On the Giving of Gifts (and Alchemy)

As Suleika Jaouad's The Book of Alchemy makes its way into the world, I am thinking about gift givers, including Suleika herself, who included one of my essays in her brand-new, open-hearted book.

“Pearl Earrings,” Beth Kephart, Monotype

NOTE: Suleika Jaouad's The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life is here, is now. A few hours ago, I had the supreme pleasure of watching her launch this beauty at Miller Theater in my city—Suleika, her husband, Jon Batiste, and an ensembled, assembled surround-sound of love. Grace. The evening was pure grace. Light and song and conversation. Dueting. Is that a word? I have no time to check. Dueting. It fits. Suleika and Jon were dueting.

Alchemy is a book about the power of the journal, the short story, the pause. It’s about, as Suleika says, writing toward ourselves so that we might reach back out to the world. Suleika is joined in the book by others—writers, musicians, artists, the young, and those carrying a few more years with something to say about life itself and the importance of recording our lived moments. Each essay yields a journaling prompt.

Among the essays gathered in Alchemy is one I wrote, a piece about my mother’s talent for giving. Having had the essay selected for inclusion is Suleika’s remarkable gift to me. Having been featured in The Isolation Journals, Suleika’s Substack, is thanks to my dear friend Cassie Mannes Murray and that most-fabulous Carmen Radley.

Gifts. I know what they mean.

The prompt that concludes my Alchemy essay extends an invitation to write of a gift that in some way defined your relationship to another and to reflect on that gift as it has echoed forward. Today my prose poem might be read as a response to my own prompt. I hope these words take you back to a moment in time in your own life and get you journaling. I hope Alchemy becomes part of your own creative practice.

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Pearl Earrings

The way I can’t remember most things I remember you in your room of attic artifacts, of lace and pins and scraps of other’s past, of Beatrice, a flea market find, with a lampshade for a hat. You were

pleasingly indecipherable and coy, the uncle who rolled his trousers at the shore, and more than the sea you smelled of sequins, fusty paper bags, slightly tacky Elmer’s glue, the scrapbook ornaments that you made each year for Christmas. You never

brought me the right presents on purpose. You kept the pearl earrings in their velvet box in your one deep pocket until your sister had gone to check the turkey and it was just the two of us. I knew you loved me best. I never guessed that I would die at your death the way I died at your death,

Uncle Danny. I never thought you would die, to begin with, or never know my son, never be astonished by him, for my sake. The sea, however, is where you left it, and Christmas is still yours, and I never touch a pearl to my ear without hearing you, loving you first.

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Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, received a Booklist star alongside gorgeous words by Carol Haggas; Beth Castrodale of Small Picks Press called the writing in the novel “staggeringly beautiful.” Caroline Leavitt and I talked about the book’s making here. The book is available wherever books are sold.

My first book on the writing of memoir, Handling the Truth, won a Books for a Better Life Award shortly after its publication in 2013. I’ve continued to write books about the making of true stories ever since, working with my husband to create workbooks, prompt-rich books, and suggested approaches to the page. A guide to those resources, along with a link to my essay collection You Are Not Vanished Here (illustrated by William Sulit) can be found here.

Join Beth for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.