The Fork in Our Road
Bill and I have produced nearly 100 Juncture Notes over the past many years, distributing this mostly monthly publication to some 1,200 of you. We’ve brought you news of hot titles and glorious classics, ideas about craft, commentary on the state of the publishing world (and the writer’s heart), prompts and quiet exhortations. Juncture—and all it represents—has been our passion, our calling, even, in a way, our identity.
But the true-story world has changed. Memoir has entered a new season. Publishing becomes an ever-more jagged terrain.
Following “Taking Flight,” our art-full workshop series slated to begin on September 28th, Bill and I will be setting off toward destinations only partly known.
I will, for example, be launching Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News (Tursulowe Press), my first novel for adults, next April. Bill will be continuing his work as an oil painter and ceramicist. I’ll be sharing my writing, thinking, book recommendations, and art at my new Substack, The Hush and the Howl. (See more about this below.) Together, Bill and I will be taking our respective art to craft shows and galleries. (For more on that, see Bind-arts.com.)
It is our great hope that you will remain near. Our various memoir resources—Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., We Are the Words, Consequential Truths, and We Are Not Vanished Here: Essays, among others—are there for the reading. It our hope, too, that you will know how much your friendship has meant to us along the way—the indelible conversations, the stories you have shared, the dear faces and deep intelligence of those who joined us for our many workshops, in all their forms. You broadened our world. You believed in us. We thank you.
Below I share here the first two entries of The Hush and the Howl, with the hope that you will join me on this new Substack journey.
Always Beginning
“It was everything we wanted. It was the luminous dawn. It was the unwritten, never-to-be-written, never-ending, always-beginning book. It was the book that left nothing behind …”
Shortly after I read those words on the near-final page of Sofia Samatar’s Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, I was rumbling down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, headed west, to Morgantown. A solo trip, as my son would call it. Away, if only for a few hours, if only to unshackle myself from the tyranny of domesticities, if only to wander the wide and silver, green and blossomed aisles of a monumental greenhouse, or to sit alone at a weathered picnic table eating a sandwich slathered together by a girl who ditched my gratitude with a roll of her blue eyes, or to buy myself a bouquet of Sylvia Ball dahlias that were preposterously puffed, or to watch what I thought were rust-colored birds rising and settling among the fields, but it was detritus being chased by a breeze.
Away, and no one else was speaking, and so Samatar’s words remained: never-ending, always-beginning, the kind of book that leaves nothing behind.
The Hush and the Howl will be that kind of book—unbound and without bounds, digital ink, the cracked seeds of what I dream and how I see and the traceries of books I read. Internal rhymes, if I please, and the ragged edge of thick Rives paper, the intensified blue of double cyanotypes. I’ll be speaking freely here, for time runs short. I begin what I will not finish.
From Paint to Portrait: James Whistler Teaches the Writer to Whisper
What if (a wild summoning) the memoir workshop had never come to be (as in, never before, in the history of humankind, had there been a memoir workshop), and the only instruction on the craft of character development was espoused by portrait artists? By Tamara de Lempicka, say, the Art Deco artist who painted, in her words, “clean,” and chose, as her subjects, those who made her “vibrate.”Or by Vincent Van Gogh, who, in a letter to his brother Theo, wrote of the “modern portrait” as an opportunity to conjure “something of the eternal” through the use of the “actual radiance and vibration of our coloring.”
How might our literary portraits radiate? How might we color our sentences? How might the words “clean” and “vibrate” inform the way we write about the people in our stories?
Or: What might we learn from the sequence of portraits painted of the treasure-hunter and museum-maker Isabella Stewart Gardner? John Singer Sargent painted her both at the height of her powers (bold, provocative, declarative) and late in life (ephemeral, suggestive, soul). Anders Zorn painted her as gesture, a woman inseparable from her context. Before either Sargent or Zorn put Gardner down in paint, James Whistler rendered her in chalk and pastels. He focused on feeling and form.
Whistler kept the features of Gardner’s face indistinct. The background neutered. The time of day. He whispered her toward us. Gardner, in Whistler’s hands, is a distinctly present mystery, a character who has our attention.
To write like Whistler painted Gardner is to craft sentences that sound like confidences, something whispered with intimate intent. It is to elevate those one or two things that prove to be indelibly revealing. It is to choose scenes or moments that contain elements of innuendo or suggestion. It is to evoke a quietly propulsive sense of mystery.
It is to write, in other words, like Michael Ondaatje in Running in the Family: “My grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree. She could read thunder.”
I have thought a lot about the alchemical lessons of painters and musicians as a writer who has lately turned to art. I’ve built a four-part series that has emerged from this obsession. It’s called “Taking Flight.” It starts September 28th. I hope you’ll join me.
Recently published essays:
Eleven years ago, upon the publication of Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, I flew to Decatur, GA, to spend time in the company of the astonishingly brilliant Stacey D’Erasmo. Together we sat on a narrow stage before a wall-to-wall crowd in a room built of light and height. How we live, how we love, how we render truth upon the page—it was just two women talking, an afternoon I’ll never forget.
This past July, D’Erasmo’s new book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry (Graywolf), made its way into the world after a protracted period of literary and personal struggle. D’Erasmo writes:
Relationships broke, friendships broke, promises broke. Where I lived, who I lived with, what I counted on, who counted on me, and where I worked all changed, sometimes quickly and vertiginously. Many facets of my identity shattered. No one wanted the anthology…. I couldn’t sustain a project. After twenty pages or so, I would lose interest and momentum. The words seemed weightless, rootless, tinny. I kept trying and I kept failing. I couldn’t write this book, or any book.
We have been there. We have all been there. Trying and tinny and desperate.
In time, for D’Erasmo, the questions became: “What sustains the artist over the long run?” How have others—dancers, musicians, visual artists, writers—kept going, and why? What wisdom might they yield? The questions became the project, the project the obsession, the obsession this book, this deeply moving composition of profile, memoir, and virtuoso prose. D’Erasmo isn’t simply using the lives of others to reflect upon her own. She is weaving an utterly human web out of the tasseled fibers of youthful ambition, mired shame, private confusion, unfettered hope, broken love, and the persistent pulse of the unknown next.
Here D’Erasmo is, pausing in the midst of reflections on the actress Blair Brown to share her own hard-won worldview:
The nearly unbearable sense that your life somehow depends on making art isn’t something anyone else can inculcate in you. It’s a quality you must recognize in yourself, if you have it, and then decide if you want, or can bear, to heed it.
And here she is, in a chapter devoted to the musician Steve Earle, revealing a choice she “had never made before” when she “couldn’t write this or any other book” and “discarded [her] identity for a year by writing an anonymous weekly column called The Magpie for Catapult.”
The one thing you can be sure of getting if you publish is your name on your work, but by letting go of my name, a more fundamental energy—the sheer pleasure of doing this, or transforming experience into prose—rose up. I had feared that it was missing forever, but from the moment I started writing those columns, I discovered that it was right there, unstemmed. All I had to do to find it was drop my name, which is probably one of the first stories we learn to tell about ourselves.
D’Erasmo does not traffic in easy answers; she never has. In fact, she honors, above all else, Keats’ “negative capability”—the propagating, mysterious force of rampant uncertainty. You’ll find no bullet list of life lessons here. No puffed-out pretense about what we artistically minded “must” finally do if we want to write this book, finish that canvas, dance again on the stage. No didacticism. No knowing more than her readers do about this thing called life.
The wisdom, in The Long Run, is the wisdom of the quest.
Isn’t that the only wisdom that there is?
You Are Not Vanished Here: A Review
Sometimes a reader so profoundly understands our literary hearts, our hopes for the books we make, that we are overcome with gratitude. This happened to me a few weeks ago, when the dear writer Ilie Ruby (of the gorgeous The Language of Trees (Harper Collins)) shared these words about our new essay book on social media. With her permission, I quote her in full:
“I began to design my life around the making—the rooms where we live, the distribution of my time, even the writing I was writing and the lessons I was teaching becoming infiltrated by the things my hands would do. New structures. New colors. New arrangements. New hybridities.”
So starts Section 4 of Beth Kephart’s luminous poetic essay collection, “You Are Not Vanished Here.” It is uncommon these days to find what feels like an opportunity to delight in language, but Kephart’s affinity for and homage to the literary offers this luxury. In this layered, effortlessly lyrical, often startling work, Kephart takes on such diverse themes as the seismic shock of disability, the pain and joy of the creative process, and the complex gifts of a loving intercultural marriage. About her mother’s mugging in “Thieves” which left her handicapped, Kephart writes: “Daughters will lie in the dark yet wishing for a way to unbreak what has been broken.” In “To You Who Walked By,” she captures both the disappointment and the reckoning after the destruction of her admired wildflower garden (“In the end, I took the dying from the garden, pressed them into cyanotypes”). In Edge Life, friendship is “it’s own private orbit, a two-star constellation…. As if all the outlander parts of me are their own astronomical secret.” In “Animal Me,” a street has become a battleground where a neighbor wages war with his leafblower (“Sometimes he’ll blow all morning…. I’ve checked the township rules. It’s legal.”) Kephart weaves these glimmering threads together like the paper art she so lovingly creates to produce a singular work of such rarity that we want to savor it, section by section, page by page, sentence by sentence. Here, Kephart’s talent reaches new heights, wholly unfettered, notably unconcerned with itself, and yet she manages discernment, each piece expertly distilled to its essence. Poring over these pages, I was reminded of my favorite poet, Jack Gilbert. Kephart writes, “The dark isn’t the dark, it is sound.”
Like a good painting, this book is not about outlines, (or the “interference of story frame,” as she calls it), but about impressions and gestures grounded with electrifying crisp details, painterly things that tap in so deeply they catch you off guard. We have the sense that we must go quietly, go slowly, as if in a gallery, taking in the enormity of each ineffable rendering, pausing to rest on a word or a phrase, and to revisit, finding something new and illuminating each time.
During breaks from the rush and tussle of the news, I have carried this book with me, something I have not done in years as I, too, have returned to my art where strokes of color and luscious paint textures occupy the spaces between words. Within these pages, I have found myself thinking, Yes, this. Exactly this. Said exactly in this way. In the way only Beth Kephart can say it.
There are no compromises in this work, only dogged determination and truth as best a writer can tell it. Yet somehow Kephart writes with an admirably light touch. A line I have repeatedly told friends about, that has stuck with me: “On a bright day, on the rise of a street, where I went walking. Deer crimping the grass beyond me…”
Much has been written lately about writers that are also artists. This is certainly not new, and yet in these trying and chaotic times, when so much is demanded from us all, Kephart lifts us up and perhaps shows us how we might synthesize and metabolize our world. “You Are Not Vanished Here” is evidence that some things might be best expressed by working with light and shadow first, on the canvas or the page. Perhaps this is what is required to truly self-nourish. Perhaps we must deepen our capacity in new creative directions, if only to build bridges back to ourselves and each other.
I will leave you where Kephart begins:
“Bloom had been hers to hope for. The hyperbolic first bright blinks of color. Forget the wind, she thinks–how it had scabbed and scorned. Forget the cold, how it had levied. Remember how the moon came in: sliver, crescent, full.”
Remember, indeed. If you’re not already a fan of the writer and artist, Beth Kephart, no doubt you will be after reading this collection. Applause, applause, all around.
Recently published essay:
“Writers Block? Make Room for Beauty,” Books by Women, July 1, 2024
Taking Flight: A Juncture Workshop Series
“Taking Flight” is a four-part workshop series designed for writers of all genres seeking new ways to think about the possibilities and power of language. Participants will enter a curated world of art, music, and literature, taking literary inspiration and instruction from John Singer Sargent, Agnes Martin, Gustav Mahler, Elizabeth Hardwick, Paul Auster, and others. They’ll be led through a series of original art-inspired prompts (art by William Sulit and Beth Kephart) and given a behind-the scenes look at Beth’s approach to fitting words with images and ideas. They will write, finally, to a progression of elevated, guided prompts.
At the close of each session, Beth will suggest five literary magazines in which participants might consider placing the work they have begun or revised inside the classroom.
A private group Facebook page will be established in which participants can share their work over the course of our time together.
Details
Saturday, September 28, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (People)
Saturday, October 5, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Landscapes)
Sunday, October 12, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Plot and Pace)
Saturday, October 19, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Big Ideas)
Sample Prompt from the Series:
Place can speak for us, even as us, on our pages. It can speak for our lonesome selves, our buried feelings, our very stance on life.
Prompt: Write of a landscape or interior world that captures your current state of mind or mood. The cool dark of a quiet cave, perhaps. The endless breadth, and breath, of a cornfield. The muddy oblivion of a marsh. A couch beneath a lamp. Now look at all the words you’ve chosen. Can you use them to capture your interior self? Write a second piece doing just that.
Bind News:
A number of new items are now available in the Bind-Arts Etsy shop, featuring Beth’s weaving into book covers, Kephart Keepers, handmade cards, and more. Please look for Beth’s new wall art in this digital space.
The books are square, smoothly skinned, elegantly slender. Inside, just a page or two of words, and then, in quiet abundance: photographs. Black and white art by the documentary still photographer Harvey Finkle. Full-framed distillations from a life spent freezing in time those, who, according to the flap copy, might find themselves “marginalized and disenfranchised,” those who might be “working class, low income and homeless families, refugees and immigrants, the disabled and the deaf, as well as groups struggling for economic equality, peace, justice, human rights and civil rights.”
A good person, then, this Harvey Finkle. A man whose photographs are not just art but exhortation, or perhaps we’ll call them hope. Hope that the rest of us will slow down a bit, and take a moment—even more—to look into another face and see.
In my hands right now is Finkle’s Readers (Tursulowe Press), a book designed, so the opening essay tells us, to “remind us that the world is full of readers waiting to take in new information and to move forward with what they discover.” Yes, Book Banners, we are here, and we are reading, and we won’t be stopped because we know a life without books is a life seismically small. A life unalleviated. A life too crisp.
I’m flipping through. I find a well dressed man standing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the paintings at his back and a book is in his hands, an astonishingly thick book. I find a woman perfectly poised, unruffled, reading, as a speeding subway car whooshes by. I find readers in the tall grass of a river’s bank, oblivious to all but the stories they hold. I find two women aligned in the trunk of a hatchback, each devotedly obsessed with the news. I find, as a dear friend of mine says, “so many noses in broadsheets.”
Finkle has not just captured these scenes. He has framed them—taken advantage of sunfall and shadows, benches and concrete, distance and proximity. Somehow, he has not rushed the camera’s click. He has made a bargain with the moment and decided to wait until the perfect shot is framed. So that now we have them—his readers, our readers. So that now, by studying the readers Finkle found, we get a new look at ourselves.
For isn’t that the question, too? Who are we, when we are reading? Where do we lie or stand or sit, turning our pages, forward-progressing our narratives, pausing on the sentences that we believe will remain? Where do we stick the pencil with which we will make our ghostly margin notes? Who do we ignore, what dog’s head do we stroke, what smudge do we forget on our shoes?
This is Juncture Notes, a memoir newsletter, so here I will make my point, yield my prompt, give you a riddle to solve: Imagine Harvey Finkle has taken a picture of you reading. Imagine you have found that picture in his book. What has the camera caught—your posture, your expression, your relative ease, your readerly haze, your striped couch, your wood floor, your windowsill, your bench, your riverbank? What is happening to your body as your mind is somewhere—else? Write 300 words that see yourself as Finkle might have seen.
I bet you have a scene worth sharing.
Recent Interviews and Publications
You Are Not Vanished Here, our new collection of illustrated essays, is now available, here.
“Learning Sideways” recently appeared in Oldster Magazine.
Juncture Announces a Brand New Workshop Series
“Taking Flight” is a four-part workshop series designed for writers of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry seeking new ways to think about character, scene, story, plot, pace, and language itself. Participants will enter a curated world of art, music, and landscape, take a behind-the-scenes look at Beth’s approach to fitting words with images and ideas, and write to a progression of elevated, guided prompts. Selected responses will be shared and considered within the Zoom classroom.
Details
Saturday, September 28, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (People)
Saturday, October 5, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Landscapes)
Sunday, October 12, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Plot and Pace)
Saturday, October 19, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Big Ideas)
Visit our Workshops Page to register
Upcoming Workshops
Beth will be teaching a Master Class on Writing Home on behalf of CRAFT TALKS on July 13, 2024. More information here.
Beth will be teaching a Master Class on Telling Details on behalf of Cleaver Magazine on July 28, from 2 to 4 PM. More information here.
Bind News:
A number of new items are now available in the Bind-Arts Etsy shop, featuring Beth’s weaving into book covers, Kephart Keepers, handmade cards, and more. Please look for Beth’s new wall art in this digital space.
Sometimes, when the arts-and-crafts shows crowds are thin and I’m standing beside Bill in the Bind Arts booth, I think about our many iterations. Secret friends at an architecture firm. Long-distance romancers. Husband and wife, then parents, then Fusion (our partnership serving corporate and not-for-profit organizations), then and still Juncture Workshops (our partnership serving writers and readers of memoir and other genres), and, most recently, this Bind Arts, through which we offer for sale our handmade paper things and original ceramic vessels.
We have made it up as we have gone along. Bill has figured out the hard stuff—filing the paperwork, designing and building the websites, illustrating/producing our workshop presentations, and sending out these newsletters. I’ve leaned toward and then tested new story-making ideas, worked through a sometimes exasperating number of presentation drafts and workshop syllabi, and then either stood up or sat down to share my discoveries, prompts, and notions. We live in modest quarters, share most every meal, hope and stumble and rise together. We persist. I can’t imagine another way of being.
(I won’t ask Bill the question, for what if he disagrees?)
You Are Not Vanished Here, now released, is the seventh in a series of Juncture Workshops publications, but it is the first Juncture book like this—a book that focuses not on the how of memoir but on the stories that I tell and the many ways I choose to tell them. The braids and the collages, the fragments and the long-form narratives, the prose poems and the facts as I believe they occurred unspool across these pages. The essays concern themselves with the essence of childhood, the devastations of loss, the beauty of the things we make with our hands, the writers who engage us, and the keys to the kingdom of awe. Some of the essays were written years ago. Some are brand new.
I spent several months compiling these essays and identifying their binding themes. When the words were ready, Bill began to work on illustrations to accompany each of the six sections. He painted outside, in his studio, where I never interfere. When the oil paintings were done, he came inside and amplified them with digital art. Finally, the images complete, I wrote toward his imagination—small fragments that now appear alongside the art that inspired them.
You Are Not Vanished Here is, then, a call and a response. It is a book in which Bill and I fully enter each other’s spheres—the yearning realm of my stories, on the one hand, and the complex magic of his art, on the other.
We hope you will enjoy the book. We have put our hearts into it.
Recent Interviews and Publications
My conversation with Amy Tan, at the Free Library of Philadelphia, April 29, 2024.
My conversation with Helen Hiebert about all things paper and otherwise, April 19, 2024
“Details, Details, Details,” a craft essay in Cleaver Magazine, May 11, 2024
“Character Development: Lessons from Amy Tan,” in Brevity Blog, May 14, 2024
Juncture Announces a Brand New Workshop Series
“Taking Flight” is a four-part workshop series designed for writers of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry seeking new ways to think about character, scene, story, plot, pace, and language itself. Participants will enter a curated world of art, music, and landscape, take a behind-the-scenes look at Beth’s approach to fitting words with images and ideas, and write to a progression of elevated, guided prompts. Selected responses will be shared and considered within the Zoom classroom.
Details
Saturday, September 28, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (People)
Saturday, October 5, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Landscapes)
Sunday, October 12, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Plot and Pace)
Saturday, October 19, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Big Ideas)
Visit our Workshops Page to register
Upcoming Workshops
Beth will be giving a full-day Master Class on behalf of CRAFT TALKS on the topic of character development on June 1. More information here.
Beth will be teaching a Master Class on Writing Home on behalf of CRAFT TALKS on July 13, 2024. More information here.
Beth will be teaching a Master Class on Telling Details on behalf of Cleaver Magazine on July 28, from 2 to 4 PM. More information here.
Bind News:
A number of new items are now available in the Bind-Arts Etsy shop, featuring Beth’s weaving into book covers, Kephart Keepers, handmade cards, and more.
Thirty-five years ago, the job at the big-wow company down the road was mine. I’d made it through all the interview rounds. I’d impressed with my portfolio. I’d been given a tour, been shown where I’d sit, knew how much money I’d be making. I’d get a letter making it official in a couple of days, I’d been told, and in the intervening hours I should let other prospective hiring executives know that I’d been plucked from the employment marketplace.
That letter never came, of course. A few weeks later I got pregnant with my son.
We writers know the scenario well. Someone in power gives us a sign—an agent, perhaps, asking for an exclusive read of our newest pages and what we hear back is … nothing. Or the editor at a certain publishing house writes with enthusiasm, even winning charm, I’ll be in touch in the first week of January, and because we’ve dared to believe her, we wait an extra month to follow up only to met with … nothing. Or someone says I want you to give this keynote for me, or I want you on my panel, or I want you on my podcast, and we begin making our essential notes to self about what we’ll say, but really, as it turns out, we were not the one most wanted, we were but mere runners up, news we learn by hearing nothing at all, except for the ping of our unanswered emails.
They just lost our number, we try to tell ourselves—mis-sent their email, had an emergency. They are just in need of a better prod, we say, as the silence continues—a brief and tender, adorably self-mocking, de facto apologetic, surely subservient note that might just be the best follow-up note we ever wrote, except that it, too, will go unanswered.
A no we can take. A no is not confusing. A no is a decision made, it is nothing that’s left hanging. The silence is much harder.
Careless? Cavalier? It doesn’t really matter much in the wake of the Lit World’s Silent Treatment. Our hope starts to hurt. Our buoyancy leaks air. We doubt the work we dared to love, the stories we believed were important.
That son I had all those years ago was the best thing that could have ever happened—a gift in the wake of a most confusing disappointment, proof that the silencers do not have the final say. That son has his own business now, a boutique strategic advertising firm that would not exist were it not for those who say yes to him and actually mean it.
But what about all the others—the ones who say yes until they vanish? How, I asked him the other day, does he remain uplifted in the face of negation? How does he, day after day, extend his heart, extend his hand?
“You’re an upholder, Mom,” my son replied, citing Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies. “You expect people to be like you—to follow through on what’s been promised. But I’m a questioner, and so I understand the questioner in others.” By which, my son means, that sometimes yes means maybe, and sometimes maybe means no, and how what takes place inside a moment might well be reconsidered later, and most likely will. How everything is fluid until it’s not, and how another’s silence is no reflection on us, no measure of our worth, no indication, in our case, of the value of our words, our truths, our stories.
My son is wise, and what he says is true, and we all need (ask Rubin) our questioners. But I am condemned, I suppose, to my upholding, to my basic wish for basic civility. I am condemned to wonder this: Even if silence is a symptom of our brisk and fleeting times—the easiest way out for agents of power, deciders of deals, and coordinators of keynotes—does such silence, in the end, advance the world in which we live?
I don’t believe it does.
But I close with this, for it also must be said: There are—I promise you, I promise us—still extraordinarily good, hugely talented, wondrously big-hearted, non-ghosting people in this publishing world. There are still agents who answer, editors who care, people who keep the promises they make. You can find their names in the backs of the books they’ve stewarded. You can find them extending a hand at conferences. You can find them in the mastheads of the publications you love most. You can find them behind the colophons they’ve crafted. Every time I grow disheartened (and oh, I do grow disheartened), someone proves me wrong. He answers my query. They want to talk about a piece. She invites me to sit in a room surrounded by books to imagine what a story might become.
Ghosters run rampant; they have their unsaid say. But there are also those who truly do love stories and respect the people who dare to write them. There are those who will answer your query—one way or the other. There are those who are still worth searching for. There are reasons, yet, to hope.
Recent publications and features
“Does It Have to be Memoir?” Brevity Blog, March 28, 2024
“A Paper Tale,” Omnia feature on My Life in Paper, March 26, 2024
“Three Squared: Book of Synonyms,” Cyanotype Art, Big Wing Review, March 15, 2024
“A Memory Palace of Paper,” The Boston Globe, March 12, 2024
Juncture Teaching News
Beth has a few open spots for one-on-one manuscript consulting. More about that here.
Beth will be giving a workshop on behalf of CRAFT TALKS entitled “Does It Have to Be Memoir? Reimagining Your True Story” on April 3. More information here.
Beth will be giving a full-day masterclass on behalf of CRAFT TALKS on the topic of character development on June 1. More information here.
Juncture Announces a Brand New Workshop Series
“Taking Flight” is a four-part workshop series designed for writers of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry seeking new ways to think about character, scene, story, plot, pace, and language itself. Participants will enter a curated world of art, music, and landscape, take a behind-the-scenes look at Beth’s approach to fitting words with images and ideas, and write to a progression of elevated, guided prompts. Selected responses will be shared and considered within the Zoom classroom.
Details
Saturday, September 28, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (People)
Saturday, October 5, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Landscapes)
Sunday, October 13, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Plot and Pace)
Saturday, October 19, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Big Ideas)
Registration opens in April on the Juncture site.
Juncture Announces the Planned Launch of an Illustrated Essay Collection
Juncture will launch Beth’s first-ever essay collection, You Are Not Vanished Here, later this year. The collection showcases short-burst work as well as longer meditative pieces, all organized into six cohering sections with titles like “The Kingdom of Awe,” “Far Away, and Near,” and “Edge Life.” Each section will be prefaced by Bill’s original art.
Please keep an eye out for the upcoming cover reveal and a mid-summer launch date.
More Juncture News
We hope you’ll consider buying one of Juncture’s memoir craft books such as Tell the Truth: Make It Matter, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life, each of which looks at very different aspects of truth making in very different ways. All Juncture memoir-making books are supported by a wide range of other writers’ works.
Bind News:
We continue to evolve here at Bind—adding new items to our Etsy shop, preparing our schedule of farmers market and guild shows (we will soon have some exciting news to share in that regard), and exploring new means (sewing machines! a modest paper-weaving tool!) to produce new kinds of art. We are always grateful for your interest.
In recent workshops and craft pieces, I’ve been exploring that intriguing netherland in writing—that place where personal stories inform the making of hybrid forms and fictions, on the one hand, and where the crafting of hybrids and fictions helps us better understand what might have been in the lives of those we’ve loved, on the other.
A perfect exemplar of that transmutation is the new book by Cynthia Reeves—Falling Through the New World (Gold Wake Press Collective). This is a collection of short stories written over a period of two decades. It’s fiction that emerges from Cyndi’s deep engagement with family history, global history, and generational trauma. I asked Cyndi to share a bit of her process with us at Juncture Notes. I was delighted when she said yes.
Note to readers: I’ll be giving a workshop on this very topic, “Does It Have to Be Memoir? Reimagining Your True Story,” on behalf of CRAFT TALKS on April 3. More information here. In addition, please take note of Juncture News, below, in which Bill and I are announcing a brand-new Juncture Workshops series, “Taking Flight,” for 2024.
Weaving Family History into Fiction
Cynthia Reeves
Imagine this: An Abruzzesi lacemaker pulls a cylindrical velvet pillow onto her lap, fastens the pricked pattern of a doily to the convex surface with hundreds of silver pins, secures dozens of bobbins wound with silken thread to the pins, and begins the intricate process of intertwining and plaiting the threads. It’s a delicate dance of weaving, accompanied by the music of clicking bobbins.
Twenty years ago, when I began to envision the scenes and characters of my newly released collection of short stories, Falling Through the New World, this image was the starting point for months of research into the craft of bobbin lace.
Why bobbin lace? I’d inherited several pieces of my maternal grandmother Anna’s handiwork—a bedspread and bureau scarf of rustic lace patterned with overlapping diamonds, and a white nightgown edged with gauzy scallops of eyelash Chantilly. The book was to be fiction, but its essence was to pay tribute to my Italian forebears—the virtuosity of their labor, their courage to leave the familiar for the new world, and their faith in the future. I saw bobbin lacemaking as a literal thread that would bind together the four generations inhabiting my book. But I also saw its potential as metaphor—many threads simultaneously in play, the fragility of lace, and patterns repeated or broken across generations.
Beyond exploiting bobbin lacemaking’s literary potential, I wished to honor my grandmother’s memory. It broke my heart that she came from a culture that valued lacemaking as art, whereas in America the craft was considered manual labor. Moreover, her arrival here in 1929 coincided with dwindling demand for lace as fashions became plainer, and the Depression all but eliminated the market for handmade lace. Even after months of delving into the art, however, I found it hard to depict the complicated weaving of wedding veils and dresses, antimacassars and tablecloths. It took months for me to feel confident enough to describe in the most rudimentary way the fictional Anna making a wedding veil in the story “La Mantiglia”:
I pick up a pair of bobbins and resume where I left off yesterday, twisting and crossing the bobbins, guiding them along the pins that outline the paper pattern underneath the lace. Row after row of stitches, repeating and repeating, create the delicate mesh of the wedding veil. A single bird with two heads facing away from each other rises out of nowhere, floats in the airy ground, and dissolves at the edges.
As the stories unfolded, I came to know my grandmother—who died before my parents married—through the heirlooms she brought over. Touching the linens she’d touched raised goosebumps, as if the very fabric were ghost flesh. Her photographs haunted me. These things were among the precious belongings she was allowed as a steerage passenger on the MS Vulcania traveling from Naples to New York. I can almost see her choosing from among her clothes and photographs—and yes, lace—tucking each item carefully between sheets of tissue paper. Anna Giove Romano De Francesco was, according to the ship’s manifest, a housewife in possession of the $50 required for admittance to America, destined for her husband’s residence in Philadelphia, and—not surprisingly—not a polygamist or an anarchist. Through the miracle of fiction, though, I transformed her into a first-class passenger enjoying the comforts of a luxurious berth, an artisan practiced in lacemaking, stylishly dressed.
The challenge when using family history to inform fiction is to transmute facts into something aesthetically meaningful. It was difficult to let go of who I knew my relatives to be—hard-working, deeply religious people—in order to create characters whose flaws and tensions illuminate the human condition. But eventually, for example, I was able to conceive Anna’s Mamma in “La Dolentissima Madre” as a less-than-admirable character whose relationship to Anna and her lacemaking emerge in the very first paragraph:
At the deserted kitchen table Mamma ties a wide ribbon of my handmade lace around a gold box. She winds each of the two long strands trailing from the knot around her fingers, once, twice, three times, and secures the center with a piece of thin wire. The bow’s petals fall like those of a chrysanthemum as she fluffs them into a pleasing circle of overlapping loops. To make each loop requires ten centimeters of ribbon; to make each centimeter of ribbon requires a quarter turn of the clock. In the time it takes Mamma to fashion the bow, she has used up another day of my life.
Juncture Announces a Brand New Workshop Series
“Taking Flight” is a four-part workshop series designed for writers of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry seeking new ways to think about character, scene, story, plot, pace, and language itself. Participants will enter a curated world of art, music, and landscape, take a behind-the-scenes look at Beth’s approach to fitting words with images and ideas, and write to a progression of elevated, guided prompts. Selected responses will be shared and considered within the Zoom classroom.
Details
Saturday, September 28, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (People)
Saturday, October 5, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Landscapes)
Sunday, October 13, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Plot and Pace)
Saturday, October 19, 2024 3:00 – 4:30 ET (Big Ideas)
Registration opens in April on the Juncture site.
Juncture Announces the Planned Launch of an Illustrated Essay Collection
Juncture will launch Beth’s first-ever essay collection, You Are Not Vanished Here, later this year. The collection showcases short-burst work as well as longer meditative pieces, all organized into six cohering sections with titles like “The Kingdom of Awe,” “Far Away, and Near,” and “Edge Life.” Each section will be prefaced by Bill’s original art.
Please keep an eye out for the upcoming cover reveal and a mid-summer launch date.
More Juncture News
Beth has a few open spots for one-on-one manuscript consulting. More about that here.
Beth will be giving a workshop on behalf of CRAFT TALKS entitled “Does It Have to Be Memoir? Reimagining Your True Story” on April 3. More information here.
We hope you’ll consider buying one of Juncture’s memoir craft books such as Tell the Truth: Make It Matter, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life, each of which looks at very different aspects of truth making in very different ways. All Juncture memoir-making books are supported by a wide range of other writers’ works.
Bind News:
We continue to evolve here at Bind—adding new items to our Etsy shop, preparing our schedule of farmers market and guild shows (we will soon have some exciting news to share in that regard), and exploring new means (sewing machines! a modest paper-weaving tool!) to produce new kinds of art. We are always grateful for your interest.
At the University of Pennsylvania this semester I’m teaching two gifted and committed young women who are at work, in independent-study fashion, on what one might classify as poems, or prose fragments, or lyric suites, or tether-breaking narratives.
Or something more? Else?
Sometimes the work is rooted in everyday truth, and sometimes the truths are imagined, and often the work is magpie work, weaving many forms and genres. Beautifully intense, these young writers are requiring me to once again transcend myself—to move beyond what I know for sure, to test new theories and proclamations, and to read with more teacherly precision work I once read solely for my pleasure.
I’ve always loved the wild, wide mind of Carole Maso, for example, but not until now, having assigned one of the students Maso’s The Art Lover, have I had to figure out just how that book, with its memoir flicks and fiction dives, illustrative art and time warps, works. And Saskia Hamilton’s All Souls moved me deeply, but why, precisely? What can be learned from it? How might I teach the authenticity that rises from its raw, not perfectly seamed self? And I need to read Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, the novel, as The New Yorker says, that “never settles down,” because one of my students is deeply inspired by it, and now I’m ordering Anna Hope’s Expectation, for the same reason, and there I stand in the kitchen cooking, listening to interviews with Anne Carson. And new to me because I think this might inspire one of them is Sofia Samatar/del Samatar’s Monster Portraits, and because I can imagine both young women wholly embracing Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s forthcoming intensity of memoiristic poetry Exploding Head, I have assigned it, I am reading it again, I am investigating its vivid parts. And why not pull out Suzanne Scanlon’s index Her 37th Year again, and can I really teach these two illuminated souls without leaning on Lars Horn?
Clearly, I am in over my head, but isn’t that what teaching is? Shouldn’t we always be just a little panicked? Shouldn’t teachers be the first to admit that we don’t quite know yet, that we are working things out, that we cling to the notion that we learn even more when we sit down to learn together?
“What are you hoping for from this course, from me?” I asked one of the students at the semester’s start.
“I want you to ask me the right questions,” she said.
Could there be, I thought, on my side of the Zoom screen, any larger responsibility than that?
Panic has accompanied the making of every course I’ve ever taught, every Juncture presentation, every guest workshop, including this brand-new Cleaver course, Writing Advanced by Categories: Obsessions into Stories, a masterclass scheduled for February 25. I’ve arranged and rearranged that slide set more than a dozen times now. I’ve rehearsed it and torn it apart. Just ask Bill, who does the digital rearranging for me.
At the same time, I’m taking a class of my own—Weave Through Winter, Helen Hiebert’s course on paper weaving. Every single day during this month of February, I’m working on her prompts, trying out new structures, and studying the posted work of the hundred other paper weavers. I’m new at this, I’m vulnerable, I’m trying, I’m making, I’m posting, too, the amateur among them. Not precisely panicked, but somewhere close to panic’s edge. And somewhere, absolutely, on the right side of joy.
And so my hope for you this winter: Take on something new. Pursue the thing you don’t know yet. Live the wider realm.
Upcoming Workshops:
February 25| Writing Advanced by Categories: Obsessions into Stories, Masterclass, Cleaver Magazine. Register here.
Beth has a few open spots for one-on-one manuscript consulting. More about that here.
Other workshops are in the works for 2024. In the meantime, we hope you’ll consider buying one of Juncture’s memoir craft books such as Tell the Truth: Make It Matter, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life, each of which looks at very different aspects of truth making in very different ways. All Juncture memoir-making books are supported by a wide range of other writers’ works.
News, Essays, Interviews:
Harold Underdown at Kane Press has acquired world rights to my The Many Lives of …, a four-book picture book series about the origins and uses of basic materials. The first book, The Many Lives of Paper, will be illustrated by Julia Breckenreid. Publication is scheduled for fall 2025.
“Beth Kephart Pens a Love Letter to Paper Through Her New Memoir,” PRINT Magazine, February 1, 2024 (an interview featuring several examples of my paper art)
“…a heartbreaking and highly original memoir, “Washington Independent Review of Books, February 1, 2024 (a narrative essay weaving My Life in Paper with the archives of Carolyn Forché)
“Extra (Extra) Virgin Olive Oil,” Orion Magazine, February 1, 2024
“I Took Instructions from My Hands,” Cleaver Magazine, January 17, 2023
Bind News:
There are new journals, cards, prints, and booklets in our BINDbyBIND Etsy shop. We invite you to take a look around. We hope you’ll consider buying one for yourself or a friend.
As if this were the cure, the one sure thing that springs each story from its mysterious interior habitat and assures its dominion on the page.
As if those of us (I raise my hand) who write in fury for an hour or day or weeks at a time and then push back, pause, leave the story in its nascent state are not somehow writers, too. As if those of us who do not write for months at a time (there goes my hand again) should take up another trade, or cause.
For many, of course, a daily writing practice is the cure, as inseparable from the reliable routine as brushing one’s teeth or taking a walk or setting the kettle to boil. Five-hundred words a day. One thousand. A chapter. Among our dearest writing friends, dailiness motors stories forward. It soothes. It yields. It works.
But is dailiness a mandate? Should we feel ashamed if we are not writing all the time? Should we worry about our authorial future? Our interior lives? Our general legacies?
Here, at the dawn of a new year, I would like to suggest that is okay—we are okay—if we cannot heed the call to write every single day.
Life, for one thing, might get in the way. Perhaps there is a child next door who comes to you with questions: Can she make paper with you? Will you teach her how to bind a book? Do you want to hear what she hopes Santa will bring? Wouldn’t it be funny if she danced like the Nutcracker, and do you want her to teach you how? Why not let the child’s curiosity become our own, her spark become our joy? Why not set the pen aside, leave the writing for another day? Why not decide, as the clock ticks on, that we did not lose by not writing that day. No. In fact, something ineffable was gained. Something that will someday excavate vocabulary, image, or metaphor we had not previously acknowledged (or deployed).
The work-in-progress, for another thing, might want or need some time to itself—time to sort its way through our subconscious, time to change its mind, time to find the missing thing with which it must ultimately braid, time to find the place where the story actually begins, time to make sense of what the writing teacher or the workshop colleague said. So much of our writing work is language-less. It is a feeling, a mood, a melody that emerges precisely because we have chosen not to force it. We have, instead, given it time to breathe—time away from our scribbling, our thesaurus thumbing, our boundless analyses and critiques. Our lines-across-the-forehead need.
Other people’s stories, to name yet another thing, might be placing a claim on our immediate attention or wistful imaginations—and for reasons we cannot even name. Yes, we really did have to read Saskia Hamilton’s poems today, and so went our writing time. Or maybe Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind galvanized us. Or Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day. Something in us cracked open as we read, and we’d needed to be cracked and crackled in just that way before we could begin to write again.
The point is: We are not lesser writers if we do not write each day. Nor are we lesser if we decide to change course with a writing project that has heretofore consumed us—to turn the story into a poem, the poem into a memoir, the memoir into a burst of flash nonfiction, or the clamor of the work itself into the quiet of not writing. Every line we do write when we make our way back to writing will be broadened in incalculable ways by the child to whom we said yes, the poem that poet wrote, or the time we gave ourselves to look away from the words we had been writing so that we might appreciate the world that waits for us. The world that, with its hush and curl, its Nutcracker dance and beads of light, will send us back someday (we cannot know when) to the work, the joy, the necessity of finding the words with which we story forward.
Upcoming Workshop:
February 25| Writing Advanced by Categories: Obsessions into Stories, Masterclass, Cleaver Magazine. Register here.
Other workshops are in the works for 2024. In the meantime, we hope you’ll consider buying one of Juncture’s memoir craft books such as Tell the Truth: Make It Matter, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life, each of which looks at very different aspects of truth making in very different ways. All Juncture memoir-making books are supported by a wide range of other writers’ works.
News, Essays, Interviews:
My Life in Paper was featured on Helen Hiebert’s 100 Papery Picks 2023.
“Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch” was nominated for 2024 Best of the Net by The Gravity of the Thing.
“The History of Color” has been nominated for a Puschart Prize by Short Reads.
Beth’s prose poem “Squeeze” is featured in Story Seek, a “new virtual reality journey combining color, sound, and site-specific poetry, memoir, and fiction,” to quote the creators. Story Seek is a collaboration between Cleaver and the Drexel Entrepreneurial Game Studio, funded in part by the William Penn Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
Blank Pages, Bound Books, Beth’s essay about journal making, appeared in Writers Digest, December 22, 2023.
Beth’s conversation with Michelle Fost, about failure, redemption, hope, and My Life in Paper, appeared in Cleaver, December 18, 2023.
Beth is featured in What Women Create, an eight-page spread on grass paper, in the Winter 2023/2024 issue. Copies can be found online or at Barnes and Noble.
A dialogue with Jehanne Dubrow, appeared in Adroit Journal, December 12, 2023. Jehanne and I talked the way poets and prose writers do about the entanglements of language, structure, and form.
“The Lessness of Things,” an essay about wanting, well, less, appeared in Books by Women, December 2023.
Bind News:
There are new journals, cards, prints, and booklets in our BINDbyBIND Etsy shop. We invite you to take a look around. We hope you’ll consider buying one for yourself or a friend.