Ghosts of Wyoming by Alyson Hagy/Beth Kephart Review

I don't have a photograph of Wyoming, for I've never been there. I don't have a picture of my friend Alyson Hagy, either, though she was here one evening for a Christmas-time meal, and I have in my head the rigor and intelligence of her stories; I have in my mind's eye an image of her studying the books on my shelves; I remember that I had a terrible migraine before she arrived and her presence cured me of it like a pill.

I write of Alyson Hagy on this blog—of her talents as a teacher and leader within the University of Wyoming, of her talent for friendship, too. But today I am writing to herald Alyson's sixth book, a collection of eight wildly specific and original short stories called Ghosts of Wyoming. I'm heralding her relentless drive to present the Wyoming she knows—its tricksters, equivocaters, promoters, miscreants, and scamps; its legends and tall tales; its bird-afflicted weather; its eye-grazing, heart-bruising beauty.

The stories here take many forms and live inside several eras. Bad is not always bad and good is not what it seems. A boy steals a pup. A man goes missing. A girl does wicked thievery with bones. A reverend out in the wilderness can't decide what should be trusted. A woman on the edge of hysteria decries the loss of a moth. Men talk—trainmen and oilmen, a near-scholar. Women love hard and return as ghosts. The sky is made of howl and chirp and "the lusty flute song of larks," and "ravens...gliding with the confidence of the undiminished and unfed."

"You know why people come here, Livvy," one character observes. "They like how the mountains look. They like the wild creatures they see, the fantasy that we can change our lives." I don't know for sure how long Alyson, raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, has been making Laramie, Wyoming, her home. But anyone reading Ghosts, due out from Graywolf Press in February, will recognize, on every page, a woman and a writer who knows where stories lie and how to tell them. They'll find a woman gifted with a preponderance of odd and unfamiliar phrases, with metaphors that wild your mind and make a foreign place familiar.

I am blessed by many things in this life. One of those things is Alyson Hagy.

Riviera Pears

The pears came treasured in the web of their box, in the crush of their green paper, in the nearness of their time. Wait until they are ready. Wait.

All day long, they sat in the box and ripened, their juices rising.

Children's Book World Author/Illustrator Night/Lititz Kid-Lit Festival

Those of you in the Main Line Philadelphia area looking for an opportunity to mingle with young adult authors and illustrators are invited to join myself, Jen Bryant, Elizabeth Mosier, Catherine Murdock, Donna Jo Napoli, Kathye Petrie, Jerry Spinelli, David Wiesner and many others for the 18th Annual Author/Illustrator Night, tonight, November 6th at 8 PM at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA.

Those of you who live within driving distance of Lancaster, PA, meanwhile, have the chance to take part in the Lititz Kid-Lit Fest, running November 13 - 15 and hosted by Aaron's Books, an independent bookstore. I'll be joining Sandy Asher, Lisa Greenwald, Jenny Han, Lee Harper, Caroline Hickey, A.S. King, Marie Lamba, Faith Reese Martin, Ken Munro, Matt Phelan, Mara Rockliff, Siobhan Vivian, and Eric Wright for a variety of events. Super book blogger Julie Peterson will be hosting a Saturday afternoon panel. I know that I'm looking forward to it, and I hope to see you there.

Rain Smear, First Drafts, and the National Council of Teachers of English

You should see the view through my office window, I wrote to John V., one of my earliest dance teachers, and still a dear, even if he's moved to Germany. Take a picture, he wrote back, and I did—the panes smeary with rain, the sky beyond somehow broken. It was the end of a day in which a long-loved novel found its final line, in which I stopped holding my breath, and exhaled. Anna sent a box of royal riviera pears from California—five of them, green golden. They arrived on my stoop the very instant I typed the book's final words. I don't know how she does this, how she is always here when the big things happen, but, in fact, she does and is.

In any case, in any case: A first draft. I will wait, let time do its thing. I will then work it through all over again. And then again. And more.

In the meantime, I'll be attending the National Council of Teachers of English conference at the Philadelphia Convention Center on November 22nd. I'll be traveling this way and that, among the booths, then attending, thanks to Laura Lutz, the HarperCollins-sponsored ALAN cocktail event before heading off for what should be a pretty spectacular dinner. I wonder if any of you plan to be there. If you do, I hope you'll let me know. I would love to meet you.

Dreamscape

From high up, what does he see? What, after all these years, is he still hoping for?

He dreams with his hands.

He folds fabric over wire, and the breeze blows through.

What a Girl Wants: The Mean Girls Question

In her ever-popular What a Girl Wants series, Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray is asking about that notorious literary mean girls fad, specifically wondering, "Does teen literature exaggerate the mean girl phenomenon too much?" Laurel Snyder, Zetta Elliott, Lorie Ann Grover, Melissa Wyatt, Sara Ryan, Kekla Magoon, yours truly, and others have opined. As always, the conversation is rich.

On other fronts, I am about a chapter and a half away from finishing the first draft of the adult novel I've been writing this past year. If silence begins to emanate from this blog, it's only because I've lost myself, temporarily, in another place and time.

Devotions/Beth Kephart Poem

K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.

Devotions

The hawk came three months after the fox

had taken that one last lubricious

step onto my porch, a day of deer

unclasping the bracelet of themselves

across my lawn. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been

sleeping well, had not been on the lookout

for the hawk or for the toad, the crow, the snake

the single cricket that pulls a hawk down from the sky.

Nor for an egg; I wasn’t looking for an egg —

the mind fighting the night and at war

with the age I have become, wishing I had learned color

instead of words, but then: This hawk, with that telling

streak of rust for a tail and those four pounds

at least of bird encasing bone and soul, in the morning

in my garden, where it was late in the season and things

had turned to seed and no one, nothing but a bird and I

could guess the garden’s lore. I liked the hawk,

therefore, from the start, and I asked its name,

and it looked straight through me, for my bones

were hollow and my soul was the suggestion of insomnia,

and we were alone, besides, each on the verge of excavating

secrets but choosing to amble instead, from the garden,

across the mud pocks, toward the Japanese maple,

side by side and counting benefactions, the hawk walking

the way hawks walk, and I in devout deliverance of dawn.

English 145 (6): The Art of the Interview

In English 145, we talked about the art of the interview. About framing the conversation without boxing it in. About listening for the tangent and knowing which tangents count. About never pretending to understand more than one actually does. About follow-up and follow-through. We had the fabulous Paris Review interview of Truman Capote as a model Q and A, and then we turned to one another, or the students did, for trial interviews.

I took a walk while the students dialogued. Found my way to a garden that I'd never seen before —a place tucked behind the Penn medical buildings and dedicated to a son. It was damp and chilly out, and there was just one young man sitting on one bench, looking out over the garden-wrapped pond. I missed, I realized, my students, asking and listening a mere ten-minute walk away, and soon I was hurrying back toward them, to that warm hearth that is the Kelly Writers House. Their interviews were done. There'd been some homework; we discussed it. The conversation then could have gone a thousand ways, but it went toward the personal—toward their lives, their decisions, their ideas about ethical living. For thirty minutes, perhaps more, they were the teachers. I listened.

Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (5)

She runs the tip of her tongue over the ridge of her mouth. She blinks, and a tear falls down through the pebble land of her freckles. From far away I hear the high gauze of a church song—bells. Sunday, I think, and somewhere there are everyday people in everyday cars going somewhere. There are the mothers, and there are the babies, and they are together.

His World

I'd stayed up late being silly the night before (some people dress up for Halloween and look gorgeous; I dress up and I am still, unfortunately, me, although, quite fortunately, I have my Halloween-glam friends who stand by and beguile, who also (miraculously) dance with me, even that friend who spends part of the night telling me how gorgeous all the other women are, detail by detail, he explains, they are so gorgeous, they have, he says, an aura, and that's right, these friends, they have an aura), and then I never did fall asleep. So that by the time we started driving through the endless rain to see that son I sorely miss, I was in a strange gray place, one easily pierced by the sight of cliff rock and red ivy on the dark bark of trees.

Some of the valleys were fog. Some of the valleys caught lost bits of sun, then shucked them off, before they warmed me.

When it wasn't outright pouring, we walked the campus with our son. "Hope he's able to show you a few surprises/discoveries," my friend Jay had written, and our son did more than that. He stole, with us, inside academic buildings and showed us where he sat in class. He took us upstairs to the quiet retreat where he gets his reading done. He walked us behind the campus, then out of it, and told us landmark stories. He said over and over how much he loved his school, then said, as many times, how glad he was that we had come.

What is it, I thought, what is it about him?

His happiness. His calm. His aura.

Rain-soaked Autumn

The rain has was melting the leaves from the trees; at the height of storm, I went out foraging for color.

Mirror Image

BTW, my friend Anna wrote, my daughter and I want to see your fanciful jacket.

And since today is a day in which no one is pressing, nothing is pushing, my mind is unspooling, and my thoughts are easy, I grabbed my camera, went upstairs, and stood before the only mirror in this house that is bigger than 12 inches by 12 inches. I actually never see myself from head to toe, which is probably a good thing. But at least the jacket is short, and I could snap this picture.

William Robert

at the Richard Avedon show, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
August 2009.

readergirlz writing contest (2): the story song winner (2)

The second winner of the readergirlz story song contest is Rachel L., who brought us a lyric called "Strength."

Strength

To stand as stone; to sing as wind.
To call your name; to let me in.

With flame and ice and skin aglow,
Those eyes that crackle; those tears like snow.

The heart that’s stronger
Than the oak’s wide frame;
The lips that call

And those that came.


Choreography Explanation: When I get an idea for a piece of writing, usually it comes in the form of a single image. Then I take the image and do what I can to sketch it out and transfer it to the reader’s mind. Once I found my image, my strategy for this poem was vagueness. I wanted the words I wrote to conjure up an image in the reader’s head and perhaps a feeling that went with it, but I didn’t want it to be the same thing that came into my head. I endeavored to take my image and just lightly brush around it with my finger, enough that the reader has an outline of my thought, but there are thousand possibilities of what I could have meant. My meaning is mine alone, and your interpretation makes the poem yours too.

Shelf Elf reviews Nothing but Ghosts

As those who read this blog know well, Nothing but Ghosts was written in the wake of my own mother's passing—inspired by the finch, the fox, and the songs that edged near to assure me that her spirit was yet within reach. Much of the book takes place in a fictionalized version of Chanticleer, the pleasure garden. In this photograph, the great katsura tree rises over a bench a gardener made, and those who sit there can look out over Doug's cutting garden and the wild profusion of asparagus. Beneath the shade of that katsura is a stone I asked an artist to create for me, a stone that Doug placed, just right, between the shade of limbs. The stone reads "the wedge of sun between us." It's a line from my memoir, Ghosts in the Garden, a line that memorializes my mother.

This morning, Shelf Elf let me know that she had posted a review of Ghosts. Her extraordinary words touched me deeply, for she had seen what it is that I try to do with books, writing in part, "Beth writes about the quiet miracles of real life. She helps readers to see that ordinary experience, all of it – the trouble and sadness and simple day-to-day joy of it – is worth noticing." I know this isn't always an approach that resonates with readers; it is, however, what I have chosen to do in this book life of mine, and I am so grateful, always, when touched by the grace of readers who wait, who read, who imagine themselves inside these worlds.

This Happened

The rain came and came. I might have gone out, but I stayed in. I sat on the couch and not at my desk, and I closed my eyes, and I thought. The issue was, How will I finish this novel I'm writing? What is the final scene, and how do I get there?

I hadn't asked before because I needed not to know. I needed the making of this novel to be urgent, powered by wanting, by uneasiness, angst. I needed to wake to not knowing, to that desire to find out, and I did, I woke to that, but most days I could not work, and the novel was a dreamscape, the novel was a stagger.

Today: rain and silence. Today: courage. Today, all by myself, I knew. I saw the final scene. I saw one way to get there. I opened my eyes and I wrote not a line. I will carry the scene with me now, until I find the truest words.

readergirlz writing contest (2): the story song winner

The second readergirlz contest asked writers to think out loud about the way their own work is choreographed—how it moves across the page, and from sound toward meaning. Our winner is Q. Here is her poem, and her reasoning. Q receives a signed copy of House of Dance.


Tinged with regret
The girl in the bus
window
sees me on a park bench,
me with all my waiting and
watching her,
too.

I might have known her
once,
and I wonder if she saw me
for who I was,
for who I am,
or for who I'd like to be.

And how do I see
her?

She is a sheet of
paper,
breezing by on the wind
of the bus she sits in.

(Maybe I should have
sung
when I had the chance.)

When I write a poem, each sentence is its own stanza. I break lines where the next word should be emphasized more, leave a word on its own when it should be said slower and more alone, and leave lines together where they ought to be said faster. That, however, is just the basic structure.

I imagine this speaker thinking about the direction her life is taking and, perhaps, not really knowing where it leads. The girl on the bus could be anyone--like the sheet of paper, she is generic and fleeting. Yet, the poem starts with her perspective because it ends with the speaker's. She allows the speaker to build to a climax at the end of the second stanza, and then draws the speaker to her regretful conclusion, all without saying a word.

readergirlz writing contest (3): then and now

Two winners have been selected for the October readergirlz writing challenge, and their work will be posted shortly. In the meantime, I'm happy to unveil the third challenge of four, a contest I've called "Then and Now." Here we go:

In this readergirlz challenge, the premise is simple (and does not involve a video). Find a photograph of yourself as a young child on the verge of some new knowledge or turning point. Write a paragraph about that photograph/that moment in present tense, as if you are experiencing that moment for the first time. Then write about that photograph/that moment in past tense, with the gift of retrospection. Ask yourself what you gain from working in the present tense, and what is gained by reflection; include your thoughts on this with your submission. Send your entry to me at kephartblogATcomcastDOTnet by November 25, 2009. The author of the winning entry will receive a signed copy of NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, a novel about a young girl who, in learning to live past her mother’s unexpected passing, involves herself in decoding the mystery that envelops the recluse down the road. The past and the present collide in GHOSTS.

English 145 (5):

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.

In the end, what does it mean?

The thing about making yourself vulnerable in a discipline you'll never own is that you don't go out and do it alone. When you dance, for example, before a few hundred people on a Sunday afternoon on a stage, it's not the steps that matter in the end, not really. It's Annika and Monika, who arrive early, with all their enthusiasms, and love. It's those who stand on the margins of the stage, calling your name as you whisk by. It's your Broadway partner, Jean, who looks you in the eyes as you dance and laughs off a mistake and texts you later, "I enjoyed our show a lot. It was very alive." It's your husband, Bill, who worked so hard to make the tango right and who, at the end of the journey, said, "You did great." It's your father, who comes in his best suit; it's your friends, John and Andra, with whom you later share dinner; it's Mike, Aideen's Mike, who says, "I had no idea you had that jive thing in you;" it's Magda and her sweet Polish-flavored encouragements; it's Tim, who says, "Yes, you danced it well, and you danced it together;" it's Jim, the quiet choreographer of the very few words, who says, "Your dances were good."

I have no illusions. I don't pretend. I am not headed toward world championship titles, I am not the show-closing star, I am still (and will always be) fussing with the way I stand and move, I will never be "the one." I dance because I love to and I dance in shows like these because my friends are there. Because in the end what does it mean, save that we cheer each other on.

Some of Each, in a Rain Storm

Throughout the long pour-down of yesterday's rain, I travel. First, in the dark of pre-dawn, I travel a dreamscape, write to page 246 of this new novel. It's a number bearing no actual significance, save that there, within page 245, are the seeds of the novel's ending, a turning toward, a knowing that, someday, I'll finish this—a fact I would not have bet on until yesterday's strum-beat of rain. Mid-morning Body Pump at the gym with friends is a journey away from me, my mind. Later, back at home, the windows streaking, the laundry room leaking, I slip inside the work of my Penn students, who have responded, with heartbreaking skill, to this call:

Choose an event from your own life about which you now have some distance, some accumulated wisdom. Tell the story of what happened. Enrich it with your understanding of what it meant then, of what it means now, of how time has shifted both the event and its meaning. Consider Ginzburg's dictate about poetic beauty, Dillard's consuming wish to notice everything, Hampl's suggestion that true memoir is written in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.

In the early afternoon, my husband and I eat under a canopy at a local dive, watch the canvas pucker beneath the force of rain. At the gym, beneath the pounding down of storm on rooftops, we practice our tango. Inside the ceaseless wash, we drive home, and again I read the work of my students, then read (for the fourth time) "Hotels Rwanda," authored by my friend Jay Kirk, a best travel essay originally appearing in GQ. Jay will join our class on Monday, talk about how narrative nonfiction gets done, about how one hunts for story, then finds its heart, then gives it shape and purpose. Jay will come, and because he knows and charms and bushwhacks and waits, we'll all be smarter for it.

Late afternoon, our son calls and we talk for a long time about the things he has learned, the conversations he has started, the words his teachers write across his papers. Night, the rain still falling, we watch the movie, "Seven Pounds." I cannot sleep afterward.

Today, this much-discussed ballroom dance showcase will take place. A tango. A Broadway quickstep jive. No matter what, then, that chapter will be written, complete. That is life, the sum total: the anticipation, the afterward.

I just wish I slept more.

Writing by the Numbers/Twin Stories

On October 19th, The New Yorker published a piece by Rebecca Mead called "The Gossip Mill." Subtitled, "Alloy, the teen-entertainment factory," the piece revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations of the company that packages approximately 30 teen-oriented books each year, while also scouring the what if? horizon for new TV and feature film projects. Alloy is indeed a factory. Its products are designed to sell, built to please, crafted with an insider's understanding of what teens really want, and want right now. The Gossip Girl series is the brainchild of Alloy. So is The Luxe and The Clique. With concepts brewed in team meetings, plots crafted by committee, and authors hired to see the big concepts through, teens, apparently, are getting their own very special brand of berries.

As one who struggles along here on her own, writing from her heart, I read the story with more than a modicum of interest, wondering how I would fare in a write-by-numbers scenario. Not well, most likely, since I've yet to use (as I've already stated here) so much as an outline, and since one sentence inevitably (if painfully) leads me to the next sentence, as opposed to, say, a hyper-imposed yellow sticky or rules sheet.

Mid-way through the article, however, I was stopped in my tracks by these words. "Shandler says, 'More serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit.' Alloy's next offering in this genre is a book called 'Wish,' which is to be published by Scholastic in January. The heroine of 'Wish,' Olivia Larsen, is a withdrawn 17-year-old in San Francisco whose outgoing twin sister, Violet, has recently died...."

Um, I thought. Hmm. Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel, is about twin sisters, one of whom has died. It's serious, too, it's literature, and there's a fair amount of angst, but I would like not to think of it as morbid. Still, could I, in my five years of non-committee isolation with this book, my fifteen drafts, my word-by-word finding my way, my nose-too-buried-to-parse-out-the-leading-indicators, have inadvertently hit on some pop trend? Was that trend already augured by Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry another book about twin sisters, one of whom also dies?

Could I, in other words, be onto something?

An entire year will pass before my book is out on shelves. I'll just have to wait to see what is what by then. I'll spend the time curled up with this adult novel I'm writing, immune to the trends in that genre, too, never knowing, day by day, just where I'm going.

The Drexel InterView: Beth Kephart and Paula Marantz Cohen

A few weeks ago, I prematurely loaded this brief excerpt from a much-longer interview conducted by the extraordinarily gracious Paula Marantz Cohen on behalf of The Drexel InterView, a nationally distributed cable show. My thanks to Lynn Levin for clearing the way for this permanent posting.

The conversation was held last autumn. During this segment I speak of the blog, the dance world, and next projects. I had not yet started on the book that preoccupies me now when this taping took place. I did not yet know that Dangerous Neighbors, my fifth novel for young adults, would find its way to Egmont USA.

Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (4)

Stories had saved Sophie, stories with their small acts of victorious aggression, their black words on white pages, their strikes against, their love affairs with deviations. There was snatch and thrum in stories. There was sway and influence, shatter and audacity, the glory yield of the road not taken; Sophie had gone her own way. She had set off with no sure understanding of where she had been or why she had been there ....