Promptly: Beth Kephart

Wildflower seeds and a prompt for new beginnings

Today it is my great pleasure to present a prompt for collecting prompts from Beth Kephart, powerhouse writer-of-all-the-things, National Book Award finalist in memoir, teacher, book artist, and generally lovely person. I first worked with Beth when Penny Candy Books published her MG/YA/also good for adults novel, Cloud Hopper, set among old planes and majestic hot air balloons of a run-down municipal airport. I fell in love with her cast of characters (one of whom is a teenaged baker of all things blueberry, and the descriptions of her bakes will delight you) and her singular, poetic voice. Bonus: Beth’s prompt is about seeds and flowers. 🌻

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The Prompt

It started with seeds. Way too many of them, but I didn’t know that then. I stomped them into the earth. The neighbor’s children stomped. And then we waited. One year, two. When the wildflowers began to rise and bloom it was a gorgeous, nearly unbearable surfeit——cornflower, yarrow, perennial lupine——one upon the next, so many. When the first wave of blooms had reached their natural end, other flowers crowded in——black-eyed Susan, dwarf sunflower, prairie cornflower——until soon the first eruption of flowers was fighting with the next, looking for a way to lay down their seedy heads.

Has this ever happened to you? You’ve started your poem, your story, your essay with too many seeds, and now all the color and leaf stuff are at war with one another, and it’s all one big lovely mess, and you know you have to pare down, prune, but you love all the buds and all the petals and so what do you do?

[Try this: Make a list of the images that must go——that scene, that scrap of dialogue, that cultivated detail——and slip them into a journal or a tab marked “Prompts.” Think of what has been excised as what is now to come, so many brand new starting places for the poems or stories still cracking wide within.]

The Writer

Beth Kephart’s book art

Beth Kephart is the author of nearly forty books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher of memoir, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Her new craft book is Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life and, forthcoming, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera. More at bethkephartbooks.com, junctureworkshops.com, and bind-arts.com.

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Much of Beth’s book art involves botanical work——cyanotyped ferns, paper made from grass, dried flowers embedded in marbled pages——bound and delicately stitched. Here’s what she’s been working on this week:

Beth Kephart art books

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Thanks, as always, for joining the conversation. Thanks to Beth for being here. May the prompts be with you!

Hugs,

Lex