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Maybe it's because I lead but one class during the one semester at Penn that teaching carries, for me, such weight. I begin planning for January in August, often earlier. Choosing the books we'll read, plotting our course, interacting with potential students. I pack as much into every class as our allotted hours allow. Pressing in with ideas, exhortations, readings. Bringing guests like George Hodgman (via Skype), Reiko Rizzuto, Margo Rabb, A.S. King, and Trey Popp into the fold. (Next year we'll be hosting Paul Lisicky, and focused on the art of time in memoir.) Using multiple media, stretching the idea of memoir, expecting much. Finding the good while searching, too, for all that is still possible.

And, this semester, leading two remarkable thesis candidates—Nina Friend and David Marchino—toward work so extraordinary that, I believe, it will represent their calling cards for years and years to come.

Teaching is standing before a class, then stepping aside. It's managing the ripples and waves while keeping the craft on course.

Three more weeks. And then these students will be off on their own, carrying our lessons forward, glancing back, I hope, not just as writers, but as people who value truth, empathy, conversation, and a greater knowing of themselves.

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Last night, at the Kelly Writers House, we thought about home—a theme that has carried my current class of memoirists forward. We were graced by the presence of the exquisite memoirist/novelist Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, the young adult novelist super star A.S. King, and the all-round talent (fiction, young adult fiction, New York Times/Slate style commentator) Margo Rabb. We were joined by Penn faculty, my current students, my previous students, and friends. Jessica Lowenthal facilitated every last detail. Jamie-Lee Josselyn brought her ineffable spirit. Al Filreis sat among us, in the home that he has built. Julia Bloch was the woman we all love, and, Julia, I'll be forever grateful for your words.

The evening was made possible by the generous gift of the Beltrans, whose endowment causes all of us who teach writing at Penn to think even harder about how we hope on behalf of our students.

We closed the evening by dimming the lights and listening to the voices of students and faculty as they answered the simple, confounding question, What is home? This is a gloriously produced soundtrack (thank you, Wexler Studio's Zach and Adelaide), made even more stunning by the guitar work of our own music man (and someday Grammy winner), Cole Bauer.

I encourage you to listen (here). In a fractured world, these words offer light.

For even more writing and thinking about home, I encourage you to stop by the Writers House and pick up your copy of our Beltran chapbook, Where You Live & What You Love.

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I talk about my beloved Penn students. I boast about them, often. And sometimes I have the honor of introducing their work to to the world.

That's going to happen next week, March 1, 6 PM, at the Kelly Writers House, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, when we convene for the Beltran Family Teaching Award program. The event is free and open to the public, and we hope you'll join us.

The official blurb is below.

(Those of you who may be wondering about the provenance of the cover photo for the chapbook we've produced: that is a garden in Florence where my Nadia (of One Thing Stolen) slipped away to feel at peace.)

Join us for HOME AS HEART, AND HEARTH: STORIES AND IDEAS, a discussion on what exactly makes a home—how it’s built, how it’s found, and how it’s sustained. This year’s Beltran Teaching Award winner BETH KEPHART will lead a conversation featuring beloved Young Adult novelist A.S. KING, New York Times contributing writer and Young Adult novelist MARGO RABB, and National Book Circle Critics Finalist RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO. Following the event, “home”-inspired work made by guests and Penn students will be bound together in a commemorative volume.

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Earlier this week, George Hodgman of Bettyville fame joined us via Skype at Penn. I have been teaching the idea of home this semester—what it is, how writers frame it, how every book ultimately, somehow, departs from or returns to a centering place.

(Speaking of which, please join us for the Beltran event at Penn's Kelly Writers House, March 1, 6:00 PM, when I will be joined by Reiko Rizzuto, A.S. King, and Margo Rabb—along with students past and present—to discuss this idea of home in literature.)

The winds and the rains were fierce. I had my Skype-technology jitters. My students were ready, and so were the students of dear Julia Bloch, who were joining us for the session. And, oh—George Hodgman was brilliant. He was: Looking back over Bettyville—how it began, how it evolved. Circling then pinning the definition of memoir. Speaking of his mother's love and his enduring felt need to make her proud. Pondering the nature of, and the blasting off, of personal and writerly inhibitions. Recalling the sound of conversation above the slap of flip flops.

Next George spoke about his life as an editor. The importance of stories that don't wait to get started, the importance of writers who are willing to work, the decision an editor must make, early on, about if and when to get tangled up inside a draft's sentences. And then George said this simple but remarkably important thing: Be messy (at first). The worst books are the clean, perfect books, he told us. The ones that feel safe.

Be messy.

For the past many years I've been at work (intermittently) on a book I feel could define me. It's a novel. It is a structural storytelling risk. I thought last year that I could publish this book as novel for adults. After a great disappointment, I pulled it back. Let it sit. Returned to it just this week, fear in my heart. Was it any good? Had I pumped it up in my own estimation, without any actual basis for pride?

Open the document, Beth.

Find out.

I finally did. And what I discovered was a book that was, indeed, messy. Too pretentious on some pages. Unnecessarily fantastical in covert corners. Too wishfully literary.

But. The story, the characters, the scenes—strip away the mess of the book, and, I discovered, there was a beating pulse. Despite all the mud I had slung on top of my tale, there was a glorious gleam.

I am taking this mess. I am turning it into something. I am grateful, deeply grateful, that I made such a horror in the first place. Inside these pages are complexity and promise. Inside them is my world.

I am reminded, once again, that this writing thing is, above all else, process. Clean first drafts are a constricting bore.

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In the early hours of this morning, I've been reviewing the final submissions to the Beltran Family Teaching Award chapbook—a collection of reflections on home by Penn students past and present; featured guests A.S. King, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Margo Rabb; and the leaders of Penn's Kelly Writers House.

Trust me, please. The words (and images) are stellar and binding. No piece remotely resembles another. Each reveals and, in ways both quiet and surprising, sears.

I have crazy ideas, that is true.

But when those who join us that evening—March 1, 6 PM, Kelly Writers House, all are welcome—hold this chapbook in their hands and hear our guests and look out upon these faces, this particular craziness will not seem so very crazy at all.

Because it's them.

And they have spoken.

A huge thank you to my generous husband, who has spent untold hours by my side, laying out these pages.

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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.

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Look for me behind stacks of books. That's where I'm living lately.

Assembling the content for a traveling multi-day memoir workshop. Preparing to teach the personal essay during a morning/afternoon at a Frenchtown high school. Knitting together ideas for a four-hour Sunday memoir workshop, next weekend, at the Rat (also in Frenchtown; places still available). Conjuring poem-engendering exercises for the fourth and fifth graders of North Philly. Building the syllabus for my next semester of teaching at Penn. Putting more touches onto the Beltran Family Teaching Award event at Penn next spring (featuring Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Margo Rabb, and A.S. King). Re-reading Buzz Bissinger so that I can introduce and then publicly converse with him at the Kelly Writers House this Saturday, for Penn's Homecoming. Talking to Jennie Nash about an online memoir workshop. Writing the talk I'll give this evening to kick off the LOVE event (featuring film students and Philadelphians) at the Ambler theater.

My writing (my novels) sit in a corner over there, where they have sat for most of this year. I'm sunk deep into the pages of other people's work. Their stories, their sentences, their churn: a thrilling habitation.

Every time I feel frustrated by a sense of career stall or perpetual overlook, I remember this: There are writers—truly great writers—who have gone before me, who have written more wisely, who have seen more clearly. I may want to be noticed, I may hope to be seen, I may wish to be important, a priority, first on a list, but honestly? Why waste time worrying all that when there is so much to be learned—about literature, about life—from the writers who have gone before—and ahead—of me.

James Agee. Annie Dillard. Eudora Welty. We could stop right there. Read all they've written. Make the study of them the year we live and it would be enough. It would be time well spent, time spent growing, time during which we learn again that aspiration must, in the end, be contextual. We can't hope to stand on a mountain's top if we don't acknowledge all the boulders and the trees and the ascent and the views that rumble beneath the peak.

My cure for my own sometimes literary heartbreak: Sink deep inside the work of others. Recall what greatness is.

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This morning, on HuffPo, I'm reflecting on why structure actually does matter in memoir — how indeed it helps to define the form—to distinguish it from autobiography, essay, war reporting, journalism, because that distinction matters. I refer in the piece to some of my favorite memoirs and memoirists, though there are, of course, many more.

And, because I must, I remember my brilliant students at Penn, and one particular Spectacular.

The full link is here.

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A few months ago I was very privileged to share an excerpt from a work-in-progress (an "adult" story) with Clockhouse, the beautiful new literary magazine. Recently, Heather Leah Huddleston, a key member of the Goddard community, asked if I might agree to a follow-on interview. Of course, I said, to this very dear and talented soul.

And so, today, that interview goes live. I'm talking about the difference between writing for adults and teens, the frustrations I've faced, the stuff I don't do well, and the life choices I make, on a daily basis.

It's all here.

Thank you, Heather. And thanks, too, to Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, one of my dearest friends in this wide world, who first bridged me to Heather and to Goddard. Reiko lives in Brooklyn. I live where I live. Even so, sometimes, like just yesterday, I take a walk, dial her number, and live in her company for a glorious while. A true forever friend.

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I stole upstairs with Clockhouse in hand and read the conversation between my friend Rahna and the ever-interesting M.T. Anderson (Octavian Nothing, Feed, etc.). It's the sort of interview the whole world should read—two very smart people talking, unexpected tangents and revelations, deep questions, unvarnished (which is to say actively honest) responses.

I share just a snippet here, but oh my. The whole is New York Times quality stuff.

RRR: What is the biggest risk you ever took as a person and as a writer?

MTA: Every big work is a risk. One thing I found is easy enough to tell my students, but now I am having to tell myself is: every time you write a new book, you should try to write something that is impossible for you. You should try to write something at which you think you are going to fail. Because it's only then that you actually realize that you've succeeded in new ways you've never dreamed of before. Now that obviously a nice adage to tell students when they are facing trouble, to say, look, you just need to lean into this, and trust that you can do it and seek solutions because if you don't feel like it's impossible for you then you aren't re-envisioning yourself as much as you need to be. On the other hand, it's very difficult to do that for yourself....

The photo above is of too long ago—my husband, my son, Reiko's Ming and her boys, then Reiko herself at Hawk Mountain. Reiko sees things others don't. This interview (and her books) are proof of that.

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Years ago, when I was a young mother desperate to find more hours in each day, all there was for me was fiction. Short fiction. Published in journals like Sonora Review and Alaska Quarterly Review and International Quarterly and Rosebud. Publishing was my conversation with the world. I had yet to meet an actual writer. I'd taken no classes. I was naive. My critiques came in the form of letters from the editors.

Later there would be attempts at "adult" novels, but always something intervened. The El Salvador novel became the El Salvador memoir (Still Love in Strange Places). The adult novel about southern Spain became, after nearly a decade, Small Damages, a novel for young adults. And so on.

In the meantime, through other projects, panels, moments, rides on subway trains, I met so many special people, including Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, who remains my dear friend today; indeed, I recently spent a blissful Brooklyn afternoon in her company and missed her for days afterward. It was Reiko, a beloved faculty member at Goddard College, who suggested to the Clockhouse team that I might be a right contributor for the second issue of this new and beautiful magazine. An essay, they suggested. How about a poem? I suggested back. But in the end, we went with fiction.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see this first sliver of adult fiction, an excerpt from a novel in progress, appear in a magazine produced by such an incredibly kind team, including Julie Parent, Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, and Stacy Clark. I am equally happy that Reiko is the angel on all our shoulders. And I was touched to learn, a few weeks ago, that Heather Leah had been asked to read my story aloud to a gathered few as the printed journal emerged from the press. I wish I could have been here.

There are excerpts from a number of pieces here.

The list of contributors can be found here.

Thank you, Clockhouse.

from Beth Kephart’s The Velocity of Wings:

“Oh, Love,” Becca said. “Oh, God. Kate.” And she couldn’t lift her, couldn’t hold her, had to keep herself back, no harm, she kept thinking, no harm, and she ran her finger just as gently as she could up and down Kate’s one whole arm, singing a song she remembered from long ago, some idle tune from Prague that Kate had loved, that Kate remembered, she could tell that Kate remembered it now; it was the right thing to sing, it was all Becca could do—no questions, don’t make Kate talk, no harm—and now, at last, from around and above, from a place far away but growing near, there was the sound of sirens.

Blue, Becca thought. The sound of blue. A hard scream into a spring day until the macadam crackled and a van door slammed, and there were two pairs of boots coming, a stretcher between them, Becca calling them around to the rear.

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How entirely psyched am I to visit the Big Apple next week?

Entirely psyched.

It will be a day away among people I love in a city I've got a thing for.

It will be a privilege.

I'll spend the day in Brooklyn, with my dear friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto and her pottery-brilliant Ming. I'll see my son, who has just taken on a second job and (in addition) been elected a co-vice president of Marketing for his NYC Alumni Association (love. that. young. man. and I have to give him a personal high five). And I will spend the evening hours among wonderful YA talents, in the Great Teen Reads event at Books of Wonder.

I'll be there with gratitude.

Speaking of gratitude, I have this photo in my possession because of one Dahlia Adler, who so incredibly kindly wrote of Small Damages and Going Over here, and who, rumor has it, I will meet at the store! Speaking of gratitude (again), might I also mention that I will meet, at Books of Wonder, a certain copy editor, Debbie DeFord Minerva, who wrote to me after she worked on One Thing Stolen, the Florence novel—words I will never forget.

Join us?

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Not long ago, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (a novelist, memoirist, teacher, and dear friend), invited me to contribute a post to She Writes, "a community, virtual workplace, and emerging marketplace for women who write, with over 15,000 active members from all 50 states and more than 30 countries."  Reiko herself had been invited to spearhead a series of front-page stories called "The Daily Mentor," and you can find her series on the She Writes front page all throughout this week.

I was, of course, more than delighted to contribute.  I share my post with you here; it will go up at noon on She Writes.  Please check out the entire site and register to join, if you haven't already.

When Rahna Reiko Rizzuto invited me to submit a guest postfor She Writes, I remembered, as I often do, a day Reiko and I once shared inManhattan.  A long walk.  The rocks of Central Park.  A story she was telling about theHudson River.  Turtles.  I remembered that day, and then Iremembered all the years before and after, when Reiko and I have been friends.  And then I had this thought, small andessential:  None of any of thatwould have ever occurred if it hadn’t been for books.  Because that’s how we met, Reiko and I—through the bookswe’d been writing, through the books we had read.

I’ve been getting older lately, and I’ve been realizingthis:  I feel most at peace amongthose who recognize the power of books, who work to write or protect orcelebrate them, who value them, who buy them, who will write an email, 4AM:  I’ve just found a book that I know you will love.  Some may see this as an elitistthing.  I see it as anythingbut.  Lovers of books are lovers ofstories, and stories are foundational, heart-centric, core.

Publishing is hard, full of abrasions and deflations,unnecessarily brusque, unnaturally confusing—or, I should say, publishing canbe those things.   But writingbooks and reading them, loving books and sharing them, is a different matteraltogether—it is a peace zone, a shelter.

I will have published fourteen books by the time next summerrolls around, and what stands out most for me, in all these years, is not thereviews or the awards or the sales figures (never the sales figures!), but thecommunity of book lovers, book bloggers, book friends that I have found andkept, the community that has kept me. What stands out for me is the walks that I have been privileged to take,the conversations I have had, the rescue and the shelter, the promise and thepassion, those turtles sunning themselves on those rocks. 

Something true and affirming has emerged from it all.  Something real, and honest. 

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This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.

(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)

Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 

He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House

Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Elizabeth Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup

Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing

When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" �

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I began my travels to southern Spain more than 16 years ago.  I met an old man named Luis, who cooked for me when I was sick.  I found a bathtub full of oranges high up, on an old, odd roof.  I met one of the King's best friends, southern Spain's finest breeder of bulls, and he took me out in an open jeep, where the unsuspecting herd was chewing.  I watched the flamenco dancers dance; I climbed the towers; I studied the bridge. I read of the war, and I read of survivor, and I tracked down old memoirs from the Franco era, preserving the recipes I'd find clenched within the pages.  Seville was home to my brother-in-law, Rodi, his wife, and their children, and so to Seville my husband, son, and I would repeatedly return.  I walked through doors few do.

For years, I worked on a book I called Small Damages, except for the years during which I thought of it as The Last Threads of Saffron.  The novel evolved over time—became a story of gypsies, a story of the deaf, a story of an old cook's love affair.  Last summer, just about this time, I shared a draft of the book with Tamra Tuller, an editor at Philomel Books, whose Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird) would go on to win the 2010 National Book Award and whose Ruty Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) would appear on the bestseller list in her debut week earlier this year.  Tamra had ideas about Small Damages.  She encouraged me to keep working.  She emerged as one of those rare editors who agrees to read again, who quietly and gainfully encourages. 

Tamra shares, with me, a love of travel, a love of exotic foods, even a love of the TV show "Top Chef."  Tamra is also, as of today, thanks to the announcement (below) in the PW Children's Bookshelf, the editor of Small Damages.  I don't think I can express just what this means to me.

Tamra is kind, and she is smart.  She works within a team—which includes my dear former editor Jill Santopolo (who introduced me to Tamra by way of Ruta's book) and the remarkable Michael Green—that makes a writer feel at home.

My great thanks, then, to Tamra, to Jill, to Michael, to Philomel, and to my agent, Amy Rennert.  My thanks, too, to Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Alyson Hagy, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Ivy Goodman, who read this book over time and kept me believing in it.  Maybe it took ten years and eighty drafts to write the book that Small Damages finally is.  But the book feels brand new and just right and full of hope in the hands of Tamra Tuller.

Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books bought world rights to National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart’s YA novel Small Damages, a coming-of-age story set in southern Spain about the difficult choices a teenaged girl faces when she gets pregnant. The publication is scheduled for summer 2012; Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency brokered the deal. 

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In her memoir (Hiroshima in the Morning) and personal essay (“Why I Left My Children“), author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto explained why she left her husband and two sons (ages three and five at the time) to become a part-time parent.

The video embedded above features a Today Show clip with Rizzuto and relationship expert Argie Allen. A recent profile of the author on Shine generated more than 16,000 comments, 360 re-tweets on Twitter, and 75,000 “likes” on Facebook.

What do you think? Here’s an excerpt from the article: “In any case, it’s evident that there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to motherhood. But does striking out on your own or being a ‘Hiroshima Mom’ take free-range parenting to an extreme?”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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I never read nearly as much as I'd like to read—my multiple worlds are perpetually colliding, fracturing time. But I was so gratified to learn that, on this year's list of NBCC nominees, many of the books I'd loved best and celebrated here, on my blog, are being equally celebrated by the judges.  In Autobiography, there's Patti Smith's remarkable Just Kids, Darin Strauss's deeply moving Half a Life, and the thoughtful, provocative Hiroshima in the Morning, by my much-loved friend, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  In Criticism, there's Elif Batuman's The Possessed and Ander Monson's Vanishing Point.  I'd put all five books on my Penn syllabus months ago, and here they are—proven, lifted, upheld.

A huge congratulations to them all, and, especially, to my dear friend, Reiko.  I've linked to my own reflections about these books here, should you be interested in how they affected me early on.

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My friend, Reiko, a novelist and memoirist, lost her mother too recently, and every day when I wake up, I think of her.  Today I remember this poem I wrote for Reiko years ago.  Both of us, then and now, undone and remade by the desire to remember.

Unassailable

From where we stood, on the castle rock

Of Central Park, Harlem was as near as

Twenty years ago.  Everything

Between then and us was green.

The pond turtles were stacked up like stones

On stones.  The trees were a day away

From shucking their own shells.

The red wing of a black bird was like a hand

That had been dealt, and we were the splendor

Sight we had given ourselves.

Afterward, it was Amsterdam to Broadway,

Columbus Circle down to the sweet

Remembered squalor of Times Square,

And on every corner:  Song.

The high hollows of the Peruvians,

The mesquite of a jazz trombone,

The Mennonites in hairnets and black sneakers.

I wondered later whether we had become

The engine of concatenation,

Two women made radical
With unappeasable want,

The unassailable desire to remember.

 

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Dignity is a word I have long associated with Darin Strauss.  His refined mind and sensibilities were on display in novels like Chang and Eng.  A certain quietude pervaded interviews.  When I learned that Strauss was sending a memoir into the world, a memoir entrusted to McSweeney's (and hence, in some fashion, to the multiply talented and deeply generous Dave Eggers), I knew for certain what I'd be reading next.

I read Half a Life this morning, grateful for every white-steeped page.  It is, as you must have heard by now, the story of an accidental death—the story of what happened one day when Strauss set out to play some "putt putt" with his high school friends.  He was 18, behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile.  On the margin of the road, two cyclists pedaled forward.  Of a sudden, there was a zag, a knock, an "hysterical windshield." A cyclist, a girl from Strauss's school, lay dying on the road. She'd crossed two lanes of highway to reach Strauss's car.  He braked, incapable of forestalling consequences.

It was forever.  It was always.  A girl had died.  A boy had lived.  Strauss spent his college years, his twenties, his early thirties incapable of reconciling himself to the facts, of entrusting them to friends.  There's much he can't remember perfectly.  There are gaps, white space, breakage—all of which, in this McSweeney's production, is rendered with utmost decency—the thoughts broken into small segments, big breaths (blank pages) taken in between.  There is knowing here, not shouting.  There is an exploration of guilt, and no bravado. 

Half a Life sits now, on my shelf, beside Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home—two memoirs that transcend precisely because they are so quiet, so well considered, so honorable. These books, along with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning, give me hope that memoir, the form, is finding its center again.  There may not be any sure-fired truths, but there are consequences.  There may be stories, but they are always tangled.  There may be ache, but there is solace, too.  There may be drama, but in drama's wake, we stand.  In need of understanding.  In need of one another.

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Early in the Rutgers-Camden workshop we reflected on the auguring power of literary lists—what they can tell us about a story not-yet-unfolded, what they teach us about voice.  We used, as our exemplars, the opening pages of Colum McCann's Dancer, the extraordinary yield in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and the evocative early pages of Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning.  We heard:




All three lists featured here sit toward or at the very start of books—before we know plot or meaning, before w

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Yesterday I sat outside beneath a canopy, reading Hiroshima in the Morning, a memoir by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto due out from The Feminist Press this coming September.  It is her story, of course—about a journey she takes alone to Japan, about the things that she learns, about the world that opens and the world that shatters in the midst of self-discovery.  It is a story in which everything is on the line, and in which bargains must be struck with time.  What is a mother?  What is a wife?  What is owed, and what must be taken?  Whose side do we stand on when the question is survival?  These are the themes that shape and permeate Hiroshima in the Morning, and this is what makes the book true and brilliant memoir, and not mere autobiography.

(There is a difference, and it matters.)

Reiko, these words for you:

If remembering lies at the heart of all memoir, the best memoir goes far deeper—asking questions about the propulsive nature of time, the consequences of forgetting, and the treacherous liberations of solitude.  Hiroshima in the Morning is a memoir of the most sophisticated kind—a lyric, a quest, a universal poem.

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I have been reading Birdology these past few days, a book written by my dear friend Sy Montgomery.  Sy and I met years ago (virtually), following a review I wrote of her magnificent Journey of the Pink Dolphins.  We met in person a few years later.  I've read every one of her fabulous books since—Search for the Golden Moon Bear, The Good Good Pig, among them—and counted myself lucky to know this permeable woman who floats among God's creatures—chameleon like, inspirited, sometimes barely breathing, always awed.  Sy swims with dolphins and dances with bears.  She sleeps on the belly of a pig.  She speaks of her border collie, Sally, as if Sally had written a few books of her own.  With Birdology, Sy dances with birds.  She might swim with them, too; I don't know.  I still have two chapters to go.

I am myself a great lover of birds, and so I am loving this book with particular fervor.  In it, we meet the famous Ladies, Sy's crew of intelligent chickens. We walk, with Sy, through a dusky Australian park, hoping for an encounter with the bone-headed cassowary (six feet tall, dagger-equipped, footprints akin to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but Sy's not afraid, so we're not either).  We urge two orphaned hummingbirds on toward life, and learn, in the process, more than a couple of things.  We learn, for example, that two baby hummingbird's together "weigh less than a bigger bird's single flight feather," and that "a person as active as a hummingbird would need 155,000 calories a day—and the human's body temperature would rise to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and ignite!"  We go on a bloody falconry adventure.  (Blood, with Sy, is a rather commonplace sight.  She may have a mass of great blond curls, and she may be fashionably svelte, but don't let that fool you:  this is one tough, bug-bitten, leech-proven traveler.)

I was about to read a chapter about parrots—squeeze it in between client calls—but I thought, Oh, no, why rush this?  So I'm going to take this book outside after my work is done and pick my feet up and hope a hummingbird will visit in the meantime.

(As for the photo, above:  I snapped this gorgeous creature a few years ago while on Hawk Mountain with my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, her boys, and my own.)

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My friend Reiko, knowing that I had lately received what can only be described as the rudest rejection letter ever (a rejection apparently based not on my work but on this editor's estimation of my career), sent along a link entitled "30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers."

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not famous (which was this recent editor's accusation against me). But I do take solace (and shouldn't we all?) from reviewing again (for we've reviewed them in the past) these bits and pieces from the annals of whoops.

"We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."

— from one of many publishers rejecting Stephen King's Carrie

"It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA."

—from the editor dismissing George Orwell's Animal Farm

"There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice."

— a publisher assessing the poetry of Sylvia Plath

And my personal favorite:

"I'm sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."

— a San Francisco Examiner editor rejecting a Kipling short story

Everyone, of course, has his or her right to his or her opinion, and editors can only buy those books with which they are in love. I'm simply not altogether convinced that cruelty need enter the scene.

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Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and I are friends. We met, as I've noted here before, over the essays we wrote about mothering—our work ultimately appearing in Salon.com and in the two wildly successful anthologies that Kate edited with Camille Peri, Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. We continue to meet, from time to time, in San Francisco, in New York City, or here outside Philadelphia. When we can't meet, we email and call. We read the other's books long before most people do. We rely on one another.

This year, both Kate and Reiko have new books due out; they have both also launched new blogs. Kate's Cake Walk, a recipe-infused memoir about surviving childhood, is due out from Dial Press in May. The book, so irresistibly Kate, is excerpted here.

Reiko's memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is due out from Feminist Press in September. It's a book about motherhood and Ground Zero, a book infused with freighted questions about what it means to survive and to love. Reiko is a mother, a teacher, a reader, and, of course, a writer, and in her new blog, you get to see all sides of her.

The photos above, finally, are this: Kate's cats, looking out through her kitchen window, while she made dinner for us this past August; and my husband, my son, Reiko's family, and Reiko during our trip to Hawk Mountain, a few years ago.

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All through the night, there's been rain and howling wind, and now, in the dark, I gather my things for a day trip to Wall Street.

I remember a day, years ago, when Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Camille Peri, and I were all headed uptown to give a reading from the Salon.com anthology, Mothers Who Think. Rain had overtaken Manhattan, and every subway stop was flooded through, and from stop to stop we ran, Reiko the transplanted New Yorker leading the way. We were to meet Jayne Anne Phillips and others at a bookstore. We were not to be late. We put our trust entirely in this gorgeous green-eyed, dark-haired physicist-athlete-writer, and she did not let us down.

I'd never met Reiko before that day. She became and now remains one of my very best friends. Whenever I go to New York City, I think first of her, and how it was that she got us safely through.

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