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I write YA books; that is true. But I never write strictly and only of teens. I care about the sweep of generations. I think generations are relevant. Some of my very favorite characters are women even older (believe it!) than me. My Mud Angel and physician Katherine of One Thing Stolen. Stefan's East Berlin grandmother in Going Over. Old Carmen, the rugged beachcomber, of This Is the Story of You (due out next spring). And, of course, my Estela, the old Spanish cook in Small Damages—a character I lived with for a decade before she found herself inside that gorgeous cover.

But now look at the silver wing near the right upper edge of that cover. That is Estela herself, who came to me this afternoon by way of my husband's cousin, Myra. Estela in real life was my husband's father's mother—a loved, buoyant, life-affirming General Counsel in the United States who had also served as the Philippine ambassador to Portugal. I wear her ring as my engagement ring. I hear stories. And today I received this bookmark, which once clipped the pages of the books Estela read.

Myra's words (in impeccable handwriting):

This is an antique silver bookmark from El Salvador my grandmother Estela picked up—probably 50 years ago.... I decided it was time to send you this now. I always thought this should go to you—since you are the writer in the family and it came from William's home country.

 I am so in love with this gift. This piece of then. A bookmark shaped like a coffee bean that might as easily mark my third memoir about my marriage to this Salvadoran man, Still Love in Strange Places.

I thank you, Myra.

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Readers of this blog know that I married a man from a land that was foreign to me. El Salvador. That I traveled there. That I studied it. That I tried to make sense of that world in a memoir that took years to write, Still Love in Strange Places. I read every last news story I could find at the time, every antique coffee brochure, every photograph made available to me (this one, here, I especially love, featuring my husband's grandfather on the far right). I talked to dear Aunt Adela, my brother-in-laws, Mario and Rodi, my mother-in-law, anyone who had the time.

But the story is never over, and this morning I found myself spiraling back toward El Salvador while watching this New York Times retro reportage on the four American nuns who were murdered in December 1980. Their story horrified me when I first heard of it (a few years before I met my husband). I never could make sense of it. But love and memory keep a story alive, and justice finds its way.

For those interested in footage of El Salvador that I never saw and in a story that has many twists and turns, I highly recommend this story by Clyde Haberman and important video.

I am off to Masterman High, in Philadelphia, to talk with students about the Berlin Wall, about the world beyond, about risks and responsibilities. There is, I believe (I stake my small legacy on it), nothing like the real world to inspire meaningful conversations. 

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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.

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The ever-provocative Dwight Garner opines about the productivity of Important Novelists in today's New York Times, expressing a desire for work that yields "heat as well as light"�and a frustration with "the long gestation period [that] is pretty typical for America's corps of young, elite celebrity novelists."  Says Garner (who cites Eugenides, Franzen, Tartt, Chabon, and David Foster Wallace among the slower working novelists):

Obviously, some of this is about personal style. There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace.

The economics of novel writing (how many must teach, for example, to survive) and the tugs on a novelist's time (book tours, interviews) clearly, Garner notes, run interference in a writer's life.  It's likely that other things are also to blame—life itself, for example, by which I mean the need for a writer to live deeply so that he or she might know even more deeply.  Then there are the demands of research—how long, one wonders, did David Foster Wallace have to steep himself in the arcania of tax code before he could even begin to find the story inside The Pale King?

As I read Garner's piece, I reflected—as I often do—on my own "productivity."  I published my first book in 1998; by the end of next summer, with the publication of Small Damages with the rocking house Philomel, fourteen of my books will sit across the room from me on the shelf.

Some would categorize that effort as prolific.  In fact, I feel anything but.  I may have published my first book in 1998, but I was writing long before that, and many of my books—Small Damages being a prime example—went through ten years of work, more than eighty drafts, and two genres before it became the story it was always meant to be.  Still Love in Strange Places (W.W. Norton), published as a memoir, was for a decade a novel about El Salvador before I spent three years turning the fiction into fact.  You Are My Only, which will launch in a month, was three very different books (written for adults) before I wrote it as a young adult novel.  And I am, at this very moment, utterly overhauling a novel for adults that I was so sure was cooked to order six months ago.  I am, in some ways, starting from scratch.

Writing has never been, for me, a straightforward process.  Publishing has been anything but.  I am trying to suggest that as writers we work and work (when time allows, when the day job on occasion eases up), but we rarely control the outcome itself.  The story comes on us, at us.  It dawns, it reveals, it retracts.  It's there for a moment, and then it scuttles away, and as much as we would like to put ourselves on a publishing schedule, our imaginations are countries unto themselves.

Today I wake, for example, to a scene that has eluded me for weeks.  The same darned scene.  The same patch in the same

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A thank you vlog, in a stolen moment.

For Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jill Santopolo, and Philomel, for their faith in Small Damages.  For the gift of hydrangeas.  For the quiet now of making a house ripe for guests.  And for Q who forgives me even when knows should be know.... :)

Happy Fourth of July Weekend to you all.

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If there is anything that I've learned from writing the books that I have written, it is this:  Take your time. Get it right. Don't send your book out for editorial review until you can't write it any better, or any more.

I have written three novels for adults in the past.  One became, after fifteen years of radical reworking, the El Salvador memoir, Still Love in Strange Places.  One, following equally radical shifts and reimaginings, became the young adult novel due out this October, You Are My Only.  The third former adult novel is at the tail-end of a redrafting process; you'll be reading more about that no-longer-an-adult novel soon.

Last year, I sat down to write my fourth novel for adults.  This time, I would not tolerate the ersatz in me.  This time, I would work the novel and set it aside, work it and set it aside, until finally I asked my agent, Amy Rennert, and my friend, James Lecesne, to read.  They had wise things to say, loving things, hopeful things, and I listened to them—reworking the structure of the book at Amy's brilliant suggestion and intensifying the heart of the story, at James's.  I worked the book, set it aside, worked the book, and made a decision:  Before sending this book to any editor in the land, I would mail the whole to my friend Marjorie Braman, who recently stepped down from her role as editor-in-chief of Henry Holt to launch a literary consultancy.  I value what Marjorie has to say; I have learned from her counsel in the past.  I wanted to know what she would make of a story that means so much to me.

This is to say that I made the right choice, for Marjorie's notes, like Amy's notes, proved to be invaluable.  It's not just that she was so enthusiastic about this project.  It's that she read with care, wrote notes with precision, pointed me to places that needed rounding out and places that needed trimming.  She was honest and she was galvanizing.  I could not sleep (and I have not slept) for I had been given a new key to my own strange land.  I have rounded passages and abbreviated others.  I have softened and also clarified.

This blog post, then, is a thank you—to Amy Rennert, for sharing my hope, for believing in this dream, and for so conscientiously delineating ways that I could make this novel better; to James for being the love and light that he is; and to Marjorie for demonstrating her continuing commitment to the clarified page.

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Years ago, after I finished writing my third book, Still Love in Strange Places, Andre Dubus III wrote words for that jacket that still stun me.  Quiet and elegant words, beautifully crafted, followed by a note of equal elegance.  You don't forget people (perfect strangers) who do those things for you.  You tuck them into a special place on your shelf of fortunes.

I have read all Dubus books since, watched his House of Sand and Fog on the big screen, wondered where his craft came from (though of course there were the genes, the blood legacy of his namesake author father), and while I knew the bare outlines of Dubus's personal story, I never guessed at what he reveals in his new memoir, Townie.  Dubus was one of four kids left to hardscrabble living after the separation of the mother and dad.  Having left the family to pursue a life as a published, teaching author, Dubus the elder appeared once or twice a week for years—took the kids to dinner, interceded on behalf of bullies, taught his teenager son to toss a ball, but stayed, otherwise, where he was, in his zone of writing and teaching and young and hip friends and outside the circle of his family.  It was Dubus's mom who was left to the overwhelm of single parenthood, and it did, Dubus's reveals, overwhelm her.  Boyfriends came and went, houses were abandoned, much was filth and poverty, alcohol and drugs, and nearly everything was violence. 

I'm going to write more about this book in a few days to come.  But just now I want to share this passage, early in the book—a passage that is, I think, a high example of classic, gorgeous writing.  There's the hard truth here, in other words.  There is also tenderness.  Story and situation, I tell my students (using Gornick's terms).  Here are both, the perfect web.

The house was almost always dirty.  Whatever chores Mom would give us, we just did not do.  But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway.  We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor.  We'd go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat.  Sometimes I'd go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop.  In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I'd use it on our dirt yard.  I made straight even lines parallel to the fence.  It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.

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What do you do when the very perfect title you'd picked out for your new book is—uncomfortably, sadly, a fact discovered late in the game—a title David Foster Wallace used for a short story a few years back?  What do you do when nothing else seems to fit?

You find a quiet place in which to think, for one thing.

And you call your son, a genius at titles, among other things, who, years ago, when a certain untitled book was a day away from final catalog copy, called out to you, from where he was writing,

But Mom, he said, isn't that book (a memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man) about how there is still love in strange places?

Still Love in Strange Places? you said. 

Yeah, he said.  Something like that.

Two minutes later you were on the phone with Alane Mason, your W.W. Norton editor.  We have a title, you told her.  She didn't skip a beat.  She agreed.

Late last night, you called your son.

I need another miracle, you said.

Give me a day or two, he told you.

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Two days ago, while in line at Whole Foods, a friend approached with some news. "I've fallen completely in love with your husband," she said.  And when I didn't say anything, she continued: "Head over heels."

It's not an uncommon line in my world; I've been told the same thing by any number of women who have been charmed by my husband's Latin bearing, unusual stories, and incredible talent for the samba.  But in this case, I wasn't even certain that my friend had met my husband, so when I asked her to clarify, she said five words—Still Love in Strange Places—which is the title of the memoir that I wrote about my husband, his family, and the ways in which El Salvador, war, and coffee growing have shaped them.  "I just read the book," she said, "and I love everything about him.  Everything.  I want to meet him."

I smiled at this, of course, and thought of how often I have wished that my husband, a visual artist, would find the time for the books or essays or poems I've written.  He hasn't often, but he did read and bless Still Love, and perhaps because of that, the making of Still Love stands as one of my favorite experiences as a writer.  I worked for all those years to understand.  He opened the book, and he read.

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In preparing to teach the advanced nonfiction course at Penn, I read and re-read and remember. I re-enter the mind-space that took me here, to the first page of my Salvador memoir, Still Love in Strange Places.

The tear runs like a river through a map, hurtling down toward his right shoulder, veering threateningly at his neck, then diverting south only to again pivot east at the fifth brass button of his captain's uniform. Below the tear, two more brass buttons and the clasp of his hands, and below all that, the military saber; the loosening creases on his pants; the shoes with their reflections of the snap of camera light. He is one of three in a sepia-colored portrait, and someone had to think to save his face. Someone had to put the photo back together—re-adhere the northeast quadrant of this map with three trapezoids of tape so that his left hand would fall again from his left elbow and he would still belong to us. We suppose he is the best man at a wedding. We suppose that it was eighty years ago, before the matanza, before he was jailed and then set free, before he saved the money to buy the land that became St. Anthony's Farm.

“Did I ever tell you what my grandfather did the year the farm first turned a profit?”

“No.”

“He threw the money into the air, the bills, and they got caught up with a wind.”

“And so?”

“And so he ran after those colones through the park. Chased his own money through the leafy streets of Santa Tecla. Imagine that.”

I do. I am often imagining that. Imagining that I know him—this man whose likeness is my husband's face, whose features are now borne out by my son. His are the sepia eyes that passed through me. His is the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the determined mouth, the face not like an oval or a heart, but like a square. He died long before I'd ever meet him, but I carried him in my blood. Just as the land carries him still, remembers. Just as St. Anthony's Farm will someday, in part, belong to my son, requiring him to remember what he never really knew, to put a story with the past. Words are the weights that hold our histories in place. They are the stones that a family passes on, hand to hand, if the hands are open, if the hearts are.

“You look like your great-grandfather.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Come here. See? That’s him, in the photograph.”

“Him? My great-grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“But he looks so young.”

“Well, he was young once. But that was a long time ago, in El Salvador.”

We remember. We imagine. We pass it down. We step across and through a marriage, retrieve the legacies for a son.

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Yesterday, while I was lounging about at the dance studio, the very gorgeous (you should see her) Tirsa said to me, "Do you know that there are, like, a ton of Beth Kepharts?"

She was on Facebook, trying to friend me. I was the forest, apparently, that could not be found for the trees.

A ton of me(s), I thought. How tres convenient! Could one possibly do my laundry and the other cook and the other get caught up with that pile of magazines? Oh. Please. I am aware of one poor alter ego, right in this neighborhood, who gets called upon, on occasion, to read from one of my books. I had the chance, once, to apologize in person, when she showed up at one of my readings to shed some light on her most unfortunate circumstance. I told her that I'd share the spoils of my fame someday, if ever spoils there are.

(From the looks of things, that won't be happening anytime soon.)

But I'm banking on the fact that none of these Beth Kepharts have had a day like the one I've had—an email from my brother-in-law of Seville, at four AM. A call from my Dallas-based brother-in-law nearer to ten (he wanted me to open a box he'd sent; he said, Beware, for the love stuffed inside might spatter out and stain you). A call after that from my Salvadoran mother-in-law, a woman I met just weeks before my wedding, a woman who taught me coffee farming, a woman I didn't think knew much of anything about English until she lay on my sofa for a week reading my book about her country, Still Love in Strange Places, laughing at the funny parts). A note later on from Adela, my aunt-in-law, if I might use such a term for one of the most glamorous women on earth.

And in between, my friends. And yesterday, my father. A moment ago, my son, that now-familiar happiness in his voice, a story he's been writing on his mind. And in a few hours, the sea.

That's this Beth Kephart. She has rain in her hair in the photo up above. She wears her lousy, ripped-up jeans.

PS Oh yes. I've been nominated me for a bloggers choice award. If you want to play along and vote, I'd welcome that.

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Although I've had an obsession with photography since I built my first pinhole camera back in elementary school, it wasn't until I married a Salvadoran and began to travel to his country that portrait photography became my great passion—photographs of people living their real lives, children, in particular. In El Salvador, then in southern Spain, then in Juarez, San Miguel de Allende, and West and North Philadelphia, I have been confronted, again and again, with the raw, guileless beauty I ache to carry home.

The camera frees me from the need for conversation. It demands of me an observer's stance. It requires no vocabulary—not, at least, right then, when the child stands before me, in her bird-colored dress.

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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.

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