My advice to writers is “research but write.” Don’t wait until you have gathered every conceivable fact or explored every area of interest. Put the collection away and start typing. Avoid what the novelist Margot Livesey calls in her essay, research’s “siren song.”Read more...
The wharves and docks of William Penn's city that helped build a nation are gone--lost to the onslaught of more than three hundred years of development. Yet the bygone streets and piers of Philadelphia's central waterfront were once part of the greatest trade center in the American colonies. Local historian Harry Kyriakodis chronicles the history of the city's original port district, from Quaker settlers who first lived in caves along the Delaware and the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793 to its heyday as a maritime center and the twentieth century, which saw much of the historic riverfront razed. Join Kyriakodis as he strolls Front Street, Delaware Avenue and Penn's Landing to rediscover the story of Philadelphia's lost waterfront.Harry, I am grateful. Like my dear friend Adam Levine, who taught me so much about my river, the Schuylkill, you haven't simply accumulated a wealth of knowledge. You have made it your business to share it. Read more...
About the Author
Harry Kyriakodis is a staff attorney for the American Law Institute and ALI-ABA Continuing Professional Education. He is a producer of teleseminars for ALI-ABA and has been the librarian for both organizations since 1992. A historian and writer about Philadelphia, Harry has collected what is likely the largest private collection of books about the City of Brotherly Love: about two thousand titles, new and old. He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides and has lived at Pier 3 Condominium at Penn's Landing since 1997, when and where his fascination with Philadelphia's waterfront district began. Harry regularly gives walking tours and presentations on this and other unique yet unappreciated parts of the city for various groups. He is a graduate of La Salle University (1986) and Temple University School of Law (1993) and was once an officer in the U.S. Army Field Artillery.
I'll be speaking at Rosemont College this coming Thursday evening on a topic I've often thought about but never spoken on—the art of researching creative nonfiction. I'll be talking about three books—Flow, Still Love in Strange Places, and Ghosts in the Garden. I'll be inspired, in part, by this photograph, found for me by my friend Adam Levine in the city archives. This from the talk, just written:
Whether I’m writing memoir or novels, fables or poems, young adult novels, adult novels, or fantasies, I am, at one point, reaching far beyond myself, to bring the greater world in. I am following the always persistent, hardly consistent, rarely well-tiled path of my insatiable curiosity. True, research is often either a surfeit of overwhelm, or a tease. Still, and nevertheless, I don’t believe in bringing presumption to the page—in writing simply and only what I already know. I don’t believe in closing doors before I’ve opened windows. I want to be alive when I am writing—engaged, in suspense, full of the unprotected what ifs? I want to convey my own surprise, dismay, or basic indignity right there, on the page. Formulae don’t cut it for me; formulae have been done. Research scrambles the math.
I wrote a book about a river — told her story in her own words—and today I'm reading from a page called "Ooze." Many of the images here are here because of the generosity of my dear friend Adam Levine, who yields his knowledge about the river to the many of us who ask.
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