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We seek community. We find our way toward those who share our passions. Last evening I had the pleasure of joining my husband, William Sulit, at the opening reception for Craft Forms 2016, an international juried exhibit featuring textiles, metal work, ceramics, jewelry, wood, furniture, and basketry held at the magnificent Wayne Art Center. This year's exhibit was curated by Stefano Catalani, Executive Director of the Gage Academy of Art, and what a show it is. One could spend a lot of time appreciating the materials, hand work, stories.

And one could bask, as I now am at this early morning hour, in the friendships strengthened or rediscovered last evening. Many of our clay friends were there—all dressed up and mud free. But so were friends from other spheres of my life—Bill Thomas, the Executive Director of Chanticleer, with whom I worked on the book, Ghosts in the Garden; Peter Archer of Archer and Buchanan, an architect of great talent whom I first met so many years ago when we both worked for the same firm; Susan, a former family neighbor. The Wayne Art Center is a world of windows and light, ideas and the people who have them. It is led by Nancy Campbell, who achieves much and dreams forward. It is a welcoming place at a time when we could all use a little more welcome.

Today, from 1 to 2:30, Stefano will discuss his selection process and some of the artists—my husband among them—will talk about the pieces that were selected for the show. The event is free and open to the public.

Bill's selected piece is right there in the middle of the room, by the way. A close-up image can be found here.

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At Chanticleer not long ago I photographed this winged thing. Like a hummingbird, but with antennae. Like a fattened frog, but it could fly.

I do not know the name of this hybrid creature, but I feel as if it is living my life. I'm glad that it, like me, has paused for a spell upon a bright pink flower.

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Yesterday was moving day at my father's house. After so many months of packing and renovation, the big truck came. I snuck away from the activities for two beautiful hours in the afternoon to celebrate the release of The Art of Gardening (Timber Press) by the gardeners of Chanticleer. (And then rushed home, changed back into grunge wear, and began again the unpacking of boxes.)

Readers of my blog and books know that Chanticleer has served as backdrop for many of my musings, both nonfiction (Ghosts in the Garden) and fiction (Nothing but Ghosts). (Indeed, my Inky story about this fabled landscape is featured in Love: A Philadelphia Affair.) But as a writer I merely bear witness. I do not know the names of most things, do not capitalize upon the folds in the earth, do not walk the garden every day looking for the ebbing away and the new opportunity.

Bill Thomas and his gardeners do. They make these now 48 acres (the garden is growing) glow, season after season, with their plants, their sense of purpose, their artistry. You'll find their winter projects—clay pots, wood furniture, metal work, hand rails, sculptures—in among the blooms. You'll hear them talking about ways to preserve the biodiversity of soil and to optimize microclimates, not to mention the secrets still stashed in the greenhouse.

The Art of Gardening, featuring photographs by Rob Cardillo (who once took this photo of me on a rainy Chanticleer day for what has become an award-winning magazine), is subtitled "Design, Inspiration, and Innovative Planting Techniques from Chanticleer." Its authors are the gardeners themselves, with Bill Thomas editing the overall narrative and Eric Hsu providing the captions. The history and vision of Chanticleer is represented here, as are design strategies, reports on experiments, and a planting list.

It's a lovely compilation, celebrated on a gorgeous day that also marked the unveiling of the grand new path that winds up toward the Chanticleer house and (at this particular moment in time) makes the hover above the ground feel airbrushed with a color that is not quite pink and not quite purple.

Huge congratulations to the Chanticleer gardeners (and Rob) whose artistic spirits are so well captured here.

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I'm starting from scratch, I told a friend the other day. She on her phone, me on mine. I had walked a few miles during our conversation. We'd traveled to Montana and back in time, through clay work and literature, through architecture and family woe, and now I was still walking and we were still talking, and I said, J: I'm starting from scratch.

I meant that I had been sent back to very birth of things in my art and my career. That everything was a very brand new. That nothing was sure, nothing was predestined, I had no sure writing home, no sure writing brand, nothing sure at all, except the stories in my head.

It's like I never published before, I said.

Isn't that wonderful, she answered.

Isn't that wonderful. Starting over, starting fresh, taking nothing for granted, asking questions I haven't asked for twenty years. Twenty-one books are twenty-one books, but I dwell in the here and now. I make for the sake of making. I push (can push) too far. And where I am, and how it's been—I'm starting all over again.

Isn't that wonderful.

Yes, J. It is. I am afraid, I am raw, I don't know, I'm on my own, and it is wonderful. It is brave and uneasy and I'm alive with it, alert to it, figuring it out. Again.

Yes, J. It is.

But so are you, for saying so. And so all the many friends who have accompanied me in this summer of questions, of starting over again. I stepped back and took it slow. You've been there. I thank you.

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It's been some time since I wrote that fifth memoir, Ghosts in the Garden—a meditation on the two years I spent walking Chanticleer (in Wayne, PA). I was at a crossroads. Middle aged. Not sure. Pondering my purpose.

Published by New World Library, this slender book, about a well-loved but entirely local garden (every garden is an entirely local garden), went on to be reviewed in papers across the country (I could not have guessed that) and to be translated (this was an even bigger surprise) in South Korea. It sold out of its original modest printing of 5,000 copies and was never reprinted.

Done. Gone. Another Kephartian exercise, by most standards, in the small.

And yet. Every now and then the book returns to my life. This past week it did, in the form of this photograph—a South Korean garden lover who had read the translation in her country (she holds it in her left hand) and come here, to Wayne, PA, to find the garden with her husband.

A book brought a reader across the ocean to a garden.

What makes a book small? What makes a book big? I wish we never had to ask that question. I wish that we'd stop quantifying authors by sales or prizes and take solace in stories about individual readers who allowed a book to prompt a journey.

One book. One reader. One garden. One sunny day. One surprising photograph. Two smiles on two faces.

Thank you, BJ, for sending that smile my way.

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The rain was just beginning to fall as Rob Cardillo and I set off down the hill of Chanticleer. The glorious garden is closed now for the winter, but Rob, a tremendous photographer (see his images here), was taking portraits for a new project now under way with our mutual friend, Adam Levine.

I've contributed in a small way to the project and agreed to an accompanying portrait if (and only if) Rob kept me in the far distance of his images.

He kept that promise.

I snapped these two photographs in between takes.

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One of my incurable obsessions is imagining Then. The yesterday years. The years before those. The land before it was cultivated. The earth before the glaciers peeled off. The mountains before they were sprung loose from the seas. The birds when they were the size of dinosaurs.

Give me an afternoon off, keep me on hold for a conference call, put me in the car alone for a long drive, and I’m thinking about Then. We live in a transitory and transitional time. We have entered, say some, the Epoch of the Anthropocene. We have reconstructed and redirected our planet to suit our own needs. Nothing that is here right now was here eons ago. And none of it will be here in the long future.

— excerpted from "Garden Ghosts and River Voices," the talk I'll be giving this evening as the Community Garden Club at Wayne kicks off its season. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (the affordable paperback edition), my Chanticleer memoir Ghosts in the Garden (some of the final copies in existence), and my Chanticleer young adult novel Nothing but Ghosts will be available.

The details:

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You know summer is ending when the flowers at Chanticleer are taller than you, when the pods are mostly empty, when the petals have mostly blown away, when the cardinal flowers light the bendy paths.

You stand at the crest of the hill. You consider the months that are now tucked inside your history.

There's a breeze out there. A stirring.

Next week, or the week after, I will drive to the beach and stand on the shore and talk to the sea. Because the end of summer also means a little reckoning with the salt and the churn of the sea.

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A few days ago, I wrote of an upcoming September 4 talk at Radnor Memorial Library, open to the public, about my ghosts (which is to say my two Chanticleer inspired books) and my river (Flow).

Today I'm posting information for two keynote addresses I'll be giving in honor of the Schuylkill River Heritage Area's 2014 River of the Year Lecture series, on October 14 and 16. Details and registration for these free events are here.

I hope you'll join us.

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Because the program intrigues me, because I believe good things can happen when like-minded people gather around a table to think about the past and what it means, I said yes to Kerry Malawista when she kindly invited me to conduct a full-day workshop on behalf of New Directions next spring.

We'll focus on senses—not just what we see, taste hear, smell, touch, but the power of heat and its absence, the causeways of pain, the prerequisites of balance and bodily awareness. I'll share the works of favorite poets and memoirists, launch small exercises, listen carefully to the emergent memories, help shape them.

Each participant will move, throughout the day, toward a single, honest, well-rendered moment—a memory that lives rightly on the page. We will, together, build a community. We'll reflect on some of the memoirs I discuss in Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, and why they are essential to a writing life; we'll reflect on some brand-new titles, too.

A handful of personal critique sessions on manuscripts-in-progress will be offered during breaks. 

If any of you are interested in participating, please leave a comment or send a note. I'll have more information shortly. For now:

Let us be honest: A Memoir Workshop
New Directions in Writing
http://newdirectionsinwriting.com
Residence Inn, Pentagon City, VA
April 23, 2014
9:00-5:00

 More on New Directions in Writing:

 . . . an innovative three-year postgraduate training program for writers, clinicians, and academics who want to develop their skill in writing with a psychological perspective.  We have been of help to  students who were novice writers and to others who were well-published authors, and to all those in-between.  While most of our students have been psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, our student bodies have also included journalists, authors, and university faculty, among others.

In seasonal weekend conferences and optional summer and winter retreats, our community of students, alumni, teachers, and guest faculty come together to explore topics of psychological interest which stimulate our minds and enrich our writing.  Each weekend has a specific topic focus, such as memory, play, trauma, gender, writers block, mourning, revenge and forgiveness, religion, boundary, children’s literature, evil, the body, music, neuroscience, projection, and imagining a life.

Writing helps us to think. Thinking helps us to write. But writing is the focus of the program.

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If you came here just for the pictures, here they are—Chanticleer Garden, April 7, 2013, a brand new season of color and verve. The secret garden elves have spent the winter widening paths, planting pots, putting the start of lettuce into rows. They have had a ball with succulents. And the big bright fish are alive.

If you wondered how I'd felt about seeing "The Trip to Bountiful" at People's Light and Theatre Company on Friday evening with my father, wonder no more. It was a full-throttle production, emotionally speaking, and elegant in all other ways. I believed in these characters and their stories, the two side-by-side chairs that constituted a bus, the painted mural that was the landscape of memory. I believed in the anger and in the momentary resolve.

And finally, River North Dance Chicago, presented last evening at Annenberg Center. There are, apparently, young men and women whose bodies are only muscle and air, not bone. There are choreographers who can bring Eva Cassidy back to life. There is a dancer named Jessica Wolfrum who can make a dress breathe and a dancer named Ahmad Simmons whose muscular nomenclature is like nothing I've ever seen, and who danced within the quick strobe of light, his arms like wings. Then there were those who danced in and out of elastic shirts without ever losing track of time.

Or perhaps they lost all track of time, and that is why I was so mesmerized.

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The fog is lifting here, the rain subsiding, and in two hours I'll meet my friend Annika at Chanticleer, where we will walk a path familiar to us both.  We have both taken solace and shelter in this pleasure garden.  We are both lovers of dance.  And I have a written a book about Annika's home, Germany, which she has generously agreed to read.

And so Berlin, gardens, dance, stories.  All of it here, in two hours. 

From the novel (first draft) that I will be sharing:

Some time, late, I wake to the sound of Omi snoring behind the door to her room.  She takes a long, rasping time filling her lungs, then snorts the air out quick, and then it’s silence, then rumbling again.  Who knows how she sleeps.  People who hide don’t want to be found, she said, and now when I close my eyes it’s her world, the stories she’s told me.  The Red Army has made its way in, is crossing the river.  There are German traitors—deserters—strung up by their flimsy necks from the lampposts at train stations, and women and children are almost all that is left of Berlin.  There will be no virgins standing after everything is done, and the newspapers have stopped, and the phones ring empty, and the trains run two-to-three to a car while everybody else walks, because no one else, including Omi, can afford the fare; they have all been issued the wrong ration cards.  She will wait in many lines.  She will fight for rancid butter.  She will loot the abandoned bakery for whatever there still is, and at night she will warm her feet by that brick, her legs cold and white beside her mother’s.  When the bombs go off she will scramble, her heart high and sick in her throat.  She will run, buckets of stolen things in either hand, the buckets clanging.  She will run beneath the streets into the shelter.

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We waited for rain a long time in these parts, and when it came, Chanticleer, the garden that has formed the backdrop of two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden and Nothing But Ghosts) was glorified.

These shots were stolen on Wednesday afternoon.

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It's been many years now since I first stumbled onto Chanticleer, a pleasure garden ten minutes from my home.  In the epics and eras since, Chanticleer has served as a retreat of sorts, become a place of friendship, and crept its way into two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden (a memoir) and Nothing but Ghosts (a YA novel)).  It has also become a birthday tradition.  The garden opens on April 1st of each year.  I go to bear witness and to reflect on my own life.

Profoundly exhausted, I wasn't sure that I'd make it this year.  I was glad I found a way.  The skies were gray but not storming when I arrived.  The daffodils and cherry trees had bloomed out early, as was this eager season's way.  Still, purple and blue electrified the landscape.  The neon koi were in their pond.  The pots were brimming.

"Now I'm going to show you my favorite part," a little girl told her mother as she ran by.  And then:  "Oh, look!  It's changed.  It's even better!"

Change. Yes. It just keeps coming. That's the way it is, the way it will be. But I am grateful for the familiar rolling hills of Chanticleer, the familiar faces.  I am grateful for the reflecting ponds that restore me, for the quiet that I find, because I'm searching.

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After a day of thick, gray rain, I imagine spring being near.  I imagine myself at Chanticleer garden, in the opening hours.  Maybe my friend Annika will be there.

In the meantime, I will be grateful for the day that was.  For the enormous kindness of a certain editor who (even in the midst of her great personal busy-ness) stops to write and to give me hope for my Berlin book.  For the time I had to return to a memoir-long-in-the-making.  For a client who stops to thank me for project work completed thus far.  For studently goodness.  For a text from my son.  "Wrote 11 stories for the TV station today," he said.  "You're really good at that," I told him.

I'm taking the earliest train to Philadelphia tomorrow, so that I can take a still-early train to New York.  I'll spend much of the day on Wall Street then, but I'll be back in time for dance.

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This is not my yard.  This is the perfect lawn of Chanticleer Gardens, where two of my books take place and many of my other books have been considered.  This is the lawn children tumble down, the lawn my own Chanticleer students once traversed as they made their way from prose poems to villanelles.

This is also not my life—this quiet, green perfection.  My life is more like last night—those 45 minutes of sleep that I finally got—or more like this morning, when, after deciding that further sleep was not an option, I turned on my computer only to experience a three-hour computer crash.  My email files have now been restored, thank you very much.  But it's 11:20 AM, and I have not dressed for the day.

What I have done, while wading through no sleep and no connectivity is to read and blurb a book, to talk to my father, and to read Jonathan Franzen's essay, "Farther Away," in last week's The New Yorker.  This is the piece my dear student brought to me on Tuesday.  This is the quality of work she finds inspiring.  And no wonder.  I share with you now the passage my student read aloud to me, on that gray day, in that dark and too-cold room, her voice the warmth, her presence the light.  It's Franzen reflecting on David Foster Wallace:

People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul.  A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure.  Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn't "belong" to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of people closest to him.

What we learn from our students.  What they yield.

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that I didn't think I'd caught the running boy.  My camera was turned off and I was on manual focus when I saw him and rushed to get the shot.  Only later, rummaging through all 102 images I'd taken yesterday at Chanticleer, did I realize that both boys were with me still.

Ghosts in a frame.

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At my advanced age, any insights into how to improve my living (before it is, indeed, too late) are welcome.  Besides, I've always liked reading Michel Eyquem de Montaigne or about him, and besides (and in addition), I write memoir, I teach it, and I blog; I have, in other words, a debt to pay when it comes to this thoroughly-modern 16th-century wine-growing Frenchman who made it his practice to pay attention—to himself, mostly, and to those around him—and to write down what he thought.

Long story short:  As soon as I heard about Sarah Bakewell's How to Live or A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, I bought it.  This weekend, I sat down and read it.

Oh, what pleasure I have had.  How much respect I have for Bakewell's thoroughly ingenious, utterly companionable go at a man and his era.  No mere biography, this.  No self-help guide, either.  Might we call it a romp, then, through history and idea?  Might we simply say that history rarely feels this contemporary, especially when centuries stand between the subject and the reader?

Montaigne spent years observing, contradicting, bellowing, whimpering, celebrating, complaining.  He wrote hundreds upon hundreds of "essay" pages.  Bakewell organizes the best of him, his times, and his work into twenty chapters that are titled like this:

Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop.
Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity
Q. How to live? A. See the world.
Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing.
Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer. 

You're in love with this already, right? (Come on.  It's just us. Tell the truth.)  You want an excuse to sit with a fat hardcover filled with old-time iconography and well-told stories about a long-dead man so that you can (at your leisure) take measure of your own life, your own ways, your next steps.  I know this about you, for I know it about me.  We're human, the two of us, and so it's what we need.

P.S. This photo, taken earlier today at Chanticleer garden, heralds spring where I live.  It heralds seeing.

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Even if you take a drive—45 minutes, two hours from home—you may find yourself feeling refreshed again, a wise writerly friend wrote yesterday.  Most of all, don't be afraid of silence.  Silence, exile, and cunning is what Joyce advised.

(I love my friends.)

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I'll be joining the writers of Agnes Irwin on the sloping terrain of Chanticleer today; we'll be at work on memoir.  Last night, while again not sleeping, I found these words in Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Far Away.  They are the right place to begin.

"We are a dynamic country, fast-paced, ever-onward.  Can we make sense of love and ambition, pain and longing?  In the center of our speed, in the core of our forward movement, we are often confused and lonely.  That's why we have turned so full-heartedly to the memoir form.  We have an intuition that it can save us.  Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect.... Often without realizing it, we are on a quest, a search for meaning. What does our time on this earth add up to?"

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I'm Wisconsin bound, and those in the know are telling me that Wisconsin is the place to be. Wonderful people, I'm told. Well-read people. Nice people. I shall keep those goodnesses close to my heart as I travel to Little Chute Public Library, Roosevelt Middle School, Madison Middle School, West High School, Kaukauna Public Library, New London Middle School, Appleton Public Library, and East High School.

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... I am grateful to Amy Robinson, for an email exchange she had with Ramon Renteria of El Paso Times, and I am grateful to Ramon himself, for last evening's conversation. I am grateful to Janet and her work with children with special needs in Anapra. I am grateful to Anna, for the crystal amethyst, the Amazonia, and words of calm; to Mario, for something very special from Paris; to my sister and her kids (my nieces and nephew!) for their crazy card; to Sherry, for her amazingly loving email; to my dad, with whom I spent time yesterday; to Jean, who yesterday led me around the dance floor even though I can still barely breathe; to Amy Riley for everything she does; to Magdalena Piekarz, who will spend this morning with me at Chanticleer garden; to my son for his midnight text message; and to my husband, who has promised to learn to cook and to share what he has learned with me, in a once-each week extravaganza.

I am grateful for sun—its rising and its setting.

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