Beth Kephart, Writer of the Heart's Mystery

Her very first book, A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage, was short-listed for the National Book Award in 1998. Its subject was very close to home: her son, Jeremy, had been diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder when he was two.

She and her husband Bill refused to listen to doctors who said they should put Jeremy in special schools or environments for autistic children. "We were given terminology. The terminology was a dark room, a dead end, an imbroglio not an enlightenment."
Is Normal Possible? Can It Be Defined?

They decided that they did not want their son's life to consist of "holing up in the offices of therapists, in special classrooms, in isolated exercises, in simulating living, while everyday 'normal' happens casually on the other side of the wall."

Instead, they kept his life manageable, helping him to handle the intense capacities of his own mind, surrounding him with safe people and situations. If he could not handle leaving the house, they kept him at home. When he found a lime green fedora several sizes too big and insisted on wearing it everywhere, they let him have his hat.

"He marched to his own beat, one set by rituals and phases, all of which doctors attributed to PDD."


When he was in sixth grade, he started writing screenplays. His head was full of intricate plots and titles of movies, memorized in categories. That should not have surprised them. He had always preferred tales of medieval knights to Goodnight Moon.

Fast forward to December 2007, when Jeremy got the news that he had been accepted into "the college of his choice, a prestigious communications school" where he could study film-making, his lifelong love. .Kephart's readers get to share such moments on her blog, where she posts photographs, bits of poetry, muses on the world around her and her writing process, and regular updates on Jeremy's progress in the world.

Beth Kephart's original following, in the days before blogging, were readers who love memoir. They devoured her offerings about her child, her friendships, her in-laws in El Salvador, her beloved Schuylkill River, the Chanticleer Gardens outside Philadelphia where she taught young writers each summer, and her theories of creativity and business. What all her books have in common is beauty - of language, of process, of thought.

Into The Tangle of Friendship

A Memoir of the Things That Matter was written when Jeremy was pre-teen, finding his unique way into friendships and teaching his mother, even as she was teaching him.

Her first YAF book, Undercover, was one of those instances where "a story has been living inside of you for years and years, but it takes someone to pry it open."

She admits that Elisa, her protagonist in Undercover, shares some of her own traits as a teenager. She has a vivid imagination, a love of dance, and a writer's way of seeing the world.
The Way I Watch the Sky, The Way I Read the Sun, the Forty-two Flavors of Breeze

Kephart claims that Elisa is a far better writer than she herself was at that age. Elisa is so good at reading the world, at reading people, that she decides she's undercover. She sees things other people never notice.

"I know just by looking when someone's wavering with love or dreamy with longing or about to turn and flee."

Elisa's ability to see and write makes her the Cyrano de Bergerac of her school. She conjures words for lovestruck boys, sweet nectar that works every time they use her words as their own..

Beth Kephart's most recent YAF novel, The Heart Is Not A Size, is particularly relevant to what is happening at the border between Texas and Mexico, where she and Jeremy went on a church mission trip in 2005 to help build a community restroom in Anapra, a squatter's colony just over the border from El Paso. She wrote an essay about it which led to the book.

"Given the horrible news that greets us most days from Juárez, I want the world to know of the beauty that lives behind the headlines -- of the people who deserve our attention and concern," she told the El Paso Times recently in a telephone interview.
On Behalf of Those With Nothing

Kephart's home church, St. John's Presbyterian in Devon, Pennsylvania, sent a group of privileged teenagers from the Philadelphia suburbs into a community where "Mules stand in the shade of pallet houses, nuzzling a cardboard box, a dented pail."

Her description of her teenage characters is equally vivid, as she captures what a pastor calls "the interior journey that accompanies introducing youth from the United States to life in Mexico."

The two friends in the book learn about "Las muertas de Juárez (the dead women of Juárez)" and decide to do something for the children left behind. Their "interior journey" will take them places they have never been, within their friendship and within their own souls.

Like another popular author, Anne Lamott, Kephart is a woman of faith, but its presence is often more subtle in her work than in Lamott's. For example, in The Heart Is Not a Size, The Cristo del Rey - the big white limestone cross of Jesus on a hill above El Paso is always there, off in the distance.

Beth Kephart's faith in the human heart is always there, as well, just as is Jeremy, the little boy she and her husband nurtured and protected, who has grown up to be a sort of guardian angel, checking in to see how his Mom is doing. Readers should go back to A Slant of Sun to fully appreciate this writer.