We've asked some friends and family to help post to Littoral for the next week and a half while the Seminar is underway. Here's the first, from Nancy Klingener, a member of our board of directors and creator of the Bone Island Book Blog. –ed.

Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of "March" and "People of the Book," opened the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar with a terrific keynote address Thursday evening, and she opened the address with a terrific line. "You don't have to be a necrophiliac to write historical novels," Brooks said. "But it helps." In giving the John Hersey Memorial Address, Brooks paid tribute to Hersey, whom she never met but who is buried on Martha's Vineyard, where Brooks lives with her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz. (Brooks noted that she loves graveyards and was encouraged to move to the island by one stone with the inscription "At Last, A Fulltime Resident.") Hersey, she said, was a model for her as a journalist and a novelist. "He wrote about heroes but never about heroics," she said.

The address was followed, as always, by a gathering in the lovely gardens of the Audubon House from which we sincerely hope everyone made it home safely before one of Key West's regular, if inexplicable, power outages darkened the island.