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I have spoken here of
Adam Levine, a Philadelphia writer, historian, gardener, and friend who was so instrumental in my search for Schuylkill River images during the creation of
Flow. I have referenced a certain
Rob Cardillo, an exquisite photographer (he and Adam together created
the definitive guide to the great gardens of Philadelphia), who recently asked me to join him at Chanticleer in something other than a black coat. (I took my own small camera along and
snapped these photos.) Let me here introduce Scott Meyer and Kim Brubaker, former editor and art director for Organic Gardening, respectively.
Together these four have concocted a most gorgeous magazine called
Grow, for the 25,000 or more members of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. It has launched this week. It is worthy of a celebration.
I was honored to contribute this back-page essay to
Grow. Rob Cardillo took this photograph just before the rains unleashed at Chanticleer. I share just one column of the text. The rest lives for the Growers of PHS.
The talk is written.
The doors will be open.
Rivers. Gardens. Ghosts.
Radnor Memorial Library
September 4, 2014
Several weeks ago, Avery Rome of the
Philadelphia Inquirer got in touch with a question. Would I be interested in writing in occasional pieces for the paper's Currents section? Pieces about my intersection with my city and its fringes, perhaps. Pieces about the people I meet or the questions I have. Avery has been at work at the
Inquirer through many seasons—vital and invigorating, disciplined and rigorous, enriching the pages with literature and poetics, even, with different and differing points of view. If the
Inquirer has gone through many phases, it has always been clear on one thing: Avery Rome is indispensable.
Would I be interested? she'd asked.
Well, who would not be? I'd have reason to sit and talk with Avery, for one thing, which is a pleasure every time. And I would be joined in these pages by two incredibly special women, Karen Rile and Elizabeth Mosier. Both are first-rate teachers and mentors—Karen at Penn and Elizabeth at Bryn Mawr College. Both write sentences that thrill me, stories that impress. Both are mothers of children I love, children whose plays I have gone to, whose art I have worn, whose questions have made me think, whose inner beauty is as transparent as their outer gorgeousness. And both are very essential friends.
Karen and Elizabeth's zinging essays have already appeared in the
Inquirer and can be found
here and
here.
My piece appears today. It was commissioned and written during the high heat of last week, before the gentling rains of this weekend. It takes me back to Chanticleer, a garden that inspired two of my books (
Ghosts in the Garden, Nothing but Ghosts) and is a source of escape, still. The essay ends with these words and includes two of my photographs of small, sacred places at this gorgeous pleasure garden:
In the high heat of this summer I find myself again returning to Chanticleer — walking the garden alone or with friends. The sunflowers, gladiola, and hollyhocks are tall in the cutting garden. The water cascades (a clean sheet of cool) over the stone faces of the ruins and sits in a black hush in the sarcophagus. Bursts of color illuminate the dark shade of the Asian Woods. The creek runs thin but determined.
I don't know why I am forever surprised by all this. I don't know how it is that a garden I know so well — its hills, its people, its tendencies, its blocks of shade — continues to startle me, to teach me, to remind me about the sweet, cheap thrill of unbusyness, say, or the impossibility of perfect control. We do not commandeer nature — gardeners know this best of all. We are born of it, live with it, are destined for return.
Dust to dust, yes. But why not shade and blooms in between? Why not gardens in this summer of infernal, angry heat?
Wishing us all more rain, less heat, and the goodness of editors who love words, gardens that still grow, friendships that nurture, and children who move us on this Sunday morning.
Not long ago I sat in a local coffee shop with a young woman who dazzled. Yes, that's the word. She'd found her way to the very beating heart of the publishing world as a young Vanderbilt graduate, moved from the Big Apple to the south to work as the BookPage fiction editor, and today works as a content manager for a suburban Philadelphia brand consulting firm, writing freelance pieces for BookPage on the side. Beyond us, the little town of Wayne was having an outdoor festival. Between us, the talk was books and work. I adored her within seconds. She asked smart questions. She listened.
Abby Plesser (for that is this wunderkind's name) had been asked to interview me for a BookPage feature. I could not have been a luckier soul. The conversation alone would have been enough. The resultant story is more capacious, more generous than anything I could ever deserve. The piece ends with these words, below. The whole can found
here.
Abby and BookPage, thank you. Jessica Shoffel, thank you (for everything).
No matter the audience, there is
one thing Kephart hopes readers
take away from her novel: not to
judge others. Of her protagonist, she
says, “Kenzie is very loving, intelligent,
moral. She is in a situation. I
think no less of her and I don’t want
my readers to think any less of her.”
Kephart speaks with such compassion
for her characters and such
passion for her work that it’s hard
not to be inspired by such an unassuming,
accomplished woman. Of
her career, she reflects, “I never want
to look back and say, ‘Well, my best
book was my first one or my fifth or
my seventh,’ so I’m highly motivated
to not just slide. I try to break form
or go to a new place in the world
or tell a story that hasn’t been told
before. I’m invested in challenging
myself and going to the verge or taking
the risk.”
Small Damages is a book well
worth the risk. Kephart has created a
lyrical, beautiful story about a young
woman at a turning point, struggling
to reconcile her choices, find
her place in the world and discover
the true meaning of family.
Let's just say that it's been quite a time in these parts. I leave the house for teaching and other appointments at 10 AM, say, return at 11 PM, say, and have 20 hours of client work due by 10:30 the next morning. I'm lousy at math, but even I know that the numbers aren't properly crunching.
But we keep on keeping on (do we have a choice?). Today I chose to wash my exhausted face, peel my eyes open with fresh mascara, and meet a new client at an utterly atypical client-esque location, Chanticleer—that glorious garden tended by glorious gardeners. I had my little camera with me. I took a few furtive shots. I was made (miraculously) alive again.
When I returned to my desk later this evening, I had an email from Philomel's Jessica Shoffel, who was forwarding a most beautiful
blog review of SMALL DAMAGES. The blog is called Book Loving Mommy. The five-star review touches my heart. It closes with these words:
This book was written beautifully and I really didn't want it to end. You will pick it up and become so involved and wrapped up in Kenzie's life and her relationships with Estela and Esteban. You will feel what Kenzie feels and understand her confusion about the choice she must make. This is definitely a book I am going to buy when it comes out in stores!
Huge thanks, then, to Jessica and Book Loving Mommy for brightening my day.
It is a pleasure peculiar to the teacher that, even after classes end and the students go on their way, so many find their way back to your own soul-er home. They report on their journeys. They change the tenor of the conversation you were having with yourself. They make you believe, above all else, that the intensity of what was then matters still, right now.
You students know who you are, and you know that I am grateful.
In other news, I prepare today to meet with the 14-year-old San Francisco-based book club that travels once each year to meet an author who has written of his/her city. We'll be gathering at
Chanticleer garden, where two of my books (
Ghosts in the Garden and
Nothing but Ghosts take place); we'll talk as well about
Dangerous Neighbors. My thanks to Kathye Fetsko Petrie, a writer and writer advocate, who suggested my name to the group, and a warm welcome to Kyle Taylor and her band of reader/travelers.
I prepare as well to meet, on Monday, with the students of the
25th Annual Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference, which Lisa Zeidner so brilliantly concocts each year. I'm joining (quite late in the game) a cast that includes the likes of Jane Bernstein, Ken Kalfus, Lise Funderburg, J.T. Barbarese, and Peter Trachtenberg. I'm offering my thoughts on creative nonfiction. I'm banking on some time alone with Lisa, whose friendship I have grown to cherish.
A few posts back, I showcased
my $6.88 royalty check—a check received for my fifth memoiristic volume,
Ghosts in the Garden. Ghosts went out of print shortly before that check made its way to me, but it earned out anyway, thanks to a small sale in South Korea and the many fans of Chanticleer garden, where that book takes place.
Today I learned that
Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill River, has also earned out its small advance in an equally small, but meaningful way, and I'm taking this moment to honor that—to honor these books of ours that don't slot easily into any proven category, that don't have a logical spot on Barnes & Noble shelves, that don't scream Bestseller to those who dare to take them on, and that find their right readers nonetheless.
Flow is the book that most people laughed at before it was published, and
Flow is also the book that changed my place in Philadelphia, this city I love.
I hear more about
Flow than nearly any other book I've published. Not because it sold hugely—it didn't (though this one is still in print)—but because readers are smarter and more willing to stretch than many give them credit for. "I have no idea what this book is," Micah Kleit, Temple University Press editor, said to me, early on. "But we want to take the risk."
Thank you, Micah, Ann Marie Anderson, and Publicist Supreme Gary Kramer, for taking that risk with me, for giving me a book that I remain most proud of.
(And thanks, Karen Baker, for taking my call.)
and that means I'll actually get to meet—live and in person—this writer with whom I've had such a wonderful, honest, intelligent virtual conversation since I first read
Illyria last August. My thanks to
Colleen Mondor, who raved about Liz's immaculate sentences to begin with and opened Liz's world to mine.
Liz travels far and wide, both physically and in her own imagination, and she's coming to Philadelphia as a keynoter. I'm thinking I'll take this colorful lady to Chanticleer, pictured above, if she'll let me.
How colorful is Liz Hand, you wonder? Well, consider this. She's giving her talk for the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Her topic? Norwegian Black Metal music. With brilliant friends like this, I defy anyone to call me boring or, say, stuffy.
(smiles)
Spring is here, the blues are bluing at Chanticleer, and this coming weekend I'll be joining a cast of very special writers—Wendy Mass, Audrey Vernick, Stevie French, Jennifer Hubbard, Ellen Jensen Abbot, Nancy Viau, and Amy Holder among them—for the Mt. Airy Kids' Literary Festival at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore. My event takes place on Saturday, April 9, at 3 PM, and I'll be sharing the mike and hour with the talented Kate Milford (
The Boneshaker). More information can be found
here.
As anyone who might have read my second memoir,
Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth. Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well). And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately wrong (a shattered tooth, a pain killer to which I had a nightmarish reaction), I've had gum grafts that have made me feel and look like a flying UFO.
It's just my mouth. It is not life-threatening. People face far far worse things every single day—many people. But still. I woke up this morning and didn't feel like going to the periodontist who is perfectly nice and tres talented (his nephew is also high up on Obama's team, so he tells good stories). I didn't feel like it.
Here's what happened to make the day sweet anyway. My son woke up and said the kindest thing. My husband offered to make me a late-night brown cow (something to savor while watching
So You Think You Can Dance). Matthew Quick sent along
these generous words about The Heart is not a Size. I heard from friends (I love my friends). And.... the yellow finch that banged on my office window for months following the passing of my mother, the finch that launched
Nothing but Ghosts (or its near cousin),
started banging again the very instant I arrived following this morning of surgery and stitches. It had not banged for months and months and months. But here it was again—another message, I suspect, from my mother.
Life is good.
Well, you know I could not have come up with this one on my own. I needed a trip to Chanticleer's lotus pond, so that I might find the photo. I needed my husband to make that photo art. But most of all, I needed Amy Riley and Nicole Bonia of
Winsome Media Communications to patiently wade through my design hopes (can it be simple? can it be easy for me to maintain? can it be basically like it was but a million times better?), to kindly walk me through Feedburner and the Site Meter, and to be there, pretty much around the clock, to answer my profoundly unintelligent technology questions and to be their dear, helpful, knowing, calm selves.
Amy and Nicole, you are the best, you really are.
So what do we have here? We have, at long last, an uncluttered sidebar. We have my biography—the books, the awards, the teaching, the anthologies, the judging—all housed on one page. We have review excerpts of books past and present; an interview revealing a little why, a little how; a YouTube channel that collects my various adventures on film (not all of them, indeed, I tossed many of them out; call it summer cleaning).
We have the blog, still—the photos and musings on the writer's life, the heat of summer (or the chill of winter, if we ever get there), and, mostly, books I've loved and other writers who have taught me.
The door is open. Please stop by. Please stick around.
It was hot, it was humid, it was teaching at Chanticleer in an unpredictable spring, but those 15 Agnes Irwin girls were willing and far more than able—reeling themselves backward and forward in time, willing themselves to remember.
The thing about teaching is you never know. You prepare your prompts, you know your own heart, you know what you want to leave behind, but you do not know what will make a student vulnerable to the process. I never teach the same thing twice. I have become a student of teaching.
It is 4:22 AM, dark. I'm about to set off for the Big Apple where I will, at too long last, meet so many of you who have sustained me here. Until then.
b
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.
I found her at Chanticleer, and of course I fell in love (yes, yes, it's true: on a daily basis I fall harmlessly in love). She was afraid of nothing (you see that in her eyes, and in the cock of her inventive hat). She was willing to trust the warming weather. She opened her hand as if to say, Let me show you the way, and when I saw her next, down by the big pond, she was delineating the orange-backed koi from the blue. Knowledgeably, with stylish forewarning.
Last night, a young friend wrote to ask if I am sometimes afraid for the young women in this world. Perhaps you are, perhaps you should be, my friend wrote, but then she went on to tell a late-night story, offering it as a salve, "in case you were worrying."
I worry. All the time, I worry. And I am redeemed, every day, by brave young souls.
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"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."
— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter
Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet blue, toward black.
This is my home, my view, my slice of somewhere, and again and again, it appears in my books.
I write about suburban Philadelphia because as a teen I lived here and as an adult I returned here. I write about Juarez because once, in 2005, I took a trip across the El Paso border that changed my life. I write about a cortijo in southern Spain because I've been there, because once a man tall as royalty took me out into his dusty hectares in an open-to-the-sky jeep and said, Might I introduce you to my fighting bulls? I conjure a secret poet at Radnor High School because I once was one of those, and I story ghosts through a garden much like Chanticleer, down the road, because I spent two years walking through, week after week, and because a stone I had made for my mother rests there, beneath the katsura trees, and because I don't know where I'd be without seeds and all they beget.
I write where I've been, who I've been, what feels like mine. I have this place that I love. I begin here.
Confession: I neither google my name nor go looking for reviews of my books, and still sometimes I'm following a chain of comments, or dear Anna Lefler will send me a link, or someone will write to me and say, "hey," and I come across some gift that has been strung out there in the blogosphere, and I think, Oh Gosh, I almost did not thank this soul for that.
Today I came across a most exquisite Ghosts giveaway on the very-fine GalleySmith blog. If I said any more about it you might not be tempted to spend time on that site. And so that's it. That's all I'm saying. Visit GalleySmith.
Those of you who have been following Book Blogger Appreciation Week know just how much effort its creator and myriad (tireless) support persons have put into announcing, promoting, supporting, and delivering the 2009 BBAW Awards Shortlists, which have been announced today (because these good souls never rest, not even on Labor Day). More than 1,000 blogs have been sorted through, screened, and considered. Now that the shortlists are up, it's up to the rest of us to go visit those blogs that may be new to us, and to vote for the winners.
I've been quite lucky this year and have been shortlisted—along with Neil Gaiman's Journal, Maureen Johnson Blog, Meg's Diary, and Scobberlotch—in the Best Published Author Blog category. Whomever thought to include me, whomever judged my work, I embrace you with a very large thank you. I don't believe my name has ever before been in the same sentence with these fine writers, and it's a privilege.
Kelsey Coons is family—the daughter of my cousin, Linda, and thus a Kephart by blood. Like her sister, Brianne, she is athletic, gorgeous, smart. Like her sister, she had a knack for making my mother smile. She always makes me smile, too, especially since we're also united by our love for dance (and for the show, So You Think You Can Dance).
Last fall Kelsey took a college class called Rhetoric of Style and chose the chapter "A Talent for Living" from my memoir Ghosts in the Garden as the subject of her final paper. Yesterday she asked if I would like to read it, and of course I said I would. I wanted to know Kelsey better. As it turns out, she taught me a whole lot about myself. About how I use semi-colons (as fulcrums). About how my use of the rhetorical I and you allows me to "generalize (my) personal epiphany to apply to reader who may make their living other ways." About how I use parentheses to validate word choices. About the emphasis I place on sounds. About the chemical mix of my choice in pronouns.
It is stunning to come up against the thoughts of one who has counted, literally, the syllables in your sentences, who has weighed the anaphoric series, who has discovered the rationale behind your own word choices, and not just your word choices, but your vowel choices. It is, in fact, humbling, to be found out—to have what you thought were your secrets parsed. On every level of her assessment, Kelsey got this right. She saw what it was that I hoped to do with words, and word parts, and expressed it far more intelligently than I myself would know how to do.
This blog post, then, is to honor Kelsey, and her talent for paying such close attention.
I met Annika along the high plateau of Chanticleer, and she told me stories; then we walked. She has come to know this garden better than most—located the cotton flowers (white and pale pink), the butterfly on a man's blue shirt, the strange dish of red that passes for a flower in the woods, the place where the artichoke had bloomed. I told her stories of asparagus and of cutting gardens; I showed her the rock that recalls my mother, down in the bed beneath the old katsura trees: the wedge of sun between us.
This slice of afternoon had not been planned; not really. It was nearly spontaneous and might not have happened had I not decided simply to be this weekend. To finish reading one fat book, and to buy two more, to go on (as I do) with my friend Andra, who listens and understands. To make dinner something simple and to talk at length by phone with my son, who seems far away and near at once, attuned to every speck of stuff he's learning.
It's beautiful out there today. Live it, I tell myself.
I am trying not to look at the calendar. I am trying not to think: In less than three weeks, my boy will be back at school, in a dorm, in his classes. My boy, who stops to see, who leans in to inquire, who walks to this side of my desk, plants a kiss on my forehead, and says, "You are looking so pretty today." No matter what I am wearing, no matter my hair, no matter what I see when I dare to see myself.
He has been writing all summer long. Yesterday I went out for three hours. When I returned he had 11 new pages, done.
"Eleven new pages?" I said. "But that's impossible."
"Not if you figure it all out before you start typing," he said.
Figure it out before you start typing, I thought. Figure it out.
It was my friend Buzz Bissinger who got me onto Facebook—a series of notes from him that could not be read unless I went ahead and plugged myself in. I'm not what anyone would call Facebook adept; I still can't figure out which notes are private, which are public, what the world sees and what gets sent to just one friend. And don't even ask me about that wall, and to be honest: the photos that I've posted are just the ones that have stuck; who knows where the rest of them have gone to.
Still and nonetheless (and yet!): Facebook has brought me back into touch with former high school track teamers (Donna and Donna) and with a Bread Loaf alum (Leslie Pietrzyk). It has introduced me to editors and readers. It has kept me up-to-date with the infamous personalities of the ballroom dance world (the famous ones, too), and it has presented me with a number, an actual number, of friends. Counted them up for me on the off-chance that I need to quantify my life. (According to the stats, I have far fewer "friends" than the average Facebooker.)
This week, I received a message, and then a brief series of notes, from a writer named Kathy Briccetti. Ultimately I received from her an attachment. It was an essay she'd written for an anthology called A Cup of Comfort for Writers. The piece is called "The Drowning Girl." It recounts a moment several years ago in the Tiburon bookstore, Book Passages, where I'd gone to read from my Chanticleer memoir, Ghosts in the Garden, and where I talked about the writing life. Kathy had been in the audience that night. She captured that moment in time.
I am no celebrity writer. I rarely read from my own books. I've only ever once been invited to the BEA, and this is what happened then: They put my signing "line" directly beside Jodi Picoult's signing line. Guess which line was longest (by about ten miles)? And so it touched me more deeply than I can say to read Kathy's account of an evening four years ago, to realize that I'd been listened to that carefully, that I'd been transcribed onto another's page. I don't believe I've ever read another's account of me; it's one thing to be interviewed and it's another to be described. My wild hair is there. My deep set eyes, lost entirely to shadow. My way of speaking, pausing, thinking.
What is the punch line? What is there to say? Nothing, but that I found myself in tears by the essay's end. That was me then. I existed.
As part of the Literary Road Trip sponsored by the GalleySmith, I was asked to talk about home by My Friend Amy, who in turn shared our conversation with Beth Fish Reads, who so graciously reviewed Ghosts yesterday.
That's a long way around saying that if you would like to know how being a Pennsylvanian has influenced my books (and it most fervently has), I encourage you to visit Beth Fish Reads and find out. I enourage you to visit Beth Fish Reads anyway. I know that I've added her to my own daily habit.
Tell me why you love "Mad Men", the AMC TV show that vivifies 1960s Manhattan, the dawn of a certain kind of advertising, the red pucker of big lips, and unblinkered gazing into another's eyes. All right, perhaps you haven't seen the show, perhaps this post is thereby to you seemingly irrelevant, but nonetheless, I have climbed onto this cliff and I will stay here until I explain:
I love "Mad Men" for its subtlety. Yes, subtlety. I know we are talking ad men and 1960s style TV, but I claim subtlety as the reason that all writers out there should be watching this show—sitting up straight and taking note of how the hard stuff gets done.
There are, for example, those leitmotifs. There is the submergence of the same, the way the show seems to move on, spiral forward, until suddenly the show's past is its present again—an old argument surfaces, a familiar sweater appears, a longing is ripped back open, and the whole thing burgeons with the messy complication of life and how life is lived. I am not going to fight you, Don Draper says to his wife in one episode. I'll say what you want me to say, but I won't fight you. And there it is—an answer to a question, all a viewer has to know about what has gone on behind the scenes in a household that is permanently unsteady. Somewhere off stage, an argument we had seen coming but did not fully witness has been had. Agreements have been made. The rules have changed.
One of the hardest things about writing well is recognizing that life is never neat, never only present-flowing, never summarily concluded. Writers have to honor that fact without burdening the reader with knotted tangents. "Mad Men" honors the messiness of life while being one of the most gorgeous and most carefully crafted TV shows of all time.
Every now and then, I have the chance to sit down with an emerging writer, and a week or so ago, I had that privilege with a beautiful young woman (and recent Radnor High graduate) named Caroline Goldstein. Caroline and I sat at Chanticleer and talked about books and life, about the blurred lines between fiction and truth, about the power of place in the books I write, and about many other things.
Today, Caroline's story about Nothing but Ghosts and other Main Line endeavors appears in Main Line Suburban Life, and she's done an immaculate job (they teach those writers well at Radnor). The story makes me doubly happy, for it features a photo taken by my talented friend, Mike Matthews (photo not available online). It makes me triply happy because it brought me back in touch with Sam Strike, who is a dear out here where I live and a wonderful mentor to younger writers.
In any case, I hope to see some of you this evening at the Doylestown Bookshop.
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I love this. Thank you for sharing Chanticleer with me and letting me sit and look out at all that green. As you know, I spend every single day in this city looking for more green :) I think you're right that it helps you begin.
I can't wait to read your piece! What a week it's been for you! xoxo
Wonderful. I will read the piece now.
Hi, Beth--
I enjoyed your piece. I am also one of the columnists Avery recruited. My first column appeared last week. Kudos on your Inky debut. --Kelly McQuain
Of course, this piece thrills me! I can't wait to meet Chanticleer, up close and personal - in September.
Thanks for Sharing (your joy and your words for) this special place!