Reviewer Meg Nola Interviews Beth Kephart, Author of My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera
Beth Kephart wants you to think about your love of books.
What if your lifelong curled-up reverence for stories on bound pages is as much a matter of the texture, smell, and inky mottled mystery of sheeted wood pulp as it is the meaning of the printed words? In her mind, it’s a missing the forest for the trees thing—in reverse. Those individual pieces of paper are key: to the novel, obituary, recipe card, sewing pattern, dollar bill, and so much more paper-dependent stuff.
In her collection of essays My Life in Paper, Beth gets a remarkable love letter down on paper, while Meg Nola’s review of the book appears in the lovely printed pages of Foreword‘s September/October issue, and you could bring a great deal of harmony to the world if you let your printer make today’s interview another historical artifact.
Dard Hunter was an American craftsman, historian, and expert on paper-making and printing, and he was the author of the 1958 My Life with Paper: An Autobiography. You address Dard throughout My Life in Paper—how were you inspired by his legacy, travels, and lifelong passion for paper?
It was Dard’s voice in that autobiography of his that drew me in. He told extraordinary stories—about traveling the country with his brother as part of a wild magic show, about meeting an ancient turtle, about trying, desperately, to build a handmade paper mill, about answering an invitation to sit with Gandhi—in a seductively self-effacing way. Dard was one of those writers who made room for the reader, and I was right there with him as I read—learning the history of paper, learning the stories of papermakers, learning what paper is and means.
And also this: I began to read Dard at a particularly vulnerable time in my own life. I was failing, I felt, at teaching. I was losing, I felt, my ability to make sense of stories. I was lonely, I knew, for my father, who had passed away a few years before. In reading Dard I began to think in fundamentally new ways about the big issues in life—home and possession, failure and obsession, the things we leave behind. I wanted to talk to Dard about this big life stuff. And so I began to write him letters, to imagine him alive.
Paper almost seems to have a shape-shifting personality throughout the book—it can be sturdy and supportive, delicate and whimsical, creatively inspiring or impersonally official. Family recipe cards bear a “spill of spices” from years of use. Love letters are enticing and intimate, while postcards share a spirit of distant connection. By shifting to a more paperless society, are we losing some of that tactile, versatile, papery essence?
First, I just want to say how gorgeous this question is. I hope it follows the book wherever the book goes.
I am writing my answers to you on my old Apple. I will email this document when it is done. You will have it in moments, and I won’t have to wonder if it gets lost. So much communication can and should and will get done without a piece of paper. We have to think about the environment (though disposing of an old computer does have more environmental impact than placing paper in a recycling can). We have to think about the commerce of daily life in this era.
But, for example, my mother’s best friend is also a dear friend of mine. We send cards to one another, once a month or so, and her notes to me, in her precious purple ink, carry life in a way no email could. For another example, I cyanotype, marble paper, make paper, design and bind blank books, create handmade collages and cards. I mail these to friends. I sell them at a local farmers market. I hear, and I see, what these tangible, tactile objects mean to others, what they hold. Just yesterday, at the Sunday market, a musician came and bought one of my journals. He said he’d be writing his evening thoughts in the pages. “Love me a good journal,” he said. That’s a pretty widespread feeling.
I think the point is that for many things, paper really is the best vehicle. We have to take care. We have to produce and recycle paper wisely. We have to hold onto those letters with the scribbles in the margins, those postcards with the cramped handwriting, those recipe cards with the stains. They are our history.
Let’s keep our history.
Let’s make it.
The historical aspects of paper-related items are especially intriguing in the book, from sewing patterns to photographs, to sheet music and paper bags. There’s the self-taught ingenuity of inventor Margaret E. Knight and the diligent dedication of pharmacist Julia Pearl Hughes. And there’s a spirited 1788 gathering of Philadelphians, who, carrying “feathery plumes and the artifacts of their manifold crafts,” paraded through the city to Reinagle’s Federal March. What was your general process for researching and vivifying this historical content?
I am so blessed to have access to the University of Pennsylvania library system. I was a student at Penn years ago, and hanging out in the stacks was a great comfort. Now, as a teacher on the campus, I return to those stacks and archives whenever I can. The sewing pattern story (which is one of my favorite bits of history in the book) was just waiting for me in the stacks, for example. I simply had to decide that sewing patterns would be my newest obsession, and then I went hunting.
But I’m also a great lover of podcasts. The Margaret E. Knight story is told on a variety of podcasts, for example. I did other research, of course, including searching for her obituary in the New York Times and hunting down old magazine stories (the Smithsonian, for example). One of the issues, of course, is that historical “facts” are always competing with each other. I read and listened until the versions of the stories that felt most true (and actively alive) to me emerged in my own mind.
But I didn’t want each historical legend, as I think of them, to be obvious or repetitive in nature. The legends were never going to be a listing of the First Sewing Pattern or the First Postcard, for example. Some of those legends are but one line long. Some quote from contemporaneous books (Abigail Thomas on the diary, say). Some legends are designed to feel like the end of the story that was being told above. The patterning and rhythm of this book mattered. It had to remain surprising.
Writers once had an inextricable relationship with paper, from quill and parchment to leather-bound journals, to the big, continuous roll that Jack Kerouac used to type On the Road. Do you still write on actual paper or have you migrated to laptops/desktops?
I can begin no project staring into the strange blank light of a computer screen. My handwriting is atrocious, but I begin with the blue or black mess of it on paper of all kinds. I use my own handmade journals to collect research, to test sentences, to mess around with ideas. I use the flip sides of expended paper to experiment with structures. I use the ribbons of paper I slice off of signatures to make lists of possibilities. I have a famously unmessy house except for this: There are a lot of books. And there is a lot of paper.
You began making crafted paper, cards, and books after your father passed away. How did this help you to manage your grief?
My father died during COVID, in a retirement home. For years, I’d spent nearly every day with him, and suddenly I couldn’t be there, at his side, talking or sharing a sandwich.
The COVID isolation was ruinous for my father, as it was for countless others. Soon, he had a hard time using the phone, using the computer, connecting. There was more and more silence between us, no matter what I thought to do, no matter how hard I fought to somehow keep him near, despite the physical distance.
Though I was allowed to be with my father during his final moments in life—I was called in the middle of the night and rushed to see him—I was devastated, just devastated, by all the lost time. My father was a very good man. He could not have a funeral, given the COVID era—again, like so very many. I wanted everyone who had known my father to spend some time thinking of him, and so I made all these booklets and sent them to all my friends and his, hoping the recipients would tell a story on those pages, stories to somehow keep my father’s memory near. It was my way of giving my father a funeral.
Making became my solace. It still is.
Are you working on any new projects?
I am working on a few things. One is something I think of as a novel in memoir, a multi-generational story that extends from World War I to the present hour. Another is a new work of creative nonfiction focused on the lives of makers. I’m also writing deeply researched biographies of key historical figures for younger readers. And so, yes, you can picture it: paper and books, everywhere.
Meg Nola
