Before 1999, we promoted the Seminar entirely on paper– in magazine and newspaper ads, through direct mail, and on 11"x17" posters. At present, there's scant online record of the Seminar at all before 1994, and only a text listing of the panelists for the years 1994-1999. We're working to fix that. Above, posters from 1988, '89, and '92. We're building pages for all years prior to 1999, featuring these classic posters. They won't be fancy, they'll stick to the facts. We'll let you know as they're ready.
Wallace Stevens began visiting South Florida and the Keys in the early 1920s with his good friend Judge Arthur Powell. Stevens was a director at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and these were prinicipally business trips, with a few days added on for pleasure. He was struck by what he found, so different from his New England upbringing, and his experiences here color many of the poems published in his first two books, Harmonium (1923), and Ideas of Order (1936). Stevens's first extant mention of the place comes in a letter to his wife, the former Elsie Viola Kachel, from Long Key on the tenth of January, 1922. In part, it reads:
Dear Elsie:
...
The contract arrived this morning, but instead of taking tonight's train for the North I am going to wait until tomorrow night's which should get me home on Friday night or Saturday morning. ... The sea is about fifty feet from the cottage in which I slept last night. This morning I just stepped out doors in my pajamas and used them as a bathing suit, taking a surf-bath. There are no ladies here so that one can do as one pleases. The place is a paradise—midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen. What a fool I should be not to come down here when I can give the results already achieved in return and still have a little fun out of it. I wish you could have come—that you could see how gorgeous it is. We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards. I send you a check to enable you to keep things going until I get back.
With love,
Wallace
As it happened, Elsie never did accompany Stevens on his annual jaunt to Florida. Stevens liked to do as he pleased, after all.
Quoted from Wallace Stevens's letter of Tuesday, January 10, 1922, as printed in Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, University of California Press, 1966.
Novelist Francisco Goldman talks about José Martí, a seminal figure in the birth of the Cuban nation. The talk focuses on Martí's years in exile in New York (1878-1895), where he worked as a journalist, and later organized and raised funds for the revolutionary force which would eventually overthrow the Spanish. Goldman's informative history is followed by a reading of several excerpts from Martí's prose, including a piece about the 1884 presidential campaign between James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland, in which Martí makes the following ever-timely remarks:
It's hard and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. ... They lie and exaggerate knowingly. They stab each other in the belly and in the back. Every defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. He who invents an effective slander can strut proudly. An observer of good faith has no idea how to analyze a battle in which everyone considers it legitimate to campaign in bad faith.
Goldman also reads from Martí's "New York Under the Snow," about the great blizzard of 1888, "Tributes to Karl Marx, Who Has Died," and a description of the beach at Coney Island containing the memorable line "this immense valve of pleasure open to an immense people."
From the 2004 Key West Literary Seminar: Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. This lecture was given in the auditorium of the San Carlos Institute, which served as Martí's operational base in Key West, and which each January hosts all KWLS readings, discussions, and lectures. Goldman will be joining us again in 2009, when we turn to Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. His novel The Divine Husband (2004) is an account of the love affair between Martí and Marí a de las Nieves, famous throughout Latin America as "La niña de Guatemala, La que se murió de amor" (the girl from guatemala, she who died from love).
(48:20) / 22 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Francisco Goldman.
We've now identified each of the writers in this photo, taken on Hidden Beach in 1984. Thanks to Liz Lear, Holly Merrill, and Don Kincaid for their help. Read the appended post here. Click here for a full-size version.
If you're thinking about attending the Seminar in January, or if you're a fan of either Marilynne Robinson, Allan Gurganus, or both, you'll enjoy what's going on over at Reading Room. It's an online panel discussion of Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping. Gurganus is an unabashed fan, and takes an enthusiastic and omnivorous approach to the book. His initial post suggested it may be "the greatest novel of our last quarter century." He's compared Robinson's artistry to silent-film star Buster Keaton, to metaphysical poet John Donne, to Emily Dickinson. And he's permitted the Times to reprint a fan letter he wrote Robinson after his book group read Housekeeping in 2006. In part, it reads:
After much study, I don't know how you did it. The book is so much about its making and yet all traces of construction seem obscured. "Housekeeping" seems the least autobiographical work I know and yet it's also the one closest-in. It's theological, but it always pertains as immediately as any fairy tale does. Harsh in its outcomes, it's also a psychological work of such density, restraint. The limpid acceptance of death finds reflection in all its aqueous properties. There are few living males in it and little dry land. Somehow it starts with death and moves toward life, a reversal of most books I know.
Check out Reading Room for more. You can read my brief review of Housekeeping in this post.
1991 marked our first foray into full-color printing. Techniques had yet to attain today's precision, and the resulting promotional literature bore serendipitous irregularities. As in life, the sunset on each of these 5"x7" postcards varies widely— from an almost entirely chartreuse haze, to a nearly-complete spectrum that steps from red in the upper altitudes, to a flash of green, to deep blue sea. Our trusty logo was perhaps never more at home than it is against this unpredictable backdrop, where ingredients and intent are only suggestions toward a result.
John Malcolm Brinnin delivered the keynote address that year, "Travel and The Sense of Wonder," in which he said:
Some of the soupiest travel writing on record has been done by moonstruck impressionists aspiring to literature; some of the best by close observers aiming to convey no more than pertinent information, a credible economic or sociological overview, a guidebook devoid of Chamber of Commerce soufflé.
Touché, John Malcom. We've got a few of these cards lying around, reader. If you'd like to start a collection, email me with your mailing address, and I'll post one your way before sundown.
Four more authors have been confirmed for our 2009 Seminar: HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth.
Francisco Goldman is the author, most recently, of The Art of Political Murder: Who killed the Bishop?, a non-fiction work on the Bishop Gerardi murder case in Guatemala. It was named a "Notable Book" by The New York Times for 2007, and a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Economist. His three earlier novels are The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband. He last joined us in 2004, for Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. We happily welcome Francisco back to Key West.
Alan Cheuse, "The Voice of Books on National Public Radio" has been "reading for America" every week on NPR. He is the author of The Bohemians, a historical novel about John Reed and Louise Bryant, Fall Out of Heaven, which focused in large part on the life of his father, a pilot in the Red Air Force, during the 1930s, and the novels The Grandmothers' Club and The Light Possessed. His forthcoming novel To Catch the Lightning (October, 2008) follows the career of turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis and his quest to photograph the western tribes of North America. Alan last joined us as a moderator in 2003 for Poetry: The Beautiful Changes.
In response to a panel discussion titled Poets and Their Work: Poetry as Its Own Biography (personal I vs. poetic eye), John Ashbery delivers a "mini-lecture" on so-called confessional poetry and the work of Elizabeth Bishop. At the conclusion of the lecture, Ashbery reads his "Soonest Mended" (1966), from The Double Dream of Spring, inspired, he tells us, by Bishop's "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance."
This is the (unpublished) lecture cited in Eugene Richie's introduction to Ashbery's Selected Prose. An excerpt:
It's only when I feel compelled to write poetry that is all of a piece, that I feel uncomfortable. Poetry bloweth where it listeth. It should never be thought of as a practical solution to life's mess. Its value is in its total uselessness. It's the roses we are always being urged to stop and smell.
Elizabeth Bishop is a poet in whom the two kinds of I/eye are fully, and beautifully, fused. We do not read her to discover the details of her biography, yet I feel that we end up knowing her— and I feel it all the more intensely in Key West, every time I walk past that little house, tucked behind the pandanus bush— better than many poets who set out to inform us about the particulars of their lives.
(12:04) / 5.4 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 John Ashbery.
Billy Collins was in his second term as U.S. Poet Laureate at the time of this reading, in January 2003. He reads a selection of poems, including "Shoveling Snow With Buddha," "Monday," "Flock," "Creatures," "The Lanyard," "The Country," "Surprise," "No Time," "Love," "Sonnet," "Japan," "Forgetfulness," "Consolation," "On Turning Ten," and "Nightclub."
(30:31) / 14 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Billy Collins.
As part of a panel discussion in 2003, we asked Robert Creeley to read and comment upon one of his favorite poems. It was no surprise when he selected a poem by his great friend and comrade, Charles Olson. Creeley reads passages from his introduction to Olson's Selected Poems, and reads the latter half of Olson's "Maximus, to Gloucester," which concludes:
John White had seen it
in his eye
but fourteen men
of whom we know eleven
twenty-two eyes
and the snow flew
where gulls now paper
the skies
where fishing continues
and my heart lies
(5:14) / 2.4 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author(s). © 2008 the estate of Robert Creeley. © 2008 the estate of Charles Olson.
Creeley photo is © Elsa Dorfman. You can see more of her portraits of Creeley here. Olson photo is from the Olson archives at the University of Connecticut.
Tony Horwitz's new book, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, was released yesterday. You can read The New York Times's review of the book and profile of Horwitz, here. From his publisher, Random House, you can hear an .mp3 of Horwitz reading from the new book.
We're looking forward to Horwitz's contributions this January, when he'll join us for HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth.
There's an excellent discussion of Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping (1980), going on right now at Reading Room, the New York Times blog which hosts two-week-long online panel discussions led by editors of its Book Review. Participants include Allen Gurganus, who, together with Robinson, will join us in January as we examine HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. I read Housekeeping for the first time last week. What follows is how I found it.
Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters growing up in the isolated western town of Fingerbone. Madness runs in their family, and men are mostly absent but for the memories adumbrated by fading photographs, dried flowers, and unread letters. Their mother's suicide has delivered young Ruth and Lucille to the care of her sister Sylvie, a drifter, whose "housekeeping" is a hodgepodge of inabilities to come to terms with domesticity. When the girls are still quite young, Sylvie's child-like capacity for make-believe makes her an excellent playmate; they become close friends and confidantes. As the girls grow older, however, they become more aware of Sylvie's aloofness from ordinary human society. They battle over an allegiance to Sylvie, on the one hand, and the pressures of societal norms, on the other. It's the story of sisters torn apart by adolescence, overwhelmed by the complexities of an adult world, handicapped by a family history riddled with unexplained absences. Here's Ruth, our narrator:
When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception.
This is a mysterious book, a fiction which feels as if it could be fact, a tale of a human family rendered exotic by tethers to an other-world. "All this is fact," Ruth tells us. "Fact explains nothing. On the contrary it is fact that requires explanation." Robinson was a poet before writing this novel, and it shows in lucid, elusive prose wedded to a story of life as apparition. It is a gem, and gem-like, reading like the spare and opulent product of considered elisions, yielding luminous glimpses.
Go to the Reading Room for the New York Times discussion of Housekeeping.
Buy the book.
from top left: James Merrill, Evan Rhodes, Edward Hower, Alison Lurie, Shel Silverstein, Bill Manville, Joseph Lash, Arnold Sundgaard, John Williams, Richard Wilbur, Jim Boatwright.
from bottom left: Susan Nadler, Thomas McGuane, William Wright, John Ciardi, David Kaufelt, Philip Caputo, Philip Burton, John Malcolm Brinnin.
How many words is a picture worth if its subjects have penned more than many thousands of bestselling words apiece, already read by tens of thousands of readers? If in their beach bags are five Pulitzer Prizes, a few National Book Awards, two Bollingen Prizes, and office stationery from the U.S. Poet Laureate?
Thanks to Bill Wright for loaning this excellent group portrait. Liz Lear arranged the event, at Hidden Beach. The photographer was Don Kincaid. Click here for a full-size version. Thanks to Liz Lear, Holly Merrill, and Don Kincaid for their help in identifying the authors.
Current U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic reads and comments upon his poems "White Room," "Mirrors at 4 a.m.," and "The Friends of Heraclitus." From the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar. (7:32)
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Charles Simic.
We've just posted details for workshops by Alison Lurie & Edward Hower, Porter Shreve, and Bich Min Nguyen. Click the links to go to their respective workshop descriptions, or click here to see all of our workshop instructors.
Key Westers bemoan change. You should've seen it twenty years ago. You should have seen it last week. But look far enough, and you'll see we've made a habit of proclaiming ruin. Still, it's better here than not, and gems do turn up in what looks like faceless change. Today, it's condominiums. Yesterday, it was the Navy. Here's Elizabeth Bishop, in 1942:
Marjorie and I are leaving for Mexico on the fifteenth. We're flying to Mérida, where we'll stay awhile. Then we're going up to Mexico City and then find a cool place—on a lake—to stay for the summer—in fact maybe for "the duration," I don't know. It is impossible to live here any longer. The Navy takes over and tears down and eats up one or two blocks of beautiful little houses for dinner every day. Probably the house on White Street will go, too.
The local build-up for the war was an unprecedented disruption, with thousands of young servicemen and the bustle of war preparations altering the pace of daily life. Though only a part-time resident, Bishop owned a home and had begun to feel at home here. These new transients shook her claim on the place. Who were these crass military men who displaced Miss Bishop?
One of them was nineteen year-old James Schuyler, future Pulitzer-prize winning poet, "simply the best we have," according to John Ashbery, and member of the so-called New York School of poets, along with Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. That's Schuyler in the image above, enrolled in sonar school in Key West during the summer of '43, a year after Bishop's complaint. By delighful coincidence, Schuyler and Bishop worked on the base together as fellow patriots that summer. Neither was aware of the other, but Bishop wrote to Marianne Moore of her adventure in the Navy:
1990. If ever a year spoke greater optimism, I, only recently turned twelve, was unaware. The eighties were down, and the twentieth century was nearly out. Our promotional literature from that year displays a timely enthusiasm. A sloop sails counter to the prevailing winds betrayed by the bent coconut palm. The postcard, below, has fireworks. And that custom-cut font, running in every direction it can to get away from itself! In the program, David Kaufelt recounts how it all began:
Literary agent Dick Duane and I were schmoozing over Diet Cokes and white meat chicken sandwiches in a Manhattan hotel bar with Rosemary Jones of the Council for Florida Libraries. She was in New York to round up authors for the council's annual lecture series. But New York publishers' publicists were having none of it, fully convinced no one in Florida read, much less bought books.
I said we have so many writers of so many persuasions in Key West, we could have our own literary festival. There was a suden enlightened silence. We could. We should. And we would.
Instructors, schedules, and details for our 2009 Writers' Workshop Program are now online. Poets Billy Collins and Dara Wier will join us again this year to offer their insight and expertise, and we'll have Mary Morris, Patricia O'Toole, and Alan Cheuse leading workshops which focus on the writing of history and historical fiction. Click here for links to complete information about each of these workshops. We'll be posting more information about additional workshop opportunities soon, including instructors Alison Lurie, Edward Hower, Bich Min Nguyen, and Porter Shreve.
One of last year's workshop attendees, Claire Lipschultz, had a story air last week on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She worked on it in a workshop with Bich Min Nguyen this past January. You can listen to it here.
Three Scholarships are available to writers, students, and librarians to offset the cost of the Writer's Workshops. This year, we are particularly interested in supporting emerging historians and writers of historical fiction. Last year's scholarship winners and Workshop attendees include Nami Mun, whose Miles from Nowhere was subsequently accepted for publication by Riverhead Press; Mehdi Okasi, whose work is forthcoming in the 2009 Best New American Voices anthology; and Kristen-Paige Madonia, whom I recently interviewed, and who will be a Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West this fall.
We've just confirmed the addition of two novelists for next January's Seminar, HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Elizabeth Gaffney is a former editor under George Plimpton at Paris Review, a translator of German literature, and the author of Metropolis, a post-Civil War story of love and crime set among New York City's immigrant communities. The stereopticon image above of immigrant men working as streetlayers came out of her research for this book. Visit Gaffney's author page on our site for links and more information.
Peter Ho Davies is a Guggenheim Fellow, a faculty member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, and the author of The Welsh Girl, a novel set in and around a POW camp built by the British during WWII in the remote mountains of northern Wales.
We will continue to add more writers for next January's Seminar. You can find the up-to-date roster here, with links to information about each author. Tickets are still available for the event, however we do expect to sell out early. Register for the event here.
I think writing about history is not unlike writing science fiction or certain other genre novels that are outside the present time and reality in that they actually sometimes serve as more effective metaphors for what's going on in the present world. I am very interested in that. And the way that you can talk about a world that has a lot of structural similarities to the present but is very different— in some ways be more honest, be more probing, or simply because of the distance from people's contemporary reality, push into certain corners that otherwise might be uncomfortable.
—Elizabeth Gaffney, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum.
1992 Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott reads passages from his then-unpublished book-length poem, "The Prodigal." Of it, he explains: "I think the book is about another kind of colonization— of the intellect, and maybe even of the soul— colonization that came from visiting Europe. For a long time, I refused the seduction of Europe. Because of its history, and because of the the pride Europe took in its culture and the obscenity of its history. But I have been going often, and in spite of furious attempts to resist that seduction, I am falling for it." This was Walcott's first public reading from "The Prodigal." A passage from it echoes the title of the Seminar that year, borrowed from Richard Wilbur's 1947 poem, "The Beautiful Changes:" the beautiful changes of rain in which the hills faded into cloud and the hulls of the yacht seemed anchored in a field of fast flowers. (50:26)
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Derek Walcott.
A decade ago, the Key West Literary Seminar began offering financial assistance to individuals who would otherwise be unable to attend the Seminar. Last year, three new scholarships were introduced to recognize excellence from new and emerging writers. Through the generosity of Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida, these scholarships are once again available. The Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award, the Scotti Merrill Scholarship, and the Marianne Russo Scholarship each provide full tuition for either session of the 2009 Seminar and the writer's workshop program. In addition, these scholarships may provide support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West and an opportunity to appear on stage at the Seminar. This year we are especially interested in supporting writers of historical fiction.
Junot Díaz has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Of all that our zeitgeist is composed, the popular praise for this book is surely part. In this time, a major-party political candidate invites citizens to hope for a society that is post-racial, or at least post-"racial" as that term has been handed down for a generation. And Oscar Wao, peppered with Spanish slangs and devoted to a New Jersey-raised Dominican sci-fi nerd, a subculture within a subculture about as far off the radar as an American life can get, wins America's premier literary prize, a prize which honors "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life (italics mine)." The Pulitzer committee is again right on in making an award based on the quality of the writing, and the richness of its expression. I'm thinking of past winners Richard Ford, Michael Chabon, authors who get at something profound, subtle, iconoclastic, heartbreaking, and hilarious in American life. Díaz's book evidences not only great talent employing our flexible language, but great heart and humanity as well. This heart, apparent in Junot the person during his visits with us in Key West for the Seminar, is displayed in this quote from an interview he gave to New York Magazine:
'When I talk to people I'm such a dumbass. ... When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.
The audio below is a recording of Díaz reading from and discussing Oscar Wao during this January's Seminar. The pictures which follow after the jump, also from January, come from Jason Rowan. That's Junot talking with a Seminar attendee after his reading, Junot talking with KWLS board members Judy Blume and Lynn Kaufelt, Junot and Billy Collins pontificating, and Junot and Kevin Young right next-door to KWLS administrative headquarters at one of our famous parties. Congratulations to Junot. We're looking forward to seeing him again.
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James Tate, half stand-up comic, half great American poet, reads a selection from his work, including "Of Whom Am I Afraid," "A Sound Like Distant Thunder," "The Animists," "The Rally," "Silver Queen," "The Rules," and "The Special Guest." His offbeat humor and superb comedic timing keep the crowd in stitches. From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (21:04)
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 James Tate.
Sharon Olds reads a selection of poems from her body of work, including 1987's "On the Subway," "Animal Crackers," "When I Left Her" (work in progress), "Stag's Leap," "Wooden Ode," "When She Slept In," and "A Week Later." From the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar: The Beautiful Changes. (19:12)
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Sharon Olds.
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 John Ashbery.
The New York Times reported last week on the discovery of a sound recording made in 1860, nearly twenty years before Thomas Edison first captured the sound of the words "Mary had a little lamb" on a piece of tinfoil. Oddly, this recording, made by Parisian typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was never intended to be heard. The idea of audio playback had not been conceived, let alone by Martinville, and his intent, to create a paper record of human speech, related more to stenography than to phonography. We have come, of course, a very long way; the in-your-ear-in-an-instant .mp3 which accompanies the Times article is proof of that.
When the Key West Literary Seminar began in 1983 as a program of the Friends of the Monroe County Library, audio recordings were ubiquitous in the average American home. Vinyl records had been around for a generation, and cassette technology had made it possible to listen to your favorite recordings in the car or anywhere you and your Walkman, invented by Sony in 1979, might travel. Furthermore, cassettes were easily recorded upon, easily recorded over. One could now, with a minimum of equipment, affordably create audio recordings of any event. The Key West Literary Seminar did not immediately pick up on the possibilities afforded by this technology. The early years' events were assembled on a nothing budget as a labor of love. Many of the organizers were remarkably young. Key West was a surface and a beneath-the-surface; an anonymity which implied assent toward myriad behaviors thrived and was prized. Posterity was on no one's mind.
When you're through, listen to our podcast of Junot Díaz reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, during our 2008 Seminar: New Voices.
Image credit: Robert Birnbaum
Edmund White talks about finding a style and a mode of expression to approach the gay subject matter which has been his life's work. Discussing social, professional, and aesthetic attitudes toward gays and "gay literature," White reveals his experience as an emerging writer in the 1960s, reactions to gay lifestyles at institutions like Time and The Nation, and the varied attitudes among writers he's known, including Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. Along the way, White discusses several of his books, including The Joy of Gay Sex, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, A Boy's Own Story, and Hotel du Dream.
From 2008: New Voices. (41:31) includes 16 min. Q&A.
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Edmund White.
For our fourth annual event, in 1986, we honored playwright and Key West habitué, Tennessee Williams. The graphic design of the program and poster, as in 1985, is simple and direct. The Martha Swopes photograph shows a dapper, not-quite-at-ease Williams, seated in a wicker rocking chair on the telltale terrazo floors of a Key West home. The font is a straight-ahead serif, printed on glossy stock. We were the Key West Literary Seminar and Festival, it seems, and we were administrated by the Friends of the Monroe County Public Library. Then-President of the Friends, Petronella Collins, pens a delightful early statement of our intents: "The correct mix of intellectuality and frivolity has, over the centuries, proved extraordinarily successful. As our Literary Seminar evolved, the keen judgement and clairvoyance of the Council for Florida Libraries was combined with the magic of Key West to produce a mix of very fine quality."
Yes, intellectuality and frivolity. A fine mix indeed, one whose perfect proportions ever eluded Tennessee:
Frankie and I (let's face it!) have fallen into a virtual social oblivion here. A great old Queen Bee named Erna Shtoll or Shmole or something like that has arrived on the scene and become the center of gay society. Bedecked with yellow diamonds like 1000 watt light bulbs on the marquee of a skating rink, she holds continual court on the beach and at the bars, the boys flock to her like gnats. ...
Littoral is the year-round online voice of the Key West Literary Seminar. We write about literature, about Key West, and especially about the authors who have been or will be part of our annual Seminar. Throughout the year on Littoral, you'll find podcasts from our growing audio archives, interviews, book reviews, news about the Seminar, links, commentary, and arcana. To submit a post or idea, to ask a question, please email our editor, Arlo Haskell, at arlohaskell@gmail.com.
