The San Carlos Institute on Duval Street, home of the Key West Literary Seminar
I’ve been back from Key West for a week since my 11 day trip to work on the event staff of the 32nd Annual Key West Literary Seminar. It’s my sixth year contributing to the seminar and it’s such a beautiful and invigorating way to start the New Year. The joy comes from being apart of this incredibly intimate and special weekend filled with panel discussions, lectures and readings from the top writers in their field. They range from Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, U.S. Poet Laureates and emerging voices.
I’ve been delighted to hear lectures and readings from Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Billy Collins, Mark Strand, Jane Hirshfield, Richard Wilbur, Frank Bruni, Roy Blount, Jr., Molly O’Neill, Calvin Trillin, Jennifer Egan, Gary Shteyngart, Paul Hendrickson and many more through the years. This year’s theme was crime fiction and mystery, and authors included Carl Hiaasen, Gillian Flynn, John Banville, Alexander McCall Smith and Billy Collins who has been a constant presence at the seminar for over a decade (and who I get to know a little better every year).
It’s also a joy to work with an incredibly dynamic and dedicated team of writers, photographers, publishers, poets and teachers to produce this event year after year. It’s a solid group that feels a little more like family with every meeting. In the evenings, the seminar hosts cocktail parties and dinners, and we mingle in gorgeous, historic settings, like the Hemingway House, the Audubon House and the Truman Little White House. Afterwards, we inevitably end up at a favorite local haunt, like the Green Parrot, The Porch or Two Cents for a little more fun before waking up early to do it all over again.
And that’s the other joy, just being back in Key West, the island I called home for more than four years. I’ve mentioned in this blog before that I moved around a lot growing up and that I’ve never lived in the same city for more than six consecutive years. I often find myself thinking that if any place feels like my hometown, it’s Key West. It’s a small community, and even smaller is the community of friends I made while working there on the boats at Fury Water Adventures. When you spend day after day on the water with the same group of people (or in some cases, person), you get to know them pretty well, and over the years a deep love develops akin to family.
I love Key West for many reasons. It’s a place where I can absolutely be myself. There’s a beautiful simplicity in the lifestyle. The unimportant and superfluous melt away. And what is important? It’s the natural beauty of the sea and sky that constantly demands your attention, no matter the time of day or the season. It’s the feeling of salt water on your skin and the wind whipping through your hair making your way back to shore as you note the water’s clarity and color changes that day. It’s riding your bike along uncrowded streets eliciting a smile on your face as you take in the bougainvillea punctuating conch cottages and the scent of night-blooming jasmine after sunset. It’s Duval Street constantly calling for a prowl where you run into old friends and acquaintances at every bar you pop into, and where one too many is just enough. Above all, I love Key West because it feels like home.
I love that this home has such a storied past, that Ernest Hemingway was charmed by it, and Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and Tennessee Williams, that Judy Blume and Laurent de Brunhoff still call it home today. I love that every January the Key West Literary Seminar keeps that legacy alive, and I love that, in some small way, I’m apart of it.
Next year’s KWLS topic is How The light Gets In: Literature of the Spirit. Visit their website for more information on the seminar and writer’s workshop, as well as audio archives from past seminars. Subscribe to Littoral, the seminar’s year round online voice, for news, interviews, essays, archival photos and more.Â
