Key West Literary Seminar Blog

We've Moved!

This blog is no longer active. Please visit our new blog: Littoral: the blog of the Key West Literary Seminar.

Brand New Website!

We're about ready to launch the brand new website!

Wondrous Strange Photos

One of the Finnish contignency at the 2007 Seminar, photographer Petri Krook captured some remarkable images of guests, authors and Key West itself. Thanks to the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat for allowing our use of these photos. For more great shots like this one of Margaret Atwood click here.

KWLS writers on NYT blog

Since it started in May, the New York Times blog Paper Cuts, by Book Review editor Dwight Garner, has become a must-read -- and two recent items have KWLS connections. The first is a nice interview with Judy Blume, who is a Key Wester, a Seminar board member and a panelist at the 2008 seminar, New Voices (it's a two-parter, Judy's on for both sessions and tickets are still available). In the interview, Judy reveals that she'll soon be starting her own blog. We'll definitely be linking to that.

The second item is, unfortunately, a tragic one, reporting the death of Aura Estrada, wife of novelist Francisco Goldman. He was here for the 2004 seminar about immigration, titled Crossing Borders and if I'm not mistaken, Aura was here with him. He is a great writer and a hell of a nice guy. Our condolences go out to him.

Eugenides Gets The Oprah Touch

On the same day that Oprah airs an interview with notorious recluse Cormac McCarthy (who's next, J.D. Salinger?) she announces that 2007 speaker Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" will be her current Book Of The Month Club Selection. "It will grab you from the first sentence, I promise," said Oprah. Congratulations to Eugenides for scoring the literary world's equivalent of the bonus round: a bestseller that gets re-marketed to a new audience by the woman who has changed how-and what-middle America reads, and whose blessing guarantees a return to the top of the charts. Meanwhile, Eugenides has a new piece in the Summer Movies section of the June 11 & 18 New Yorker Magazine.

KWLS Board Member Judy Blume and Jeffey Eugenides at the 2007 Seminar

2007 Author Follow-Up

"The Inner Life Of Martin Frost", the film that Paul Auster discussed writing and directing at the 2007 KWLS, had its debut at the New Directors Film Festival in New York. Here he is with leading lady-and daughter-Sophie

Molly Ivins

Many of us are mourning today the loss of Molly Ivins, the great Texas journalist who was a panelist at the Seminar in 2005. The topic that year was Humor and Ivins was, of course, hilarious. The New York Times (where Ivins worked for a spell but found the Gray Lady just too stuffy) has a nice obituary and the Houston Chronicle has a piece with a small sampling of her great lines. We were lucky she came to visit with us in Key West and our country was lucky to have her.

The Podcasts are coming!

We're working on getting podcasts from the 2007 Seminar together for the end of February and will have them available on the blog here, from the main website (keywestliteraryseminar.org) and from iTunes.  We'll be rolling them out once a week. Pretty exciting to take this next step into the information age, especially with material from a year of such stellar content.

'On Chesil Beach'

The new book Ian McEwan read from (in two sections, one on Sunday morning and on Sunday afternoon) is excerpted in the New Yorker here. It’s fascinating to note how profound an effect editing has on the piece; when McEwan read beyond where the New Yorker excerpt left off and got into the racy bits the story took on quite a different cast, less tragic and more entranced with the absurdity of carnal desire.

Those charming Finns

The delightful team of Finnish translators/journalists and their photographer Petri were everywhere during the Seminar,  adding a slightly magical quality to the proceedings. They’ve reported on the Seminar back home, but unless you can read Finnish it might as well be in Sanskrit. The article and a great slideshow (click on the photo) are here.

Stranger than fiction

Straight from the Key West Literary Seminar, Ian McEwan is in the news because the public has recently learned what he found out a few years ago: He has a long-lost brother. The story behind this is amazing and touching: wondrous strange indeed. For details check out
this story in The New York Times.

"Suddenly...."

For me, the humorous high point of the 2007 Seminar occurred during Saturday night’s group poetry reading. Billy Collins read a poem he said had been inspired by an axiom about never using the word ‘suddenly’ in your writing, that it was a cheap, weak way to create action and excitement. The poem was funny, clever and unexpectedly moving, like much of Billy’s work. The over-use of ‘suddenly’ and other narrative-bludgeoning clichés had the audience laughing. A couple poets later, Joyce Carol Oates read a long poem. Towards the end of the second stanza she paused mid-phrase, and uttered ‘suddenly’ with a wry twist. Many members of the audience and the speakers all caught the irony, and there was a slow wave of laughter. Several lines later Oates pause again, looked over her glasses and intoned ‘suddenly’ with delightful self-effacement, underlining the moment with a wave of her slender hand. I caught Billy's eye for a second, and the normal sparkle factor was extra high. This time the laughter really built, and you could feel the waves of recognition and understanding washing through the room, as everyone shared in the joke. Good stuff.

Apostrophe-tastrophy

Amy Driscoll, in this piece in the Miami Herald on the Seminar, pointed out that the ‘Writers Lounge’ sign was missing its appropriate apostrophe, and that someone had added it by hand. As technical director of the Seminar, I must take full responsibility for the gaffe. I’d placed an order for some signage over the phone to my graphic guy-always a mistake-and while the sign is lovely, the grammar was wrong, My bad, mea culpa, etc. But the mystery remains: who fixed it? ADDENDUM: So the corrector was Billy Collins, which Nan pointed out in a comment, as well as the info being in Driscoll's story, which I clearly didn't read all the way through. I just look worse and worse in this one.

The Long, Long Line

The line for the public session at the KWLS is always pretty cool to see. I love how the mostly local crowd queues up hours in advance to see authors speak, like kids at a rock concert.

selected out of context quotes from Sunday

A quote from "The Bowl is Already Broken" by Mary Kay Zuravleff: "She'd never make it as a mystic. She had too many errands."

Michael Cunningham: "I think of Walt Whitman as the last unstupid optimist, the last undeluded optimist ... He was our Rumi, our whirling dervish."

Margaret Atwood on literary writers taking on speculative fiction: "We can do it. It's not talking squids on Planet X."

Cunningham: "I count among my influences Flaubert, Chekhov and 'Robot vs. the Aztec mummy.'"

Paul Auster: "It's a fundamental fact of life that stories create the world. There's no way to organize reality other than the story ... It's not that it saves us -- it is us."

Ian McEwan: "Behind the novel lies gossip. Gossip is the key to everything else ... It's a natural human thing to want to talk about the people around you and we use fiction to do it."

Auster: "People are as hungry as ever for stories, whether it's on TV or in the movies or in comic books or just sitting around the dinner table talking. That's why literature is never going to stop. It's as natural to human beings as eating or breathing."

Siri Hustvedt: "Being mentally ill does not make you stupid. Condescension is like a bad smell in the room."

Hustvedt: "Every fiction writer hears voices. Writing dialogue is the strangest thing in the world." A novel is "like remembering something that never happened."

James Tate: "I shall never again think of poetry readings as anything but pop-ups."

Atwood: "I'm a reading addict so I will read anything. I will actually read airplane magazines."

Atwood on why reading the Bible in school can be a good thing: "It makes you realize that some people who are purporting to uphold it haven't actually read it."

Atwood on why she reads the Bible in hotel rooms rather than watch TV: "First of all, the stories are better and second, it's more violent."

Whatever you got

“Feel free to leave your cell phones on. Icemakers, whatever you got . . .”
Steve Stern at the start of his Sunday morning reading.

“My grandmother and my aunt both died on the operating table several times. . . They were very competitive.”
Steve Stern again

Steve Stern is a very funny man.

Steve Stern is a very funny man.
Steve Stern is a very funny man.
Steve Stern is a very funny man.
Steve Stern is a very funny man.

Sudden verse

“I’m not as funny as Billy
I’m not as funny as Billy
My undies more frilly,
More vitamin-pilly,
I’m not as funny as Billy”

Margaret Atwood reciting a poem written while awaiting the daunting task of following Billy Collins on stage Saturday night, possibly proving herself wrong.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but they say nice things anyway

“I guess I liked this morning [Saturday] the best. Aimee Bender’s reading was great. And Wally Lamb . . . the creepy janitor in that story — I know that guy.”
Bob Muens, bookbinder, KWLS board member, and Wondrous Strange co-chair

“I’ve really enjoyed the panel discussions, even though they wander around. The wandering is the best part.”
Kelly Lavin, Sarasota, Florida

“I love the James Tate pop ups. He gave me an ab workout from laughing.”
Kathy Kilroy, Key Wester and fitness queen

“What’s my favorite part? That’s too hard. Maybe all the questions and the conversations. Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwen, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt . . .”
Susan Rice, from outside of Philadelphia

Two to three senses

“It’s very important for a translator to see, hear, and possibly touch, the authors.”

Kristiina Rikman, ringleader for a trio of Finnish translators who translate the works or Margaret Atwood, Siri Hustvedt and Michael Cunningham and are in Key West for the seminar.