Brideshead Revisited for the very first time—the first time!—and when will I have time to read again my favorite books?

Why isn't there ever enough time?

We will take our son to the university bus today, and he will be driven, along with some of his classmates, north, returning for his first set of college finals. He will come home again two weeks from now. We'll miss him in the meantime.

Separately, unexpectedly, yesterday I discovered that a blog reviewer whom I've always admired had this to say about HOUSE OF DANCE. Thank you, Becky of Becky's Book Reviews. Thank you so much.

Moira Silva, the ALAN workshop moderator whose company I would have had the pleasure of keeping this past Monday at the workshop I never (thank you, Delta Airlines) got to, just sent along the most gracious note of understanding, and I am grateful. Had I had
the chance to be among her and my co-panelists, I'd have answered Moira's questions this way.

Clearly you have chosen sports as a point of engagement with young people. How did you decide to use this lever? (Was it a conscious decision or did it evolve as you wrote?)
I built the character of Elisa first; I lived in her head for a while. Since she is patterned after who I was years ago, I knew her heart, I knew what would heal her from all the hurt and isolation she was feeling. Skating—its lift, its flow, its speed, its way of making a skater feel graceful, empowered, beautiful...I wanted Elisa to have all of this. I want all young people to have all of this.

What point of engagement worked for you as an adolescent reader/writer? Who/what provided that for you?
Language mattered most to me—the song of it, the way it played on the page. I skated myself, choreographed some of my routines, and I always fell for stories that felt choreographed to me—bigger than plot, bigger than dialogue, bigger than technique. I fell for the emotive entangling work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

As you write your sports stories, do you consider your audience to be both boys and girls?
I recognize that girls have been my primary readers up until now. I don’t write for them necessarily, but my books find them.

Can you describe a time when sports played an integral role in your life?
Sports are essential in my life. There’s a great deal of connection, for me, between the way a body can move or can be taught to move, and the way that words move across the page. I ice skated for many years, then joined the high school cross country, winter, and spring track teams, where I was a sprinter, high jumper, and long jumper and also a part of a relay team that went to states and to Jamaica. I played high school tennis as well, and when I went to Penn, I learned squash and played on the Varsity team. I was a tom boy through it all, always kicking and throwing the ball with guys. Now I am learning (always learning) ballroom dance, which is much more of a sport than one might at first think. And which requires better clothes than I own now or ever will own.

Readers have categorized your writing as sports stories; how else would you classify it?
I write about young people at turning points in a language-intensive way.

What have you hesitated writing about, or even eliminated? In other words, what negotiations have you made in writing for young adults?
I am always working against my tendency to play out a feeling or a thought too long, at the expense of plot. I try to speed things up more than I might otherwise, for other genres. By writing skating into UNDERCOVER and dance into HOUSE OF DANCE I was able to vary the rhythm and sound of the books.

Since our workshop theme is negotiations and lovesongs, can you describe a situation that a character of yours is trying to negotiate?
Elisa, my heroine, is writing love notes on behalf of love-struck boys when she realizes that she’s falling in love with one of her clients. It’s a conflict of interest, shall we say.

By using sports in your writing, what kinds of themes can you develop?
Pushing against the odds.

Can you tell us a bit of information about what you are writing on now?
NOTHING BUT GHOSTS is due out in June, and though galleys are already out, I’m still tweaking it in true Tennessee Williams style. I have a fourth YA book due out next February about a mission trip to a squatter’s village in Anapra, Mexico. I have a short story in a forthcoming HarperTeen anthology called NO SUCH THING AS THE REAL WORLD. I’m working on a novel that takes place in 1876 (in which there is rowing and some more ice skating).

Who has been the easiest character for you to write about? Hardest?
Ease comes with familiarity. All my characters are implanted with parts of me. I can move through them and walk with them once I know who they are.

How has the Internet affected your writing process and overall career as a writer?
My blog has brought me close to younger readers, helped me understand what is important to them and how they dream. It has also yielded friendships with adult readers and writers that I cherish.

This morning I am grateful to the finches that still come, despite the snow, and to Lorie Ann Grover—a mother, a writer, an illustrator, a former dancer, a co-founder of ReaderGirlz, that YA site that transcends all others—who read HOUSE OF DANCE and had kind words to say.

Goodness abounds.

This isn't really me, but it is a photograph of happy dancing feet, which I found myself in possession of last evening. I'd been practicing the samba with the champion Belarusian, Jean Paulovich, and last night, among friends, we performed it. Though perhaps "perform" is too strong a word, perhaps "perform" suggests glitter and glued-on lashes and fish-netted thighs, and that will never (to Jean's professional despair) be me.

What is me is only this: The music goes on, and my bones take it in. My heart beats higher in its cage. Someone waits for me to get it right, and occasionally (but never wholly) I do. Frankly, I missed a few steps last night. But I never lost the music.

It's a privilege, dancing with Mr. Paulovich. It's a happy thing, to be forgiven for less than perfect bota fogas, voltas, whisks. It's good, after a stretch of worry, to come back home, to dance.

It seems like decades since I wrote memoir, though one might argue (and indeed some have) that blogging is memoiring, too. I tussled with the genre, ultimately let it go, moved onto poetry, history, fable, and also the YA novels that I have been writing for HarperCollins.

What I have never relinquished, however, is my belief that memoir's highest purpose is to put into place, for all of time, the people, geographies, and ideas that have earned a permanent vessel. In Still Love in Strange Places, my third book, I wrote about my husband's birthplace, El Salvador—the wars, the coffee farm, the people of Santa Tecla, my marriage. I wrote and researched and photographed for more than ten years, and in the final weeks of my work on that manuscript, a terrible earthquake shook Santa Tecla to the ground. Still Love had become the vessel for that which was no more.

In my novels, I look for ways to keep the true alive as well. To celebrate an English teacher who mattered (Undercover). To honor a young man named Nick, whom I have watched grow up over these past 13 years (House of Dance). In a book coming out next June (Nothing but Ghosts), each important person bears the name of someone important to me—my nieces and nephews, for example, my editor, Jill Santopolo (whose doppelganger is actually a young, smart, patient, curly-headed blond named Danny Santopolo). In The Heart is Not a Size (which I've been editing of late), there is a young man named Drake, who is fashioned after K., the rising poet with the enormous heart whom I sometimes write of in this blog.

Our first responsibility is to readers, of course. But I have discovered that I write truest when I am writing from the truest corner of my heart.

Poems by Alan Katz Drawings by Edward Koren Margaret K. McElderry / Simon & Schuster 2008 Okay, once again just to make sure we're all on the same page: do not give your book a title that can be used against you in a review. You would think editors would be the first to understand the rules of making a book review-proof. Of course, it's also a good idea to make sure the content followed the