The Men Paid to Read Novels Aloud in Tampa
For fifty years in Ybor City, cigar workers paid a man out of their own wages to sit on a platform and read novels aloud while they worked. They elected him, voted on the books, and struck when the owners…
Tag: Research (Page 9)
Authority Through AuthorshipThe School That Owns a Newspaper
The Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times, because Nelson Poynter willed it to them so no chain could buy the paper. It is also where much of the modern craft of nonfiction writing was taught and written down.
HistoryThe Mound Under the Picnic Tables
There is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
Authority Through AuthorshipKerouac’s Last Address, Twenty Minutes From My Desk
Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg in 1969 at forty-seven, in a concrete block ranch house in Disston Heights, leaving an estate valued at ninety-one dollars. On the Road has never stopped selling.
HistoryThe Safety Harbor Library, and Why I Keep Going Back
The Safety Harbor Public Library began in 1938 with a hundred books and $2.35 raised at a tea party. It is now open seven days a week and is the best free workspace in town for anyone writing a book.
Memoir WritingThe Clearwater Main Library, and Why Writers Should Know Its Hours
The Clearwater Main Library is a landmark building with maker studios, a digitization station, and a harbor view. It is also closed on weekends, and part of it may become something else.
HistoryThe East Lake Community Library, and the Room That Taught Me Craft
The East Lake Community Library in Palm Harbor is where the East Lake Writers' Workshop met, in a side room off the main floor, and where I sat every other week for years while Deanna Bennett ran the table.
Character DevelopmentForty Years of Cases Nobody Explained
A psychiatrist at the University of Virginia spent four decades collecting cases of small children who described lives they had not lived, including 210 whose birthmarks matched wounds on the person they claimed to have been.
HistoryFour in Ten: American Prisoners of the Japanese
About four in ten American prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity. For Americans held by Germany the figure was around one percent. That gap is the shape of the Pacific war, and my grandfather spent three and a half…
Book MarketingWhat the First Month With a Ghostwriter Looks Like
The first month of a book project is mostly interviews and one structural decision, and having the writer twenty minutes away changes the mechanics, not the price. Sessions happen at your table with your objects in the room.
Fiction WritingHistorical Writer’s Handbook
Readers forgive small factual slips; they never forgive modern souls in period dress. Accuracy is getting the facts right. Authenticity is understanding how
Book LaunchBookends, Ybor City: Four Years, One Bungalow, and a Trailer Full of Books
Bookends opened in 2026 at 2208 East 2nd Avenue in Ybor City after four years, a fourteen month permitting fight, and a grant that nearly vanished. Sisters Laurie and Teresa Rodriguez traded from a mobile bookstore the whole time.