Rachel Kushner writes frequently for Artforum and coedits the literary, philosophy, and art journal Soft Targets, whose focus is political inquiry, poetry, and literature-in-translation. Her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award.

Telex from Cuba takes place in Oriente Province and Havana, Cuba, during the 1950s. We learn about the American businessmen in charge of the country's sugar and nickel mining operations, and the Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians who work in the mines and cut the cane in a form of indentured servitude. Meanwhile, from their base in the mountains above the sugar and nickel operations in Preston and Nicaro, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army battle the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose surrender on New Year's Day fifty years ago introduced hope to the Cuban underclass and fear to the businessmen who relied on their cheap labor.

Kushner will join us for the second session of the 27th annual Key West Literary Seminar, January 15-18, in the theater of the historic San Carlos Institute, which stands today as a museum to an earlier Cuban revolutionary, José Martí. In this final interview of our 2008 series, conducted by email over the holiday season, Kushner talks about the experiences of her mother's family living in Cuba, the real Christian de La Mazière, and the process of creating fiction from the Cuban revolution.

Littoral: From the book jacket, we know Telex From Cuba is based in part on your mother's experiences as a child in Oriente, on land owned by the United Fruit Company. How much of the book is family history? Are there characters that are closely based on your mother's family, and the people they knew?

Rachel Kushner: The original spark, my idea to write the book, was due to the fact that my mother had lived in Cuba as a child, and I'd gone there with her and two of her sisters to see the strange, former American colony in northeastern Oriente Province where they'd spent part of their childhood. The historical circumstances upon which I attempted to build my novel– an American colony in Cuba, and the various roles the people who lived there played in the revolution– was a fictional schematic that I borrowed from real life, the lives of my mother's family and the people they knew and that I discovered, independently, through my own research. I did, at least initially, draw heavily from the mountains of archival material my grandparents had left behind: every letter they'd written from Cuba had a carbon, they saved every calling card and receipt and budget book and party invitation– I mean everything– so I had access to this very rich archive of the lives of the Americans who managed and controlled Cuba's sugar and nickel– the country's most valuable resources. But the novel itself is a work of fiction. I am a fiction writer, not a memoirist, not a historian. As a literary figuration, it is ruled by the imagination, and structured by it, too. If the book were simply a fictionalization of my family's history, it would have been a rather dreary exercise– not because their lives were in any way dreary, but because fiction has to rise up organically and reconfigure the past on its own terms, via a logic that's aesthetic, not factual. I learned this the hard way. At first, I was rather attached to some of the details I found in my (long-deceased) grandparents trove. But those details so often caused problems. They weren't invented, and so they lacked the suppleness of context. The invented detail fits with the mind's own contextual logic. The "real" detail, by contrast, is often so much less believable. Much of what creates "my" Oriente Province is a synthesis, a false reality I was only able to generate after sifting through the details of the real place.

    Overall, the proposition of Americans of various sorts leaving the States to live in a colonial outpost, running away to become more themselves, or get their share of what they think they deserve, and the tacit race and social hierarchies they encounter, and comprise, is a proposition I worked out after having thought a great deal about my own grandparents' lives. So in that sense the whole project is subtended, or ghosted, by the experiences of my family. But as I said– fiction is fiction, and not "about" any real person's life. And because of the mysterious process of writing fiction, and its special integrity, I wince a little when people describe my novel as "based on." Publishers rely so heavily on back-story to promote novels these days– because they think it sells, and maybe it does– but novels don't simply enact the real as it took place. They do something else, stranger and more complicated.

L: Where did your mother's family go after the revolution? Did they ever return? Did you grow up with an awareness of Cuba and Castro, or did this come later?

RK: My family actually left before the revolution. I think my grandfather was fired. He was very disappointed to leave Cuba. My grandmother, far more closed-minded, was happy to leave the "natives" and their lack of love for iceberg lettuce and proper English. The episode in my book of the Americans who get rescued by aircraft carrier because the town is being strafed by Batista's military planes is drawn from a situation that really occurred in Nicaro, but my own family was not there for it. They ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after having first moved back in with their own parents, in St. Louis. They had to split up their children because my grandfather was unemployed. Although this occurred before the Cuban revolution that ejected the Americans from Nicaro, the predicament is in some sense the same: having escaped the US only to wind up returning, jobless and on some level estranged.
    After my grandfather regained his footing, got a job and re-established a life in Tennessee, I know that he was very amused by Castro. He saved all kinds of clippings from the early sixties, and paid attention. He'd spent his time there, of course, and he was not surprised by the comeuppance– especially because Nicaro played a particular role in the whole thing. The rebels were right above Nicaro, and Fidel later railed against the Americans for owning and controlling Cuba's incredibly valuable nickel mines.

    My mother and aunts are all quite far to the left, politically, which is unusual for Americans who lived in Cuba, but for them, it is that experience that politicized them. I had heard about Cuba my whole life, my mother always cooked Cuban dishes, played Cuban music, talked about her childhood as this wonderfully free time in her life. I went with them to Cuba, for the first time, in 2000, which is when I started writing the book. They were the only ones of the Americans who had lived in Preston and Nicaro ever to go back to the United Fruit and nickel enclaves, respectively. Most of the people who lived there were unsympathetic to the revolution and had no desire to see what became of their once-elegant world, the sovietization, the pollution, the shabby state of their country club and manager's row. But my mother and her sisters still feel very connected to the place. Quite simply, they're rather pro-Fidel, because the people they saw working in the canefields and the nickel mines and as servants in their parents' homes have all benefited from the revolution. Obviously this is a sticky issue, and not everyone feels this way, but my mother and her sisters lived there, and I respect the context in which they have made their political judgments. As a student of Latin American politics, my awareness of Fidel, growing up, was that he was the first Latin American leader to stand up to the U.S., and as a child, this impressed me greatly, lack of political freedoms and embargo-related privations notwithstanding.

L: How much time did you spend in Cuba? Where? How did you get around the travel ban?

RK: I spent about two months there, all told. Mostly in Nicaro, which is in the Nipe Bay region. But also Havana, Santiago, Holguín and that whole province: Preston and Banes, the two United Fruit towns; Moa, the other nickel-processing town; Birán, where Fidel grew up. Professional researchers may travel legally under a general US Treasury License, a far easier way to go. I flew direct from Miami.

L: Your Christian de La Mazière is a real villain– an execution instructor and a double-dealer involved simultaneously with the Castros, Batista, and Prío, as well as the notorious dictators of neighboring Hispaniola, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What is known about the real La Mazière? What made him appealing as a character?

RK: I'm so glad you asked about La Mazière, who takes up a good portion of my book, and is the character whose interiority is most exposed to the reader, and yet so often my novel has been described as being told by the two young Americans, as if the French Nazi were this curious blind spot. To me, he is very much at the center of things. While I'm amused that you call him a villain, as the designation is an acknowledgment of his affective role, I don't quite see him that way myself.
    At one point Everly has a kind of musing on her little sister's amorality and the difference between that and immorality, and in a way it echoes La Mazière (although perhaps the distinction would be his own– that he is not in opposition to morals but outside of them). In fact, you're probably right that he is a scoundrel. Certainly the "real" La Mazière, upon who my character is based, is very much of a scoundrel. He was an aristocrat who wrote for a fascist newspaper during the war and then, in August of 1944, just before the allies rolled into Paris, he fled east and enlisted in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS.

"Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth" is now less than a month away. Writers of historical fiction, historians, and a few hundred guests will come together for two long weekends of readings, panel discussion, and lectures at the historic San Carlos Institute; while informal gatherings and parties will take place each evening at local cultural institutions and lush gardens.

The first session, as expected, has been completely sold out. Tickets are still available for the second session, which opens with a keynote address by Booker Prize winner Barry Unsworth on Thursday January 15, and closes on the afternoon of Sunday January 18. Unsworth, who begins the book tour for his new novel Land of Marvels at the Seminar, will be joined by Marilynne Robinson (Home) and Rachel Kushner (Telex From Cuba), two of this year's nominees for the National Book Award; as well as Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Thomas Mallon, and many more.

Admission for the entire weekend, including receptions (with open bar and passed hors d'ouevres) and a light continental breakfast each morning, is only $495. If you have any questions about the Seminar or would like to register, please call Miles at 888-293-9291, or send an email to mail@kwls.org.

We endeavor to make our website as useful and informative as possible to anyone who is planning to attend the Seminar. Here is a brief guide.

    • Complete Schedule of Events for the first and second sessions.
    • Complete list of Speakers, with biographies, bibliographies, and links to resources on the web
    • Key West Lodging Guide, including discounts at hotels and guesthouses for Seminar registrants
    • Our Interview Series– with Barry Unsworth, Geraldine Brooks, Thomas Mallon, and more
    • Our podcast series: free, downlowdable recordings from past events, perfect for the drive or flight to Key West

The Monroe County Public Library website now has an online exhibit of books written by the speakers for our 27th annual Seminar this January. The splash page shows book images by 20 of our panelists, with links to more information about each book. You can also search for additional titles and authors, just as you do at the terminal in the physical library. And, if you log in with the ID number on the back of your library card, you can reserve books that are checked out by someone else, and find out how many books you have checked out. Thanks to library administrator Anne Layton-Rice for assembling this useful tool.

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've been asking our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. For the fifth and final installment of the series, we asked David Levering Lewis and Alison Lurie to recommend their own work. We also make a few suggestions of our own.

 • David Levering Lewis is the author of a landmark two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois. Each volume won the Pulitzer Prize for biography (the first time this happened for back-to back volumes), while the first also won the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize and the Bancroft Prize.

     "Two books for me, my latest– God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 and W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. As historical fiction can express the truth of our deepest wishes, my Islam book about the making of Europe recaptures a long-ago time of admirable interfaith cultural and economic cohabitation in Andalusia devoutly to be wished today. Similarly, the Du Bois biography prompts a reimagining of progressive social and economic options foreclosed by the cold war. I'll also use W.E.B. Dubois's Mansart Trilogy as a platform for my talk. It is a fictional historical trilogy that begins with Reconstruction and ends in the mid-20th century– with himself as thinly disguised protagonist."

 • Alison Lurie is the author of nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs (1985). She and husband Edward Hower will co-teach a writers' workshop in January focusing on the memoir, titled "Creating Writing from Personal History"

    "I recommend my most recent novel, Truth and Consequences, along with The Last Resort, which is set in Key West, and Familiar Spirits, a memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, who lived in Key West. All of these books are, or as time passes are becoming, historical fiction, since they involve a new look at the past, and in the case of fiction an attempt to combine memory, research, and imagination. For a memoir, memory and research are essential, but imagination is dangerous, since what one hopes to do is to tell as much truth as possible."

 • Several of our panelists have books which are newly released or forthcoming. Among these are Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky's Blindspot, Alan Cheuse's To Catch the Lightning, and Barry Unsworth's Land of Marvels, which will be released in January and will be available during the Seminar through Voltaire Books in the lobby of the San Carlos. We also recommend this year's finalists for the National Book Award: Home by Marilynne Robinson, Telex From Cuba by Rachel Kushner, and Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. Read more recommendations from our writers here. You'll also find our authors talking about their work in our interview series here.

Click the image below for a full-size reproduction of the letter John Malcolm Brinnin wrote to Octavio Paz on October 13, 1991. Brinnin recalls the first time he and Paz met, in 1972 in Elizabeth Bishop's Cambridge apartment, and invites Paz to be the keynote speaker of the 1993 Key West Literary Seminar.

We will soon begin to release audio recordings from our 1993 Seminar devoted to poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The event was organized by John Malcolm Brinnin, a friend of Bishop's since the 1940s, and brought together many of Bishop's intimates for a weekend of informal tribute. In many ways, it anticipated the field of Bishop scholarship as we know it today.

At the time, Bishop's extra-literary life was largely unknown to the public; her private letters and unpublished works were still private and unpublished, and the experiences revealed by biographies and oral histories were mainly known to those she shared them with. Brinnin recognized a beginning flood of interest in Bishop, writing in an invitation to Octavio Paz of "the slow but sure rise of Elizabeth's reputation, from the devoted attention of an elite to the acclaim of an ever-broadening audience." He ended up orchestrating an event that offered a richer, deeper, more fully-known Bishop than ever before.

Among those Brinnin gathered in Key West was Robert Giroux, Bishop's longtime editor and publisher, whose reading from her letters (a selection of which he published the following year as One Art) was likely the first public presentation of this important material. Bishop's close friend and fellow poet James Merrill also took part. He read a selection of her poems along with the poems they inspired him to write, linking the pairs with private anecdotes that reveal and offer insight into each poet's creative process. Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner whom Bishop translated into English, joined Richard Wilbur and Ashley Brown, who had translated portions of Bishop's anthology of 20th-century Brazilian poets. Alice Quinn, editor of the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (the "uncollected" Bishop poems) was here with Alice Helen Methfessel, Bishop's companion in her last years and the executor who has made possible so much of what we now know of Bishop. In addition to the readings and discussions, Bishop's watercolors (loaned by Methfessel) were exhibited to the public for the first time. The collection, curated by William Benton and later documented in his book Exchanging Hats, presents a folk-art version of the Key West Bishop knew and loved in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, in a ceremony coordinated by the Friends of the Library USA, her former home at 624 White Street was added to the national register of Literary Landmarks.

Our audio engineers at Private Ear Recording Studios have remastered the original recordings from nine cassettes and converted them into digital .wav files for our use. We're now in the editing process– listening to the recordings, selecting the material that will be of most use to readers, fans, and scholars, and securing permissions from various copyright holders. The production of these recordings for the web has been a particular goal of our audio archives project. We look forward to sharing them with you here soon.

Congratulations to our friends Peter Matthiessen and Mark Doty, who each picked up a National Book Award at the ceremony in New York last night. Matthiessen, who also won the award in 1979 for The Snow Leopard, was honored in the fiction category this year for Shadow Country. The now-definitive overhaul of his so-called Everglades trilogy was cited by the judges as a "masterpiece" and "an epic of American rise and descent." Doty, our keynote speaker this past January, received the committee's esteemed award for poetry for his Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems. The NBA citation calls Doty a "master" whose work conveys "ferocious compassion."

Visit our podcasts page to hear Doty's 2008 keynote address, and his reading of several Key West-inspired poems. To see and hear Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country, visit the Seminar in person this January.

This week's catch from the deep:

  •  The New York Times on the mini-controversy regarding Peter Matthiessen's nomination for a National Book Award for Shadow Country.

  •  Joy Williams interviewed in Bookslut by the inimitable Tao Lin.

  •  President-elect Barack Obama with KWLS 2003 keynote speaker Derek Walcott's Collected Poems in hand. Also, Walcott's newest: "Forty Acres," a poem for Barack Obama. (Thanks, Valparaiso / One Poet's Notes.)

  •  KWLS perennial and formeer U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins assesses Bob Dylan's poetry. (Thanks again, Valparaiso / One Poet's Notes.)

  •  Alan Cheuse's To Catch the Lightning, previewed in our May interview, is now available to order.

We are delighted to announce the winners of our three named scholarships. April Puciata has been awarded the Scotti Merrill Memorial Scholarship; Martha Otis has received the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award; and Patricia Engel has won the Marianne Russo Scholarship.

The annual scholarships are given by the Key West Literary Seminar to recognize excellence in a manuscript submission from a new or emerging writer. They provide full tuition to our 2009 Seminar and writers' workshop program, financial support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West, and an opportunity to appear onstage at the Seminar. We are sincerely grateful to Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida for the endowments which will continue to make these scholarships possible for years to come.

April Puciata, a poet, lives in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Mangrove, and Salonika. This will be her fifth visit to Key West and her first to the Seminar. Martha Otis lives in Miami and first visited Key West two years ago with her daughter. She teaches writing at the University of Miami and has published fiction in Best New American Voices 2000, the Indiana Review, and Moment Magazine. Patricia Engel also lives in Miami; she learned about the Seminar last year and attended a few of our free-and-open-to-the-public events. Her fiction has been published in Harpur Palate, Driftwood, Slice, and the Boston Review (here and here). In 2007, Engel was selected by Junot Díaz as Featured Emerging Fiction Writer at CLMP's "Periodically Speaking" at the New York Public Library.

Congratulations to April, Martha, and Patricia. We look forward to meeting you this January in Key West.

We're pleased to announce the theme for our 2010 Seminar. Clearing the Sill of the World, from January 7 - 10, will be a celebration of 60 years of American poetry in honor of our longtime friend Richard Wilbur. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Wilbur has, in his distinguished career, received virtually every award available to a poet. Our title comes from a line in his poem, "The Writer," which you can see on our home page for the 2010 Seminar. We've begun to assemble an excellent cast of poets for the event, and will be announcing their names in the weeks and months to come.

We're delighted to note that our partners at PennSound have added three more recordings from the KWLS archives. Our 2003 recordings by C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander, and a 2008 recording by Maggie Nelson, all recently posted here at home, are now also part of PennSound's estimable collection.

For years, PennSound has been the best place to go for free, downloadable poetry readings by many of the 20th century's most original poets. We're grateful for the opportunity to work with the good people at PennSound and for the chance to reach their listener-readers. Check out their author index here, where you'll find rare readings by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Koch, Michael Palmer, and others.

Tony Hillerman, bestselling author of detective novels set set among the Navajos of the Southwest, died last Sunday at 83. You can read his obituary in The New York Times here. It was written by Marilyn Stasio, who also wrote this piece for PaperCuts about meeting Hillerman at the 1988 Key West Literary Seminar, where they discussed Hemingway while leaning against the pink stuccoed wall of the La Concha.

Below is a reproduction of a letter Hillerman wrote on personal stationary to Les Standiford, the coordinator for our 1988 Seminar, Whodunit?, dedicated to the art and tradition of mystery literature.

The daily schedule for our 2009 Seminar has been announced. The first session begins at 7:45 p.m. on Thursday, January 8 with a keynote address from Geraldine Brooks. All day Friday and Saturday will be given over to readings and discussions, including Ursula Hegi reading from Stones from the River, David Levering Lewis discussing W.E.B. DuBois, Peter Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country, and a special gala evening with Gore Vidal. The first weekend concludes on Sunday afternoon, with a free-and-open-to-the-public program featuring Sena Jeter Naslund, Allan Gurganus, and Barry Unsworth.

Unsworth returns to deliver the keynote address for the second session, which begins on the evening of Thursday, January 15. The second weekend will include readings by two of this year's National Book Award nominees, Rachel Kushner and Marilynne Robinson; and an on-stage discussion between William Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Russell Banks. The free-and-open-to-the-public event on the final Sunday features Anchee Min, Madison Smartt Bell, and Francisco Goldman, among others.

Click here to view the schedules for the first and/or second session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar.

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. For the fourth installment of the series, we asked Peter Ho Davies and Barry Unsworth about their work.

• Peter Ho Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His novel, The Welsh Girl, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003.

     "My first collection of stories, The Ugliest House in the World, contains several historical pieces– "Relief," "Safe," and "A Union"– which I think might make for interesting reading alongside my recent historical novel The Welsh Girl. "A Union" is set in the same part of North Wales as the novel, albeit in 1899 rather than 1944. "Relief" and "Safe" represent early efforts at incorporating historical figures into my fiction, something I do again in The Welsh Girl, where Rudolph Hess is a featured character. Lastly, I think reading these works side by side raises some questions about the different challenges of historical fiction in the two forms– the novel and the story– which I hope we might touch on at the Seminar."

• Barry Unsworth won the Booker Prize in 1992. He will deliver the keynote address at our second session this January.

     "The two books of mine I'd recommend are Sacred Hunger, which takes the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century as an extreme example of the human tendency to disregard moral restraint when in full pursuit of profit; and The Songs of the Kings, which takes a Greek myth– the sacrifice by Agamemnon of his daughter so as to obtain a favourable wind for his invasion of Troy– and seeks through this to illustrate how the need to consolidate political power can lead to war, and the sacrifice of the innocent which follows on this."

A two-weeks' catch from around the web:

• The Nation reviews Gore Vidal's Selected Essays

• Interview with Samantha Hunt in Small Spiral Notebook

• Judy Blume in Jacket Copy on YA for Obama

• Critical Mass takes another look at James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover

• Ernest Hemingway's Cuban baseball team

• Key West History Magazine online

• Valerie Martin's favorite books, in The Week

• Marilynne Robinson on Bat Segundo

• A directory of the Monroe County Public Library's online historical projects

• The double-rigged shrimp trawler pictured above is from NOAA's Fisheries Collection

Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and his Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems is nominated for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry. In this recording from our 2008 Seminar, Doty reads a selection of work inspired by a visit to Key West in 1997, including a section from his 2007 memoir Dog Years, and the poems "Sea Grape Valentine," "Watermelon Soda," and "Catalina Macaw."

       from "Watermelon Soda"

       Strange island,
       to yield a walking
       hot-pink soda can
       inhabited by a lucky
       Modernist crab,
       carrying on his back
       a tropic shelter
       by Barragan
       or Corbusier,
       perennially modish
       if not quite practical...

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (11:19) / 5.2 MB

To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Mark Doty. Used with generous permission from Mark Doty.

Forrest Gander is the author of several collections of poetry, essays, and the novel As a Friend, published by New Directions in 2008. He has translated the works of several Latin American poets including Coral Bracho and Pura Lopez-Colome, and is the editor and co-translator with Kent Johnson of two books by Bolivian poet Jaime Sáenz. In this recording from 2003, Gander reads a selection from his body of work, including an early version of "Present Tense" (its first public reading); a translation of Sáenz's "Someone Must Be Called Twilight"; and, from the collections Science & Steepleflower and Torn Awake, "To Live Without Solace" and "To The Reader."

From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (19:59) / 9.2 MB

To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2008 Forrest Gander. Used with generous permission from Forrest Gander.

This year's National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday. Among the fiction nominees are Peter Matthiessen, who will join us during the first session of our January 2009 Seminar; Rachel Kushner, and Marilynne Robinson, who will each join us for Session 2.

Matthiessen, who has been nominated four times for the award (winning in 1978 for The Snow Leopard), is nominated this year for Shadow Country, a new novel which consolidates his trilogy about legendary Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson. Robinson is nominated for Home, the successor and sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. Kushner receives the esteemed nomination for her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, a portrait of the American colonies in pre-Revolutionary Cuba and their collapse in the face of revolutionary change.

Tickets are still available to see Marilynne Robinson, Rachel Kushner, and a host of other distinguished writers during Session 2 of our 2009 Seminar, "Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth." Click here to register.

C.D. Wright is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Bunting Institute, as well as Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In this audio recording from 2003, Wright reads from One Big Self (2003), her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, which portrayed inmates at three Louisiana prisons.

In the old days they would have sent you to America
The one called Grasshopper raises wild things
sparrows     hares     you name it
They've got a muleskinner here that can make one sit down and talk
Then there's the wren nesting in the razor wire

From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (15:54) / 7.3 MB

To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2008 C.D. Wright. Used with generous permission from C.D. Wright.

We note with sadness the death, earlier this summer, of Rust Hills, our friend and collaborator for more than 20 years. He was 83.

The importance of Rust Hills to the world of American letters, particularly as fiction editor at Esquire, is well conveyed by the obituaries which ran in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. The enduring value of his own crisp, laugh-out-loud prose is plainly apparent in the idiosyncratic trio of books gathered together as How To Do Things Right. But Rust, who arrived in Key West in the early 1980s with his wife, the writer Joy Williams, was also a man who loved a day on the water; who played anagrams and poker, threw cocktail parties and chatted over the fence; and who will be remembered and missed by the many who knew him, first and finally, as a friend.

For this memorial, we turn to a handful of those who knew Rust in Key West. Recollections follow from writers Harry Mathews, Phyllis Rose, John Leslie, and William Wright, from former neighbor and barman John Vagnoni, and from sculptor and printmaker John Martini.

     "More than twenty-five years ago I met Rust Hills when he and Joy first came to Key West. For two or three winters they rented before eventually buying a place of their own on Pine Street. Cocktail parties galore ensued– once, twice, sometimes three times a week as they got acquainted with the denizens of Key West. All the literati were invited, along with a varying group of Key West roustabouts. Rust was about sixty then, a few years younger than I am now. I can still see him shuffling between the hibachi grill filled with fragrant kielbasa, and the bar. Liquor bottles bloomed, then wilted on the kitchen countertops– the Emerald Isle as it became known at Pine Street. In his trademark khakis and button-down Brooks Brothers' shirt, a beloved Camel cigarette in one hand, a glass of Scotch in the other, Rust observed the unfolding parade. Never once did he waver in his identity. Re-inventing himself would have been unthinkable. With Rust, what you saw was what you got, as they say. And what he often said was, "No change is good change." He was as resolute in his habits as he was steadfast in his friendships. The weekly games of poker and anagrams, the many lucid days on the water– for me, Key West will not be the same without him."


     "Rust was like an old shoe. He was just a great guy. He and Joy would come in to the Green Parrot when we used to have the poetry slams. They'd order margaritas and stand outside the doorway, listening. When we were neighbors on Olivia Street, we'd bullshit across the fence– this or that, whatever was going on, and I'd walk away and get goosebumps a little, thinking about who this guy was, what he'd been responsible for. I mean I grew up in awe of Mailer; Cheever and Carver and those guys; and Rust– he was the guy. He made it happen. That picture in the Times— boy, what a good-looking guy, drink in hand, laughing. The world was his."

We are proud to issue John Malcolm Brinnin's Travel And The Sense Of Wonder as the second in our series of digital reproductions of obscure, hard-to-find, or just plain interesting books which have particular relevance to Key West letters (Harry Mathews's Epithalamium was the first). The text of this 24-page staple-bound pamphlet, originally published in 1992 by the Library of Congress as part of the Center For The Book's Viewpoint Series, reproduces Brinnin's keynote address from our 1991 Seminar, Literature of Travel: A Sense of Place, and includes an introduction by KWLS founding member William Robertson. Brinnin's essay is a deceptively simple discussion of the role of "the sense of wonder" in the impulse to travel, and "the spirit of investigation" required for said sense to "get off its aspirations and go to work." With characteristic good humor and disarming eloquence, Brinnin recounts his late-career transformation from a poet and literary critic ("one of those charity cases") into a chronicler of ocean liners and social change, revealing along the way a remarkable sensitivity toward the wondrous capacities of language.

John Malcolm Brinnin was a poet, biographer, critic, anthologist, and teacher. The director of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association Poetry Center (the 92nd Street Y) in New York City from 1949-1956, he became friends with many prominent 20th century poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz, Richard Wilbur, and Dylan Thomas. His Dylan Thomas in America recounts Brinnin's friendship with the Welsh poet and the reading tour which ended with Thomas's death. Brinnin also wrote several collections of poetry, biographies of Gertrude Stein (The Third Rose, 1959) and Truman Capote (Truman Capote: Dear Heart, Old Buddy, 1986), a critical work on William Carlos Williams, and The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic (1971). His behind-the-scenes influence on a number of writers was significant, if insufficiently recognized by the broader public. As a resident of Key West in the 1980s and 1990s, he was a crucial influence on the nascent Seminar, and was particularly responsible for the success of our tribute to Elizabeth Bishop in 1993, as he called on a lifetime of friendships to gather together the writers and friends who knew Bishop and her work best. He died in Key West in 1998.

We thank the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Brinnin's copyright-holder, for their permission to reproduce this work; the University of Delaware Library's Special Collections Department, whose John Malcom Brinnin Papers are a resource for Brinnin scholars; and David Wolkowsky.

Click the image above to view the book as a series of images in a popup window. Click here to download a .pdf (12.4 MB).

The Studios of Key West is hosting a writers' workshop led by Kristen-Paige Madonia, October 15-17. Madonia won our Marianne Russo Scholarship last year and is back in Key West this month as TSKW's first writer-in-residence. You can read all about her workshop, "Short Story: A Dialogue Between Writers," on TSKW's site here. For more about Madonia, check out our interview with her from earlier this year, and this podcast of her reading at the Seminar in January 2008.

Stetson Kennedy (born 1916) is a pioneering folklorist, labor activist, and environmentalist. He is the author of the books Palmetto Country, Southern Exposure, The Jim Crow Guide, The Klan Unmasked, and After Appomattox; and co-author, with Peggy A. Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas, of South Florida Folklife.

Kennedy is in Key West