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I offered my students the opportunity to revise their memoirs for an additional five points.
No requirement. No insistence. Just a chance, if they wanted to take it.
The points themselves—they hardly meant a thing to this talented bunch. The chance to return to their work, to their selves—that was the thing. We find the heart of our stories not the first time we write them, not the second time or third. We find the heart of our stories when we begin again, or look again, when we say,
Maybe this.After a long day, after an afternoon of such crushing corporate pressures that I could not go, as I had wanted to, to church, I have read the work of the four students who chose to revise their memoirs.
Two wrote newly, from scratch.
Two amended from within.
Each of them soared. Each of them
soars.I am the proudest prof alive. This is God's goodness to me, on this Good Friday.
Thank you, John McPhee.
Here I am, set to begin the narrative profile component of English 135.302 at Penn, set, as a matter of fact, to teach the art of the interview this coming Tuesday (this very one), and there you are in the pages of
The New Yorker, with your essay
"Elicitation."Your timing, as always, is impeccable.
I am tempted to quote the entire piece back to my students, back to the world. I will honor the rules of borrowing and quote just a tad. Here we go:
Whatever you do, don't rely on memory. Don't even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day. And don't squirrel notes in a bathroom—that is, run off to the john and write surreptitiously what someone said back there with the cocktails. From the start, make clear what you are doing and who will publish what you write. Display your notebook like a fishing license.
And:
You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. Evidently, you need help. Who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions? The result is the opposite of the total shutdown that might have occurred if you had come on glib and omniscient. If you don't seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it. If you are listening to speech and at the same time envisioning it in print, you can ask your question again, and again, until the repeated reply will be clear in print. Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box? Reporters call that creative bumbling.
In two weeks, Michael Sokolove will come to Penn and speak to my class as well as the students now being taught by my friend Avery Rome about this interviewing thing. He'll talk as well about his exceptional book,
Drama High. John McPhee, you've given us more to ponder. And I (as I always am with you) am grateful.
I had all sorts of prospects for my class at Penn yesterday. Just two classes to go, and I had a plan in place, some thoughts about teaching the art of putting another's gestures, postures, cheekbones, eyes on the page. I had things to read, photographs to study, Annie Dillard, Anton Chekhov, Francine Prose, and Cynthia Kaplan in my back pocket. But before we would get to that, we would hear from the students themselves, who had been interviewing each other and writing "practice" profiles.
Except. These were no practice profiles. These were fully developed, deeply moving, vastly important
gifts crafted scrupulously for one another. It became important to simply dwell with these pieces, to slow things down, to take note of all the progress my students have made this semester, to honor the insights and the care embedded in their most recent work. There were students who had entered my classroom in winter proclaiming that they couldn't write; how wrong they were. There have been those who have worried about getting things wrong; time and again they got so much right. There were those who cautioned that they might not come to every class, and would probably be late with the assignments. Okay, so. There was only one of those, and he lied. He came. He wrote. Not just extremely well, but also (he amazed us) on time (give or take three minutes).
Soon I'll be able to share one of my student's works, for it will be published in an esteemed magazine. Someday I'll be able to tell you about the others—their gains, their triumphs, their stories.
But for now, in the midst of what has become the busiest season in my life, I want to take a minute and thank my institution, the University of Pennsylvania, for giving me the chance, again, to fall in love (thank you, Greg Djanikian, and thank you, Al Filreis). This is a great privilege, spending time with these students, watching them grow. And it is a great privilege to work at my alma mater. The final project my students will produce is a profile of an individual who inspires. Many of my students have chosen a university professor, and in reading through the profile proposals this morning, I am awed by the many professors I've never met who are radically changing student lives.
If you walk through life looking for the good, you find students like my students. You find an institution like my own.
They have huge hearts and great talent. They make me laugh and they work hard. They pay attention to one another. They let the learning in.
Today they surprised me with a birthday celebration and magnificent card (you guys!) and made me cry (again). Forever and ever, 135.302. Forever and ever and ever.
Thank you, my students, and thank you dear provocateur, remembering friends Karen Rile and Jamie-Lee Josselyn. And thank you Trey Popp and Maggie Ercolani and Nabil Mehta, who joined us in our final hour and made the party finer.
I will sleep well tonight.
On the train home from Penn, yesterday. The skies starting to lose their sun.
I'd walked West Philadelphia for an hour before class. I'd brought the students Insomnia cookies (hot from the oven, chocolate chip melt.) Once we were gathered, we began—critiquing the final five student memoirs.
We know each other well by now.
I will tell you a story, I said, when we were done—emotionally exhausted, grateful, glad. I will tell you about my son, who is off to the Big Apple in a week or so to start his first full-time job. The boy was home on Monday, I said. We were talking work. I was trilling the difference between good and great, between doing enough and doing more, and he stopped me in my effusive tracks.
Do you talk to your students like this? he said.
Of course I do.
And they still like you?
I hope so. Sometimes.
Wow, he said. And shook his head.
Never do anything less than your best. I say it to them. I caution myself.
I spent most of this weekend reading a hefty book for review, then running to catch up on corporate work and student papers. Then, for about a half hour, I calmed down and read
The New York Times. I found
the interview everyone else has likely read by now—the one in which A.L. Kennedy talks to John Williams about
The Blue Book, and other such matters.
I found this particular exchange quite nicely juicy. I juxtapose it with a photo I took of my own classroom chalkboard, when I was prepping for the conversation my students and I were about to have about Caroline Knapp's memoir,
Drinking: A Love Story.
You can teach reading. You can teach critique. But you should not, as Kennedy points out here, tell someone, especially an author, what to think.
Q.
Have you ever learned anything specific about your craft from reading a critic’s reaction to your work?
A.
From a professional critic, no. I’ve never expected to. In the U.K., the critical culture can be fairly moribund and dominated by an oddly ill-informed set of academic assumptions. There’s less and less space or money for serious criticism. From critics — which is to say, people who look closely at my work and are true and wide-ranging readers — yes, I have. But paying too much attention to external opinion — fashions, theories, trends, friends — puts you a couple of years behind your own timeline, because critics only ever follow. That whole scene can take you away from your center and your voice, while making you self-conscious. It’s a toxic combination. And an adult writer can’t always be expecting this little fantasy undergraduate workshop to tell them what to think. If you’re the author, it’s your decision to find out what you think and what you want to say and then get on with it. If it were a group effort, your name wouldn’t be the only one on the title.
I spend this spring break week reading the memoir work of my Penn students.
It seems unkind, in fact, to assign a grade to work that barrels forth from open hearts.
It seems right to read slowly, to make notes, to think hard.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 3/1/2013
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Okay, so call this a
Beth loves her students blog-athon day, but I am not going to let the moon get any higher in tonight's sky without celebrating Maggie Ercolani, a student from two years ago, who has her first published piece in the current issue of the
Pennsylvania Gazette. She joins my students
Moira Moody,
Joe Polin, and
Nabil Mehta on these pages, and her story is a triumph—a telling triumph and a living triumph.
Let me explain.
Toward the end of this past summer I received an email from Maggie who I knew, from an earlier exchange, had been looking forward to a summer internship at Macy's with Maggie-style enthusiasm. I saw her name in my in-box, opened her note, then recoiled. It wasn't the story I'd expected. Indeed, Maggie was writing to tell me that she had suffered a stroke in the first hour of the first day of that internship. That she had spent the summer in hospitals and rehab. That she had a new understanding of the father about whom she had written in my class—a father who had experienced a traumatic brain injury when he tumbled from a bike. Maggie wanted to write about what had happened so that she might understand. Would I help her? Of course I would. But oh, Maggie, I said. Oh. Maggie.
But the reason Maggie's piece is in the
Gazette is because Trey Popp, an editor there, took Maggie's story on and worked with her to develop it more fully. They went back and forth, Trey and Maggie, until the piece is what it is today. I am so grateful to Trey, and I am so proud of Maggie—for her perseverance, for her attitude, for the textures in her life.
Please click on
this link to read Maggie's story for yourself.
Last night, riding the train home in the wet muck of an undecided weather day, I, like an orchid bloom, held my secret close.
Today I share it with you.
I'm wholly love the students I teach. And they earn that love.
I'm kinda tired and I'm kinda cold, but I'm not settling down on the couch beneath a blanket with my mug of warm apple cider and my memoir of the week before I post this photograph, taken at the end of a Saturday at Penn.
The highlights: Sharing the campus with my brother, sister-in-law, and super smart nephew Owen. Buying my beautiful son a quick lunch, a hot chocolate, and two party-colored pretzels. Meeting Julia Elizabeth Hogan and Peter LaBerge of National YoungArts Foundation fame for a quickish tour, a too-short conversation, and some hummus. Getting to know Julia's mom (who took this expert photo at the door to the building where I currently teach) and dad, despite the small radial arrangements in the restaurant.
And: Seeing Jamie-Lee Josselyn, associate director of recruitment and instructor in the creative writing program at Penn, at work at the Kelly Writers House. Jamie-Lee has a plan for Penn, and that plan is simply this: Let the best young writers in the world know about this university of ours, about this unique creation that is Kelly Writers House, about the gathering of word-hungry souls around the hearth. Creative, loving, persistent, Jamie-Lee crisscrosses the country, tells students the truth, and brings them to the campus for a look see. She'll even come to Manayunk on a wet day to meet the teen writers I pull together for a workshop and festival; she'll stay and chat. It's because of Jamie-Lee's efforts that I had the pleasure of seeing Julia and Peter again today. It's because of her that I have brilliant young writers entering my classroom.
To the day. To the snow that wants to fall. To the mug of cider I have earned and the book that I will read.
To continuity and friendship.
Oh, and by the way, Miss Mary Lee Adler: We did some talking about you, oh yes we did. We all love you. Hugely.
I took the earlier train to Philadelphia yesterday, bounded down the stairwell, and saw, at the end of the ramp, a tall, black-haired young man, more beautiful than any—my son. We'd agreed to take a walk together ahead of my teaching hour.
And so we made our way—wove up Market, notched south, cut through the Drexel campus, and found ourselves here, above this new sports complex with its lovely panoramic view of the city. Our city. We share that now. We declare it.
Our city.Some people say my son's eyes are my eyes. Some people say it's in the brow. Some people say he writes and you write and therefore.... But I know that my kid is my kid because when we walk together anywhere we are happy. The same small things delight us. The same nothing is something. My little stories matter to him, and his matter hugely to me, and when we stop at last for lunch along 40th Street, an even greater calm settles in.
"It's such a great campus," he said, as he left me at the door of my building. "It's so clear why you love it here." He had met one of my students, said how nice he seemed. He had walked into one of my favorite Penn places, said, "Yes. It's beautiful. I see."
I see, too. But I always see better with him.
Before my students set out across the campus with camera in hand today, they reflected, among other things, on these words from Beryl Markham, quoted in Vivian Gornick's
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.I know that I have a good class when the students are willing to disagree, are eager to look at shades and nuances, work their own experience into the equation. I have a very good class.
But what do you think? Does Beryl Markham, in this passage from
West with the Night, speak for you? Or is loneliness not quite as abhorrent as she makes it out to be?
You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents—each man to see what the other looked like.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 2/1/2013
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In short: Karen Rile amazes.
In long: Karen Rile is a creative force, a tireless teacher, a super-human funny one, a jaw-dropping mom, a friend. She paved the way for me as an adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania (Beth: Karen, where do you file the grades? Karen: I will call you and explain. Beth: What do you do with jubilant procrastinators? Karen: I will call you and explain. Beth: What do you do if your students don't all fit in your room? Karen: I will call you and explain.) She joins me in writing for the
Philadelphia Inquirer (Karen's stuff goes viral while my stuff remains rooted in a petri dish). She had four children to my one and every single one of them is a star, with no little help from Karen, who has encouraged, driven, photographed, packaged, and web sited up their dreams. She sends hysterical, private riffs regarding various Facebook commentaries that upend my dark moods of injustice. For that alone, she's priceless.
Karen Rile and me: we're friends.
When she told me that she and two of her daughters (Lauren and Pascale) were launching a new literary magazine (Cleaver: cutting-edge words), I had two thoughts:
* now Karen will never sleep, and
* this will be outstanding.
Friends, I was right. This inventive, thrilling, wow-whooping magazine has just been released in its .5 preview version and it crosses many spectra—art, poetry, fiction, essays, and the chop-chop stuff in between—while featuring my own other personal friends like Elizabeth Mosier, Lynn Levin, and Rachel Pastin. It's also beautifully designed. It's also technologically advanced. Choose your channel (HTML, Text, Mobile), sit back, and receive.
Also, judging from the fact that Karen is sending me emails at 3 AM and I am answering shortly thereafter, I was not exaggerating the no-sleep stuff.
I was lucky enough to be included in this first issue (
click click). I like this, Karen wrote to me, when she received my piece. But, um, what is it, exactly?
I don't actually know. You'll have to judge for yourself. It starts like this, below, and it ends
here.
I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it: nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. Go chill with Cleaver.
I stopped at The Strand while making my way to a client the other day. It was a long walk and bitter cold. I wanted warmth. I needed books.
Patti Smith's
Woolgathering was on a front table, signed. It was mine in an instant, and today, while on the train to Penn, I read. Patti gave the class its first exercise of the day, which began with her words below:
Blowing upon it, candles, a star ... What does one desire. A partner. A freewheeling moon. Or perhaps to hear again as one heard as a child. A music—curious, optimistic, as plain and elusive as the call of the reel permeating a summer night. Expanding squares of laughter and delight. Everyone dancing, just dancing.
In three to four sentences only, write what you desire, I said.
Oh, how they broke my heart. Oh, how I wanted to be their age again. So many years of doing still laid out before them.
I have a wonderful class.
By:
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on 1/28/2013
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Each teaching semester at Penn I choose the memoirs I want the class to dwell on, learn from. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Duke of Deception. House of Prayer No. 2. Running in the Family. Slices from Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, the memoiristic poetry of Pablo Neruda. More.
This semester we're reading three, and this weekend I was preparing my notes for our coming discussion of Lucy Grealy's
Autobiography of a Face, a book with so much to teach that I filled six pages with citations and notes and sent my students more
consider-this questions than perhaps a teacher should. As a child, Lucy has cancer. As a teen and young woman she endures more than thirty surgeries—first to remove the tumor from her jaw, then to try to resurrect her face. That's the back story, but it isn't the reason this is such teach-worthy memoir. I will teach Lucy Grealy tomorrow because of her reach—her attempt to make sense, her generosity, her thematic juxtapositions.
Autobiography is full of passages such as this:
By the end of my freshmen year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona. How trivial to actually think about one's appearance. The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes. But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly. Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.
This is my home, my table where I sit with family and friends. Tomorrow I'll take this spirit of community (pretend there are flowers, pretend there are candles), and we'll talk.
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.
These are the months when I never sleep. The annual report months, the news magazine months, the teaching months, the cold ache in the bones. I would say that I woke to the frost this morning, but that would imply that I had slept.
Still, beneath two blankets and one burning bulb I read the work of students and was not alone through the dark. I was taking one final look, for example, at
Hairography, the book that my husband and I have created on behalf of the YoungArts writers—the students' work in response to a prompt I gave them, their faces and hair as Bill so magically captured both on a windswept day in Miami. It's a beautiful book. How could it not be? And it will be in the hands of these young writers soon.
Later in the night I began to read the first "official" work of my sixteen Penn students. They were writing about a journal I had asked them to keep, reflecting on a Joan Didion essay I'd asked them to read. What is the value of the words you write in the heat of a moment? What will they teach you about now, sometime in the distant when? Who do your words tell you you are, and who do they tell you you can be?
I was reading their thoughts through the dark, closing my eyes to think after each essay was marked. At one point I looked up and the sun was near. A text message revealed that my son had arrived, in plenty of time, for his first (brisk and early) interview of this day.
It's all about the young for me these days. It's why I don't regret my age, perhaps—or don't regret it too severely.
We'll meet at Penn today—me and my new flock of young memoirists. I've chosen, among many other things, to share the first page or two of Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. What do these sentences tell us about the memoir form, I'll ask? What do they free us, as writers, to do?
It's a question I might as well ask you:
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.
I was having a party for my memoir-spectacular Penn students at the close of last semester when they reversed the logic and presented me (a closet foodie) with a gift certificate to my choice of some of Philadelphia's finest restaurants.
I have saved that gift all summer long, telling myself that I would not use it until something very special happened. Yesterday, as readers of this blog know, that
something special happened: my son was accepted into the paid internship program at a fabulous advertising agency.
We're city bound, then, my family of three. And my students—you are all here with me. My family is big and proud and boisterous, thanks to the ever-continuing goodness of you.
In my hurry through life I have, in some ways, been neglecting this blog and my blogger friends. For that, I ask forgiveness. This morning I'm about to head off to the library to collect a good dozen new books, but before I do I wanted to stop and share these moments from the past few weeks.
The first several shots take place at the Exton Barnes & Noble, where K.M. Walton brought a number of area YA and children's book writers together for what was a genuinely good time. We're all together in that first shot—K.M. Walton, Elisa Ludwig, Amy Garvey, E.C. Myers, Monica Carnesi, Ame Dyckman, Dianne Salerni, and me. And then there's Ame (who got a fantastic
New York Times Book Review assessment of her
Boy + Bot just last week), Elisa, and Eugene.
The next three shots were taken this past Tuesday, during my travels down Locust Walk and toward my classroom at 3808 Walnut Street. The final image in that series is deliberately blurry; suffice it
We came together in search of something—
words, perhaps, or stories,
a path toward or beyond.
We emerge united in our understanding of what
truth is and
why it matters.
Around a thick, old table, we sat,
we wrote,
we listened.
We will remember.
A fond farewell to my beautiful students and to a semester I will not forget.
I returned from Penn—boarded the late train home—and walked beneath a clouding sky. It had been a long day, rich, spent in the company of students, and though I ached in my heart and my head (last week is our last class; how hard it will be to say goodbye), I hurried toward the package that I knew was waiting for me.
Isn't it beautiful, the exquisite Tamra Tuller had written in her note.
Yes, Tamra. Because of you and Philomel, it is.
Small Damages, then, which was so kindly
reviewed last week by the one and only Amy Riley,
who has a knack for sensing turning points and celebrating them.
It's only a snapshot. It was taken on the run. It's not art, but it's what I love—this Penn campus and the students it shares with me. My city beyond.
Do you want me to tell you how it feels to listen to my students lead the critiques of their classmates' work? Never a cruel word but never a less than honest one. An impossible balance? Not to them, it's not.
I call them my kids, to whomever will listen.
I claim them as my own.
I have a big week on tap, and if I am less the blogger than usual, I ask for your forgiveness in advance.
First, my students are back from their spring break, and I'll be in my city reviewing their first three memoirs tomorrow. They have written spectacularly. They have gone deep. I need to give them everything I've got.
On Wednesday another beautiful thing is going to happen—I'll hop a train and head to New York City, where I'll be meeting Tamra Tuller, my Philomel editor, for the very first time. Tamra read my Berlin book this weekend (the first two-thirds, all that I've written). With her kind early thoughts she returned the essence of the book to me, in the way that only the most generous of editors do.
On Thursday I head back to Philadelphia to spend the morning at the Public Library Association conference, to be held at the Civic Center. Please let me know if you'll be there. By noon I'll be back on a train and headed to Chesterbrook, where one of my favorite clients is located. You know who you are, Charlene and Mike.
Late Thursday night we'll pick our son up from the airport (he's in Las Vegas as of this hour). I hope to spend a lazy Friday with him.
Saturday, I'll be at the Musehouse with April Lindner at a special event hosted by Doug Gordon. I'm so excited about this and I hope that those of you who live in the Germantown/Philadelphia area will consider joining us. Find out more by double clicking the poster.
Sunday we'll sadly be saying goodbye to our son as he heads back up to college to finish off his final semester. I'll cry a little, eat chocolate, no doubt, then start getting ready for the week ahead, which will include, among other things, Teen Day in Manayunk, which is shaping up to be
a super event.I hope your weeks ahead are full and rich.
When I told my son that my Penn students were completing their memoirs during this spring break and had until last night at midnight to turn them in, he cocked his head and gave me one of those looks. "Why would you
do that," he asked, "to students you love?"
I tried to explain that the spring break due date was a way of giving my students more time—that they had been free to turn their pieces in earlier, if that's what they'd preferred, that we had been working toward this memoir all semester long, that more time outside the press of other school projects could be considered kind and beneficial. Still, my son perpetuated his incredulous (but still quite handsome) stare. "Friday night," he repeated. "
Midnight. Had you considered, say,
Wednesday instead? Or Friday around dinner time?"
Were I a
real professor and not someone who teaches one course one semester each year, I might be attuned to all the nuances of academic life. But I am, alas, merely and only me—this reader/writer/memoir evangelist who wants to give her students everything she's got...and who wants them to discover and apply every ounce of their own who-ness to the page. I've got a kid who thinks I'm a little crazy. I've got students who—by and large—don't resist. And I have, this Saturday morning, some truly extraordinary work by young people who have put their hearts and very brilliant minds on the page.
At the end of a week of great exhaustion and sickness, my son is home cracking his sunny smile, and my students are here, with their words.
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Yes, looking for good is always the best choice.
And then I want to say, "Who would ever miss one of your classes - or arrive late?"
Answer: No one. Ever.
It is indeed life's greatest privilege. Meeting people. Getting to know them. Walking for a bit at their sides.