We've just posted details for workshops by Alison Lurie & Edward Hower, Porter Shreve, and Bich Min Nguyen. Click the links to go to their respective workshop descriptions, or click here to see all of our workshop instructors.

Instructors, schedules, and details for our 2009 Writers' Workshop Program are now online. Poets Billy Collins and Dara Wier will join us again this year to offer their insight and expertise, and we'll have Mary Morris, Patricia O'Toole, and Alan Cheuse leading workshops which focus on the writing of history and historical fiction. Click here for links to complete information about each of these workshops. We'll be posting more information about additional workshop opportunities soon, including instructors Alison Lurie, Edward Hower, Bich Min Nguyen, and Porter Shreve.

One of last year's workshop attendees, Claire Lipschultz, had a story air last week on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She worked on it in a workshop with Bich Min Nguyen this past January. You can listen to it here.

Three Scholarships are available to writers, students, and librarians to offset the cost of the Writer's Workshops. This year, we are particularly interested in supporting emerging historians and writers of historical fiction. Last year's scholarship winners and Workshop attendees include Nami Mun, whose Miles from Nowhere was subsequently accepted for publication by Riverhead Press; Mehdi Okasi, whose work is forthcoming in the 2009 Best New American Voices anthology; and Kristen-Paige Madonia, whom I recently interviewed, and who will be a Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West this fall.

We've just confirmed the addition of two novelists for next January's Seminar, HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Elizabeth Gaffney is a former editor under George Plimpton at Paris Review, a translator of German literature, and the author of Metropolis, a post-Civil War story of love and crime set among New York City's immigrant communities. The stereopticon image above of immigrant men working as streetlayers came out of her research for this book. Visit Gaffney's author page on our site for links and more information.

Peter Ho Davies is a Guggenheim Fellow, a faculty member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, and the author of The Welsh Girl, a novel set in and around a POW camp built by the British during WWII in the remote mountains of northern Wales.

We will continue to add more writers for next January's Seminar. You can find the up-to-date roster here, with links to information about each author. Tickets are still available for the event, however we do expect to sell out early. Register for the event here.

I think writing about history is not unlike writing science fiction or certain other genre novels that are outside the present time and reality in that they actually sometimes serve as more effective metaphors for what's going on in the present world. I am very interested in that. And the way that you can talk about a world that has a lot of structural similarities to the present but is very different— in some ways be more honest, be more probing, or simply because of the distance from people's contemporary reality, push into certain corners that otherwise might be uncomfortable.

—Elizabeth Gaffney, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum.

A decade ago, the Key West Literary Seminar began offering financial assistance to individuals who would otherwise be unable to attend the Seminar. Last year, three new scholarships were introduced to recognize excellence from new and emerging writers. Through the generosity of Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida, these scholarships are once again available. The Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award, the Scotti Merrill Scholarship, and the Marianne Russo Scholarship each provide full tuition for either session of the 2009 Seminar and the writer's workshop program. In addition, these scholarships may provide support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West and an opportunity to appear on stage at the Seminar. This year we are especially interested in supporting writers of historical fiction.

John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner, will be joining us in January for Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. We'll be posting more about him soon. In the meantime, you can listen to an excellent interview with
him on National Public Radio here. Visit Schwartz's web site here.

The New York Times reported last week on the discovery of a sound recording made in 1860, nearly twenty years before Thomas Edison first captured the sound of the words "Mary had a little lamb" on a piece of tinfoil. Oddly, this recording, made by Parisian typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was never intended to be heard. The idea of audio playback had not been conceived, let alone by Martinville, and his intent, to create a paper record of human speech, related more to stenography than to phonography. We have come, of course, a very long way; the in-your-ear-in-an-instant .mp3 which accompanies the Times article is proof of that.

When the Key West Literary Seminar began in 1983 as a program of the Friends of the Monroe County Library, audio recordings were ubiquitous in the average American home. Vinyl records had been around for a generation, and cassette technology had made it possible to listen to your favorite recordings in the car or anywhere you and your Walkman, invented by Sony in 1979, might travel. Furthermore, cassettes were easily recorded upon, easily recorded over. One could now, with a minimum of equipment, affordably create audio recordings of any event. The Key West Literary Seminar did not immediately pick up on the possibilities afforded by this technology. The early years' events were assembled on a nothing budget as a labor of love. Many of the organizers were remarkably young. Key West was a surface and a beneath-the-surface; an anonymity which implied assent toward myriad behaviors thrived and was prized. Posterity was on no one's mind.