Key West Literary Seminar

Lyndall Gordon. Photo by Nina Hollington.

“Writers on Writers” continues to attract a remarkable cast of panelists. Today we profile South Africa-born Lyndall Gordon and New Englander Paul Mariani. Both will appear at the second session, January 17-20, 2012. Registration is open.

Lyndall Gordon is the prize-winning author of six biographies, whose subjects hold in common an almost mythic fascination for contemporary readers. They include Emily Dickinson and William James, as well as the 18th-century proto-feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Modernist poet T.S. Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, whose works dramatically changed the way women were seen in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Each of Gordon’s biographies, she says, “has been a different experiment with the genre—and subjects were chosen in part because they had something to teach about our life-span, the shapes it can take, its silent spaces and invisible presences.” She has spoken of striving toward “a new form of biography” and writes that “imaginative truth must coexist with documentary truth if we want to bring a subject to life and avoid a dead shell, the compendium of fact.”

Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani is a poet and the biographer of poets including William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, and—most recently—the 19th-century prosodic innovator and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. A former poetry editor of the national Catholic weekly America, Mariani’s work evinces a fascination with the “poetic/spiritual journey” undertaken by poets, whether explicitly Catholic, as with Hopkins, Lowell, and Berryman, or ostensibly secular, as with Williams and Crane.

“If you ask me about God and poetry, I really can’t separate them,” Mariani has said of his own motivations as a poet. “That doesn’t mean that all my poems are God-filled; in fact some of them deeply question the reality of it all. But the poems that most deeply satisfy are those in which I confront the mystery.”

Mariani is currently at work on a biography of Wallace Stevens, whose reputed deathbed conversion to Catholicism belies his somewhat less Catholic adventures in Key West, and in whose late poem “Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour” we find the words “We say God and the imagination are one…”

Brad Gooch. Photo by Tom Ackerman.

We are delighted to announce that Brad Gooch will join us in Key West January 17-20, 2013, for the second session of our 31st annual seminar—“Writers on Writers.”

As the acclaimed biographer of two American writers with radically different life stories, Gooch will bring to the program an especially broad sense of the relationship between life and art. His first book, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, explores the brief, bright life of the poet whose candor and direct sensibility helped define the postmodern poetic voice, and whose glamorous career at New York’s Museum of Modern Art helped bring about the styles of a new American painting. Gooch’s most recent book is a biography of Flannery O’Connor, the southerner and devout Catholic whose battle with lupus kept her home-bound throughout her brief adult life, during which she nevertheless wrote some of the most influential short stories of the 20th century. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller. For his next biography, Gooch travels to Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, to uncover the life of the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Rumi.

Gooch joins an impressive roster of panelists at the second session, including Blake Bailey (biographer of John Cheever & Richard Yates); Geoff Dyer (whose essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction); Kate Moses (whose novel Wintering reimagines the last days of Sylvia Plath); and Brenda Wineapple (author of books on Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others).

Registration for “Writers on Writers” is open now.

Blake Bailey. Photo by Mary Brinkmeyer.

The second session of our forthcoming seminar, “Writers on Writers,” has gained two extraordinary talents, whose work offers insight into the complexities of artistic creation.

Blake Bailey is the author of definitive biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates, two greatly troubled writers who produced some of the 20th century’s most enduring fiction. His Cheever: A Life (2009) won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, while being nominated for a Pulitzer. His forthcoming book, Farther and Wilder, explores the life of Charles Jackson, whose own battles with alcohol served as the model for his 1944 breakthrough novel, The Lost Weekend. Bailey has said that his investigations of such dissolute characters are driven by a compulsion to uncover the secrets of “writing that makes us see the world afresh—the kind of writing that is better than actual living.”

Kate Moses. Photo by Ramona Pedersen.

Kate Moses is author of the internationally acclaimed novel Wintering, a reimagining of the last days of poet Sylvia Plath, including the momentous weeks in late 1962 when she assembled the manuscript of Ariel, the feverish outpouring of artistic bravado which Plath rightly predicted would “make my name.” Published in 15 languages and recipient of numerous commendations, including the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, Moses’ Wintering was praised as “a brilliant, fervent book” that returns humanity to the iconic Plath through its unprecedented rendering of “the poet newly envisioned—fixated on living, not on dying.”

With the addition of Bailey and Moses, “Writers on Writers” gains the context of an important group of iconic writers, in whose life and work we witness the struggles, pressures, and newfound freedoms of the 20th century.

Due to extraordinary demand, the 2013 seminar, “Writers on Writers,” has expanded to include two sessions. Session One will take place January 10-13, 2013; it has been sold out since early March. Session Two will take place the following weekend, January 17-20, 2013; registration is open now.

Confirmed authors for Session Two include Geoff Dyer, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award this year for his essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition; Edmund White, whose biography of Jean Genet remains the definitive study of one of the most notorious figures of twentieth-century literature; former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins; and Robert D. Richardson, the acclaimed biographer of America’s three central writers: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. Additional panelists will be announced in the coming days and weeks.

Scholarships are available for teachers, librarians, students, and writers who can demonstrate financial need. The application period is open now; there is a new priority deadline this year of June 30. Click here for more information.

"Writers on Writers." 31st annual Key West Literary Seminar. January 10-13, 2013.

Each year the Key West Literary Seminar explores the world of literature through a particular unifying theme. For our 31st annual seminar, “Writers on Writers,” we investigate the rich and varied lives of those who make this formidable craft their life; and, in doing so, we explore the work of writing itself.

“Writers on Writers” will be an exploration of some of the world’s most enduring authors and an investigation of the relationship between life and literature. As we turn the lens on the contemporary writers on stage, we will also explore the creative act of recreating a life, and consider how an engagement with great writers of the past affects the literature of today.

The latest additions to our roster of panelists include Pico Iyer, Colm Tóibín, and Geoff Dyer. Iyer is an essayist and novelist whose newly-released The Man Within my Head explores his obsession with English author and playwright Graham Greene. Tóibín is an Irish novelist and short story writer whose acclaimed works include The Master, a novel based on the life of 19th-century American writer Henry James. Dyer is the author of four novels, two essay collections, and five genre-defying titles including Out of Sheer Rage, which may best be described as a book about trying to write a book about English novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence (comedian Steve Martin calls it “The funniest book I have ever read”).

Other confirmed panelists for “Writers on Writers” include James Atlas, founding editor of the Penguin Lives series of short biographies; Rosalind Brackenbury, author of Becoming George Sand; Jay Parini, whose novel about Leo Tolstoy was later adapted for the film The Last Station; Robert D. Richardson, acclaimed biographer of American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; Phyllis Rose, author of A Life of Virginia Woolf; Julie Salamon, author of the recent bestselling biography of American playwright Wendy Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys; Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman; Edmund White, whose books include biographies of French writers Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

We will name additional panelists in the coming weeks. Registration is open now and filling up fast. Writers’ workshops and scholarship opportunities will be announced in the spring.