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I've written about Brad Watson
here before.
I've told you the story—of how, through my first editor, W.W. Norton's
Alane Mason, I began to hear this writer's name. How my dear friend
Alyson Hagy, with whom Watson now teaches at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, has perpetuated the tales about his talent. How I have read his books myself, his essays, his interviews, and been grateful for the care he extends toward literature, the idea he seems to represent (and that he shares with Alyson) that, even today, in a world of quick and trending fiction, real literature rises.
Watson has a new book coming. It's called
Miss Jane.
Friends, whomever you are, whatever you love, this one's for you. This one—the story of a young girl born with a genital difference in the early 20th century south—transcends all categories, will touch all hearts, will go down in history as a classic. I see no other way around it.
Inspired by Watson's own great-aunt,
Miss Jane is the story of a child limited by her body and uncircumscribed by her heart. She discovers her own difference over time. She discovers it in parallel to discovering the beauty of things on the farm where she lives ("the burst of salty liquid from a plump and ice-cold oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the quick and violent death of a chicken, the tight and unopened bud of a flower blossom") and in the heart of the older doctor who treats her with kindness, adopts her as a near-daughter, and explains the facts of life—and the facts of
her life—as simply as the truth allows. Jane will learn the art of aloneness. The art of forgiveness. The art of self-acceptance. She will have to starve herself in order to mask her terrible incontinence. She will have to say goodbye to a hope she has. She will have to live without physical intimacy, and yet—she will not live without love.
Watson's sentences are simpler here than they have been in his other work. His story streams. He takes the attention away from his own narrative self so as to give everything to Jane. It's the tenderness (without sentimentality) that I most admire here. The wait and the wrestling with the right scenes.
Paragraphs like these:
There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals' passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That's what it was like.
The meadow did not exist if she wasn't in it.
Congratulations to Brad Watson. Congratulations to Alane, who, according to the book's acknowledgments, has waited a long time for this.
It was worth the wait.
My dear friend Alyson Hagy sends gems through the mail. All kinds of art I would never otherwise see. Stories and poems and images that elevate my trust in this world, our capacity, as humans, to transcend ourselves.
Alyson also knows of my great passion for Per Petterson and not long ago sent me
Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, a story collection Petterson wrote early in his career—and has recently been released by Graywolf.
A young boy named Arvid who lives just outside Oslo stands at the heart of these linked interludes. Petterson rushes and hushes us into his world with language that splits seams. He is too young to understand and filter at first. We watch him want, concede, defy, question, and finally grow from childhood into manhood through an act of singular compassion. Arvid's childhood is a most remarkable transformation built of most ordinary moments. It's an astonishing trick, this tiny book. A master class in writing from a child's perspective, a book for adults, certainly, in the same way that Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist is for adults. But it is also a book for anyone working within the middle grade/young adult realm.
This is character development.
This is knowing.
This is art.
This is what the brains of the young are capable of seeing, feeling, thinking, and this is what we must aspire to as writers, no matter what age we think we are writing for. The minds and lives of children and young people are complex. They cannot be realistically distilled into issues. They don't organize neatly around obvious plots. They are the last thing in the world from nuance-free one-liners.
One passage of many. He is speaking of his mother.
She'd looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.
He cried, and said to his mother:
'I don't want to get older. I want to stay like I am now! Six and a half, that's enough, isn't it?' But she smiled sadly and said, to every age its charm. And time withdrew to the large clock on the wall in the living room and went round alone in there, like a tiger in a cage, he thought, just waiting, and Mum became Mum again, almost like before.
It is not, contrary to the opinion of some, easier to write for younger readers. It should not be. Our job, I think, is to keep on seeking ways to embrace and elevate the complexity that makes us true and hurt and human.
Readers of this blog (and of
Handling the Truth) know how much a certain Alyson Hagy means to me—the quality of her work, her character, her mind. Not long ago she mentioned that she was re-reading
Housekeeping, one of my very favorite novels of all time.
Oh, I thought. And lifted my copy of the book from its shelf.
The extraordinary thing about re-reading a much-loved novel is realizing how brand new the novel can feel, even the fourth time around. For here I am this morning, turning the early pages of Marilynne Robinson's exquisite story, and thinking: How could I have forgotten this? Or this? And this? Yes, I remember the train and the lake, Sylvie and her flowers, the laundry being hung on the line. But I did not remember how swiftly and gracefully Nelson moves through genealogy and across landscape. There's that impeccable first line, "My name is Ruth." Then an indication of grandmother, sisters-in-law, a daughter, and Edmund Foster—all in seven lines. Then a sudden shift to place and to Edmund Foster's childhood home, described in great detail, "no more a human stronghold than a grave."
All this, and we haven't turned a page.
Why?
It's almost as if the novel has broken into tangents before it has even begun, and this (among so much) is what I didn't think about before (or maybe I forgot thinking about it before so that I read it as brand new)—how
Housekeeping declares itself by means of a branching interiority right from the start.
Do I see that now because of something Alyson said in a note to me, or would I have seen it anyway, and is it because of the number of books that I have read between my third read of
Housekeeping years ago and now, or because of my age, or because I am looking for something new in the stories I read?
I don't know, but I do wonder this: What if I decided to re-read my favorite two dozen books? What would I learn—about stories and about me?
What if we did?
A project to ponder, as September unfolds.
In Alaska, a new friend asks me what I am reading and I say Anthony Doerr,
All the Light We Cannot See. I show her the book's first page, and she says, "Read it to me. Out loud." I demur. She insists. I read. In the belly of the boat while the glacial mountains float by. "Leaflets," I say, reading the chapter title. Then:
At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.
The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.
I hear my own breath catch. I look up into Kristi's face. She isn't sure, quite, about the passage I've read, wants to know why it has enchanted me. I read phrases out loud again, verbs, that word
incendiary webbed into the lush lyric of the cartwheels, the flutter. How can you speak about what you love? How can you convey the genius of Anthony Doerr, who has never been more genius than this new novel of his—541 pages long, ten years in the making, and it reads too fast, you could read it in a day, you cannot read it in a day, for there will be nothing like it again or soon. Doerr is like Ondaatje, Doerr is like McCann, Doerr is like McDermott, Doerr is like Hagy, Doerr is a writer, pure.
And this new book—about a blind girl in France and a smart boy in Germany and the war that brings them together but only after terrible journeys and terrible losses and only for a moment—this new book is wrenching and glorious. Wrenching first. Glorious because of its deep and tender soul. Because Doerr embraces life even in the midst of dying. Because Doerr inclines toward science as he writes his art, which is to say that he inclines toward the curious mysteries of our world. Snails. A massive diamond. Electromagnetic waves. The cell that divides and divides again, until it is a human, howling.
I love this book. I believe in it, wholeheartedly. I believe in Doerr. Why do books still wear labels—YA or A, historical or contemporary, literary or not? Banish them. Now. Anyone who loved
The Book Thief will be astonished and grateful for this book. Anyone who swoons over an Ondaatje sentence will recognize the power here. Anyone who wishes to return to France or Germany at the time of a devastating war will be returned in a fresh way, an eyes wide-open way.
Anyone who reads will emerge brokenhearted but also grateful that Doerr doesn't just break our hearts. In surprising and redeeming ways, he heals them, too.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 3/29/2014
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Next spring, Tamra Tuller and Chronicle Books will be releasing a novel set in Florence, Italy, and (to a lesser extent) West Philadelphia. It took me a long time, and many drafts, to get it right, and it is only recently that we have settled on a final title.
I share that here, with an early book description:
Something is just not right with Nadia Cara. She’s become a thief, for one thing. She has secrets she can’t tell. She knows what she thinks, but when she tries to speak, the words seem far away. Now in Florence, Italy, with a Master Chef wanna-be brother, a professor father, and a mother who specializes in at-risk teens, Nadia finds herself trapped by her own obsessions and following the trail of an elusive Italian boy—a flower thief—whom no one else has ever seen. While her father tries to write the definitive history of the 1966 flood that threatened to destroy Florence, Nadia wonders if she herself will disappear—or if she can be rescued, too.
Set against the backdrop of a glimmering city, ONE THING STOLEN is an exploration of obsession, art, and a rare neurological disorder. It is a story about the ferocious, gorgeous madness of rivers and birds. It is about surviving in a place that, fifty years ago, was rescued by uncommon heroes known as Mud Angels. It is about art and language, imagining and knowing, and the deep salvation of love written by an author who is herself obsessed with the beguiling and slippery seduction of both wings and words.
My students Katie Goldrath, Maggie Ercolani, and Stephanie Cara inspired me as I wrote. Emily Sue Rosner and Mario Sulit helped me get the Italian right. Alyson Hagy, Amy Sarig King, and Kelly Simmons kept me going. Patty McCormick and Ruta Sepetys listened. Lori Waselchuk gave me her West Philadelphia. Wendy Robards gave so much of her time and heart during desperate days. And Tamra Tuller stood by.
Always grateful.
I had thought, a week ago, that I would dedicate this post to both novels read during (and just after) my trip to Italy, but in my heart there is room for just this one. Amanda Coplin's first novel,
The Orchardist, deserves every line of praise you likely have already have read, and I turn, decidedly, from the voices of any who might complain. This is a book of compassionate genius. Period.
The Orchardist is late 19th-century, northwest. There is land. There is a lonesome man, Talmadge. There are two girls, sisters, both of them abused and pregnant and lost. There is an herbalist. There are apples and apricots and lettuce, horses, horse traders, pickers, craters. There are babies, and just one survives.
From these raw elements Coplin produces a portrait of an era complete, shattered, shattering. She dedicates the soul of this book to biblical themes—prodigal children, irremediable sins, revenge and its hollow aftertaste, a father's inequality, unconditional but unspoken love. She writes like very few write, like my friend
Alyson Hagy writes—so elegiacally sure, so unafraid, so careful to meet the darkness and to know the darkness and to deliver, nonetheless, blinding light. No one will ever convince me that Talmadge didn't live, or that the baby Angelene isn't living, still, or that somewhere in the northwest, a grove of gnarled trees isn't recalling two ruined sisters.
I have had so much work to do since my return from Italy but I refused to do it until I finished reading
The Orchardist. I am in awe of it. I am grateful for it. I believe that this first-time novelist has written a book that any long-time novelist would say, secretly or out loud,
That was the one.A passage:
There was a certain uncanniness Angelene felt opening her closet in the morning, her oatmeal-colored dress hanging in the space on its hanger, her workboots leaning against each other on the porch. (You turned them over and shook them, knocked them on the post, for mice.) The narrow bed with its purple, red, and green quilt, the bedside table with its jar of rocks, piled books. The porcelain basin near the window where she washed her face, the pitcher with the brown rose painted on it, the large crack like a vein in the bottom of the basin. The apricot orchard, the buzzing bees like a haze in spring. The barn–the smell of hay and manure, grease, old leather. The sun streaming through the slats. The mule's nose in her palm.
All of these things she kept inside herself, constantly rearranged them, to create her happiness. Being alone, she was able to see each thing more clearly. Although there was fear in solitude, somehow this only made things sharper.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 7/28/2012
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Could there be anything more thrilling (for a reader-rocker) than reading the beautifully researched, impeccably written David Remnick profile of Bruce Springsteen in the July 30 issue of
The New Yorker? The story is called "We Are Alive," and most everyone read it before I did, because my issue didn't arrive until late yesterday afternoon. I'd read pieces online. I'd read the raves. But yesterday, after a very long day of corporate work and minor agitations, I found a breeze and read the profile through. I didn't have to fall in love again with Bruce Springsteen; I've been in love since I was a kid. But I loved, loved, loved every word of this story. I would like to frame it.
(For those who haven't seen my Devon Horse Show photos and video of Jessica Springsteen, who is as sensational in her way as Bruce is, I share them
here.)
Perhaps my favorite part of Remnick's article was discovering the way that Springsteen reads, how he thinks about books. You don't get to be sixty-two and still magnetic, necessary, pulsingly, yes, alive if you don't know something, and if you don't commit yourself to endless learning. Reading is one of the many ways Springsteen stays so connected to us, and so relevant. From
The New Yorker:Lately, he has been consumed with Russian fiction. "It's compensatory—what you missed the first time around," he said. "I'm sixty-some, and I think, There are a lot of these Russian guys! What's all the fuss about? So I was just curious. That was an incredible book: 'The Brothers Karamazov.' Then I read 'The Gambler.' The social play in the first half was less interesting to me, but the second half, about obsession, was fun. That could speak to me. I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from. And I was a big Philip Roth fan, so I got into Saul Bellow, 'Augie March.' These are all new connections for me. It'd be like finding out now that the Stones covered Chuck Berry."
Next week, I'll begin to write my paper for
Glory Days: The Bruce Springsteen Symposium, which is being held in mid-September at Monmouth University, and where I'll be joining April Lindner, Ann Michael, Jane Satterfield, and Ned Balbo on a panel called "Sitting Round Here Trying to Write This Book: Bruce Springsteen and Literary Inspiration." I don't know if I've ever been so intimidated, or (at the same time) excited. I don't know what I have in me, if I can write smart and well enough.
But this morning I take my energy, my inspiration, from the friends and good souls who have written over the past few days to tell me about their experience with
Small Damages. We writers write a long time, and sometimes our work resonates, and when it does, we are so grateful. When others reach out to us, we don't know what to say. We hope that thank you is enough. And so, this morning, thank you, Alyson Hagy and Robb Forman Dew. Thank you, Tamara Smith. Thank you, Elizabeth Ator and Katherine Wilson. Thank you, Jessica Ferro. Thank you, Hilary Hanes. And thank you, Miss Rosella Eleanor LaFevre, who interviewed me a few years ago about
Dangerous Neighbors, and who has stayed in touch ever since. I don't even know how to say thank you for
3 Comments on Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days Symposium, and Thanks, last added: 7/30/2012
I try to keep my head down, to keep working or reading, or thinking or being—and not to dwell over responses to a book that cannot now be changed in any fashion (unless I go all trickworthy during the paperback process, and I would never do that). And sometimes people like a book and sometimes people don't, and you just have to go with the flow. You have to keep flowing.
This morning, however, my friend Alyson Hagy wrote me an email that I will always treasure. She shares my love of place, of depth, of landscape, of birds, and when she talks I listen, I learn. And this afternoon, I stopped again—was stopped—by Meghan Miller of Forever Young Adult (she calls herself an erstwhile librarian; I can't believe there's anything erstwhile about her). She has put together a review of
Small Damages reviews here; she's even cast my movie; she's brought me Emma Stone; she's set the table. I cannot let this pass. I cannot let it go. I don't want to be tedious or all about me, but:
This is remarkable. I have to thank her.
The review, titled "I've Waited Years For A Book Like This" can be found in its entirety
here.
Some of the (many) words that made me smile here. Note to Meghan: Kenzie will be your BFF anytime.
Kenzie is marvelous. She's magnificent. She has both an artist's perception of the world and a teenager's self-absorbed blindness; Kenzie's not mean or selfish, but it takes time for her to see past her own (admittedly huge) concerns and sympathize with others. But she's funny and kind, and she really does care, and I'd love to carefully wrap my arm around her and help her heal, because I think she's definite BFF material.
Out in Wyoming, where
Alyson Hagy lives and teaches and writes, there are many very real, very committed artists. One is named Kate Northrop, a poet with whom I have enjoyed a correspondence.
Her poems have been called "haunted." They have been likened to "the penumbra in painting, where light and shade blend." They have been described as "inclusive and generous, yet the tension, the thrill, never slackens." Kate herself has been hailed as a poet with a "remarkable ability to combine erudition and empathy." Last year she sent me an early copy of what would become the
Persea publication Clean. I read it in a sustained state of awe.
Today, thinking of Kate, I returned to
Clean—the manuscript she'd sent
—and found this page, these words. I'm
teaching this week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm taking Kate's words with me.
The first day they had to name
Three things they loved, three
They hated
Loved: pulling moss from the seams
Between bricks; a stone
Cracked open; Jello, when you touch it
With a spoon, how it resists
Hated: a too-visible part
On the girl in front of you, scalp;
The skin formed on house paint;
Feet; white condiments
(Miracle whip, tartar sauce, mayonnaise)
It's all moving at lightning speed around here, and frankly, I'm not keeping up. "Breathe," a friend said the other day, and so, over the course of a train ride to Philadelphia yesterday morning, I neglected all other pressing responsibilities and did. I breathed. Which is to say, I read the first pages of my friend Alyson Hagy's new novel,
Boleto, which had arrived by way of unprotected proofs from Graywolf Saturday morning.
I have known Alyson for a long time. I have read every book she has written. I have read some of her stories twice. I have treasured every email, learned what she has generously taught me, savored the quality of her—no fair-weather friend, this Alyson Hagy. She is always there, she is never self-important, she takes time even though I am not entirely sure how she finds a speck of time, for she is as deeply involved in the life of the creative writing department of University of Wyoming (Laramie) as she is in the university's sports program. She snow shoes and plays championship tennis on the side. She celebrates students, other writers, townsfolk, horsefolk. She also writes books.
Oh, good Lord, does she write books.
My entire mood changed as I read the opening pages of
Boleto. My heart beat slowed. For once again Alyson is doing something new with language, she is pulling me in, she is calming me with the tremendous grace of her talent. I recalled the tone of Kent Haruf's
Plainsong as I read, one of my all-time most favorite books. I thought of how Alyson never stays in one place, is never happy with a single note, is perpetually tempted by language.
Here, for the time being, are the opening sentences of
Boleto. You are going to hear so much more about this book. And not just from me, I swear.
She was a gift, though he did not think of her that way for a long time. He paid twelve hundred dollars for her, money that came straight from his single account at Cabin Valley Bank. She was halter broke, and trailer broke, and she had been wormed for the spring.... He knew twelve hundred dollars was a bargain for a strong-legged filly with papers. He knew that even before he saw her.
Yes, reading Alyson Hagy is breathing.
Just a few weeks ago I was writing here about my friend Alyson Hagy, and her win of The Devil's Kitchen Award. Today I write to say that this extraordinarily talented writer and honest, good, and soulful friend just won Best Fiction prize at the High Plains Book Awards, an event held at Parmly Billings Library this past Saturday. The book is
Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press), a collection of short stories that deserves every last bit of praise it gets.
But so does Alyson, as a person, deserve that praise. She sends the most gorgeous and considered emails from her post in Laramie, Wyoming (where she helps run one of the greatest creative writing programs anywhere)—talks about books she's liked or tussled with, her early morning spottings of birds, the six inches of October snow. She'll tell me she's headed out of town for a little tennis, and only later and by accident will I discover that she's playing
tournament tennis, and winning to boot. She'll say, ahead of a trip to what she calls a book festival, "I love the folks at Billings who work so darn hard on behalf of the arts," without mentioning that her own book is up for a Billings award.
This is not false modesty at work. It's Alyson Hagy—whose quality of mind and richness of perspective have kept me necessary company through the years.
And so, dear Alyson, this tribute is again for you. Not just for what you've won. But for who you are.
This one, then, is quick: I speak often of my dear friend Alyson Hagy, whose emails to me are rich, whose books are complex and fearless, whose teaching at the University of Wyoming is impeccable, whose friendship I cherish.
This week, one of Alyson's students, Callan Wink, has a story in
The New Yorker called "Dog Run Moon." It's a keeper. Also a keeper is the
post-pub interview that Wink did with Cressida Leyshon. He is asked about his work within the MFA program at the University of Wyoming. He says, among other things, this:
More than anything else though, coming to Wyoming has benefited me in that I’ve had the good fortune to work with some extremely talented and generous writers, both students and faculty. Brad Watson, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Alyson Hagy (and too many others to list here) have gone out of their way to give my work careful, serious, readings and I’m extremely grateful for that.
I know of what Wink speaks, when it comes to Alyson (and I've read enough of Brad Watson's work to know how he soars). I am glad that others, reading this interview, will know something of the power that emanates from this highly special Wyoming program.
When I think of Alyson Hagy (and I often think of Alyson, for she is one my most cherished friends in this literary world, and has been for years) I think of weather and bird calls, horses and tennis, a big, wide generous heart. I think of Wyoming, where she now lives, and the University of Wyoming, where she has helped to create one of the best lit departments in the country (I'd give anything to live closer to Alyson, not just to be taught by her but to participate in the programs she assembles for the whole town). I also think of of her extraordinary work, which I have written about on this blog from time to time.
Most recently I wrote about
Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf), her collection of short stories, which was hailed by critics across the country. I loved it, too, of course I did, and you can find my brief blog posting
here.
All of which is prefatory to this fabulous bit of news: Alyson Hagy has won the 2011 Devil's Kitchen Award in Prose for Ghosts and will be participating in the Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Anyone close enough to go should really try to meet her.
Or buy her book. It will astound you. (She's got a new novel due out soon. You'll read about that one here, I can assure you.)
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 6/30/2011
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I began my travels to southern Spain more than 16 years ago. I met an old man named Luis, who cooked for me when I was sick. I found a bathtub full of oranges high up, on an old, odd roof. I met one of the King's best friends, southern Spain's finest breeder of bulls, and he took me out in an open jeep, where the unsuspecting herd was chewing. I watched the flamenco dancers dance; I climbed the towers; I studied the bridge. I read of the war, and I read of survivor, and I tracked down old memoirs from the Franco era, preserving the recipes I'd find clenched within the pages. Seville was home to my brother-in-law, Rodi, his wife, and their children, and so to Seville my husband, son, and I would repeatedly return. I walked through doors few do.
For years, I worked on a book I called
Small Damages, except for the years during which I thought of it as
The Last Threads of Saffron. The novel evolved over time—became a story of gypsies, a story of the deaf, a story of an old cook's love affair. Last summer, just about this time, I shared a draft of the book with Tamra Tuller, an editor at Philomel Books, whose Kathryn Erskine (
Mockingbird) would go on to win the 2010 National Book Award and whose Ruty Sepetys (
Between Shades of Gray) would appear on the bestseller list in her debut week earlier this year. Tamra had ideas about
Small Damages. She encouraged me to keep working. She emerged as one of those rare editors who agrees to read again, who quietly and gainfully encourages.
Tamra shares, with me, a love of travel, a love of exotic foods, even a love of the TV show "Top Chef." Tamra is also, as of today, thanks to the announcement (below) in the
PW Children's Bookshelf, the editor of
Small Damages. I don't think I can express just what this means to me.
Tamra is kind, and she is smart. She works within a team—which includes my dear former editor Jill Santopolo (who introduced me to Tamra by way of Ruta's book) and the remarkable Michael Green—that makes a writer feel at home.
My great thanks, then, to Tamra, to Jill, to Michael, to Philomel, and to my agent, Amy Rennert. My thanks, too, to Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Alyson Hagy, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Ivy Goodman, who read this book over time and kept me believing in it. Maybe it took ten years and eighty drafts to write the book that
Small Damages finally is. But the book feels brand new and just right and full of hope in the hands of Tamra Tuller.
Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books bought world rights to National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart’s YA novel Small Damages, a coming-of-age story set in southern Spain about the difficult choices a teenaged girl faces when she gets pregnant. The publication is scheduled for summer 2012; Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency brokered the deal.
I took just one book home with me from this year's BEA, Jessica Francis Kane's first novel,
The Report. It's a Graywolf Press title—Graywolf, a first-rate house responsible for such first-class books as Alyson Hagy's latest,
Ghosts of Wyoming. I don't think you can go wrong with a Graywolf book, and I can say, with absolute confidence, that you will not go wrong with
The Report. Smart, compelling, riveting, whole,
The Report is a book about history and those who write it, about blame and the consequences of diffusing it. It is a novel based on the real-life horror of a night in March, in London, in 1943, when 173 people seeking protection from a possible air raid, died on the steps of the shelter that was supposed to protect them. No bomb had gone off. No bones were broken. All of those who died died from asphyxiation—from an inexplicable pile-up on the stairs.
How in the world had it happened?
Laurence Dunne, a magistrate, is asked to find out. Systematically, he interviews 80 survivors. He listens to those who blame themselves and those who cannot be honest and writes a report so novelistic, so empathetic, that it haunts him and others for a long time hence. In Kane's perfectly well-imagined novel, that event, those survivors, and Dunne himself materialize, devastate, haunt. I was a most captivated reader, a reader Kane kept wholly spellbound from the first sentence to the very last.
Kane notes that she got the idea for this book some ten years ago, and that her two children were born during its creation. I believe that. There's so much wisdom here, so many important thoughts quietly but compellingly collected. Kane is a transparent writer, working with absolute clarity, allowing her reader to see straight through to the complicated heart of things.
I was nearly destroyed by my ten-year-in-progress manuscript yesterday. The pacing was off, and I couldn't find a cure.
I sat with my old photographs, my boxes of books, my research. I sat with all 240-plus pages half on my lap, half on the floor. I sat, and I'm glad that I couldn't see my own face. Frustration? Bewilderment? Exhaustion? All three?
You're all washed up, Kephart, I said.
But then last night I slept a little (sleep is something else, I tell you), and when I woke I knew just what the problem was, a problem I should have guessed at first off (this is
me writing, I reminded myself,
me, with the same built-in flaws, the same go-to tendencies, the same great love for landscape and sky when the point is,
the point is, the story). I threw pages away, pages and pages. I was ruthless with every excess word. I blue penned the book like its life depends on blue penning, and, in fact, it does. The pace is back on. The tension has tightened. So much more is at stake. I'm losing sentences like I always do. I'm holding onto a new kind of story.
Novels get harder as we push ourselves beyond what we know, my friend Alyson Hagy wrote to me earlier today, after listening to me go on about this book I won't give up on. She's almost always right, my friend, Alyson. She's definitely wiser than I am. Because even though I've been writing this book for almost all of my published writing life, it is the book I've not known how to write, the book I've had to grow into.
and I'm beginning with Katrina Kenison, who took a virtual walk with me this afternoon (we were on the phone; we live many states apart; I walked by this stream; I took a picture. Snap.). Katrina's newest book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, came out this past fall and has been doing what thoughtful books do, over time—which is to say that it has been gaining momentum. Visit Katrina's web site. Watch the video she's made. Let her tell you about the life she has been living. You'll see why her book is touching so many lives, and why it's likely on its way to becoming a word-of-mouth bestseller.
I'm moving next to Rebecca Skloot, whom I met years ago at Goucher College, when she was teaching, and her dad, Floyd, was teaching, and I was teaching—and it just went down like that: teachers teaching. Rebecca was talking even then about a book that she was writing, something, she kept saying, about the immortal cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. We talked about structure in the abstract back then, and over the next many years I either heard first-hand or read (on Rebecca's blog) about the journey she was taking with a book she so believed in that no amount of raised eyebrow on the part of ersatz publishers had the power to diminish. Rebecca had a story to tell. She had a story that defined her and defined us and had, she knew, to be told. She was in New York City writing, she was in her beat-up Honda driving, she was at a friend's farmhouse revising: Wherever she was, she was determined to get this story told.
You've heard of that Henrietta Lacks story in the meantime, right? You've heard Rebecca on ABC News, Rebecca on Fresh Air, Rebecca on All Things Considered. You've seen Rebecca in the pages of Oprah and let's not forget Rebecca three times in one week in the New York Times or Rebecca on her four-month book tour. We're talking about that Rebecca Skloot, my friends. The one who never stopped believing in her dream.
Finally, I am shouting out today on behalf of one of my very dearest friends, Alyson Hagy. We won a National Endowment for the Arts grant years ago. We started a correspondence. We're in touch, because I'm lucky, nearly every day, and Alyson has seen me through thick and thin, she has sent me her weather via email, she has cheered me through teaching because she's a teacher herself (the likes of whom Michael Ondaatje, Don DeLillo, Phillip Gourevitch, Joy Williams, and Edward Jones come to visit), and she has sent me early pages of her books to read because I so believe in her. Alyson's Ghosts of Wyoming came out a few days ago. It's already been featured, brilliantly, in the Boston Globe, The Believer, New West, and Denver Post, and do you want to know what Susan Salter Reynolds of the LA Times said about my friend Alyson this weekend? Do you?
Reynolds said this: These eight burnished stories confirm Hagy's importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness.
Yeah, baby. Oh, yeah.
As I lit these candles yesterday, I allowed myself a moment to reflect on the many and varied emails that have come in these past few days. There's Mike Y. sending Where in the World updates from his trip to China and Hong Kong (snake brandy, he says, and three-story tall Buddhas). There's B.B., with reports of "decadence" in Turkey. R.R.R. is in the Bahamas, sand on her feet, and J.S. is at home, a father to sons. J.P. is planning for Las Vegas (then Arizona); my student, K.E., is at home (which is Manhattan), finishing up her screenplay; I.G. is settling in again with her short stories; and Alyson Hagy (okay, so I'll use her name) just returned from New Mexico, where, she reports, the University of Wyoming team won "one of the wildest football games played all year (or ever in the case of UW)..." and where Alyson herself ran toward the mayhem following the double-overtime win—an earned gambol given all Alyson does in her dual capacities at the university on behalf of literature and athletics.
I love my friends. It cannot be helped.
I'll take the red silk amaryllis to my mother's grave in a few hours. I'll tell her a few stories when I get there.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 10/3/2009
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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Today: Awakened at 1:35 AM, I come downstairs and do not sleep. A few lines make their way to a blank page; I do not know if the lines are good.
Morning, then, and at the gym, I find Ann, an old friend, long lost; I'd once thought forever. In the large group room Theresa, leading the Body Pump class, has chosen the music of men. She turns her barbell into a guitar and sings her Aerosmith loud; the rest of us abide her antics, need her antics, love them. We don't scream the pain we feel. Many times a week Theresa leads this class and yet on Saturday it is as if we are her only students, her passion just for us.
Mid-morning and in my in-box I find the first official review of The Heart is Not a Size. I am overcome. The reader has found within my work just precisely what I hoped a reader would. A faster plot. The smell of dust. The have-everythings who learn from those who possess little.
Noon, and while shopping for the small dinner party that I'm throwing Sunday, I find my father at the Farmer's Market, sit with him while he eats his lunch. Then there is the frenzy of deciding and shopping. Yes, the serrano ham and the lavash, the strange apples from the Lancaster trees, the fatter berries and the insanely rotund scallions, and why not those tomatoes, which cannot decide what size they wish to be.
Mid afternoon, and I sit with the work of my fantastic Penn students, who move me to tears with the way that they think; I sit with Patricia Hampl. And then time alone with the Horace Kephart segments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea" (go to episode four, plays segments five and eleven). I don't care what you want to say about my great-grandfather. He did this country good. He saved what remained of the Great Smoky Mountains from the avaricious loggers, all the while knowing that once the park was made, it would not be his homeland anymore.
Later, a conversation with Andra. An email exchange with my friend Buzz. A note from Alyson Hagy, perhaps the grandest writing teacher of all.
Later, dinner.
Later, now.
Myself.
Sometimes things just hit you—obvious aspects of yourself, known territories, that suddenly swoon large in your own self-opinion. Last night, watching the crowd gather at the bookstore, watching that community of authors engender and inspire that community of listeners, I was smacked about inside my head with this commonplace observation: I really am an outsider. I really do live on margins. The center of things eludes me.
Genetics? Circumstance? I do not know. I know only that my life as a writer is fueled almost entirely by correspondence (the essential literary back and forth with Jay Kirk, Buzz Bissinger, Reiko Rizzuto, Ivy Goodman, Kate Moses, Anna Lefler, Alyson Hagy) and the very rare phone call, not by gathering. That I write my books alone, extraordinarily so. That I miss the trends because I haven't been out among those trading news about them. That the few times that I have been out in person doing book-related things over these past many years is primarily because of one person, Elizabeth Mosier, who made it possible for me to join Patricia Hampl (one of my favorite memoirists) for dinner one evening, who drove me to Swarthmore to see Elizabeth Strout (another heroine), and who was the reason I ventured out last night to see writers who were very much worth the effort.
I have squeezed this writing life into the dark. I have made certain that it didn't interfere with the family dinner hour or the client expectation. I have gone off writing these books in my head without stopping to consider: Will they sell? Are they of the now? Will they find their readers? I have bludgeoned out this path for books, but it's a small path—whacked away and narrow.
Is that the way? Is this the way? Last night I had my doubts.
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3 Comments on <em>Tonight I){kind=small}
, last added: 2/12/2010
Say no more. This is the next novel I must read. Thank you, Beth.
Just read the first couple of paragraphs and I am hooked. Thanks, Beth.