Authors in the Corner: Blogging with Beth Kephart

Blogging with us today is Beth Kephart.

Beth Kephart spends the daylight hours as the strategic planning and writing partner of a boutique communications firm. In the early mornings, she writes. She was named a National Book Award finalist, an NEA grant winner, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts recipient, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts winner, a Leeway Foundation award winner, and a Speakeasy Poetry Prize winner. GHOSTS IN THE GARDEN was a Book Sense pick. UNDERCOVER and HOUSE OF DANCE were both recently nominated for the ALA Best Books for Young Readers List. Visit her at her blog, www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com.

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Long before blogging became a vehicle for souls such as me, I searched for ways to combine actual color and image with words. I’d buy those blank books and watercolor page after page, blotting the tints until they dried, until I could write my poems above them. I had a colored-pencil stage. I had a scatter-the-words-across-the-page-in-varying-font-styles episode.

Then blogging entered my life (I was a little late to start, but I started nonetheless), and it was as if I’d found the key to heaven. All those photos I’d been taking had a sudden, potential purpose—a virtual home. All those stories I wanted to tell, those moods I wanted to evoke, those hanging possibilities could now be succored by a picture.

Blogging for me is about completing a puzzle—about finding synchronicities between images and ideas. Sometimes I’ll go out with my camera hunting for a specific image that might support a blog story. Sometimes I study my existing photographs until they suggest an angle, an idea. The effect, in the end, is reverberatory. Blogging enables me to live inside an echo chamber.

Thanks so much, Beth!

Quote of the Day:

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby