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    Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self
    Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self
    Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self

    By Beth Kephart and William Sulit

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    ?National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart’s new book is an enchanting midlife meditation on aging, identity, and memory set against the backdrop of Chanticleer garden in Pennsylvania.
    On the morning of her forty-?rst birthday, Kephart — a mother, a wife, and a writer pressured by deadlines — finds herself at Chanticleer, one of the world’s most celebrated pleasure gardens. She knows little of the language of flowers. She cannot name the birds in the trees. She is a stranger among the gardeners and the people passing by. And yet she understands that she has somehow found her way to a place that can teach her about life and growth, about the past and the future. Week after week, she returns to Chanticleer — recalling her childhood self, mulling over legacy and soul, striking up friendships with gardeners and conversations with other visitors. Succored by the seasons and the weather, she finds the grace in approaching middle age. There are lessons in seeds, and she finds them. There are lessons in letting go.
    Kephart writes about questions we all ask ourselves: How do we remember who we used to be? How do we imagine who we’ll become? Have we lived our lives as we set out to? What legacies do we wish to leave behind? The book spans a two-year cycle, and each chapter is accompanied by a gorgeous black-and-white photograph of Chanticleer by William Sulit. Ghosts in the Garden pulses with possibility and purpose, with wisdom that is ageless and transcendent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew World Library
    Release dateFeb 8, 2011
    ISBN9781577318668
    Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self
    Author

    Beth Kephart

    Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of 16 books, an adjunct faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania, a frequent memoir workshop leader, and the strategic writing partner in a boutique communications firm. Small Damages, a young adult novel that takes place in southern Spain, was named to many best of 2012 lists and is a Carolyn W. Field Honor Book. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir has received starred reviews and was featured in O magazine. Kephart is a National Book Award finalist, a National Endowment for the Arts grant winner, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts winner, a Speakeasy Poetry Prize winner, and a featured author in the Philadelphia Literary Legacy exhibition. She has written reviews and essays for the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, Millions, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, and many others. She writes a monthly column on place for the Philadelphia Inquirer and has an award-winning blog. Going Over, Kephart’s novel about Berlin in 1983, will be released by Chronicle in April 2014. You can find her blog at http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/ and follow her @BethKephart on Twitter.

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    Reviews for Ghosts in the Garden

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    • 5/5
      My last post was about an anthology of pulp mysteries from the 1920s-1950s. What, you are wondering, does this have to do with a Beth Kephart book? A good question. One of the things you realize as you read pulp mysteries is the authors' abilities to tell a story in a small space. Some of the stories are 10 pages, some 20. But they all have one thing in common. Through the spare use of words, the right words, they've told their tale and captured the readers imagination.And so it is with Beth Kephart's works. Every word is thought out, is necessary. In a spare 120 pages, Beth has transmitted to us her musings as she wanders the Chanticleer Gardens near her home. But first, a word must be said about the photos in the book. As you as gaze at them, some are vividly clear. Some have a focused foreground with a blurry background and some, vice versa. But, isn't that life? Some things in our life are crystal clear, some have moments of clarity amidst a misty, blurry background. As I read Ghosts in the Garden, I felt that that's part of what the author was trying to say. William Sulit, her husband, has created a wonderful counterpoint to Beth's words. (I won't tell you about the poem he wrote to her which is included in the book!)But onto the words themselves. Who would have described a garden as a symphony? Certainly not I. But, in Beth's hands, "After that, to the right, are the strut and tempo of the cut-flower and vegetable garden. The flowers in rows. The vegetables in an enclosure. The upraised arms of espaliers--apples, pears--because something has to conductd this orchestra." Can you not picture the branches raised, holding a baton?Or "Now when I went to the garden I'd sit at the bottom of the hill with a book on my lap--sometimes reading, sometimes just looking out on things: a gathering of bees, the sleepy drooping of big leaves, the geometry of the pebble garden that cascaded away from the so-called ruins, down toward the pond." I can't count the times I've stared at 'nothing' while sitting under a tree.There's the old cliche about 'taking time to smell the roses' and while we all agree its a necessity, here's someone who did, the result of which is this marvelous book...and hopefully a clearer picture of the life she wants to lead. Ghosts in the Garden is a must read.P.S. Beth. You say you "...would like to write a book (a page) that is an acorn only. That ripens from green to brown and supposes a tree, yielding something like a garden." I think you have.
    • 5/5
      Hard to believe I am the first to review this excellent little book. The lead up to, and the poem by her husband are worth the price of the book. Beautiful writing, beautiful sentiments, thought provoking and meditative book. I bought this as gifts for other people. Just great.

    Book preview

    Ghosts in the Garden - Beth Kephart

    The Sound of

    Something Blooming

    We come to gardens bearing memories of gardens. I came to Chanticleer remembering a fringe of strawberries that pressed up against my childhood home. Whether we ever actually ate the strawberries that those tousled plants bore, I don’t remember. Whether my mother planted them there, or perhaps my father, I cannot say for sure. But I know I crouched the little girl’s crouch and peered, the way children peer, toward the fruit. I know I loved how the red would follow white, and how the white had come from green, and how the pendant of juice, with its thistle of seeds, would plump until it was too fat for its serrated cap. There is nothing exotic about a strawberry patch except that it delivers on its promise.

    A strawberry fringe is a garden to a girl, just as the creek that runs between the old shade trees across the street is a child’s haven. I was the one who didn’t mind mud in her shoes, the child who named the tadpoles, then the frogs. I was an adventuress at the creek across the street, where it was cool and dark and also many shades of green (moss, algae, leaves). In a year I would move with my family to an isolated outpost in Alberta, Canada, where nothing anywhere was the lucky color of the Irish and I couldn’t find a seed, and I grew determined — always, forever — never to see that much comatose brown again. Three months later we would be back home, in the house with the strawberry fringe. My toes in the creek. My hands on the frogs. My dreams of fruit and

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