How to use this Page

"You're sharing the cover with the Archbishop," Kevin Ferris, my Philadelphia Inquirer editor wrote.

"Honored," I said.

Because, well, that's never happened before. And because this piece, on Beach Haven, off season, was a delight to both research (two nights at an inn, many walks through quiet streets, sunsets) and write.

What has Beach Haven become, these many months after the Super Storm? What does tenacity look like? How have the beaches been recombed, resifted, reshaped? What are the birds up to?

The link is here.

Add a Comment

What glorious work Inquirer page designer Amy Junod does. I'm always so lucky when my stories arrive on her desk. Grateful today to be able to sing about the Wayne Art Center and the friendships I have made among people who actually know what they are doing with clay (and apparently do not mind that I don't).

This is also my first piece with a Going Over byline. The time is soon for my Berlin.

As always, a huge thanks to editor Kevin Ferris, with whom I have such fun working.

Add a Comment

The days are rarely what we imagine they will be. The news comes in. The shock. The losses. Ordinary days, as my friend Katrina Kenison has written, are, often, the greatest gifts of all.

One of the greatest gifts I've been given in recent months is the chance to write an occasional piece for the Inquirer—pieces about the city I unashamedly love. I don't write journalism, don't know how. I just write my heart. And I take my camera out there, too, because sometimes my lens writes the stories better than my handful of words.

This past weekend I was blessed by the publication of a photo essay about that part of Philadelphia once known as Bush Hill. I wrote about my travels through that area years ago and the revival of Eastern State Penitentiary.

You can write all you want, take whatever photos cross your path. It's nothing without an editor and a designer. And so today I thank Kevin Ferris and his team for the layout that they chose for the front page of this past Sunday's Currents section.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Earlier today I was writing to two special friends—Ruta Sepetys and A.S. King—and in both notes, for very different reasons, I was writing about how important it is to me to be seen as a Philadelphia writer. I love this city. I write about it whenever I can—in Philadelphia Inquirer stories, in novels (I'm at work on a Philadelphia/Florence-centric novel as we speak), in books like Flow. I've seen this city struggle, I've seen it emerge, I've walked it in sleet and in sun. I believe in it.

Imagine how amazed and delighted I was, therefore, to receive a note from Leah Douglas, who is the director of exhibitions at the Philadelphia International Airport. Her note read, in part, like this:

For 2013, I am organizing an exhibition that provides a visual overview of Philadelphia's rich literary past and present. Given the theme, I invited librarians from the Free Library of Philadelphia to create a list of 50 Philadelphia-area authors/poets/playwrights (either born in the Philadelphia region or who lived a portion of their lives in the Philadelphia area). And, hopefully you will be pleased to know that your name was included on the list.

Leah tells me that the exhibition will be launched on July 2 and live for a year in Terminal A. The unveiling ceremony will be attended by Mayor Nutter, Airport CEO Mark Gale, and President and Director of the Free Library Siobhan Reardon, among others.

And yes, I'm going to be there.

The photo above was taken last Thursday evening, as I left the Penn campus. I had been working with a student for part of the afternoon and then attending an event with my father, a Penn alum. I was headed to the train, on the phone with my son, who is a city lover, too. "I hope you can see this night; the light is amazing," I was saying. I held the phone and I held my camera and I took this crooked shot.

But look at the light. That's how I feel.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Yesterday I told the story of my first meeting with the internationally acclaimed artist Michele Oka Doner, and how that conversation became a friendship became a Philadelphia Inquirer story that celebrates artists in collaboration, the foundry master Jeb Stuart Wood, and the resurgent Port Richmond neighborhood.

Today I share the link.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Weekends in the Inquirer are like Christmases of long ago—I wake even earlier than usual, and eager. My eagerness now is for the early edition of the Sunday news, where I've written of Chanticleer garden and the Jersey Shore, of ballroom dancing and Philadelphia light, of the Schuylkill River and the cemetery where I often go before I teach my class at Penn. This weekend my story features the internationally acclaimed artist Michele Oka Doner and a spectacular Port Richmond foundry owned by the artist Jeb Stuart Wood. It's a story about collaboration, trust, and a converted warehouse in former collier country.

I met Michele during National YoungArts week in Miami. I mentioned how much I liked the pin she was wearing. She said she'd made it, slipped me her card, mentioned the loft where she lives in New York City. When I told her that I hailed from Philadelphia she replied that she has much of her work cast there in a foundry she trusts—the sort of work that ends up in the Louvre and MOMA, the Hayden Planetarium and the Miami Airport, a Tiffany's in New York City or a store clear across the world, a private home. "Come visit us at work," she said, and a few weeks later I showed up at the door of Independent Casting.

From Jeb I learned about the resurgence of a part of Philadelphia I'd never traveled through. I learned about the art of casting, about what it takes to run a foundry and to work with some of the world's leading sculptors. From Michele I learned about art as conversation, about the bronzing of organic stuff, about rivers, history, mythology. I was out of my element, and I loved it.

Tomorrow I'll share the link to the whole story, which features a photograph of Michele at work in the foundry. Today I share the photos above and this first scanned page of story.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Yesterday I noted that my story about The Woodlands and the students I teach appeared, with my photographs, in this Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.  The link is now live and can be found here.  The story begins like this:

When did we become what we, on our worst days, seem to be? This nation trampled by poor compromise and misplaced screech, this drowning swell of hyper-caffeinated opinion, this landscape of the random and the ruined. We are increasingly disinclined toward rational debate. We rage about the inconsequential. We want to be heard, but we don't want to listen. We're quick to deplore the mess we're in, and tragically ill-equipped to fix it.

Impotence has never been my thing. I believe in the kids I teach, the small heroics of neighbors, quantum generosity, anonymous kindness, in doing something, making something, being something. I believe in the idea of what lies ahead, what takes us forward. We are. We can.

Display Comments Add a Comment

The link to the whole story will go live tomorrow (and I will share it then), but after a long and sometimes painful week I am happy to find this story, with my photographs, in this Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Display Comments Add a Comment

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer I yearn toward dance, mourn my countless non-capabilities, and conclude, well — read on.  The story begins like this, below, and can be found in its entirety here.

How I stood, how I sat, how I walked into a room and didn't possess it - these were concerns. Also: the untamed wilderness of my hair, but we would get to that. In addition: the way I hid behind my clothes and failed their easy angles. Most troubling, perhaps: my tendency to rush, my feverish impatience with myself, my heretofore undiagnosed problem with the art of being led.

So I thought I could dance.

So I imagined the ballroom instructors leaning in to say - first rumba or perhaps the second - "You've got a knack for this."

What knack? What had I done? Why had I not realized that dancing in the dark alone to Bruce Springsteen does not qualify anyone for the cha-cha? That grace is not necessarily an elevated pointer finger? That how they do it on TV is how they do it on TV? That just because you love to dance does not a dancer make you?

So many thanks to Avery Rome for making room for the piece, and to DanceSport Academy in Ardmore—and all my teachers—for making room for me.  Thanks, too, to a certain Moira.  She knows who she is.

Display Comments Add a Comment

I returned from Asbury Park and Bruce Springsteen Appreciators to an email from Quinn Colter, a young friend destined for a big career as a copy editor.  I had invited Quinn to join the Dr. Radway editorial team, and she had—plying my text with wonderful questions and delightful commentary (it seems that Career, one of my primary characters, has won our Quinn Colter over).  Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 Philadelphia novel about Bush Hill, Eastern State Penitentiary, Baldwin Locomotive Works, Schuylkill River races, George W. Childs, and two best friends, now goes into design and will be released next March by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

I left the desk at last to take a walk.  Meandering through my streets, I discovered Kathleen, a very special green-eyed woman, who had, she told me, read Dangerous Neighbors a few weeks ago.  Kathleen grew up in Philadelphia at a time when circus elephants walked the streets of Erie and Broad, and in Dangerous Neighbors, a book about Philadelphia during the 1876 Centennial, she discovered many details that resonated with her.  Standing there in the glorious afternoon sun, Kathleen told me stories about the Oppenheimer curling iron, the fifteen-cent round-trip trolley, the ferry one took from Philadelphia across the Delaware, and the shore years ago.  Kathleen's grandmother was an eleven-year-old child during the time of the Centennial, and so Kathleen remembered, too, whispers of the great exposition.

I had published an essay about the Jersey shore in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago, and that story prompted for Kathleen memories of her own trips to the sea as a child.  We spoke, then, of this, too—this shared geography that has been transformed by time and yet remains a signifier, a home.

As much as I often wish I were back in the city living the urban life, I am tremendously grateful for the streets where I live.  I am grateful, too, for the people who enter my life—for Quinn now on the verge of her career, and for Kathleen with her storehouse of memories.

Display Comments Add a Comment

This past Monday, my son and I traveled to the Jersey Shore—Stone Harbor—to see my brother, his wife, and their two children.  They've been renting a place there for a long time now, and barring unforeseen circumstances, I join them for a day each year.  I took some photographs on Monday for an essay Avery Rome had invited me to write, and today I'm privileged to have the piece appear here, in the Currents section of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I share the first paragraph of my remembrances of, and nostalgia for, Stone Harbor, below.  But before I do, I'd like to share this—a photograph of my brother and sister, sand sculpture-ers supreme, taken years ago. 

In the same way that I believed in black raspberry ice cream, blue-fingered crab, and the pink sheen of a flipped shell, I believed, as a kid, in the Jersey Shore, specifically Stone Harbor.  It possessed me and I possessed it those two weeks of every year when our parents would pack the caroming car with suits, rafts, shovels, pails, rusty-bottomed beach chairs, crab traps, tangled reels, and (where there was still room) my brother, my sister, and me. 

Display Comments Add a Comment

Several weeks ago, Avery Rome of the Philadelphia Inquirer got in touch with a question.  Would I be interested in writing in occasional pieces for the paper's Currents section?  Pieces about my intersection with my city and its fringes, perhaps.  Pieces about the people I meet or the questions I have.  Avery has been at work at the Inquirer through many seasons—vital and invigorating, disciplined and rigorous, enriching the pages with literature and poetics, even, with different and differing points of view.  If the Inquirer has gone through many phases, it has always been clear on one thing: Avery Rome is indispensable. 

Would I be interested? she'd asked.


Well, who would not be?  I'd have reason to sit and talk with Avery, for one thing, which is a pleasure every time.  And I would be joined in these pages by two incredibly special women, Karen Rile and Elizabeth Mosier.  Both are first-rate teachers and mentors—Karen at Penn and Elizabeth at Bryn Mawr College.  Both write sentences that thrill me, stories that impress. Both are mothers of children I love, children whose plays I have gone to, whose art I have worn, whose questions have made me think, whose inner beauty is as transparent as their outer gorgeousness.  And both are very essential friends.

Karen and Elizabeth's zinging essays have already appeared in the Inquirer and can be found here and here.  My piece appears today.  It was commissioned and written during the high heat of last week, before the gentling rains of this weekend.  It takes me back to Chanticleer, a garden that inspired two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden, Nothing but Ghosts) and is a source of escape, still.  The essay ends with these words and includes two of my photographs of small, sacred places at this gorgeous pleasure garden:

In the high heat of this summer I find myself again returning to Chanticleer — walking the garden alone or with friends. The sunflowers, gladiola, and hollyhocks are tall in the cutting garden. The water cascades (a clean sheet of cool) over the stone faces of the ruins and sits in a black hush in the sarcophagus. Bursts of color illuminate the dark shade of the Asian Woods. The creek runs thin but determined.

I don't know why I am forever surprised by all this. I don't know how it is that a garden I know so well — its hills, its people, its tendencies, its blocks of shade — continues to startle me, to teach me, to remind me about the sweet, cheap thrill of unbusyness, say, or the impossibility of perfect control. We do not commandeer nature — gardeners know this best of all. We are born of it, live with it, are destined for return.

Dust to dust, yes. But why not shade and blooms in between? Why not gardens in this summer of infernal, angry heat?

Wishing us all more rain, less heat, and the goodness of editors who love words, gardens that still grow, friendships that nurture, and children who move us on this Sunday morning.

Display Comments Add a Comment

The Philadelphia Inquirer is calling the series "Assault on Learning."  It is painful, beyond painful, to read the stories through.  There is, for example, the story of a young woman at work on an algebra test when a band of marauding students bursts through the classroom door and attacks—as the other students and teacher watch, helpless.  Her crime? Witnessing a fight that had broken out the week before.  Her warning?  The Vaseline these attackers had smeared on their face and the scarves they had tied to their heads.  "The ritual — well-known in Philadelphia schools — is intended to keep skin from scarring and hair from getting ripped out," reporters John Sullivan, Susan Snyder, Kristen A Graham, and Dylan Purcell tell us.

The reporters also provide these staggering numbers, which I quote from the story which can be found here: 

The Jan. 22, 2010, assault on Teshada, which left her bleeding and dazed, was the 2,095th violent incident the School District recorded in the 2009-10 year.


Within a few minutes, a video at the three-story school recorded violent incident No. 2,096, another attack in a hallway in a largely unused part of the building that teachers had complained about for months. Students rushed past a security guard as the fight erupted. Then, he waded into the fray, reaching down to help a girl who had been knocked to the ground and kicked and punched by her assailants.

By June, the district's total of violent incidents had grown to 4,541. That means on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes.

That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.

This is terrible news and essential reporting.  This is one more evidence of devastation in a broken world.  What do we do about it?  How can we help?  We can start by knowing, which is what the Inquirer is enabling us to do. We can also give to Mighty Writers, a wonderful after-school, urban Philadelphia program run by Tim Whitaker.  This from a letter Mr. Whitaker sent today:

We don't think about violence much at Mighty Writers. Two years into the program, it isn't an issue, and we plan to keep it that way.

That's not to say there aren't days when kids come through our doors edgy from the school day, or that there isn't the occasional verbal dust up. We see hundreds of kids in a week; kids being kids, you'd be smart to expect disagreeable moments.

But those moments are few, and they pass quickly, and there are reasons for that. Kids at Mighty Writers come voluntarily--which means they've made a decision to find a way to get ahead, or somebody at home has made that decision for them. Either way, every kid's ongoing participation speaks volumes.

Plus, we pay close attention.

Learning to write clearly and meaningfully builds kids' confidence, self-esteem and self-respect. That's our particular truth. We see the proof. If you've been with us for any length of time, you know our mission is to turn city kids onto writing through innovative projects in safe and optimistic neighborhood centers. We want to make a difference in the lives of as man

2 Comments on Mighty Writers: a haven amidst rising violence in Philadelphia's schools, last added: 3/31/2011

Display Comments

Amy said, on 3/30/2011 3:57:00 PM

It's devastating to think that kind of violence goes on in schools elsewhere (ie, not in NYC). It's fantastic, though, what Philadelphia is doing about it..once you know and read about it, it's hard not to do anything so I hope this helps.

Mighty Writers sounds like a great organization. I'm going to spend some time reading about them.
Thank you for this post.

Lilian Nattel said, on 3/31/2011 7:23:00 AM

That is an appalling statistic. I don't understand how that cannot be the first priority of every American politician and every citizen.

Add a Comment

In between coverage of the Phillies (glowing) and the Eagles (tepid), the Philadelphia Inquirer's books section ran a terrific review of Peter Stothard's ON THE SPARTACUS ROAD this weekend. Penned by Frank Wilson, the paper's former book review editor, the review really captures what we feel to be the spirit of this book. Click here to read the review in its entirety, or scroll down for a few excellent excerpts.

Happy Monday to you all, and safe travels back this week from Frankfurt from any of you who were lucky enough to be there!

Add a Comment

I have to admit that I did not see this coming. There I was at the gym, at Teresa's Body Pump, aching (and I mean aching) between the shoulder rotation and abs, wondering how in the world that Teresa can sing—sing!—while we're all lifting that bar again and again, while we are all shaking and trembling, when I saw my phone blinking. It was a note from my friend Lynn Levin, congratulating me for a review of Nothing but Ghosts, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

I pretty much figured that the work-out had gotten to me, that I was seeing things.

But no. In fact, Katie Haegele, who writes such tremendous reviews of young adult books, had included Ghosts in her fall YA round up, along with titles like I Can't Keep My Own Secrets, Murder at Midnight, and Pop.

This is what she says. This is why I am so happy right now, while I type up this post. I can't help it. Ghosts, which like all my books celebrates this community in which I live, has been noticed in my own hometown. It has been seen.

Nothing But Ghosts
By Beth Kephart

Harper Teen. 288 pp. $17.99

Well, this is a treat. Beth Kephart, whose memoir A Slant of Sun was a National Book Award finalist, has written another one of her beautiful YA novels - this one set locally, with references to the Devon Horse Show and little kids in Phillies T-shirts. And ghosts. Katie lives with her father, an eccentric art restorer, in a big and otherwise empty house; her mother has just died, and Katie, only 16, throws herself into busyness to cope. She takes a summer job working with the grounds crew on an unusual building project at the estate of a reclusive heiress whom no one in town has laid eyes on for years, and soon finds herself preoccupied with the woman's secrets. The lovely things in these characters' lives - pebble gardens and groves of apple trees, an old painting of "a metropolis" that her father restores (or, as he says, "resolves") late at night in his studio-shed, an honest-to-goodness riddle-filled mystery - are like something from a dream, but Kephart's writing isn't what you'd call dreamy, poetic as it is. It's solid and serviceable, beautiful in its well-madeness like an antique chair.

Add a Comment

Our hat is off today to Frank Wilson, who retires today from his post as the venerable Book Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. One of the best and brightest in the book reviewing world, Frank was always a great supporter of Overlook and independent publishing. And, I wonder, if there's anyone in the U.S. who knows more about the great John Cowper Powys than Frank?

Add a Comment

Robert Klitzman, author of the upcoming book When Doctors Become Patients is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University. He was recently interviewed about the personal injury lawyer out of Atlanta, Andrew Speaker, who traveled to Europe after being diagnosed with a drug resistant form of tuberculosis. Here the podcast here.

Share This

Add a Comment