On Making Art for Tomorrow

and deep gratitude to Noëlle Gibbs, Managing Editor of Reed Magazine

A screenshot of the Reed Magazine feature, June 2025

Several months ago, Noëlle Gibbs of Reed Magazine reached out to me and asked if I might be interested in speaking with her about, well, many things. I’m the sort of writer who doesn’t ever quite believe that someone actually wants to speak with me, and so I pondered my response, ultimately sending an email that was some embarrassing version of Really? Me? This Beth Kephart? Are you sure?

Yes, Noëlle said.

Noëlle became one of the very first people, outside my editor and my friend Judy Goldman, to read Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News. She prepared, she asked beautiful questions. She invited me to share the art I made that accompanies the novel—those month by month collages capturing the weather, mood, and landscape of 1918 Philadelphia that would never have been publicly seen, were it not for Noëlle wishing to share them.

I’m posting this to thank Noëlle for being patient with the Beth who said, Me. Really? These interviews don’t just happen. These features don’t just appear. There was much work done behind the scenes, and public gratitude is in order. I invite you to listen in, as we talk, or to take a look at some of those portraits of that fictional/nonfictional year that I constructed with stained, painted, torn, reassembled papers of many textures.

I made these collages because I did not wish to leave the novel, leave my grandmother, leave my city, leave the dream. I made these collages because Tomorrow is, itself, a collage of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir, and because transparent papers, one on top of the other, tell so many stories, and because I had found such a sense of purpose in writing the novel that I needed the art to help me somehow decompress and reorient myself to a life in which the writing of this particular book was now in my past.

But it was Noëlle who asked if she might see—and share—the art. Noëlle who made these collage pieces public.

The link to the feature, including the Zoom interview, is here.

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More gratitude:

I had finished assembling this post above before I had the incredible honor of spending an hour with the talented, thoughtful, and highly recommended

Darien Gee

this past Thursday afternoon on my first Substack Live.

(Honestly, I had the same response in my heart when Darien invited me to the Live event. Me? How? Why?)

Darien and I spoke of small pieces, last lines, the beauty we find in writerly community and process, Virginia Woolf, Henry Thoreau, C.K. Williams, Jessie Williams Burns, a stranger’s apartment in Prague, and so many other things. Darien has done a gorgeous job of time stamping, link making, and presenting our hour together on her fine Substack, Writer-ish, and so I direct you to all that here. I don’t have a clue how Darien does it. I’m just grateful for our (now even closer) proximity.