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The thing about the sea is that it's theater. Dawn and the people gather, waiting for the break of sun. Dusk and the people return, their friends, or memories, near.

All eyes on the horizon. All bets on the sun.

This past week, in Cape May, New Jersey, there was weather, there was light. The dolphins traveled in pods. The birds sliced silhouettes. The hours changed. Nine memoirists had joined us for our second Juncture memoir workshop, and in between the exhilaration of their work, their metamorphosis, our conversation in an old painted lady, I traveled to the beach, alone.

While we were gone, a two-part essay/interview about my memoir-teaching work and book (Handling the Truth) appeared in the November issue of The Woven Tale Press. (Part 1. Part 2.) I have Richard Gilbert to thank for the intensely intelligent appraisal of Handling, and for the questions, which moved and engaged me.

Thank you, Woven Tale, Richard, Sandra, and Angelica.

Thank you, Sea Changers.

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This past Wednesday afternoon and evening I had the distinct pleasure of spending time in the company of the great essayist and Columbia University professor (and head of the graduate nonfiction program), Phillip Lopate, his wife, his daughter, and members of the Bryn Mawr University creative writing program.

(Thank you, Cyndi Reeves and Daniel Torday, for allowing me to crash the party.)

Between the cracks of many deadlines here, I've been reading from the books I bought that evening. I have, of course, read Lopate through the years; who can teach nonfiction without owning Lopate volumes? But I did not own, until this Wednesday night, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, which is, in a word, a glory. Perhaps it is because I agree so steadily with Lopate's many helpful assertions, perhaps it is because I, in my own way, attempt to teach and, in books like Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, carry forward these ideals about the rounded I, the obligation to the universal, the curious mind, the trace-able pursuit of questions, that I sometimes read with tears in my eyes passages like this one, from "Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story:"

In attempting any autobiographical prose, the writer knows what has happened—that is the great relief, one is given the story to begin with—but not necessarily what to make of it. It is like being handed a text in cuneiform: you have to translate, at first awkwardly, inexpertly, slowly, and uncertainly. To think on the page, retrospectively or otherwise, is, in the last analysis, difficult. But the writer's struggle to master that which initially may appear too hard to do, that which only the dead and the great seem to have pulled off with ease, is a moving spectacle in itself, and well worth the undertaking. 

There are just two more weeks left in this semester at Penn. My beautiful honors thesis students are finalizing their work and, soon, will not just hold their glorious books in their hands, but have the time to reflect back on all the lessons learned. My Creative Nonfiction students are writing letters, Coates and Parker and Rilke style, to those they feel must hear them, while also working on 600-word portraits of one another. Joan Wickersham, the extraordinary writer of both nonfiction and fiction is headed to our campus, Tuesday evening, 6 PM, Kelly Writers House—and if you are anywhere near, I strongly suggest you make the time. She is a national treasure.

Teaching is exhausting, exhilarating, necessary, confounding, essential. I learn that again, year upon year. I stagger away—made smarter, in so many ways, by the students I teach.

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The glorious hours I spent in the company with Jim Cotter and his entire team have produced these minutes on film that I will always treasure.

Here are so many of the things I care about—Philadelphia, the Schuylkill, Penn, memoir, story, language—all in one place, all at one time.

I'm not beautiful, as I always say. But maybe it is enough if beautiful things live in my world.

You can watch the segment, which also features literary translation and tenor Stephen Costello, here.

Or watch this evening at 10:30, WHYY TV, or on Sunday at 1 PM.

Articulate—all of you—thank you.

Gary Kramer of Temple University Press: you have opened so many doors. Thank you.

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My friends, the hour is soon. The chance to see if Beth is smarter than she ever manages to look on "Articulate," that glorious WHYY art show that Beth (still speaking of herself in the third person here) can hardly believe she'll soon be on.

(All thanks to Gary Kramer, by the way, for forging the bridge.)

As part of that program, three of my books will be offered to lucky giveaway winners on three separate social media platforms:

Love on Facebook
Flow on Twitter
Handling the Truth on Instagram 

Look for them and enter in, if having a free signed copy of one of these books is on your wish list.

Speaking of wishes: Wish me lots of luck. By which I mean: Wish me luck in surviving the panic that is slowly creeping in.

Show times on Philadelphia's WHYY:

Thursday, February 25, 2015, 10:30 PM
Sunday, February 28, 2015, 1:00 PM

Finally, can I just say, again and forever, how nice the entire "Articulate" staff is? And what fun it is to spend an hour talking to Jim Cotter. Even when you do just blow in from a storm. Sit down. And start speaking. Looking up minutes later to ask, Wait. Are those cameras actually on?

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Yesterday, bitterly cold from all the bitter cold, I stopped briefly at the Thirtieth Street Station bookstore while en route to my first day at Penn. There I was greeted with a tower of books featuring Ted Koppel, Chelsea Clinton, and me (Love). Everyday, ordinary company? For me, not really.

Later, at the Penn Bookstore, I was searching for something else when I discovered all these Handling the Truth's (Handlings of Truth?) beside Mary Karr's much-publicized The Art of Memoir (about which I'd had so many (politely stated) concerns).

Last week I heard from a kind soul who had found Going Over at a train station in Germany.

My point being: We write and then we let our words and stories go. We can't do a whole lot about what happens after that, except to be happily surprised when we're discovered (or when we discover ourselves).

Speaking of books, submissions have now closed for the This Is the Story of You giveaway. I'll have some news about that later today.

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In 2016 I'll be rolling out a traveling memoir workshop series—a multi-day immersive event that will focus not just on finding the kind of truth I explore in Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, but on pinning it effectively to the page. We'll be conducting these workshops against the backdrop of especially beautiful places and using a surprising range of tools and readings to get to the heart of our stories.

If you are interested in learning more, please let me know with a comment here.

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Patti Smith is on the cover of the current issue of Arrive magazine (the Amtrak magazine). That's really enough, by any measure. She's gorgeously photographed—silvers and blues.

Tucked inside that edition is an interview with me about Love and about memoir. Greg Weber and I had the nicest conversation many weeks ago. Reading these words today brings all of that back to me.

I'm grateful. I'm so grateful that I think I'll ride Amtrak every day now, for months.

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I spent my birthday in Frenchtown, NJ, this past April and fell so hard for the place that I wrote about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Which led to an unexpected email from Caroline, an owner of the town's indie, the Book Garden, inviting me to return to this river town this November. I'll be conducting a memoir workshop and meeting with students in area schools. The memoir workshop, described above, will be held November 15 from 1 to 4 PM at The National Hotel. It has limited space, and if you are interested, I encourage you to sign up soon.

(For those unfamiliar with my memoir teaching and ideas, I share a link here to Handling the Truth, my book about the making of memoir.)

A link to the page can be found here.

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We escaped to the mist and hills of the Shenandoah Valley and pondered the days and years ahead. The what next (again) of life. With the wind blowing and the rain pouring and the rivers swelling we imagined a future spent creating and delivering something new—a one-of-a-kind workshop exploring the many ways we find and represent the truth.

We're in the earliest planning stages, of course. But if you think you'd be interested in a program that would come to where you live and work with you and 14 other writers and seekers, please do let me know.

We think this idea has promise. We would begin delivering the program next year.

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In an hour I'll set out for Bethlehem, PA, where I'll spend the day at Moravian Academy, a high school that has dedicated much of this year to stories of self and memory and that selected Handling the Truth as its all-school read as part of the process.

Moravian also invited students and faculty to read three memoirs I recommended—The Answer to The Riddle is Me (David Stuart MacLean), Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson), and Gabriel (Edward Hirsch).

We'll begin with an all-school assembly and a conversation about non-traditional forms. I'll then travel to two sophomore-level classrooms to workshop emerging student ideas and to talk more deeply about the making of truth.

A day I have anticipated happily for several months now is about to begin.

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It has been a week of many words. A read and review of a very favorite author for the Chicago Tribune. The final page proofing of Love: A Philadelphia Affair, due out in September. The new afterword for the fourth edition of Handling the Truth. Revisions of the talk about home (what we learn about it in the novels we read) for the Moravian Writers' Conference, to be held this very weekend. And then, yesterday, this: the arrival of the proof pages for This Is the Story of You, a mystery set in the aftermath of a Jersey-style storm, due out from Chronicle next spring.

I'm going to leave this particular work until next week—unsure of my ability to read the story right just now. But what I want to say in this moment is this: time is our biggest ally in this writing life. The distance the process—from writing to redrafting to editing to copy editing to proof page reading—gives us from our own work. I needed months between the copy editing of Love and the proofing to see what problems still existed. I needed two years since the publication of Handling to know what else I had to say about memoir (and to be able to say it all in 1,000 words). I needed three weeks to re-read many beloved novels to know what I think about literary home, and then another week of writing and revisions to get the talk in order.

As I have needed time away from Story, which was written more than a year ago, to know if I've written as purely and truly and meaningfully as I could. I won't know, precisely, what is in those pages until I sit with them again. The mystery is a mystery to me. I have one last chance to figure out if it works.

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I was away and when I went away, I went away from myself as a writer—extracted myself from the pressures, the confusions, the fears. I read the work of others instead. Walked hours every day through crooked streets with a heavy camera taking photos of places, of faces, of fashion. Ate gelato at any hour. Learned the history of the Polish people, spent time in Schindler's Factory, visited (with a hushed heart) Auschwitz and Birkenau, walked the grounds of Wawel Castle, happily trekked through a dragon's den, and less happily endured the terror of an underground cave with shoulder-wide passageways. Spent beautiful, wonderful, thirtieth anniversary time with the husband who has taken to calling me (I can't imagine why), "Miss Daisy."

(The other husband just calls me "Beth.")

But I had much to do when I returned, and today I've been taking care of some of that business. There's a new afterword to write for Handling the Truth. Proof pages of Love: A Philadelphia Affair to read through. A review of a favorite author's book to write. Final preparations for this weekend's events at the Bethlehem Area Public Library and the Moravian Writers' Conference. (Join us for the keynote. We would love to see you.) When you go away and then return everything is seen from a new angle. I am aware always, and especially now, of how hard getting writing right is, and how much more I have yet to learn.

While away, I heard from dear Taylor Norman at Chronicle Books that the e-book version of Going Over—as well as ten other Chronicle books—can now be purchased for $1.99 during the next two weeks. The link to that fabulous opportunity is here.

I also learned about two kind reviews of One Thing Stolen—the first by my dear friend Florinda, who reads with such extreme care and who writes with such authority. Thank you, Florinda, for these original, knowing, thoughtful, generous words. You have been such a faithful, important reader of my books. You have understood my purpose.

The second review, posted on the Once Upon a Bookcase blog, is here. I cherish this review because it is written by a reader who wasn't quite sure, when she heard that Nadia was a thief, that this book would be for her. She gave it a chance anyway. And I am grateful.

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In just a few hours, I'll be on the Bryn Mawr campus with my dear friend Cynthia Reeves and her students to talk about Handling the Truth, Flow, the empathetic imagination, the past and the present and—well—I have far too much planned for the hour and twenty minutes we have, but I guess that is who I have become. Persistent. Insistent. Still wrecked and unreasonable with the impossibility of it all.

But this one One Thing Stolen thing before I go. The novel, due out shortly, is, as I have written here on Huffington Post, about a neurodegenerative disease—about the slow peeling away of my Nadia's language and historical self. Nadia, in One Thing Stolen, becomes trapped in a cycle of art making. She cannot stop herself.

A few weeks ago, Taylor Norman, a young and wondrously talented editor at Chronicle Books, took the time to send me this true story of a former lawyer whose traumatic brain injury resulted in the emergence of an unexpected artistic talent. This is art arising from injury and not disease. But it is, in so many ways, a story that yields insights into Nadia and into the question: Are we are in ultimate control over our artistic leanings, aesthetics, impulses? Can we definitively source the many ways that story, color, and shape erupt in us?

I would wager that we aren't, and that we can't.

From the story that Taylor sent that first appeared in the NY Daily News:

Doctors diagnosed Fagerberg with a traumatic brain injury. He suffered memory loss and had problems with processing language.

The accident ended his legal career. To cope, he turned to art therapy - and suddenly realized that he had a particular gift for painting.

"A little trigger went off and I became hooked. It became a compulsion," Fagerberg told KHOU, adding: "I see everything sort of in composition, so everywhere I look it's a painting."

The whole story, and a video, can be found here.

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Maybe the pre-publication months are the hardest months on writers. Best to shrug them off, develop distractions, think on next stories, next things, new recipes.

Earlier this week, through the nervous silence (and a search for tea for two guests at Penn), came news of a Booklist star for One Thing Stolen, as well as some very generous words from School Library Journal. I also learned that Chronicle will be sponsoring a Goodreads giveaway, beginning on March 1st. More on that can be found in the sidebar on my blog.

For now, I share highlights from the book's three early trade reviews:

Fans of Jandy Nelson’s dense, unique narratives will lose themselves in Kephart’s enigmatic, atmospheric, and beautifully written tale.  — Booklist, Starrred Review

“Kephart’s artful novel attests to the power of love and beauty to thrive even in the most devastating of circumstances.”—School Library Journal

"Kephart has crafted a testament to artistry and the adaptability of the human mind.  Set in Florence, Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance, Kephart transports readers across the ocean from Philadelphia, Pa., to the cobbled streets of Italy." — Kirkus Reviews 

 In other publishing news: This kind review of Handling the Truth, in Assay Journal, by Renee D'Aoust.


And Love: A Philadelphia Affair (Temple University Press, August 2016) has an official cover and flap copy, which I will share here when the time is right.

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You know how it is—the winding and wending through book booths. The writers signing, the multiples of the new fresh things in stacks; it's hard to take it in, at least for me. I never return home from The Events with a bag full of randoms. I return home with the books sought out or placed in my trust. A handful.

But there I was, Friday, at the National Conference for Teachers of English at the National Harbor Convention Center. I'd be doing my own signing in fifteen minutes, but I had time. And so I walked, my eyes cast down, and there it was, a pile of books, the cover whitish and thin, two streaks of color, a title, a name. Abigail Thomas, I read. Kept walking. Stopped. Backtracked.

Abigail Thomas? At NCTE?

"Um," I said, to the Scribner person.

"Yes?"

"Are you giving these ARCs away? By chance?"

"You want one?"

"Desperately."

"So go ahead."

It was mine! The new Abigail Thomas memoir, coming in March 2015, but I don't have to wait that long. Not me, who loves Abigail Thomas, who sang her praises in Handling the Truth, who reads her words out loud to my Penn students. Not me. I have What Comes Next and How to Like It. I read it when I was supposed to be writing, which is to say I read it today. All day and now I'm done, I'm finished, and I'm sad about that, because books this good don't come around too often. Books this good need Abigail Thomas to write them.

"Abigail Thomas is the Emily Dickinson of memoirists," Stephen King has said. UmmHmmm.

Where to start, or have I said enough? A book about friendship and motherhood, about painting and words, about comfort and soup, about sleeping all day, about waking ourselves up, about love, an "elastic" word, Thomas tells us. Proves it. Thomas could blare, in her bio, about a lot of writerly things, but what she says first is this: "Abigail Thomas is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve." Yes. That's how Thomas describes herself because that, with infinite beauty, is who she is first. Who she will be. What makes her the powerhouse writer she is. (Though to that description one must add a pile of dogs.) Thomas writes, in this new memoir, about how we hold on knowing that one day we won't. How we outlast ourselves, or live with the fact that outlasting doesn't last.

I loved every torn page. The arrangement of the pages. Thomas's smart abhorrence of chronology. How many times, in class, to students, to writers, have I said: Don't tell me the story in a straight line. Break the grid. Steer your way toward wisdom by scrambling the sequence of facts.

Now I'm just going to read Thomas:

I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it's so boring. This comes out of me with the kind of vehemence that requires a closer look, so I scribble on the back of a napkin while waiting for friends to show up at Cucina and it doesn't take long to figure it out. The thought of this happened and then this happened and then this and this and this, the relentless march of events and emotion tied together simply because day follows day and turns into week following week becoming months and years reinforces the fact that the only logical ending from chronological order is death.

Yes. And that, by the way, is a single chapter in a book built (miraculously) of brevities. A book in which the page by page sequencing is as shattering as the pages themselves.

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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.

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Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about labels. Applied to people. Applied to literature.

Still, those of us who write young adult fiction must, at times, face those who suggest that it is a lesser form, not nearly as important as the work written expressly for adults—a problem I discussed in a story for Publishing Perspectives titled, "Removing the YA Label: A Proposal, A Fantasy."

(Those of us who write quote-unquote literary contemporary YA fiction must also endure the suggestion that John Green has singlehandedly ushered in this genre's golden era, but that's a topic for another conversation, and we must be careful not to blame John Green for what is written about him.)

The problem with the YA-is-lesser assessment is that the YA writers I respect aren't writing down, aren't writing in haste, aren't writing with any less literary ambition than those who write novels for adults. We're just writing stories that happen to have younger protagonists at their heart; often we're writing "whole family" tales. Always, if we're serious about this stuff, if we're writing not toward known trends but toward felt story, we're writing as best as we can.

And so I will admit to feeling equal measures of joy and peace at finding Going Over on the Main Line Today list of 10 great beach reads by local authors. Not 10 YA books. Just ten books by authors ranging from Robin Black and Jennifer Weiner to Kelly Corrigan and Ken Kalfus. Ten books curated by Cathy Feibach of Main Point Books, who has made it her business, in this, the first year of her store's existence, to get to know who is writing what and to evaluate each book on its own terms.

I am honored. And I am looking forward to next Saturday, when I will drive down Lancaster Avenue and stop in Bryn Mawr and spend an hour signing both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir in Cathy's store. My signing caps a full day of signings, the details for which are here. And when I'm not signing, you can be sure that I'll be buying the books I want, seeing straight past their labels.

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With gratitude, as always. I do know how lucky I am.

Additionally, my wonderful friend Karen Bernstein—she of gifts from Diane Keaton, she of brilliant Going Over pots—reports that she found Going Over on page 71 of the new issue of Main Line Today Magazine listed as one of the "ten great beach reads by local authors." Huge thanks to Karen, and to the magazine.

I have always loved being local.

Speaking of local: Come celebrate the first year in the life of Main Point Books next Saturday, when a fleet of super cool local authors will be signing books. I'll be there at three o'clock with both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. More on the day can be found here.

Finally, more on Going Over can be found here, through the hugely generous BCCB review.

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There's plenty of rain out there, stripping the cherry trees of their pinks, heavying the heads of tulips, flooding the low plateaus of my brief driveway.

But inside all is color as I prepare for the launch of Going Over, my Berlin novel. Karen Bernstein, who surprised me earlier this month with a birthday celebration at the Wayne Art Center, has been at work on this vase for a long time now. She's a clay artist of the highest order. She read the book while it was still in galley form. She studied images of the actual graffiti on the Berlin Wall and made this pot — West Berlin, then East Berlin, 1983.  See that arrow up there? It's symbolic. See those flowers? Incredibly gorgeous. They fight the rain. They elevate my mood. They say love, in so very many ways.

I wish you could meet Karen and see for yourself what a special and uber talented person she is. She is, however, now in a car, headed to NYC, where she will meet Diane Keaton (whom I love so much that I celebrated her in Handling the Truth) at the 92nd Street Y. Karen has a lot of Diane in her. The two could probably talk forever. If they did, or when they do, Diane K. will be enchanted.

Those of you here, near, those of you able to slip out with all this rain, come join us for cake at Radnor Memorial Library, Winsor Room, 7:30 PM.

Berlin Wall.

Friends.

Family.

A little Springsteen, too. 

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Readers of this blog and of the Philadelphia Inquirer know that last year I had the exquisite privilege of meeting the Pennsylvania Ballet's principal ballerina, Julie Diana Hench, and her charismatic husband, Zach. Of watching the two of them rehearse for a performance of "Jewels." Of photographing and writing that story for the Inquirer (here).

I'd met Julie a few weeks earlier, at a Penn event, for Julie, among so many other things, presides over the University of Pennsylvania's Association of Alumnae. She'd invited me to speak with her and others on an evening I'll not forget. She'd introduced herself not as a dancer, but as a fellow writer (and, oh, a writer she most certainly is). I'd stumbled toward understanding, that first night, just who this Julie was.

This May 11th, Mother's Day, Julie, following an immaculate career, will be dancing her final dance with Zach on the Academy stage, her two young children no doubt somewhere near. I will be there, with my father, tears streaming. I have long been looking forward to treating my father to this event, and that feeling of anticipation deepened even more today, as I learned of the publication of a story that Julie had once written about me.

Her story begins like this:

In the back room of the Sweeten Alumni House, Beth Kephart nestled into the couch, holding a copy of her most recent book and pages from an unfinished manuscript. She smiled warmly at the 30 or so women sitting around her and graciously thanked us for inviting her to speak. A few words on why she wrote the book, some humble comments about its success, and she began to read selections from Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. 

It’s not unusual for the Association of Alumnae to host esteemed guest speakers who are Penn alumnae and/or faculty. But this first meeting of 2013-14 was different due to the soft-spoken and intimate language of Kephart’s presentation – and the nature of her expertise. We sat on the edge of our seats, listening to the rhythmic sounds of her prose. We visualized the colorful passages depicting Kephart in class with students and we felt her emotion as she described her honest, sometimes emotional, reasons for writing the book. She graciously answered our questions: “What is the difference between memoir and autobiography?” and “As a perfectionist, do you ever feel satisfied with a final draft or what you see in print?” Her answers were candid yet thoughtful.

It continues here.

Julie Diana Hench, I will always treasure this. Look for me, in May. I will be there, every inch of me, for you, the song, and Zach.

All of you, give yourself these 55 seconds. Watch Julie and her Zach dance.

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The thing is: I had already won.

I had been invited to the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life Awards Program, sponsored by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society New York City—Southern New York Chapter. I was seeing friends—Darcy Jacobs, nominee Patty Chang Anker, Katie Freeman, Julia Johnson, my Gotham editor, Lauren Marino. My husband had joined me for the evening, our sensational son had left work to see us an hour before, Jenny Powers, VP of Special Events for the Society, had put on an amazing show of truly exceptional everythings at The TimesCenter. I had a new pink dress, those famous new shoes, and Maggie Scarf, the bestselling author, was telling my husband and me a story that held us both in captive disbelief. Soon I would go down that long flight of stairs and find the fabulous Lee Woodruff in the bathroom. We would speak of pink dresses, pink scarves, the sometimes good luck of fashion.

Earlier in the day, the phenomenal team at Chronicle Books had posted the stunning new trailer for Going Over, my soon-to-be-launched Berlin novel. School Library Journal had named Going Over the Pick of the Day. Laura Fraser of Shebooks had sent sweet news. The weather was kind. Only two-thirds of my hair was a mess.

And so I settled back into my chair at The TimesCenter simply to watch the show. To be grateful for it all. To be unencumbered, for that moment, by doubt. The first category of ten to be announced was the Motivational category. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, a book about the students I love and the things they have taught me, sat (remarkably) alongside The Novel Cure (Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin), Saturday Night Widows (Becky Aikman), Survival Lessons (Alice Hoffman), and On These Courts (Wayne B. Drash). Meredith Vieira—gorgeous Meredith Vieira—was looking stunning up there on the stage, post Sochi, post Oscars. She was reading off the nominees, then opening an envelope, and then—and then—she called my name.

I have never been so unprepared for anything in my life. I had not, for a single second, rehearsed the possibility of the moment; winning was out of the question. I had a wide stage to cross, and by the time I reached the microphone and Meredith's outstretched arms, I had been rendered incapable of speech. I have absolutely no idea what words I finally said. I know only that I told Meredith how beautiful she really is (inside and out). I know that I struggled to find words for the beauty of my students. I know I said "son" and "husband" and "Gotham" and "dreams."

(How grateful am I to Lauren Marino, Lisa Johnson, Beth Parker, and the entire Gotham team for saying yes to this book in a seaside nano-second. And a million thanks to my agent, Amy Rennert, who has supported this book from the second it arrived in her to-be-read bin.)

Afterward, when all the winners gathered on stage for a Publishers Weekly photograph, I had an opportunity to speak with Meredith, to learn more about her upcoming new program, The Meredith Vieira Show. It is going to be wonderful because she is through-and-through wonderful. A real show, real conversations, a set that recreates her own family room, her own interests, pursued. Look for it come Labor Day.

I end this as I must end this—with prayers for those who are living with and seeking to combat multiple sclerosis, a haunting condition about which important words were spoken last night. Without organizations like the New York City—Southern New York Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society—organizations that work throughout the year to raise awareness and research dollars, bring together authors and publishers, put leading lights like Meredith Vieira, Lee Woodruff, Arianna Huffington, Pamela Paul, Mark Bittman, and Richard Pine on one stage, and gather friends—hope would not loom so large.  

I have never been so proud to bring an honor home.

I head to South Carolina in a few hours to serve as the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Distinguished Writer. This is the week of a lifetime.

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Memoir. There are no rules. There are only the books that we learn from, the writing that shapes us, the mistakes we are willing to make, the unmasking. Each semester, I teach memoir new because it is always new, because there is always more to read, to try, to consider.

And then I sit, as my students head off for their spring break, their memoirs in my lap. And I am stunned by the hard work, the right risks, the bold tangents, the questions raised and sometimes answered. They are off. I am here. Their lives on paper.



How they have walked deep among the trees. How they have honored the form, themselves, one another. How deeply privileged I am. Always.

This rare teaching life.

These vast and lovely spring semesters.

Them.

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It is just like me not to know where I am going until a few hours before my going time. I don't know. It is, perhaps, the way I deal with gnawing nerves.

And so it isn't until just now, this very moment, that I realize that the Books for a Better Life Awards program, for which my humble Handling the Truth has been nominated, will be taking place at The TimesCenter. I've ambled near this building during many of my trips to New York City. I've never been to an event here, never been near the stage. I don't know how I got so lucky to be included in this special evening, which is honoring Mark Bittman and Richard Pine, featuring Meredith Vieira and Arianna Huffington, and in support of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Southern New York Chapter.

I don't know, but suddenly I'm so glad that I decided to buy a new pink dress and new nude pumps. Because I'm all over winter. Because that stage is so pretty, so bright. Because, in my own small life, these chances come around so rarely. Because I am going to live the night.

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