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Yesterday Lenore enabled me to return to Barcelona, the setting of key flashback scenes in Nothing but Ghosts. The majority of Ghosts, of course, is set in a fictionalized version of a garden not ten minutes from my home, a paradise called Chanticleer. Many of the photos that I post on my blog are of this place. The book trailer for Ghosts (posted in the left margin) was filmed, Blair Witch-style, at Chanticleer. My fifth book, Ghosts in the Garden, was a true account of the two years I spent walking Chanticleer and coming to terms with the issues I then faced, the questions I had about living forward.
Transporting a real, living, vibrant landscape onto the pages of a book requires smear and lift—the willingness to imagine what isn't into the richness of what is. I sepia washed the color that lives. I pinned the moon to the back of a stream. I opened doors and windows that I have not crossed through. I floated the ghost of a woman up high, over a sill.
It was all patterns—the leopard chair, the stained-glass shirt, the spackle of foilage, the foilage of shadows, the bark peeling away from the meat of the tree.
In its dazzle she found calm.
I found myself incapable today—dropping things, losing things, driving the wrong way in a parking lot where the arrows seemed, uniformly and inexplicably, to be pointed the wrong way.
I found no lift for the tango, no energy for the book I'm reading, no time to think, and I know the organic chicken is too expensive, but honestly, I wish I had bought it for the meal tonight. It would have made the day's end so much better.
Today I could have used an older brother's steadying arm.
I first became aware of the power of that one word ruin when reading the poetry of Gerald Stern. It seems the very opposite of beauty, and yet how close the two words are often found on a page—how near and next of kin are beauty and ruin. Yesterday, reading Colum McCann on the train, there was that word again, often. When Michael Ondaatje speaks the word it is all shush and reverence.
"When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future," Christopher Woodward wrote in In Ruins.
Is that how it is for you, or is it just this thing that happens to the incurably love-riddled melancholy?
When I taught the young writers at Chanticleer, when I have taught, indeed, anywhere, I have shared, as the hours and days go by, my own idea about what makes for authentic storytelling. This morning I stumbled across two columns of teachable verbs—words I'd compiled in advance of a morning class. The first, I think, makes for screech and demand. The second makes for story.
Explain/Illuminate
Record/Remember
Argue/Explore
Retaliate/Evolve
Condemn/Liberate
Accuse/Understand
Obliterate/Rescue
Attack/Approach
Demand/Long for
Thank God for summer, he said, and thank God the window
was to his right and there was a wavy motion
behind him and a moon in the upper right corner
only four days old and still not either blowsy
or soupy.
Gerald Stern, "He Said,"
This Time(I love this:
still not either blowsy or soupy. How, inside a conversational poem, the original erupts and never shatters the tone.)
The trick, I think, is to remain calm in the face of the work that you have done, and to believe, always believe, that something greater yet lies within.
I don't want writing to be over.
I don't want to think that I am done.
With Nothing but Ghosts, my third YA novel, set to launch in eight days (I think that's right), I thought I'd offer a signed copy to one of you who answers the following question: How would you paint regret?
It's a question that Katie's father asks her, as he restores an odd and ultimately revealing painting. A question that becomes integral to the mystery in which Katie is embroiled.
Here's the relevant scene from the novel. I'll have my son assist me in choosing one of your names (from a hat or the nearest equivalent) on June 23rd.:
... everything is strangely quiet. I check the studio, but Dad’s not there. I head for the kitchen and there’s the in-the-oven-smell of pot roast, but not my father, who I finally find on the living room couch, no TV on. He seems asleep, but his eyes are open—staring straight up at the ceiling, no glasses. I used to find him like this every day for weeks after my mother died, until finally he began to work again, began to cook, like someone far away and maybe high above us, was forcing him back to life.
“You okay?” I ask him.
He says quietly, “Hey, Katie.”
I tromp over to the couch, sit at one end near his toes, untie my heavy, old, grunge-ugly work boots, which I will, I promise myself, dump in the trash once this garden gig is over. “What’s happening, Dad?”
“It’s that painting,” he says, after a while.
I wait for him to tell me more, to roll his eyeballs back down from the ceiling. “If you wanted to paint regret,” Dad asks at last, “what symbol would you use?”
“Regret?” I’m too confused, tired, hot to fake an answer.
“Things that you wished you could do over. How would you paint that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t do much painting.”
“It’s a theoretical question, Katie,” he says. “Not like I’m going to hold you to the answer.”
“Regret could be a bird flying away,” I say, thinking out loud, playing this game for his sake, because for all I know he’s been lying here for hours, waiting to ask me this question. “Regret could be the shell you leave on the beach, or maybe the last leaf on a tree.”
Today it stormed, then it stopped, then it rained while the sun streamed down, and during part of this fury I was dancing. I was freeing my mind of all the worries that crawl in and threaten to stay, save for when there is music.
And now I've come home to sun and to the loveliest note from Ed Goldberg of YAbookscentral, who has given Nothing but Ghosts a most exquisite, thoughtful, meaningful review. I excerpt from just the final paragraphs here, encouraging you to travel over to the site, where so much gets done on behalf of so many fine books.
... There is so much to like about this book. Kephart has penned an engrossing, engaging suspense story. Miss Martine is shrouded in mystery as much by the vision of her literally hiding in her upstairs bedroom peering out her window as by the indescribable way she disappeared 55 years ago. Old Olson’s actions add another layer of intrigue to the story.
But to stop at the storyline, in my opinion, is to miss the point. Kephart, better than anyone I’ve read recently, describes the loving relationship between a husband and wife and between parents and child. Jimmy clearly adored his wife as she did him. Katie has an easygoing relationship with her father. However, Katie idolized her mother and conjures up her image when in need of help or support. But most importantly, Kephart makes the point that living life in the fashion of those we loved is infinitely better than disappearing.
Nothing but Ghosts has great characters, action, romance and splendid writing. You can picture every character and every location. Any of you who has lost a close friend or relative will immediately identify with Katie. If you are lucky enough to not experience a loss, you will be treated to a wonderful story. You can’t lose by reading any Beth Kephart book. She’s a favorite author of mine.
P.S. And what/who is that finch that keeps pecking at Katie’s bedroom window? I have my ideas!
On Melissa Walker's big week (Lovestruck Summer is now out in stores!), Melissa is being utterly Melissa, which is to say supremely generous. Today I'm over at her blog, telling the story of the Nothing but Ghosts cover, with additional photos of Chanticleer, the garden that inspired this novel. Thank you, so much, Melissa. I can't wait to drift away into your own Lovestruck space.
In the meantime, Jill Santopolo has informed me that the No Such Thing short story competition details have now been officially posted on the HarperTeen site. You can find them here.
I've started on something new, very different, perhaps risky. I remember how whirligig beginnings are. You could be anywhere, but you are not there. You can almost see there, but you cannot write it. An idea is an idea: It's big. A story lies in the details; they are small, and they take time. Turn around it. Hammer it in. Hope that it coheres.
"Still Dancing in Her Dreams." That was the title, and so I read, unprepared, this story about Liu Yan, 26, who was paralyzed in an accident just prior to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. According to New York Times reporter David Barboza, Ms. Liu had been China's leading classical dancer, a woman of such extraordinary grace, extension, and soul that she had earned the only solo performance in the extravagant, theatrical Zhang Yimou show. It was to last six minutes. It was to have been called "Silk Road." She was rehearsing before 10,000 when, in Barboza's words, "she leapt toward a moving stage that malfunctioned, causing her to fall into a deep shaft and crash against a steel rod."
She woke in a hospital, with no use of her legs, her story unknown. She was asked not to speak of her fate; her family and witnesses were silenced, too. It would distract, officials felt, from the opening ceremonies, which she watched on a TV, in her hospital room.
Her arms still open to the wind. Her legs don't move.
I had been to Chanticleer, hours before, with a friend. We had seen a vase, its rooted limbs upreaching. We had spoken of its beauty, and I had thought of a dancer then—seen a dancer in the arcing, budded shafts. Now Liu Yan in my mind is that dancer—still a dancer, always a dancer, tragically caged now, as a dancer. These are the stories one cannot look past. The stories one can't fix, or mend.
Oh, to be this boy among girls. To have access to their riffling suspicions, their percussive dreams. To know when they mean what they say, and also what they would say, if only asked. At the dance studio last week, Jean claimed, "Every story a woman tells about a man is the same."
"Can't be," I said.
"Oh, yes. Believe me."
(And I pictured this ballroom dance instructor day after day, hour after hour, women in the hold of his cha-cha, his rumba, confessing and declaiming and wanting and hoping.)
"Every. Single. Story. The same?"
"One story," he said.
"So what is the story?"
"The story is simple. The story is this: Men and women are two separate species."
Imagine the moon like this—this bright in the sky. Imagine the blade of light that falls through the window now, slashes my glass desk, deflects at the touch of my hand, is not cool, is not warm, is not a weight, is yet alive.
There are reasonable people who claim the moon is nothing but dead, a stone in the sky.
There are those who like their words straight up, their stories quickened.
But I have the soul of an insomniac and the eyes of my mother, and I pour color down, where I can, where I am. Too old now to apologize for living my one life out loud.
I called Anna Lefler as the sun was setting, and we talked as the sun fell down—my eye on the purpled sky and the silhouetted tree (all its buds still in a clench). Purpled to dark, dark to the only lit thing being the moon, which is full and gorgeous this night. Have you gone outside? Have you seen it?
I'd been telling Anna about my day—an up and down day, intense from its four a.m. start. I'd been saying, Once upon a time I wrote a book that I believed in, a very different kind of book. I'd been saying, Today, Anna, on the very edge of this edgy day, I received an extraordinary letter about that book. A letter. A validation. A surge of hope. Hope, Anna, I said. A new moon rising.
I will not cook tonight, I said.
I will wear my new shoes, I said.
And you will write, Anna said, about the famines.
About the famines?
About how we have to fully own the famines, because after the famines come feasts.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 4/8/2009
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal" clerk who never wants for a thing, suddenly (and with good reason) wants for a new coat, which, after six months of near-joyous privation, he can afford to buy. Which, but of course, Akaky will soon lose.
"The Overcoat," written in the early 19th century, feels entirely post-modern, unconcerned with the traditional rules of storytelling, made eager and purposefully wild by its own tangents. It was the perfect thing to read during a wait-ful, clerky afternoon (though I'm going to hope my complexion never rose to the level of hemorrhoidal; I avoid mirrors; I wouldn't know), and as I read, I thought about how this story came to be in my hands in the first place. How the book itself was a gift from Ivy Goodman, a writer of surprising talents, whom I'd never have met had I not been asked to review her collection of short stories, A Chapter from Her Upbringing, eight years ago. She wrote a letter of thanks; we became enduring friends.
It has happened like that for me, many times. Being sent a book in the mail by, for example, Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, or John Prendergast at The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Kate Moses, formerly of Salon.com, and discovering, all of a sudden, an author who speaks to me so clearly from the page and emerges, one way or the other, as a lasting companion in this book life. Sy Montgomery and her pink dolphins (and tigers and bears and birds). Robb Forman Dew and her gorgeous, period novels. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose essays I read long in advance of meeting her, and who is here, every day, in my life.
Books connect us, and not always in foreseeable fashion. So that now, whenever I think of Gogol, I will think of Ivy, and when I think of Ivy, I will think of her own power as a writer and a friend. And I will be grateful for the knots and strings that are yet becoming my life.
Yesterday Lenore enabled me to return to Barcelona, the setting of key flashback scenes in Nothing but Ghosts. The majority of Ghosts, of course, is set in a fictionalized version of a garden not ten minutes from my home, a paradise called Chanticleer. Many of the photos that I post on my blog are of this place. The book trailer for Ghosts (posted in the left margin) was filmed, Blair Witch-style, at Chanticleer. My fifth book, Ghosts in the Garden, was a true account of the two years I spent walking Chanticleer and coming to terms with the issues I then faced, the questions I had about living forward.
Yes. I find that even with blogging, things get pushed and pinned and elevated sometimes. Laying real life on a page causes a time and spacial shift that distorts things, sometimes for the better, sometimes not so.