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…”

Online Resources

Coming soon…

Selected Bibliography

The Voice Is All:The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2012)
Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters (2001)
Minor Characters (1987)

Coming soon…

Online Resources

Coming soon…

Selected Bibliography

Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (2003)
Salinger: A Biography (2000)

Her first book, a biography of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for “a writer of growing stature” under the age of 35. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson and edited works by Stevenson and Warner. She writes short stories for radio and publication and was runner-up for the V.S.Pritchett prize for short fiction in 2008. Her most recent book is a mixture of biography and criticism, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World.

Harman has taught English at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. She has appeared on radio and television and writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic, reviewing books, films, plays and exhibitions. She is now at work on a biography of Charlotte Brontë, to be published in conjunction with Brontë’s bicentenary in 2016.

Harman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

Online Resources

claireharman.com

Selected Bibliography

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2009)
Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (2005)
Fanny Burney: A Biography (2000)
Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (1989)

James Merrill, Key West, 1987. Photo by Lawson Little.

A rare recording of the poet James Merrill (1926-1995) is now part of our audio archives. This development preserves and makes available to the public the bewitching reading that Merrill gave in tribute to Elizabeth Bishop at the 1993 Key West Literary Seminar, which was dedicated to Bishop’s life and work. To attendees of that seminar, Merrill’s performance was a distinct highlight. To the small handful of us who’ve had the chance to listen to the recording of it in the years since, it is a singular document that reveals Merrill’s significant gifts as a reader and interpreter of Bishop’s work, and suggests the depths of the influence he felt from the poet who he said “set standards for me as no other contemporary did.”

Bishop and Merrill had been close friends during her lifetime (1911-1979), and both poets had lived in Key West—Bishop on White Street in the 1930s and 1940s, Merrill on Elizabeth Street, at the top of Solares Hill, in the 1980s and 1990s. The influence of Key West upon their work is particularly felt in Bishop’s debut collection North & South, in such poems as “Seascape” and “Little Exercise”; and in Merrill’s 1985 Late Settings, in poems like “Clearing the Title” and “Island in the Works.” Merrill was an important part of the community that nurtured KWLS in its first decade, and he had a strong influence on the 1993 seminar, organized by John Malcolm Brinnin, which was the first in what would become a wave of public tributes and recognition for Bishop’s work.

We are especially pleased to release this recording as we prepare for our forthcoming 31st annual seminar—“Writers on Writers,” to be held in January 2013. Our inspiration for “Writers on Writers” draws from the admiration, influence, and fascination engendered by great writers and their lives. In this context, Merrill on Bishop may be as good as it gets.

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.

James Merrill, Key West, 1987. Photo by Lawson Little.

James Merrill (1926-1995) was among the most acclaimed poets of the 20th century, winning virtually every major honor, including the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, the National Book Award (twice), and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His 12 collections are distinguished by language that is extraordinarily rich, even in the rarefied context of poetry, and by the use of metaphor to coax precise and elegant structures from the spontaneity and apparent unruliness of modern life. “Life’s advantage over art is its genius for the unexpected,” Merrill once said. “If art has any advantage over daily life it’s that it allows us to get things right for a change.”

Merrill lived in Key West for many years, and his was an important influence on the Key West Literary Seminar during its first decade. He was particularly involved in the 1993 seminar, which was devoted to the work and life of his fellow poet and longtime friend Elizabeth Bishop. In this recording from the 1993 seminar, Merrill delivers a reading in tribute to Bishop, presenting a careful selection of Bishop’s work and his own and, in between the readings, discussing the lines of friendship and poetic influence that connect the poems. There are three poems by Bishop, including “Exchanging Hats,” “The Shampoo,” and “One Art”; and four poems by Merrill, including “The Kimono” (inspired by Bishop’s “The Shampoo”), “Investiture at Cecconi’s” (dedicated to Bishop’s and Merrill’s mutual friend David Kalstone), and “Victor Dog” and “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia” (both dedicated to Bishop). Merrill’s perfectly modulated performance and commentary reveals not only his significant gifts as a reader and interpreter of Bishop’s work, but also suggests the depths of the influence he felt from the poet who he said “set standards for me as no other contemporary did.”

From KWLS 1993: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
This recording is available for noncommercial and educational use only. Copyright © 1993 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University, used with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

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.

Styron is also the author of the novel All the Finest Girls. Shorter work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She currently teaches memoir writing in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Online Resources

On ‘Reading My Father’ for the ‘Atlantic’
Excerpt from ‘Reading My Father’
alexandrastyron.com

Selected Bibliography

Reading My Father (2011)

Coming soon…

Online Resources

Coming soon…

Selected Bibliography

Coming soon…