The Unanticipated Impulse

I'm in the very earliest stages of researching a new book—googling the heck out of one specific night in one specific year, tromping home with piles of library books, checking out my favorite used book barn up the road, which I raid at the start of many projects (the books are shelved in old peach crates; there are multiple sets of stairs that don't always necessarily lead anywhere). Every book is sui generis. We are forced to sit back and learn.

Like GHOSTS IN THE GARDEN and FLOW: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PHILADELPHIA'S SCHUYLKILL RIVER, this new book returns me to an era—the 19th century—that has endlessly obsessed me. Ghosts obsess me. The possibilities that lie just within reach of old photographs.

Of course, the challenge of writing about things that have already happened is making everything feel as if it is happening right now. Making it urgent. With GHOSTS, my hope was to make the past personal. With FLOW, I was drawn to writing about a river as if I were myself a river, ripe with arrogance, disbelief, ruin, yearning.

With the new book: Who knows? But this, I find, is one of the privileges of writing. We leave ourselves wide open to the unanticipated impulse.