I also wanted to create an environment where they were free to ask questions, write stories, and be inspired by music. I felt at the time like they were always being asked to compete against each other, and I wanted to show them that imagination and writing were not competitive. Then in the summer, when my son had a group of his friends come to our house, I’d roll out huge pieces of paper, give them assignments, and have them write stories. I would go to his elementary school and talk about various stories that I love, and give them writing exercises. I began teaching my son and his friends when he was in third grade. How did you first start teaching writing? I’d write poems that were inflated, audacious, and deeply purple in terms of the language. I’ve always been interested in the saturation of words and color. I’d watercolor the pages of blank books until they were all buckled and ripple-y, and wrote on them. For me, these two things-skating and writing-have always been linked, for writing is, to me, like choreographing your moves on the ice-the slowness, the quickness, the extensions, and the compressions.
I continued skating in a rink upon our family’s return to Wilmington, Delaware. When I was eight years old, I started to skate on a pond in Boston. When did you first discover you wanted to be a writer? PW spoke with Kephart about what ice skating has to do with her writing, how her obsessions fuel and inform her work, and the truths behind why she does what she does and who it’s all for. She is also a professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, a teacher of writing workshops, classes, and seminars for writers from 7-90 years old, and an avid creator of handmade books. Recently she added picture books to her publication list, including two picture book biographies: And I Paint It: Henriette Wyeth’s World and Beautiful Useful Things: What William Morris Made and another, A Room of Your Own: A Story Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Famous Essay coming in early August. She is an award-winning author of more than 36 nonfiction and fiction titles, including Handling the Truth and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, collections of essays and poetry, and middle grade and YA novels.
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