Beth’s essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Orion, The Boston Globe, CRAFT, North American Review, Tin House, LitHub, Salon, The Millions, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Family Circle, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Cleaver, and Woven Tale Press, among many other publications. Frequently anthologized, her work has appeared in Best American Sports Writing, Mothers Who Think, Big Shoes, and New York Times Writers on Writing.
This is a sampling of the several hundred reviews and essays written over the past many years. I’ve included a few interviews as well.
A conversation and original poem, as part of Alyson Shelton’s “Where I’m From” series.
“The Landlord, the Tenant, and the Machete,” Short Reads, August 28, 2024
“Writers Block? Make Room for Beauty,” Books by Women, July 1, 2024
“On Writing Home with James Agee,” Brevity Blog, June 25, 2024
“Learning Sideways,” Oldster Magazine, June 10, 2024
“Character Development: Lessons from Amy Tan,” Brevity Blog, May 14, 2024
“Details, Details, Details,” a craft essay in Cleaver Magazine, May 11, 2024
My conversation with Amy Tan, at the Free Library of Philadelphia, April 29, 2024
My conversation with Helen Hiebert about all things paper and otherwise, April 19, 2024
“Does It Have to be Memoir?” Brevity Blog, March 28, 2024
“A Paper Tale,” Omnia feature on My Life in Paper, March 26, 2024
“Three Squared: Book of Synonyms,” Cyanotype Art, Big Wing Review, March 15, 2024
“A Memory Palace of Paper,” The Boston Globe, March 12, 2024
“Extra (Extra” Virgin Olive Oil,” Orion Magazine, February 1, 2024
“…a heartbreaking and highly original memoir,”Washington Independent Review of Books, February 1, 2024
“Beth Kephart Pens a Love Letter to Paper Through Her New Memoir,” PRINT Magazine, February 1, 2024
“I Took Instructions from My Hands,” Cleaver Magazine, January 17, 2023
My prose poem “Squeeze” is featured in Story Seek, a “new virtual reality journey combining color, sound, and site-specific poetry, memoir, and fiction,” to quote the creators. Story Seek is a collaboration between Cleaver Magazine and the Drexel Entrepreneurial Game Studio, funded in part by the William Penn Foundation and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
“Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch,” nominated for 2024 Best of the Net by The Gravity of the Thing.
Blank Pages, Bound Books, in Writers Digest, December 22, 2023
My conversation with Michelle Fost, of Cleaver, about My Life in Paper, December 18, 2023
Featured in What Women Create, a six-page spread on grass paper, Winter 2023/2024 issue
Featured in Books by Women, “The Lessness of Things,” December 2023
A dialogue with Jehanne Dubrow, in Adroit Journal, December 12, 2023
The Free Library of Philadelphia launch of My Life in Paper, as a podcast.
“The History of Color” has been nominated for a Puschart Prize by Short Reads.
“On the Observational Lens,” Literary Hub, The Craft of Writing, November 29, 2023
“Rare Books,” an excerpt in Literary Hub, November 16, 2023
“The Berwyn Farmers Market,” in Savvy Mainline, November 15, 2023
“Diploma,” an excerpt in The Pennsylvania Gazette, November 15
My conversation with Caroline Leavitt, on A Mighty Blaze, November 9, 2023
“The Papermaker War,” in Orion, October 26, 2023.
My interview about My Life in Paper, with Foreword Reviews, is here.
“Syllabus,” in Los Angeles Review, October 9, 2023 (an excerpt from My Life in Paper)
“On Reading Fast and Reading Slow,” in Assay, October 1, 2023
“The Secret Language of End Papers,” in Fine Books Magazine, September 2023
“Thieves,” first published in CRAFT, is a 2023 Best American Essays Notable selection.
“Adventures in Ephemera,” an excerpt from My Life in Paper, in Image Journal, September 26
My wildflower prompt, on the Yard Dragon Substack, August 11, 2023
“Be inspired: A Writing Tip,” Cleaver Magazine, August 2023
“Learning to Sleep,” Grey Sparrow Journal, August 2023
“The Gift Giver,” Isolation Journals, July 2023
“Middle Distance,” The Citron Review, Summer 2023 edition.
My conversation with Leonard Marcus and Barbara McClintock, for the School Library Journal Breakfast Keynote, July 27, 2023
“A Book I Wish More People Knew About” (Judith Kitchen’s The Circus Train), in Biblioracle, July 26, 2023.
Women of Letters Interview, July 25, 2023
“The Gift Giver,” in The Isolation Journals, July 9, 2023
The Rumpus Letters in the Mail program, with Abigail Thomas, July 1, 2023
My thoughts about turning toward art, in Next Avenue, June 20, 2023
“The Memoir in Pieces Says Yes,” Brevity Blog, May 30, 2023
“On Crafting the Memoir in Pieces,” CRAFT Literary, May 24, 2023
“Birl,” Two Hawks Quarterly, May 23, 2023
“Edge LIfe,” Two Hawks Quarterly, May 23, 2023
“Beth Kephart on Designing My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera,” Spine Magazine, May 19, 2023
“Steps” appears on Oldster, April 10, 2023
“The History of Color” appears as short-reads.org’s inaugural essay, 001, here, March 29, 2023.
My conversation with Abigail Thomas in celebration of her new book, March 18, 2023.
I had this lovely conversation with Ronit Plank on her Let’s Talk Memoir podcast, January 24, 2023
“Writing the Urgent,” Brevity Blog, January 17, 2023.
“Lost,” The RavensPerch, January 11, 2023.
“Blurb Matters: A Quiet Manifesto,” Jane Friedman Newsletter, December 13, 2022.
“Tether and Float,” an exploration of the art of the essay and a review of two new collections, in Cleaver Magazine, December 9, 2022.
“Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch” has been nominated by The Gravity of the Thing‘s editors for 2023 Best Microfiction anthology and the 2023 Best Small Fiction anthology.
The New York Times Book Review featured our Virginia Woolf picture book, A Room of Your Own, here, November 7, 2022.
“Beth Kephart on Margo Jefferson,” in the Fall 2022 Edition of Creative Nonfiction.
“Thieves,” which originally appeared in CRAFT Literary, is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
“Wide Awake at the Dog Hotel,” The Parliament Literary Journal, October 30, 2022.
A new piece, in Trampset, about the noise in my head. “Mozarting the Mind,”October 28, 2022.
“The Sum of Which Parts,” first published in Upstreet Magazine, was named a notable in the 2022 edition of Best American Essays.
“How are you?” Cleaver Magazine, September 27, 2022.
“Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch,” The Gravity of the Thing, September 19, 2022
Publishers Weekly interview, July 25, 2022.
Best Books for Truth Wranglers: A Shepherd List, July 25, 2022.
Best Memoirs in Essays: A Shepherd List, July 25, 2022.
“Memoir Teacher as People Pleaser,” in Brevity Blog, July 21, 2022.
My conversation with Alice Elliott Dark, about her novel Fellowship Point, on the Free Library of Philadelphia stage, July 13, 2022.
An audio recording of “The Chin I’m In,” which first appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, June 21, 2022.
“Thieves,” Craft Literary, May 11, 2022.
An interview with Longleaf Review, May 4, 2022.
“Unvanishing,” Autofocus, February 23, 2022.
“Heat Harvest,” Longleaf Review, February 6, 2022.
“Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, by Laura Stanfill.” My review is here, at Cleaver Magazine, February 3, 2022.
“On the One Side. On the Other,” (Nurture Literary) named a finalist in The Best of the Net 2022.
“Walking with the Widows,” Brevity Magazine, January 18, 2022.
“The Memoirist’s Dilemma,” Brevity Blog, January 10, 2022.
My Radnor Memorial Library presentation on how to write the self. So many examples and prompts and some Wife | Daughter | Self along the way. Recorded in November 2021, posted on January 4, 2022.
“Animal Me,” in Full Grown People, December 16, 2021.
A vimeo presentation on managing time in memoir, here, for the National Association of Memoir Writers, December 13, 2021.
“Wanted: Two Writers Muse on the Art of Saying No,” Cleaver Magazine, December 13, 2021.
“When You Start an Indie Press with a Life Partner,” Literary Hub, December 6, 2021.
My interview with Leslie Pietrzyk about her new book, Admit This to No One, at The Rumpus, November 12, 2021.
“Brief and Continuous Encounters with Brief Encounters,” Epiphanyzine, November 2, 2021.
“An Interview with Beth Kephart,” The Sunlight Press (Annie Scholl), October 18, 2020.
“Creative Couples: Beth Kephart and William Sulit: An Interview,” Pantser and Plotter, October 1, 2021.
“Anyone Human Must Wonder,” Phi Kappa Phi Forum Magazine, special issue on Family, Fall 2021.
“The Hat Was Full Price,” in the Dorothy Parker’s Ashes Wedding Attire issue, September 10, 2021.
“Still Life Theater,” in Halfway Down the Stairs, September 1, 2021.
“The Memoir in Pieces,” Creative Nonfiction Online, August 25, 2021.
“A Memoir Should Be a Conversation, Not a Monologue,” in Catapult, adapted from We Are the Words: The Memoir Master Class, August 16, 2021.
“On the One Side. On the Other.” nominated by Nurture Literary for Best of the Net.
“The Chin I’m In,” Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, August 9, 2021.
“The Sum of Which Parts,” Upstreet Number 17, July 24, 2021.
“Overjoy Cruise,” Tiny Spoon, July 23, 2021.
“The Funny in Memoir: Alison Bechdel, Dinty Moore, and Trey Popp,” Cleaver Magazine, July 24, 2021.
An excerpt from Cloud Hopper, in the wonderful The Milk House: A Rural Writing Collective, July 22, 2021.
“The Art of the Moment Memoirs,” an excerpt from We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, on Jane Friedman’s blog, July 21, 2021.
“Teaching to Write,” Women Writers, Women(‘s) Books, July 20, 2021
“Spreadsheeting the Void,” in The Raven’s Perch, June 8, 2021.
My conversation with the spectacular Alisha Crossley, on the Imperfectly Polished Podcast.
“Feather White,” In Blood and Bourbon, No. 8, Grace, downloadable here.
My conversation with Ken Jones on KBOO.FM, here.
“The Distance of Awakening,” Tigershark, May 2021. Download the issue here.
“House as Home: Writing the Places That Raised Us,” Brevity, May 17, 2021.
An interview with Naomi Milliner, on memoir, fiction, and the writing life, May 11, 2021.
“Moving the Type,” a Virginia Woolf and Common Press story, at The Curator, May 10, 2021.
“Shattering the Frame: A Conversation with Beth Kephart,” The Adroit Journal, April 9, 2021.
“Make New Memories, Our Story is Enough,” an essay in Catapult about a sudden memory blink, March 30, 2021.
Art + Words, a conversation about collaboration featuring a slide show of my husband’s art, at Hidden Timber books, with thanks to Christi Craig, March 2021.
“Stitch Work,” an essay about a plain sewing sampler and my deeply loved uncle, in Lines and Stars, March 22, 2021.
My review of A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, in Cleaver Magazine, March 21, 2021.
My podcast conversation about memoir and the writing life with Matty Dalrymple at The Indie Author, here, March 9, 2021.
My conversation with Jacinda Barrett at the Free Library of Philadelphia, about Wife | Daughter | Self. Audio: https://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/episode/1982
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaiD81BNzv4
A conversation with Jackie Shannon Hollis about Wife | Daughter | Self at The Rumpus, March 3, 2021.
“Her Room. Ours.,” Entropy Magazine, March 1.
My conversation with Leslie Pietrzyk, at Work in Progress, about Wife | Daughter | Self, March 1, 2021
“Finding Quiet in a Chaotic World,” Covey Club, March 2021.
A Memoir Conversation: David Marchino and Beth Kephart, Cleaver Magazine, February 10, 2021.
“Character Development: Putting the Other on the Page,” Causeway Literature, January 27, 2021.
The Art of the Telling Detail (as told in gelli prints), Cagibi, January 26, 2021.
“On the One Side. On the Other,” Nurture Literary, January 25, 2021.
“What Passes for Love: On the Marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf,” Literary Hub, October 28, 2020.
“On Crafting Stories Without Commas: Today’s Artisanal Writers,” Entropy Magazine, October 26, 2020
“Set Pearls in the Dark,” a 2019 Best American Essays Notable selection, originally appearing in Ninth Letter, October 2020
“The Case for Writing a Memoir in Essays,” Literary Hub, October 2, 2020
“Unchildrening the Children” (at the border), in Nerdy Book Club, September 9, 2020.
“The Writer, the Editor, and the Aftermath: Beth Kephart and Laura Stanfill in Conversation,” in Big Other, August 27, 2020.
“The Memoir in Pieces,” Creative Nonfiction, August 2020.
My essay, “The Spaces in Between,” in Image Journal (digital), June 18, 2020.
My essay “Circus Act,” in Brevity, May 4, 2020.
My review of The Royal Abduls,by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, in Cleaver Magazine, May 4, 2020.
My essay, “What are the Boundaries of a Memoir?” featuring new books by Paul Lisicky and Mark Doty appears in Literary Hub, April 17, 2020.
My essay on librarians featured in Nerdy Book Club on launch day of The Great Upending.
“The Osmotic Space of Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places,” in Image Journal, Good Letters, March 12, 2020
My review of The Beauty of Their Youth (Stories by Joyce Hinnefeld) in Cleaver Magazine, March 3, 2020.
My review of Sojourners of the In-Between (Poems by Gregory Djanikian) in Cleaver Magazine, February 18, 2020
“Cry Across the Sound: a memoirist’s chant,” North American Review, Open Space, January 24, 2020.
“Storm Coming,” in Toho Journal, December 2019
“Next Book Blues,” in Publishers Weekly Soapbox, December 16, 2019
“Eyes Set Far Apart or Close: The Art of William Sulit, the Language of Carolyn Forche,” in After the Art, December 10, 2019.
“Panic Attack,” The Normal School, December 4, 2019
“Thought Patterns: Reflections on The Crying Book,” Good Letters/Image Journal, December 2, 2019
Stamping the Life Upon the Page, The Curator, October 21, 2019
My review of Ruby & Roland appears in Cleaver Magazine, October 9, 2019
My review of The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning appears in Cleaver Magazine, September 9, 2019
My essay-review of Art Can Help by Robert Adams appears in Cleaver Magazine, September 3, 2019
Photograph of a Lost Oil Painting (remembering my great uncle and the design of the Waldorf Astoria), The Curator, August 12, 2019
“Three Car Crashes and the Long Afterward,” an essay on collisions and forgiveness, in Catapult magazine, July 22, 2019. This essay was selected as one of the best personal essays of the week by Memoir Monday, July 29, 2019.
“Sentence Pioneers: Bending Language with Lydia Kiesling, R.O. Kwon, Ali Smith, Alyson Hagy, Jesse Ball and Sally Rooney,” AWP The Writer’s Notebook, May 22, 2019
“Set Pearls in the Dark,” Ninth Letter, Spring/Summer 2019
“Wick Inside Flame: A Poem,” Commonplace Living, May 15, 2019
“Story by Story: Talking with Margaret Renkl” about Late Migrations, on The Rumpus, April 17, 2019.
“The Ministrations of the Moon: A Poem,” Commonplace Living, April 14, 2019
“Four New Friendship Novels and the Bonds That May Not Tie,” The Millions, April 3, 2019
“Learning from Carolyn Forche’s Fearlessness,“ Literary Hub, March 20, 2019
My conversation with Carolyn Forche, at the Free Library of Philadelphia, March 19, 2019, as podcast and as broadcast.
My thoughts on writing and teaching memoir are shared in this Life Story Coach podcast, March 2019
“Fixing Beauty,” Woven Tale Press, March 11, 2019
“Jeremy & James,” featured in Life magazine’s Special Issue on Friendship: The Bonds That Shape Us at Every Age, February 2019
My Conversation with Dani Shapiro, at the Free Library of Philadelphia, January 22, 2019
Here If You Need Me, Catapult, January 10, 2019
Forgive the Defacer: On Writing Into Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State, The Curator Magazine, January 9, 2019
Family Resemblance, Pennsylvania Gazette, November/December 2018
Here Is the Needle, This Is the Thread: “Safekeeping and the Liberation of Memoir,” (my thoughts on Abigail Thomas), The Millions, October 30, 2018
Lake on Fire: Reflections on Rosellen Brown’s new book…and some of what this first teacher taught me, Chicago Tribune, October 14, 2018
Eroded Tropes and Fears and Consequences: The Millions Interviews Alyson Hagy, The Millions, September 28, 2018
Baby Shoes, Ruminate Blog, September 19, 2018
Paynes Gray: When Watercolors Become Words, Brevity, September 17, 2018
The Four Times I Became a Teacher, LitHub, September 10, 2018
The Tides of Success: A Two-Artist Marriage, Catapult, September 6, 2018
The Truth is Elusive|The Art of the Suppose: HippoCampus Magazine, excerpted from featured HippoCamp18 address, September 3, 2018
The Four Pinocchios (truth revealed by the original puppet), Cleaver Magazine, August 25, 2018
The Death of Truth/Michiko Kakutani, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 29, 2018
The Wild Blues|Breakout Conversation, Nerdy Book Club, July 20, 2018
The Story of a Stranger, Ghosted, Ploughshares blog, June 17, 2018
My interview with Margaret Bradham Thornton, LA Review of Books, May 8, 2018
Olivia Laing Profile, LitHub, April 19, 2018
The Recovering/Leslie Jamison, Chicago Tribune, April 2, 2018
Census/Jesse Ball: A review, Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2018
“Clean: Learning the Liability of Having,” Woven Tale Press, March 15, 2018
Winter/Karl Ove Knausgaard: A review, Chicago Tribune, January 25, 2018
“Reclaiming a Beloved Writer from the Brink of Disappearance,” LitHub, November 16, 2017
“A Writer Learns from Wyeth,” Woven Tale Press, September 7, 2017
“The enormous and the infinitesimal: 5,000 miles of America,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 13, 2017
“Finding empathy in a time of division,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 9, 2017
“In Writing a Memoir, Structure Matters,” HuffPost, September 16, 2016
Riverine/Angela Palm, Chicago Tribune, August 11, 2016
All the Wonders interview (This Is the Story of You) with Matthew Winner, July 19, 2016
“Home is where the art is,” Chicago Tribune, January 8, 2016
“What Does It Mean to Review a Memoir?” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2015
Dear Mr. You/Mary-Louise Parker, Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2015
“How to Write a Memoir: Or (The Expectation Virtues),” HuffPost, May 11, 2015
Bettyville/George Hodgman, Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2015
“Book Brahmin,” Shelf Awareness, April 15, 2015
“Finding Empathy in the Essay,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 2015
Leaving Before the Rains Come/Alexandra Fuller, Chicago Tribune, February 12, 2015
“Scrabble,” Cleaver Magazine
“The Moment and the Poem,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 21, 2014
“Good historical fiction makes the past present,” Chicago Tribune, June 13, 2014
“Maya Angelou’s Lingering Hum,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 2014
Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature, Keynote Address, February 2014
“On the Impossible Trial of Listing Your ‘Favorite” Memoirs,” Signature, December 12, 2013
My Hippocampus interview, November 1, 2013
My Hairpin interview, October 28, 2013
“Raw to the Bone: Transported Toward Truth and Memory by Springsteen’s River Songs,” Poets’ Quarterly, October 13, 2013
“Their Necessary Stories: on really getting to know today’s college students,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, October 2013
My Ploughsharesinterview, September 14, 2013
“And There’s Your Mother, Calling Out to You: In Pursuit of Memory,” Brevity, September 12, 2013
“The Signifying Life: In Praise of the Outward-Looking Memoir,” The Millions, September 3, 2013
“How Photographs Can Boost the Memoir Genre,” Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, September 3, 2013
My Free Library of Philadelphia and Voices in the Family talks/interviews, August 2013
“Why (some) Teens Don’t Read YA,” HuffPost, March 27, 2013
“Lamp Lighters and Seed Sowers: Tomorrow’s YA,” Publishing Perspectives, November 30, 2012
“On Cambodia, Trauma and Making it Real for YA Readers,” Publishing Perspectives, October 29, 2012
“Removing the YA Label: A Proposal, a Fantasy,” Publishing Perspectives, July 18, 2012
“The rubble-rouser,” Salon.com, January 24, 2001
“As Her Son Creates His Story, A Mother Waits for the Ending,” New York Times, December 17, 2001
“The uncomfortable reader,” Salon.com, June 21, 2000
“Crossing Over” (On Jayne Anne Phillips), Salon.com, April 28, 2000
“It’s how they take you anywhere,” Salon.com, February 16, 2000
“Into the belly of the earth,”Salon.com, November 29, 1999
“Cool. Dark. Moist.,” Salon.com, September 9, 1999
“The bad seed,” Salon.com, April 14, 1999