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It took me a while to find my next book. The one that is to come after
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent (New City Community Press/Temple University Press/March 2013)
, Handling the Truth (Gotham/August 2013)
, and
We Could Be Heroes, Just for One Day (Phliomel/Winter 2014). It had occurred to me that I might have said everything I ever had to say. That I had shadowed all the characters, or ideas, or places, that could ever mean something deeply real to me.
And so I read—not to find a next book for my beloved editor, Tamra Tuller, but to satisfy hollow places within. I wrote essays—short pieces about landscapes and people, inquiries into the art of literature or the state of young adult tales, profiles of writers whose work intrigues me, reviews of new and forthcoming books. I planned road trips (south, this coming September) and dreamed of returning to Europe. I listened to Springsteen songs until even I knew it was time to stop. I watched documentary films. I cooked. I went to two different beaches on two different days. I tried not to ask myself, What? Next?
Still,
what next crept in, slow, on a sideways angle. It arrived via old memories, new readings, and an urge to take five paragraphs that I wrote a dozen or so years ago and turn them into the start of something new.
What next beat its feverish wings at me. I began to buy books, to take notes.
I'm in no hurry. I've written nothing that I'll keep. I'm just thinking about all of this, sure of this one thing: the center of this idea holds and I want to write the heck out of it for Tamra. I have time before the idea becomes a project becomes a deadline. I have time, but I also have (incredible, necessary) a new and urgent passion.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 7/26/2012
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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I began a blogging conversation with Melissa Firman of The Betty and Boo Chronicles so long ago that I can't remember the first prompt, the earliest words. Melissa and I share many things—proximity (at least until a transfer took her west), friends, a love for our children, a love for books—and the first time I actually met Melissa was on a bitter cold night, when she came to a talk I was giving about the impact of place on my work. She came bearing books, my own. She has built, over time, an embarrassingly generous Beth Kephart library. Even as she does so many things, for so many others, and even as she keeps her Facebook friends abreast of the special people in her life.
And so Melissa's
words today, about Small Damages, are the words of one who has read an oeuvre with great care. They are the words of someone who has carefully, patiently watched my work evolve over time. Reading Melissa's blog post was, to me, akin to reading a scholarly piece. I learned so much and became so absorbed in Melissa's thinking that it wasn't until the end that I remembered that she was writing about me. This post was so exceptional that my publicist, Jessica Shoffel, sent an email earlier:
Making sure you saw this one.I share Melissa's words at the end of a day of many emotions. We honored our
George Shaw this morning at a beautiful service in which grandchildren read, a son eloquently remembered, and family and friends and neighbors knit tight. How proud George is, looking down, on his gigantic community. His son referred to George as an extraordinary ordinary man. My own son, sitting near me in the pews, said later that that is the best kind of man.
After the service and lunch I came home to read
Handling the Truth one last time, for it is bound for copyediting soon. I'll never quite forget the note Lauren Marino, my Gotham editor, wrote last night to tell me that we are entering the book's next phase. Having just sat here today and read all 61,000 words through again, I hope it is all right to say here that I am so at peace with
Truth.
Yesterday I sent dear Tamra Tuller of Philomel the revised Berlin novel. A few days before, HANDLING THE TRUTH went off to Lauren Marino at Gotham, and the week prior to that DR. RADWAY'S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT was emailed to its publisher, a package made complete by my husband's eleven illustrations.
It has been, in other words, a heady time—my thoughts, in overlapping intervals, inside a certain German city, circa 1983, inside a century's worth of 100 memoirs, and inside 1871 Philadelphia and the cacophony of Baldwin Locomotive Works.
But it was my office that was really showing the heat.
That space is so much neater now. It's dusted and Windexed and vacuumed, too. It's a place for starting over in, and that is what I'll be doing over the next many weeks. I'll be back at work on corporate projects. I'll be doing some teaching, some reviewing, some author interviewing, some essay writing. I'll be reading some 20 new books and celebrating them here, on my blog, with the world.
And I'll be launching SMALL DAMAGES.
It will be an untangling time. It will be awhile, I suspect, before I begin to dream about any new books.
Things haven't been altogether "ordinary" in my world of late. Small concerns accumulating into larger ones, and whatnot. I have felt a bit like this blue-eyed horse. Not quite right but fiercely committed to, well, tomorrow and the day after that.
So that it gave me great comfort today to reach out to some of my former students—to ask for permission (official permission) to share excerpts of their work in HANDLING THE TRUTH, my memoir-making book. I could not exaggerate these students' beauty, nor their very essential-ness. I couldn't be more excited about bringing out a book that consecrates, in part, their talent. A teacher steps into a classroom and the gifts come roaring at her. These students, all of my students, have been gifts, so exponential.
As is, of course, my son. Here at home applying for jobs, building his portfolio, contemplating the creation of a blog. Several times today he left the room where he works to join me in the room where I work, simply and only to say, "Hey. I love you."
I have been given so much in this life. I am gigantically aware of my blessings.
The grace of youth.
I have, as many of you know, been on a hunt for extraordinary memoirs. The equally inventive and true kind of memoir. The it's-not-really-just-all-about-me. This weekend alone I went through several would-be memoir contestants. I emerged holding just one high above my head.
(Victory.)
It's called
The Rules of the Tunnel: My Brief Period of Madness. It's by Ned Zeman, whose work you might have seen in
Vanity Fair or
GQ or
Outside. He's a reporter—witty and smart—but he's also dogged by the demons of depression. Anxiety gnarls at him, too, worries that escalate over time. And as therapy of the medicinal as well as the talking kind fail to relieve him of a paralyzingly dark stupor, Zeman turns, with hope, to electroconvulsive therapy.
The madness doesn't quell; it escalates. Mania ensues. Zeman will barely remember a bit of it, for amnesia has swept in, too.
Told in a fantastic, sometimes bawdy, reliably funny (yes, funny), deeply intelligent second person,
The Rules of the Tunnel is not just a reconstructed life. It's a book that looks out for others along the way—defining, cautioning, placating—all while offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the doings of
Vanity Fair, the collective care of friends, and the investigative tools that must be brought to bear on the telling of a life that is not, in large swaths, remembered. I am head-over-heels for the final lines in this book, but it wouldn't be fair to quote them. So I will give you the equally fantastic first bit of a book that is just this good in its entirety:
Not so long ago, in the heyday of your idiocy, you made yourself a promise. That you can no longer remember making the promise, nor anything about it—aside from a yellow sticky-note reading "Remember Promise!"�fills you with the warm glow of achievement. You lived, if only briefly, among The Great Amnesiacs. And you did live well. Reportedly.
The Rules of the Tunnel is, I will add here, a Gotham publication, acquired by Lauren Marino. I always sensed that I, with
Handling the Truth, was in good hands. Now I know for sure.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 5/31/2012
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If I am too exhausted to state with any inch of eloquence how grateful I am for today—for being included in a well-run, truly substantive, inviting conference, for sitting on a panel among greats, for meeting, at long last, the delightful Jenny Brown, for spying on Roger Sutton's socks, for a chance to hurry through a loved city's streets, for an excuse to visit the extraordinarily wonderful Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jessica Shoffel, and Jill Santopolo, for the opportunity to meet the funny and fun and winning Lauren Marino—if I am too exhausted, might I at least share these two images of a conference I won't forget?
Thank you, Ed Nawotka and Dennis Abrams of
Publishing Perspectives for making this day what it was. For making me a part of it.
You will, I hope, forgive the nostalgia that floods this week as I look ahead toward my son's graduation from the finest communications program in the country. He'll leave that campus emboldened—by adventures and friendships, by classes and professors, by his four years as a news writer and content producer for the student-writer TV station, by his two semesters with the great writer, Dana Spiotta. He'll leave with a major in Advertising and a minor in English and Textual Studies. He is, already, missing this place that had welcomed him so completely. He speaks of all he has learned, retells his adventures, promises that he'll be returning, soon. On my end of the phone, I listen.
Yes, I say,
I understand. Because leaving is the hardest work we do.
Today, while writing about the role of prologue in memoir for
Handling the Truth, I stopped to re-read my own prologue to
Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, the book I wrote about the power and place of the imagination in children. I had wanted, I had written about my then-nine-year-old son, wisdom over winning. I had wanted him to channel his talents toward passions of his own choosing. I'd wanted happiness for him, room for his own dreams.
It strikes me now, as I read these words, that my boy grew up into the man I had fervently hoped he would be. He has everything I'd wanted for him—moral wisdom, deep joy, remarkable friendships, an extraordinary education, a career he cannot wait to seize, and a habit that still sits him down at a desk to write whatever he wants to write, when other pressures ease. He remains my trusted reader, my confidante, the guy who always asks, no matter how busy he is,
So how are you doing today, Mom?He'll graduate on Mother's Day, and while that seems (to me) to be right and good, it is also important, on this day, to feature this image, above, made by my son's father, who is also my husband, who loves this kid just as much as I do. The image is, of course, one of two in a series, the first of which I
showcased yesterday. I want to raise my son to pursue wisdom over winning. I want him to channel his passions and talents and personal politics into rivers of his choosing. I’d like to take the chance that I feel it is my right to take on contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one. I’d like to live in a world where that’s okay.
Some call this folly. Some make a point of reminding me of all the most relevant data: That the imagination has lost its standing in classrooms and families nationwide. That storytelling is for those with too much time. That winning early is one bet-hedging path toward winning later on. That there isn’t time, as there once was time, for a child’s inner life. That a mother who eschews competition for conversation is a mother who places her son at risk for second-class citizenry.
&
And so, having cleared my mind with three days of reading, with long walks, with dance, I turn to writing
HANDLING THE TRUTH for Lauren Marino at Gotham. Every pink and yellow square flags a chapter that waits (and wants).
I imagine myself just slightly underground, inside a grotto of time.
Body Drama: Real Girls, Real Bodies, Real Issues, Real Answers
Author: Nancy Amanda Redd
Publisher: Gotham; 1st edition (December 27, 2007)
Pages: 272 pages
I searched all over to find this book in a Connecticut library and when I was finally successful, it was checked out! Ugh! Fortunately, I took out a bunch of other Cybils finalists and by the time those needed to be returned, it was checked back in- phew! When I first thumbed through the book, I have to admit, I was a little shocked at the pictures. Redd holds nothing back and I think it's fantastic! A book like this needs to tell (and show!) the whole truth and nothing but the truth! The cover says it all: Real girls, real bodies, real issues, real answers. I agree with other reviewers of this book when they say, "I wish I had this book in high school and college." It should be recommended reading. I think it's a great resource for women of all ages (even I learned a few things), and a handy tool for the mom or dad who doesn't quite know the right things to say when it comes to body issues.
All of us are concerned about our bodies, so it's nice to have a book that shows how women's bodies actually look, smell, feel, behave, and change. Nobody's perfect and we all have that one thing (or two!) that makes us wonder, "Is this normal?" Well, now you can find out. Body Drama talks about all the issues that every girl should know about and presents the facts in a fun, conversational way. The photos of real girls show us how most bodies look, not the usual 'perfect' ones we see gracing magazine covers. I especially love the section that covers airbrushing and how magazine pictures come to be what they are, and the tips on how to give yourself a great facial are excellent! It's great to see a book educate women about real life and what women's bodies naturally go through.
Check out Nancy Amanda Redd's website for information about the author and extras that go with the book.
Read these other great reviews...
Carol's Corner
Abby the Librarian
By:
Danette Haworth,
on 2/22/2008
Blog:
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CJ Ray has tagged me with a most creative meme: I must grab the closest book with more than 123 pages, turn to page 123, go five sentences down, and provide the next three sentences here.
How fortuitous that Bartlett's tome sits nearby; a book on bodily functions occupied a nearer space yesterday.
Here are the words from the required quadrant:
Modestus said of Regulus that he was "the biggest rascal that walks upon two legs."
There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this--that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right, I am quite well.
* * *
I included a bonus sentence because I like the flip voice of the speaker.
My tag is open--if you like this meme, show us what you've got!
In other news, Stephen Parrish gave me an E for excellence blog award. Thank you, Stephen! I'll add it to my sidebar.
Being noted for excellence is an inspiration to aspire to greater heights. I want to achieve excellence in all my endeavors. I want to be all I can be. Oh, wait, that's the Army.
Get an Edge on Life, that's the Army, too, but the other slogan,
Be All You Can Be is better. Here are a few more:
It's not just a job. It's an adventure! Navy slogan. I give it an E for excellent!
The Few. The Proud. Marine Slogan. SC for super cool!
Aim High. Air Force. O for okay.
Be Part of the Action. Coast Guard. B for boring. There's gotta be something better than that. Post your alternative in the comments!
A couple of Wild Blue strips I used to do for the Air Force Times.
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So glad that something stirred on your time out with books to read and visits to beaches...Enjoy this leisurely pace with the new book
I just got really excited. I am a greedy Kephart book monster.
Ah, so glad to read this, so down-deep sigh glad.
yay! I would never want you to stop writing. Also, I missed the title of the Berlin book somehow and I love it. ;)
you could write anything and I'd want to read it.
Great post.. This very helpful info for all. Thanks
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You're amazing!