I've been working out ideas about home and literature, literature and home for awhile now, and on March 1, accompanied by friends A.S. King, Reiko Rizzuto, and Margo Rabb, my colleagues at Penn, and students past and present, I'll be doing even more thinking about the topic for the Beltran Family Teaching Award event at the Kelly Writers House at Penn.
My newest thinking, in this weekend's
Chicago Tribune (Printers Row), with thanks to Jennifer Day, Joyce Hinnefeld, and Debbie Levy, upon whom I seem to first try out my ideas. (Oh, Debbie, you're a gift.)
To read the whole story, go
here.
I have written of
the weekend we spent in Moravian Bethlehem—of the happy times we had among friends old and new. Today I'm talking more about those three days—and the idea of home—in the
Inquirer.The story begins like this, below, and can be found in full
here.
I traveled to Bethlehem, Pa., to talk about home at the Moravian Writers' Conference. About how home roots us, shapes us, tethers, scrapes, and needs us. About how (if we are writing, if we are living) we are forced to define what the word means to us.
Home is akin to poem. But how?
(With thanks as always to Kevin Ferris of the
Inquirer, and with great thanks to Joyce Hinnefeld, for the invitation.)
There was this thing that happened in Moravian Bethlehem this weekend. This clutch of days, of hours spent among writers and friends in a town I quickly came to love. Joyce Hinnefeld—chair of the Moravian College English Department and creator of the Moravian Writers' Conference—you made something special happen, something rare. You dignified writing and writers by the program you assembled and the writers and editors you attracted. You—miraculously—gave me the opportunity to write and deliver a keynote about a topic that I think matters, and then to spend time with my friend A.S. King in dialogue: I will never be able to thank you. Josh Berk, for time with your beautiful family at the library you run so well, I thank you, too.
I returned to my little house that is my home to much work. The day was intercepted by utterly unexpected news. First, a review for
One Thing Stolen in
Horn Book Magazine, a publication I love very much, calling this book of mine a "unique, moving story." Thank you. Then, moments later, news that the book has been named a Parents' Choice Gold Award selection.
It is always hard not to be able to directly thank people who have been kind to me.
Horn Book and Parents' Choice: I hope you find these words. Joyce and Josh, I send them to you. With deepest thanks.
Many years ago, I found and read a book I loved,
In Hovering Flight, and wrote about it
here.
I never anticipated that Joyce Hinnefeld, that novel's author, would one day lead the writing program at Moravian College and create, as well, an extraordinary writers' conference that last year featured both Laurie Halse Anderson and Ursula Le Guin. I never imagined that I'd receive an email from the beloved teen author/Bethlehem Area Public Library Executive Director Josh Berk that contained both a question and a bridge.
But both things have happened, and this June I will have the great pleasure of spending time with Joyce as well as Josh, as I participate in the Moravian Writers' Conference as a keynoter and panelist and (to make it all even more glittering) in conversation with the very special guest A.S. King. (King, we're gonna have to take our glorious private conversation public. You ready?) There are so many opportunities for area writers during this three-day (June 5 through 7) event—so many terrific writers, teachers, publishers participating.
(Another special bonus: my friend Nic Esposito of The Head and The Hand Press will be participating in the publishing panel.)
I invite you to learn more about all the presenters and the line-up
here.
Ever since the goldfinches began appearing outside my window (my mother's spirit, I've thought, I think), I've been paying closer attention to their effervescence—the way their feathers go green, then gray in autumn; the way they'll sit on the spokes of their feeder, calm, while the bright male cardinal, the blue jay, the squirrel look with envy from the tree.
In Hovering Flight, Joyce Hinnefeld's glorious first novel, is, therefore, the perfect book for me this weekend. Perfect because it is about birds, ecology, mothers and daughters. Perfect because so much of it takes place not far from my own part of the world, in Bucks County. Perfect because if it is masterfully wrought—quiet yet momentous, cohering, heartfull, whole. Hinnefeld is a gifted, informed, intelligent writer—careful, tender, never excessive—and in unraveling this story about a bird-loving professor and the student who becomes his wife, this story about their daughter, this story about eco-activism and a decision to die, Hinnefeld yields what feels to be a true, uncompromised story in language clear as bird call.
Listen, for example, to these few lines from Flight's beginning. It would have been easy to muck this up with too many words, too many adjectives, some compound metaphor. Hinnefeld restrains herself, avoids complication, and yields the tang of beauty:
"What she wanted was not only to draw birds but to understand them, to come as close as she could to feeling what it was like to fly with hollow bones. To sit atop a warm and throbbing egg within a delicate bed that rests in the crook of a branch. To sing not from something like a human throat but from a place deep within the breast."
I'd had plans for months to buy this book. Ron Charles' review in last Sunday's Washington Post made me feel as if I could wait no longer:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603318.html
By: Beth Kephart ,
on 1/8/2016
Ever since the goldfinches began appearing outside my window (my mother's spirit, I've thought, I think), I've been paying closer attention to their effervescence—the way their feathers go green, then gray in autumn; the way they'll sit on the spokes of their feeder, calm, while the bright male cardinal, the blue jay, the squirrel look with envy from the tree.
Sounds fantastic! And I love that you feel you mother's spirit in the goldfinches! Love that more than anything!
I felt my mother's spirit in a red robin that flew into our living room the day after she passed away in Paris, where I lived during my youth.