Kiriakou's public-speaking training
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Kiriakou's public-speaking training is the account John Kiriakou gives when asked how he became a fluent extemporaneous talker, a question he is asked often enough that he notes listeners tend to reach for the word raconteur.

Dr. Scarvel

The teacher was Dr. Scarvel, who taught tenth-grade speech and debate, and who had been his father's best friend growing up. Kiriakou describes the connection being made on his first day in the class, "Are you Chris Kiriakou's son?"

The two men's shared history was a serious one. At nine years old they went hunting squirrels in Farrell, Pennsylvania; Scarvel tripped on a log and dropped the BB gun, which went off and shot out his eye. Kiriakou's father carried him to the nearest house. Scarvel wore a glass eye afterwards.

Kiriakou calls him "one of the toughest teachers I ever had."

The exercise

The class began with short exercises: find a five-minute passage from a book and present it as a talk. Reading from the page was permitted, memorisation was not the point. The point was to break the habit of saying um, uh and well.

Kiriakou remembers the passages the other students chose as bloodless, "This book is about love. This book is about family", and remembers choosing instead a passage from Midnight Express describing a beating in a Turkish prison. Scarvel stood up and began a slow clap: "That is what I wanted to hear."

The lesson he kept

The rule Kiriakou still states is about the gaps rather than the words. "If you need a filler, allow silence to be the filler. There's nothing wrong with that... People hate that", the uh, the well, the let me see. "So, just let silence fill the time. It's not going to harm you in any way."

Scarvel then pushed him into competitive debate, in the extemporaneous format: a topic drawn from a hat, five minutes to prepare, and then straight into argument. Kiriakou says he did well at it, that it continued through high school, and that it is what accustomed him to answering questions with no preparation at all. "I really credit him with making me the speaker that I became."

On storytelling itself

Asked for the technique behind the stories, Kiriakou disclaims one: "There's no real trick to it, to tell you the truth. Just recount it as you recall it." He says he tries to be linear and to tell events in the order they happened.

He traces the disposition further back, to an exchange with his brother after some outing in their college years. Kiriakou told their mother what had happened; his brother objected that it was not what happened; Kiriakou insisted it was. His brother's real complaint was "yeah, but it wasn't as interesting as that", to which Kiriakou's answer was "It's not my fault that you can't tell an interesting story."

The professional compliment he says meant most came from a station chief friend for whom he ran an operation too dangerous for the chief to run himself, writing the cables from headquarters afterwards: "I so love your cables because I feel when I'm reading them like I'm standing in the room watching it go down."

It is also the premise he gives for his cemetery books: "everybody's got a story to tell. You don't have to be famous... Everybody has a story."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's father and grandfather
- Kiriakou's writing process
- Remains of the Day (book)
