An Interview with Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart—memoirist, children’s book author, writing instructor, and visual artist—has crafted a new genre-expansive novel for adults: Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story. Released by Tursulowe Press in April, the lyrical prose dances between fiction and nonfiction, weaving the author’s personal story into a well-researched, but imagined narrative that spans one hundred years of Philadelphia history.
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Kephart’s real life grandmother, Peggy, ties the novel’s three timelines together. Between 1917 and 1918, Peggy is on the brink of adulthood, starry-eyed with young love and optimistic about a bright, abundant future. By 1969, after a lifetime of marriage, children, and grandchildren, cancer riddles Peggy’s body while she lies mostly alone on white sheets, meditating on death, wondering what might have been had The Great War not intervened. She longs to share her story with young Kephart. In the present era, long after Peggy has died, Kephart receives a box of her grandmother’s possessions and begins to dig into the story and Philadelphia’s WWI-era history.
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As the dying Peggy slips in and out of consciousness on the page, the literary text performs its own graceful movement through the sieve: one era slips into the next, point of view glides between Peggy’s and Kephart’s, and invented plot points intermingle with factual data. Through it all, Kephart presents herself as a reliable character—a vulnerable one at that— pouring her heart onto the page as she reckons with all that was lost.
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“I couldn’t imagine telling this story any other way,” Kephart told me. I experienced the novel as a literary love letter to family, an interrogation of legacy, a meditation on dreams, a portrait of cause and effect, a supervision of cancer, and a manifestation of the political made personal.
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Speaking with a Reed Senior Editor Nöelle Gibbs, Kephart gives insight into her creative process and her newest release, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday's News
​I sat down with Kephart to discuss research, family, genre blending, Philadelphia, small-press publication, Substack (check out Kephart’s The Hush and the Howl), and the relationship between her visual art and writing practice, particularly in relation to the novel. That conversation is available as part of Reed Magazine’s June feature on nonfiction via our podcast In the Reeds. I hope you enjoy listening to and learning from the skilled and intentional Beth Kephart.
Creating visual art is part of Beth Kephart’s creative practice. For Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News, Kephart created collages inspired by each month of the 1917-1918 timeline of her novel. Pictured here are April, October, November, and December.
October
April
"If only she could tell the girl, who will be old herself when she begins to guess this story, shape it. When she will wonder turquoise or peach, Lani or cinnamon, Monday or Tuesday, as the rain falls on the other side of her own window."
--- Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday's News
December
November
