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By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 9/19/2015
Blog:
Beth Kephart Books
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I had a summer that didn't use much of my mind, so then I lost words. And my body, too, began to dwindle, only I gained weight in the process.
So when Jessica Lowenthal invited me to the reception honoring Julia Bloch, the new director of Creative Writing at Penn, I had many concerns. One: my wrong hair. Two: my wrong shoes. Also (like I told Jay Kirk and then Greg Djanikian and maybe even Tom Devaney and Avery Rome and Stephen Fried, but not my students Nina and David, or maybe I did, because I don't know, I was feeling irresponsible, and did I tell Al Filreis, too?, but I know I did not so burden Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Lorene Carey, Max or Sam Apple, at least I hope not), I had lost my personality. Left it somewhere. In the summer.
(Perhaps that's a good thing?)
But I went anyway, talking to my son by phone while in transit so that I would not turn back because, as I have noted, everything about me was not quite right, and if I'd not been talking with him, I'd have talked myself back onto the train and headed reverse west, for home.
Then I crossed the threshold at Kelly Writers House (there's always a little thrill involved) and everything changed. The place was just, well, filling up. With faculty members I respect and love, and students I adore. Soon (or, it actually happened first) Jessica herself was taking me on a tour of the new Wexler studio, and bam. I didn't look right, but something happened. I felt as if I belonged.
Then the star of our evening, the star of our program, stepped forward and faced a crowded, beaming room and began to read poems from
Valley Fever (Sidebrow Books) and
Hollywood Forever (Little Red Leaves Journal & Press, the Textile Series) and I, sitting there in the front row, began to feel a hot little prickle inside my head. Like the blank nothing of my thoughts was getting Braille-machine punched by all the delicious oddness of Julia's phrasing and syntax, occasionally repurposed lines, jokes I got and maybe didn't always entirely get (because, as I always say and forever mean, I am just not that smart). Julia was talking and then (I heard this) she was singing, but without any change in the pitch of her voice. Singing by exuding whole phrases in one long breath, then stopping (beat/beat) and starting again. It was like being driven in a car with the windows down, at night, when there is a lot of open road but also some bright red traffic lights.
Damn, I thought.
What do I mean, how can I explain this? These coupled and uncoupled ideas, the surreality of words you assume have been fashioned from parts, the winnowed down ideas that, when toppled and stacked, say something.
Mean something. Even if you can't actually always articulate what you have been stung by, you know you have been stung.
Here is half of "Wolverine," from
Valley Fever, a poem I instinctively love, also a poem I will ponder for quite some time.
Wolverine
I was only pretending
to be epiphanic
she said, tossing the whole
day over the embankment.
Is the heart collandered
or semiprecious
filled with holes
and therefore filled with light —
....
This afternoon, following a morning of work and a conversation with a friend, I read Julia's two books through, cover to cover. I hovered. I felt that warm thing happen again in my head, that invitation I will, as a writer and reader, always accept—to slam and scram the words around, to make the heart inside the brain beat again.
Thank you, Julia, for making my brain heart beat again.
And. You are going to be terrific. You already are.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 10/29/2010
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Beth Kephart Books
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The University of Pennsylvania has been extraordinarily good to me—inviting me to contribute to the pages of
The Pennsylvania Gazette and
Peregrine; trusting me to teach a small class of brilliant undergrads; putting me at the helm of an online book group; asking me to read with Alice Elliott Dark, or to sit on panels with Buzz Bissinger, or to join David Remnick for a Kelly Writers House dinner; and to come to know, even better, the likes of fellow teachers Jay Kirk and Karen Rile.
Earlier this summer, John Prendergast, the editor of
The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote to say that he'd read
Dangerous Neighbors and that he looked forward to having a conversation. We had that conversation on a sunny day sitting on a row of skinny benches while a tennis match played out before us. I was my breathless, enthused, and sleep-starved self (as you'll read) and John was the thoughtful man he is. Several weeks later, the photographer Chris Crisman and his team met me at Memorial Hall and put up with me long enough to take my picture.
It is an
extraordinarily generous story, accompanied by one of my favorite scenes from the book. It will always be cherished. And Chris, thanks for pulling your camera lens back. You know what that means to me.
I returned home from my afternoon at 1209 Vine to spend an hour reading the latest thoughts, impressions, and declarations of the online book discussion group that I've been leading for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. I then turned right around, hopped the train once more, and headed back to the city for the launch of Jay Kirk's first book,
Kingdom Under Glass, an altogether wonderful affair conducted within the halls of the Academy of Natural Sciences.
It was near midnight when I crossed the river and looked south, toward the newly rehabilitated Main Post Office Building at 30th Street. My city photographs well, any time of day or night.
In between the travel and the book-club talk (and, okay, true, a few corporate assignations), I received word of
this gorgeous review of
Dangerous Neighbors over at Alison's Book Marks, which concludes with words that any writer of non-vampire texts yearns to hear:
Different from anything I have ever read before, Beth Kephart raises the bar on Young Adult novels. She proves that you don't need vampires and werewolves to capture this audience's attention, and bring them on a journey they will not soon forget.
Thank you, Alison.
Yesterday, my copy of Jay Kirk's
Kingdom Under Glass arrived, a book I'll be eagerly delving into later this long weekend. I've known Jay through much of this book's creation, have been privileged to read a long, early chapter, and have been astonished (and been made grateful) by the research-inspired stories that he tells. In a few days, once I've finished reading, I'll be able to report on the book here in greater detail.
But for now, let me say this: I may stand in the minority with this, but I believe that acknowledgments, in books, actually matter. They tell us something about the person behind the story. They tell us something about the web work of his or her life. Jay's acknowledgments, in
Kingdom, carry on across four pages, and from every sentence of thanks there leans humility and grace. There are stories upon stories inside Jay's acknowledgments, and I am lucky to be among those noted. But mostly I smile at Jay's words for his wife, Julie. "I would skin a pack of wild dogs for you," he writes at the close of a long paragraph. The thing is: I'm pretty sure that he would.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 5/20/2010
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I'm headed into the Big Apple today (though not by way of clydesdales, sadly) to talk about the power of the Kelly Writers House program at Penn, to read with Kimberly Eisler, one of my truly talented students, and to witness the indomitable Al Filreis teach a poem (that should be something; hope he doesn't call on me). Two days later, I'll head back down into Philadelphia to see my first Penn student, Moira Moody, say I do to the man she loves. I'm banking on Dr. Filreis showing off some highly ecclesiastical moves at Moira's wedding. I'll take hip hop, too. Or even the cha cha.
By mid-week next week, I'll be spending the day at Chanticleer (the site of
Ghosts in the Garden and
Nothing but Ghosts)—teaching memoir to the aspiring writers of Agnes Irwin, thanks to the invitation of Julie Diana, who is not just the head librarian at Agnes Irwin, but the wife of the fabulous writer, Jay Kirk. Thursday and Friday, back in New York, I'll spend some time with editor Laura Geringer and the glorious Egmont team; the book bloggers I have come to love; Amanda King, Gussie Lewis, and Jennifer Laughran, booksellers extraordinaires; and maybe even grab a few moments with Amy Rennert, my west-coast based agent with whom I often speak but whom I rarely see.
I am not, by nature, a sustainably social person, and so, when I return home next Friday evening, I'll be grateful that one of my very favorite events of the entire year—the Devon Horse Show—will have rolled into town. We moved here in large part because the fairgrounds are just down the road, because these horses do trot by just after dawn, because I like few things more than walking through the shadows of stables, fitting my hand to a sweet mare's nose. I like the sound of clop and whinny, the tinny music that accompanies balloon dart games and Ferris wheels.
With thanks to Elizabeth Mosier (author of
My Life as a Girl and party thrower supreme), Christopher Mills, and their wonderful girls; Jay Kirk (author of the upcoming
Kingdom Under Glass) and my dad; the fantastic people at Children's Book World, who provided not just the space and time, but this fab pinata; and all of those who took time from their busy schedules to join us for a memorable evening.
I arrived at the Penn campus early yesterday, first to have tea with Gregory Djanikian, a poet, a mentor, and the director of the creative writing staff. We talked of students and what might be yielded to them, talked of what remains, or should. We walked, then, to the eastern wedge of the campus, where Greg has a standing Monday squash game, and where I, by virtue of proximity to a once-familiar structure, remembered my own days on the varsity team.
I said goodbye to Greg, then met Jay Kirk on the library steps. I had an elephant's eye for him—glass, a taxidermist's tool, an object found at Paxton Gate during a San Francisco trip. Up Locust Walk, then, Jay and I went, talking of books, rehearsing history, recalling the days, mine, when again and again my work was rejected for its lack of commercial viability. We talked about English 145, and about Jay's narrative nonfiction, and about what I hoped he might relate to the students of my class.
After lunch, Jay was there, in Room 209, engaging these young writers, as I knew he would, with stories about funeral home directors and brothels, a lesbian retirement community, Rwanda's post-genocide tourism business. In structure lies meaning, Jay told the class. Scene making is story making. Write your authentic self—your fears, your not knowing, your questions—directly onto the page.
They do. They have. For we critiqued the students' memoirs then—powerful, personal stories that demanded respect and received it. Talent matters in writing workshops, of course it does, but so do intellectual integrity and kindness. My students bring all three to class. They move me to tears. I can't help it.
Sometimes things just hit you—obvious aspects of yourself, known territories, that suddenly swoon large in your own self-opinion. Last night, watching the crowd gather at the bookstore, watching that community of authors engender and inspire that community of listeners, I was smacked about inside my head with this commonplace observation: I really am an outsider. I really do live on margins. The center of things eludes me.
Genetics? Circumstance? I do not know. I know only that my life as a writer is fueled almost entirely by correspondence (the essential literary back and forth with Jay Kirk, Buzz Bissinger, Reiko Rizzuto, Ivy Goodman, Kate Moses, Anna Lefler, Alyson Hagy) and the very rare phone call, not by gathering. That I write my books alone, extraordinarily so. That I miss the trends because I haven't been out among those trading news about them. That the few times that I have been out in person doing book-related things over these past many years is primarily because of one person, Elizabeth Mosier, who made it possible for me to join Patricia Hampl (one of my favorite memoirists) for dinner one evening, who drove me to Swarthmore to see Elizabeth Strout (another heroine), and who was the reason I ventured out last night to see writers who were very much worth the effort.
I have squeezed this writing life into the dark. I have made certain that it didn't interfere with the family dinner hour or the client expectation. I have gone off writing these books in my head without stopping to consider: Will they sell? Are they of the now? Will they find their readers? I have bludgeoned out this path for books, but it's a small path—whacked away and narrow.
Is that the way? Is this the way? Last night I had my doubts.
I posted earlier this week about the gifts of friendship yielded by the mostly private writing life; I wrote, particularly, about Jayne Anne Phillips.
My story was about the time I'd spent with Jayne Anne in Prague; Jay Kirk, that enormously gifted writer whom I've praised in other blog entries (most recently that gorgeous Rwanda piece in GQ) and whom I've benefited so hugely from knowing since 2005, wrote to tell me about the quality of a critique Jayne Anne had given him at Bread Loaf. The email dialogue went (paraphrasically) thusly:
Me: Wait. What year were you at Bread Loaf?
Jay: I was there in '96.
Me: As was I. Grace Paley. Anne Lamott. The gorgeous Olena Kaltyiak Davis. Jane Satterfield. Brooks Hansen.
Jay: Wait. You were in our class? Or were you teaching...
Well, indeed. You get that point. Apparently, I've known Jay since 1996. Apparently, we sat in the same small classroom. Surely, I read pages from his then novel-in-progress; I remember the beating pulse of the guy's talent. And beyond this being one of those ain't-life-strange conjunctions, it raises for me this question:
How do I keep managing to trip up against blazing talents who are also (don't ever take this for granted) hugely good souls? The sort of people I need to know, because without them I wouldn't think nearly as hard. I had the chance to know Jay a long time ago, it seems. I was given (fluke that it was) a second chance. Thank goodness I was finally paying attention in '05. It would have been lousy if I hadn't.
I love that your university is supporting you and your beautiful book so much. Fabulous picture of you. And it's great that they are offering up an excerpt to entice more readers.
I wish I could be half as productive (and witty) as you on little sleep. :)
Beth, I am glad to hear it! You are a beautiful writer. Now over to see the link!
What a fantastic article! LOVE it. I'm so happy for you and even happier to know that all those newspaper readers will be introduced to you!
Cheers and congrats!
XO
Anna
Sometimes the Red & Blue simply knows talent and grace and generosity of spirit when it/they see it. We're all just pleased that you are connected to us in some many ways!
Wonderful article and photo!
This is wonderful, Beth. And I'm sure that you're as good to the university as they are to you.