One of the focuses of this trip was attendance/participation in the Key West Literary Seminar (home – Key West Literary Seminar (kwls.org)) and that is now done.
The Seminar gathers writers to talk on a particular theme (this year the theme was desire) and people who like writing to gather and listen. There have been other years when the themes interested me more (politics one year, sports another, mystery to name a few) and certainly a year I recall when there was a particular writer (Margaret Atwood) that I would have been excited to meet. But it was nice. It was very interesting. It was a gathering in Key West of intelligent literary people.
What I particularly liked best were the presentations in which a few writers who did not seem to know each other sat on the stage and talked and it was as if we the audience were simply eavesdropping on an interesting conversation. They talked about their personal habits (what time of day they wrote or whether they wrote while drinking or under the influence of drugs) and how and when they first started writing and seeing themselves as writers, and about their experiences getting published and (to me the most interesting) not getting published. I enjoyed that .
I also particularly enjoyed the presentations by the winners of the best upcoming new writers awards who were allowed on stage to read something they had written and all seemed honestly overwhelmed to have been selected and given a chance to present.
The seminar was outdoors this year (because of the virus) after cancelling last year and some long-time attendees said it was less intimate than when it was all crowded into the one room. I thought the venue (in the public amphitheater in the Truman Waterfront Park) was lovely.
I was blown away by two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and underwhelmed by one (semi famous) writer who has had more than 18 books published so far. I don’t particularly feel like naming her and this point other than that she received some fame/notoriety for having written a memoir about her affair with JD Sallinger when she was 18 and he was 56 years old.
I truly enjoyed the conversations that I had throughout the seminar with the hosts, and the other attendees. One of my themes was that I asked everyone “what they wrote” and pushed back at those who said they weren’t writers. Everyone there was a writer. Some were more talented, some more dedicated, some more ambitious some more successful but everyone that I talked to finally admitted that they wrote. During one presentation a writer that I liked described his feelings of being a failure after his first completed novel was rejected by 40 publishers. I asked in honest wonderment how could you consider yourself a failure if you had finished writing a complete novel that you thought was good enough to be published. To me its a simple thing that writers write. I was intrigued though by the conversations among the published writers about the degree to which 1) they measured their personal success or failure by what the publishers thought and 2) the degree to which they shaped their writing to what they thought the publishers wanted rather than to what they wanted to communicate.
I have wanted to attend one of these for a long time and I’m very glad that I finally got the opportunity. It really didn’t disappoint me at all. I went back and forth during the weekend about whether I would try to attend again if given the opportunity. I guess I finally realized my decision when I told someone that for me “lilfe at this stage is like being at a very good restaurant and knowing that you can’t eat everything that looks good on the menu.”
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