Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Beth Kephart writes about Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story from Tursulowe Press.

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Among My Souvenirs:
On Researching Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News

The box arrived on Thanksgiving Day in 2022. Inside: faux-pearl encrusted ornaments, a family genealogy dated September 12, 1966, and a letter written at least two decades ago by the woman I knew as my Aunt Miriam. She was my grandmother’s niece. She had a story she wished to tell—two pages of typewritten text she titled “Among My Souvenirs.”

Possibly, the earliest account of my relationship with Aunt Margaret is one I don’t remember—not because of selective memory, but because of my mother’s recounting of an incident involving a string of my aunt’s pearls that I’d broken, my aunt began.

Scattered pearls, she continued. News of my grandmother’s favorite song, the color peach, a neighbor girl named Edna Clancy, pansies as a most-prized flower, the name of an employer: She worked at Fleisher’s at 26th and Reed Streets. I think it was a textile or clothing company. All of this in a box that had been buried for years in the back of a stranger’s closet until it had finally—it was circuitous, it was complicated—made its way to me.

My grandmother had died when I was nine. She had died a mystery. I missed her—I still miss her—with a child’s ferocity.

And so now here this suddenly was—addresses, proper nouns, “Among My Souvenirs,” an Irish history, Fleisher’s. Here was the chance to imagine my grandmother vibrant and alive, my grandmother with a story that she might have told to me. If only I had known to ask. If only she’d kept living. I would remember the grandmother I knew, I decided. I would imagine all the rest. I would read the fat-headline newspapers, watch the crinkled films, spend strangely addictive hours on a site dedicated to the 314th Infantry Regiment A.E.F. of the 79th Infantry Division, parse old texts and catalogs, and purchase e-Bay posters and faded artifacts until I could forge, in my mind’s eye, a cinematic something. Which is to say a fact-embossed but utterly conjured version of my grandmother at the age of sixteen in the year 1918. Which is to introduce my grandmother, Peggy Finley, the sixth of nine children born to Samuel Thompson Finley and Jennie Semple, a girl who lived and dreamed and loved and wanted in a narrow Philadelphia townhouse at 1126 South 23rd Street. 

My Peggy Finley would, of course, work at Fleisher’s Yarn. She would, of course, be in love with a boy who must leave his course of study in worsted wools so that he might train at Camp Meade before heading, by way of a ship called the Leviathan, to the war. She would, of course, be so very smart that one of her favorite pastimes would be sitting on her modest stoop reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, courtesy of a Little Library Books, or sitting on a rock by the Schuylkill River reading James Joyce. And she would, of course, remember this pivotal year during her dying days in October 1969, at 6840 Guyer Avenue, the modest row house where my grandmother lived in the final cancer-ridden years of her life.

Because of course. Because there would be no other way to craft this story in my mind’s eye and ear.

When you are writing toward history you are swept into the grand and overarching—the shape of a war, the heartbreaking catastrophe of race riots, the tragedies of a pandemic, the data that place, say, some 94,000 Philadelphia girls aged 14 through 16 at work in factories, 27,000 of them in the garment industries. You are arranging your story according to the months in a year—the January freeze, the privations of February, the swelter of July. You are honoring social and cultural movements—the placards of suffragettes, knitting as social activism, women manning the machines.

But you are also snagging odd and delicate truths and holding them near—in a scribble in a notebook, in a messy computer file, in your own heart. Maybe you will not finally be able to use the fact that the coconut shells discarded at the Whitman’s chocolate factory at Fourth and Race Streets were reconstituted as coconut charcoal—an essential ingredient in World War 1 masks—but something about this fortifies your understanding of the times. Maybe your plot and self-constraining timeframe cannot make room for the famous Fleisher soccer teams, but you can make room for the Fleisher softball team—the Bloomers—and its star, nicknamed Scoops. And so you do, writing Scoops into the story alongside a real-life personality named Pearl Dunlop, who won back then, and will now win forever in your novel, a whopping one-hundred dollars for writing the best last line of a limerick in a Fleisher-sponsored contest. 

She worked at Fleisher’s at 26th and Reed Streets. I think it was a textile or clothing company. Wrote my Aunt Miriam in a type-written document that is more than two decades old. Her favorite song was “Among My Souvenirs.” These few tantalizing facts coupled with a handful of other tantalizing facts launched me on an odyssey of imagining and remembering and wanting to know more, of writing a book I could not have previously dreamed of writing, a book that insisted (I couldn’t help it) on being written. We never do know enough—or at least I never do. But, through a strange and magical alchemy, I came to know just enough to place myself within Peggy Finley’s world. Just enough to trust myself to write a story I hope she would be proud of. 

For I did fiercely love my grandmother. And my grandmother did, of this I’m certain, most fiercely and everlastingly love me.

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Beth Kephart is a National Book Award finalist, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant winner, a National Endowment for the Arts grant winner, and the author of nearly forty books in multiple genres. An award-winning teacher and poet, she is a widely published essayist, a paper artist, and the author of many Philadelphia-centric books, including Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Most recently she is the author of Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera. Find her on Substack, at The Hush and the Howl and at bethkephartbooks.com.