Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her new book is Wife | Daughter | Self: a memoir in essays, from Forest Avenue Press. More at bethkephartbooks.com.
"setting type by hand involves a very intimate kind of reading"
In 1901, at the age of nineteen, Virginia Woolf takes her bookbinding instructions from Miss Power and stands at her desk in the old nursery of her father’s house, blue curtains flapping in the window. She practices with vellum and linen, silk and leather, grids and paste and threads. She searches for books in need […]
Top Ten New Joys in an Old Kitchen
10 for 2020
Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat ~ About Dinner, by Molly Stevens ~ Those incredibly tasty, probably calorie-free brown-butter hazelnut shortbread cookies ~ The mustard-seed pickled golden raisin chutney that is as good as candy and I mean it ~ The marmalade cranberry raisin chutney (have raisins become […]
Stamping the Life Upon the Page
Messy, dangerous, preoccupied and preoccupying—memoir concentrates and quickens life. It saturates. It sings. I’m just writing about me, the memoirist says, but me is such the wily thing, and without the heroics of structure and the discipline of theme, the me on the page becomes just one thing, then the next. That me may be […]
Photograph of a Lost Oil Painting
Piercing the mystique of the great uncle who designed the Waldorf-Astoria
If I begin with purple cabbage as the prima facie evidence I must also begin with midnight, with me, my brother, my sister, our parents stiffened by a long car ride. Also here at the beginning is a white yapper of a toy poodle named Candy, and a bright light, such a bright light, bulbed […]
Forgive the Defacer: On Writing into Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State
Waking up hurts, I'd think. And I'd wake up.
I was in a fugue state reading Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State. I was safely inside the mood of the novel—inside the patterning of Kiesling’s sentences, the swish-swish of mother-child fiction that could have only been written by a mother with a child. Kiesling’s book is an escorting book. It is transporting fiction. I was […]
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