Photo by Soo-Jeong Kang When Frank Bruni was named restaurant critic for The New York Times in 2004, he was unknown to the food world. As a journalist at the Detroit Free Press and the Times, he was praised for his investigative reporting of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and his coverage of Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign. But his surprise appointment to this apparently enviable job– paid to eat in a city known for excellent restaurants– was to be, for deeply personal reasons, the greatest challenge of Bruni's life.

In Born Round (2009), Bruni's third book, he details the life that lent such irony to his tenure as the country's most notorious arbiter of culinary taste. As a child, judging from the book's many pictures, he was just slightly chubby. But in an Italian-American family obsessed with food as a symbol of status and celebration, he was clearly the most obsessed, devouring plate after plate of all that was available. With age came an additional obsession: his body and its perceived attractiveness to other men. Bruni attempts just about every fad diet that comes along and, in college, experiments with bulimia, a dangerous trick that allows him to have his cake and not eat it too. All the while, as the pictures tell, he's still not that fat. But by the end of the calorie-fueled Bush campaign, Bruni is in his late 30s and, indeed, significantly overweight. Decades of withering self-criticism have finally found an ample target.

Bruni begins to get a handle on his weight just before the Times makes its tantalizing and terrifying job offer. As restaurant critic, he will be required to eat everything on the menu at all of the city's best restaurants, occasionally eating dinner twice in one night, and always returning to a given restaurant multiple times before writing the reviews that will earn him admiration, envy, and scorn. In restaurant- and media-mad New York, getting through these meals undetected requires constant subterfuge; high jinks ensue as maîtres d question Bruni's false identities and chuckle at his sometimes clumsy disguises. By the time this entertaining masquerade is through, we've begun to see what we hope is the real Frank Bruni: a man at peace with his urges, appetites, and even occasional binges, a battle-tested and levelheaded adult, practiced in the fine art of self-forgiveness.

Frank will join us in Key West this January for The Hungry Muse, and we had a chance last week to ask him a few questions. Here's how it went:


Littoral: What have you been up to since Born Round?

Frank Bruni: I write full-time for The New York Times Magazine, and remain a Times staffer, which I've been for some 15 years now. Yikes, I'm old! From that position I get to wander through the paper a lot: I recently did a huge Dining section piece on the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, and I write a column on drinking and bars called the Tipsy Diaries for the Weekend section on every other Friday. For the magazine I specialize in profiles: over the last six months I've written about the Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, the television doctor Mehmet Oz, and Carly Fiorina, the business pioneer running for Senate in California.

L: Were you surprised by the notoriety you found during your tenure as restaurant critic for The New York Times? Had your predecessors– Ruth Reichl, Bryan Miller, William Grimes– found the same level of celebrity? How would you say your time at the Times was different from theirs?

FB: I wasn't surprised by the notoriety, precisely because that sort of notoriety, or at least a high public profile, seemed to go with the job. It was clear to me from what Bryan and Ruth and Biff (that's what Grimes goes by) had gone through that The New York Times restaurant critic was a lightning rod for criticism, a magnet for chatter, a source of public fascination. I braced myself for that.

What was significantly different about my tenure was that it was the first to come along when the blogosphere was truly full-blown: when web sites analyzed the critic's every word publicly and in real time. Eater.com, for example, did a "BruniBetting" feature– they now have something similar with Sam Sifton– that guessed how I'd rate a restaurant by deconstructing my sensibilities and approach through time. That sort of thing ratcheted everything up a bit.

L: Do you think this rapid-response media environment has a discernible effect on food and the culture around it? Is the way we're eating now affected by the way we create and consume information online?

FB: All the instant blog attention to new places can sometimes mean several things. Restaurants pay more attention to the way they come out of the gate than the way they'll mature and stabilize and endure through time. Restaurants that come out of the gate wobbly may never get a chance to recover: the naysaying and catcalling on a myriad of web sites threaten to do them in. And restaurants with a ready-made curiosity factor– because they're participating in a growing trend, because they have a chef who just got TV time on a reality show, or because they have a flashy gimmick– sometimes get more attention than they deserve, because they're able to hog the blogosphere, which needs quick and easy and instant items. Blogs aren't different from traditional media that way, but they're like traditional media on steroids, traditional media on a sugar high. The buzz is louder and more pervasive than in the past, and I think it leads people in the buzziest directions. Dining out has become more faddish as a result.

L: As the Times' "Tipsy Diarist," you've turned your focus to cocktails– a job that would seem to have sometimes painful consequences. Did you have any concerns about taking on this assignment? What's your hangover remedy?

Richard Wilbur in his study in Cummington, Massachusetts. Photo by Arlo Haskell. Richard Wilbur's auspicious 1947 debut, The Beautiful Changes, earned the admiration of two of the most enduring American poets of the era, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. By the late 1950s, Wilbur had completed a landmark translation of Molière's The Misanthrope, and received the Pulitzer Prize for his third collection of poetry, Things of This World. Since then, Wilbur has received nearly every award and honor available to an American poet, including two Pulitzers, two Bollingen Prizes, a National Book Award, and the office of the U.S. Poet Laureate. His definitive translations of Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille represent nearly the complete output of these major figures of 17th-century French drama, and he has translated poetry by an astounding range of poets including the Portuguese Vinícius de Moraes, the Russian Anna Akhmatova, and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.

For parts of five decades, Wilbur and his wife Charlee spent winters in Key West. Here they became part of a cadre that included John Ciardi, the noted translator of Dante's Inferno, Pulitzer Prize-winning World War II correspondent John Hersey, two-time National Book Award-winning poet James Merrill, and poet, biographer, and social critic John Malcolm Brinnin.

Our interview began in February as a series of exchanges through the mail. On a sunny day in late August, I drove to visit Wilbur at his home in the Berkshires outside Northampton, Massachusetts. We had a lunch of turkey sandwiches with beets from Wilbur's garden and walked from the house to his study, an open structure with large windows and wall-to-wall bookshelves. On the windowsill is a pair of binoculars, and in front of the window is Wilbur's desk, topped with an early 20th-century L.C. Smith typewriter and the blue folder containing the manuscript that will become Wilbur's next book of poems, due in the fall of 2010. Our conversation– about Frost, Stevens, Key West, Wilbur's practice, and his place in the republic of letters– follows.

•••

Littoral: You knew both Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost early in your career. How did you come to know them, and what was their influence on your work and career?

Richard Wilbur: When I went to Harvard Graduate School on the G.I. Bill after World War II, Frost was spending much of the winters in Cambridge, and my wife and I soon got to know him. He was kindly disposed toward Charlee because her great-aunt, Susan Hayes Ward, had encouraged him when he was obscure, and was always called by him "the first friend of my poetry." He took to me also, because I had many of his poems by heart, and when my first book appeared in 1947 he spoke kindly of it. We saw Robert– as he soon let us call him– frequently thereafter in Cambridge or in Ripton, Vermont, or at our house in Portland, Connecticut, once I'd begun to teach at Wesleyan. His poems always seemed to me to be a wonder and an inimitable model: I had no wish to ape his work, but it made me seek for a speaking voice, for meter and rhyme which worked as if by accident and for plain situations having overtones. In Stevens's work I was delighted by the gaiety of his flow of thought. I saw him rather rarely, but he was good to me and backed me for a Guggenheim in 1952; and I once had the honor of introducing him to a capacity crowd in Harvard's New Lecture Hall. His ability to combine "the imagination's Latin with the lingua franca et jocundissima" (as Stevens writes in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction") was something I sought after in my own way, and with gratitude for his infectious example.

L: Like Stevens and Frost, you ended up in Key West. What first attracted you to the place? Were you aware of their histories in the town?

RW: I well remember what drew me to Key West in the first place. It was the 1960s, and a colleague of mine at Wesleyan, the painter Samuel Green, said to me, "Why do you take winter vacations in remote places like Tobago, using up all your money on air fare? You ought to try Key West, our American subtropics." He asked if I liked the movie Bonnie and Clyde. "Well, yes," I said. "It's morally questionable, but, aesthetically, very pleasing." "Then you'll love," he said, "the combined beauty and tackiness of Key West." Sam was right. Charlee and I stayed at first at the Sun 'n' Surf Motel near Duval Street, which was quite empty in those days, nothing at all like what it has become. I remember, after we settled in, we sat out on the balcony in the heat and realized we were going to require a drink, something with tonic. I went out and trudged all over town looking for tonic water, but couldn't find any and had to settle for Tom Collins mix. "No tonic?" said Charlee. "Well, thank God. We've found a backwater."


The Sun 'n' Surf Motel, Key West, circa 1960s, where the Wilburs first stayed.      Later we bought a one-room apartment on Elizabeth Street, and then with some writer friends– John and Barbara Hersey, the Ciardis– we bought into a compound on Windsor Lane, to which we returned for as much as three months of every year until 2005, when my wife fell ill. We enjoyed the company of many good friends, and I always loved simply being able to wear shorts, to ride my bicycle, and to play tennis on the city courts in the middle of winter. I found the variety of Key West life very conducive to my work. It has some of the virtues of a city– there's always been a kind of art colony there in flux, and by now it has its own symphony orchestra, productions of plays– and then there are the boats, the fishing, that kind of thing. There's more of a cocktail society than is good for us, of course, but all you have to do is not attend all the parties. You can live in Key West in all kinds of ways.
     When we went down to Key West originally, I had no recollection that there was any connection with Frost. He wasn't much of a hotel dweller, whereas Stevens was practically designed to be a patron of the Casa Marina, that great old hotel on the ocean where he stayed.

L: Were you among the Anagrams players in Key West?

RW: Yes, I've played a lot of Anagrams. I was introduced to it as a child, but I wasn't an incessant player until I began playing in Key West with people like John Malcolm Brinnin and John Ciardi– a devoted and violent Anagrams player. There's a long list of people who became devoted to the game: Jimmy Merrill played a little with us, Harry Mathews, Rust Hills, Irving Weinman, and each of the players took turns hosting the weekly game. John Hersey played– he knew all the names of all the fish in the sea, and he was very good at any word connected with boats and fishing– and after a certain amount of exposure to the game John wrote a story about it, published in Key West Tales. We tried to keep it a high-minded, good-tempered game. There were no wagers, but we did begin to have certain rules that were above and beyond the rules of the game itself. It was understood, for instance, that you would not have any Bass Ale, which came to be the official ale of these games, until the first of two rounds was over.

L: What was your reaction to being named U.S. Poet Laureate in 1987?

RW: I came to it not knowing what the assignment was. I appeared in the door of the Laureate's office down there, and there were the two fine secretaries who handle the Laureate's affairs, and I said, "Here I am, reporting for duty. What am I supposed to do?" And they said, "You're supposed to think that up." So I said, "Well, I suppose this is an honor. Should I just go home and write more poems for them to honor?" They said "No, that will not do."

L: What are you reading these days?

RW: I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and other poets of that period– which is to say my period– because I'm in the funny position of being about to teach my contemporaries at Amherst this fall, with my old friend David Sofield. We'll co-teach the course, beginning with W.H. Auden, and proceeding through Bishop, Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath. It's going to be difficult for me to turn myself into a considering, evaluative teacher of the works of people I knew so well, so personally. And I shall have to try hard to avoid being an old anecdotalist, telling stories on my old friends and acquaintances.

L: Are you writing poetry now?

RW: Yes. I don't manage to write something every day, but I never have. I wait to be asked, more or less, and when something wants to be written I make sure that I've cleared the decks and that I concentrate on that alone and give it as many hours as it will need. I'm a terribly slow worker, but I'm also terribly patient, and I'm glad that I still have the ideas and the patience to execute them. I'm going to have another book next year, in the fall, and three of its poems will be in The New Yorker next week. The book will have translations as well; I have 37 more riddles by Symphosius for the volume, and I've finally satisfied myself with a translation of Stéphane Mallarmés famous sonnet "For the Tomb of Edgar Poe."
     I almost always have some translation project going to keep me busy in between visits from the muse, but at the moment I don't. There's no use looking at Molière anymore; I've done all of his verse plays that I'll ever do. The only one I haven't done is a lemon, and I don't want to try it. I just published with Houghton Mifflin / Harcourt two new translations of Corneille's plays, "The Cid" and "The Liar," and I've been considering other plays by Corneille and a couple of possibilities from Racine. It is good to have something honorable to toil at when you've not been visited by an inspiration.
     As embarrassing as that word is– "inspiration"– I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.

L: Do you prepare yourself for these visits? Do you sit at the desk and wait?

photo by Curt Richter Billy Collins is a two-term United States Poet Laureate, New York State Poet, and the author of eight collections of poetry. With the Library of Congress, he established Poetry 180, a teaching aid for high school students founded on the belief that "poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race." His newest book, Ballistics, has spent nearly a year on the Poetry Foundation's best sellers list, where his previous book, The Trouble with Poetry, has now appeared for more than 120 consecutive weeks.

Collins's poetry displays a deep affection for the details of middle-class American life. His landscapes are marked by suburban parks, dogs, and country houses, and inhabited by a narrator whose idylls of contentment and quiet adventure at first appear utterly familiar. But just as these reveries come into view, they are subverted by mischievous impulses that shift the reader, as Collins says here, "from the familiar to the strange, from coziness to disorientation."

In this interview, conducted over the course of several emails this summer, Collins talks about his poetic rivalries, the theories of John Keats and T.S. Eliot, the importance of keeping secrets in poetry, and the pleasures of disorientation in the age of the GPS. •••

Littoral: Which poets do you read again and again, and why? Which poet did you read last?

Billy Collins: My reading of poetry is very random at this point because I am not so much studying a particular poet as I am cruising the pages of poetry books and literary magazines looking for a poem, or even a passage, striking enough to urge me to write my own poem. What inspires poetry is poetry. So I read others not to steal but to find gates of departure for my own flights. Of course, some poets provide these more reliably than others. A few of the ones I return to often are Ron Padgett, Charles Simic, Clive James, Yiannis Ritsos, and Wislawa Szymborska. They all make me jealous, often enough to try to show them who's boss by writing a better poem than any of them. This always fails, but at least something gets written. Did I mention John Donne and Emily Dickinson? They make me furious.

L: Did your time as United States Poet Laureate change how you think about poetry and the audience for it? How so?

BC: My overall view of American poetry and its audience did not really change during my tenure as Poet Laureate. I knew that the audience for poetry was relatively small but that there were many readers out there who had been driven away from poetry and were ready to find a way back. Something I did not realize then was the readiness of high school students to respond fully to poetry if they were exposed to the right kind of poetry. I suppose what I am really doing here is endorsing the Poetry 180 program that I put in place at first for high schoolers. I had no idea I would hear from so many teachers who found that Poetry 180 made poetry come alive for their students, some of whom actually demanded to hear more poems. For me, making the poems available on the Library of Congress website was setting out the water; I had no idea so many horses would come to drink. And I mean "horses" in the best sense of the word!

L: One pleasure of your poetry is the way it cuts through the ceremoniousness of capital-'L' Literature. In Ballistics, for example, you spoof well-known lines of poets including Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. How much should younger readers and writers respect established literary elders like these, and how much should they try to have a more irreverent experience?

BC:  I wouldn't advise coming right out of the box and ridiculing your betters. But if you think you have learned enough from a teacher, you seize the opportunity to signal their current uselessness. Any poet I have parodied or poked fun at– O'Hara, Frost, Stevens– I have been in awe of at one point. But for every poem I have that pokes fun at a poet or poetry itself, I have at least another poem that pokes fun at me. I am critical of poetry because I often suspect its intentions, and I am leery of the easy elevation of poetry into an empyrean condition. The clay feet of every artistic endeavor need to be kept in mind.

L: I tend to think that what sets poetry apart from prose is a certain density of language, making it relatively difficult to decipher. Your poetry, on the other hand, is praised for being easy-to-read and readily accessible. What do you hope a reader will find in your work the third or fourth time around?

BC: "Transparency" has become a popular word recently in all sorts of areas, usually in the sense of revealing secrets. A good poem, no matter how plain the language, will always have a little secret it is not telling us; and that, it could be said, is what makes poetry different from prose. What both genres have in common is diction and syntax. I tend to use a simple diction (few trips to the dictionary) and straightforward syntax (I write in sentences). But as the poem moves ahead, I am trying to nudge it into somewhat mysterious or at least hypothetical territory. The experience of reading the poem should contain a feeling of shifting (or being shifted) from the familiar to the strange, from coziness to disorientation. To reread the poem would be to re-experience that shift. In just about every poem of mine, we know exactly where we are in the opening lines, but I would argue that explaining where we are at the end would present more of a challenge.

Thomas Sanchez, Key West, 1980s.
Photo by Rollie McKenna This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Sanchez's Mile Zero. The epic novel unfolds in a richly imagined Key West where St. Cloud, Justo Tamarindo, Zobop, and El Finito are players in a late-twentieth century clash of generations, cultures, and beliefs. Hailed by The New York Times as "a comic masterpiece," it is, together with Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and Thomas McGuane's Panama, a landmark in the literature of our island city.

In 1989, as Knopf was preparing the book for press, Sanchez agreed to an interview with George Murphy, a former local mayoral candidate and editor of the excellent anthology, The Key West Reader: The Best of Key West's Writers, 1830-1990. Over the course of several late nights at the now-legendary Full Moon Saloon, the following conversation took shape. In the interview, originally published in Island Life, Sanchez discusses the origins and development of Mile Zero, the parallels between Key West and Cannery Row, and the concept of contrabandista.


George Murphy: Thomas, you left the enormous California landscape of your first two books to live in and write about this tiny island. Why?

Thomas Sanchez: I had no intention of writing a novel in Key West when I first arrived there. I was on my way to another island in the Caribbean at the time; stopping in Key West was fortuitous. I had not been able to write fiction for four years. I did have several hundred pages of notes and sketches for a novel set in California and Mexico, but while writing both in California and Mexico, I was unable to match voices to my ideas. I had themes but no language. I was like a singer who has lost his voice, standing alone on a stage, mouthing empty clouds over the heads of a phantom audience.
      The first trip to Key West placed me at the confluence of several events, the first being the launching of the initial space shuttle, at the same time a boatload of Haitians fleeing the dictator Baby Doc (Jean-Claude Duvalier) came ashore in the Florida Keys, and another of the ubiquitous loads of cocaine confiscated by the Coast Guard from a fast boat attempting to make landfall near Key West. These three events forged in my mind a new American metaphor, one in the process of birth. The themes of the novel I had been carrying for four years coalesced into hard voices spoken in soft tongues in a fresh language. The illumination was simply that I had physically transported myself 3,000 miles across the continent into a geopolitical context of a transforming world. The key to unlocking that world necessitated undoing the cultural prejudice of my personal history. By that I mean the kind of "educated" American I had become, which had cost me for a time the ability to divine what is most crucial to a novelist, the character of the future which is reflected in the past.


Space Shuttle Columbia.
Photo by NASA GM:You have referred to Mile Zero as a cosmic Cannery Row. What do you mean by that?

TS: As a boy I lived at the edge of the real Cannery Row in California. It was still physically as Steinbeck had described it in his novel of the same name, as if his words had built a real place. But over time that place fell prey to the commerce of modernity. The old sardine packing houses were transformed into hotels and fancy boutiques, the ghostly quality disappeared beneath the thundering hordes searching for Steinbeck's people amongst an impossible charade. If you want to go to the real Cannery Row, you must go to Steinbeck's book; there is the life.
      When I arrived in Key West I discovered haunting parallels with Cannery Row, the old wharves where men once set off to shark, turtle, and sponge were still there. So were many of the great stone cigar factories built by the Cubans, all deserted, strangely quiet, but filled with ghostly consequence, and if you knew where to look you could make contact with those distant times; if you kept your ears open you could discover the voices of those still living who were part of those enterprises now thought of as dead. Cannery Row died when the sardines mysteriously disappeared, never to rise again.

Coast Guard cutter off Key West after intercepting
Haitian refugees, 1980. Photo by Dale McDonald.       Key West has died a thousand deaths, going from the richest city in America to the poorest. Key West died when the sponge blight came; it died when the wrecking laws were changed; it died when the turtles were all slaughtered; it died when slave auctions were abolished after the Civil War; it died when the Navy abandoned its massive base; it died after Prohibition made rum smuggling less than profitable; but each cycle was a tide washing away the old, bearing seeds of the new, changing the status quo. The tide was ceaseless, from clippership captains to freed Bahamian slaves, to Cubans escaping Spanish dictators or dictators of their own making, to modern-day southern hustlers and scammers on the lam from an unforgiving north. The future, when I arrived in Key West, was overhead in the space shuttle. The future was also a boatload of Haitian refugees.

GM: In the fictional vision of Mile Zero, Key West seems to become a character in the novel. Was this intentional?

TS: If no man is an island, then no island is a character. Mile Zero in the end is no more about Key West than Death in Venice is about Venice. Islands are about atmosphere, living at ease or at odds at all times with the elements, land, water, air, wind. Key West is the end of the American road, but also the beginning of the American dream. It is the beginning of America if you are a refugee who lands here. It is America's thrust in the new realities of the Caribbean Basin. The Spanish first called Key West the "island of bones" (Cayo Hueso) because it was littered with human bones bleached in the sun, bones of Indians left from lost battles with man and nature, bones of shipwrecked souls. For Cubans who emigrated in the last century, Key West was Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, filled with the bright promise of a future not ruled by a dictatorial past. The island is a human metaphor, but the reality is that at any moment a hurricane can wipe the slate clean. It is precisely this awareness that Mile Zero takes as its point of narrative departure.

GM: One of the major plots in Mile Zero involves an exotic Vodou-Santería murder, a crime which seems to haunt the conscience of Key West and has ramifications transcending the small island where the action is played out. The man who represents the conscience of the island is a majestic character, an Afro-Cuban-American cop, Justo Tamarindo. Was Justo, like MK, someone you knew existed before the novel was begun?


Marine Patrol officer with seized drugs,
Key West. (FL Div. Recreation & Parks) TS: No. Justo was a gift. Without Justo I never would have made it through Mile Zero. Justo appeared in the second chapter with such authority; he knew everything there was to know about Key West, about Cuba, about men and women, family and individual honor, spiritualism and the spirit. He is probably the most moral man I have met, in or out of a book. Justo just winked and promised, near ten years ago, when I was on the brink of all those pages thickening with action, "Follow me. I know the way out of here." And he did. I can say I often followed not knowing where he was leading, but I trusted and he was right. Justo Tamarindo taught me a great deal about life, and even though many early readers of the novel have made an identification between the character of St. Cloud and myself, for the obvious reasons of our similar backgrounds of political activism, it is Justo Tamarindo who inspired me. He became the very rock upon which the island of my novel was built.

Rachel Kushner writes frequently for Artforum and coedits the literary, philosophy, and art journal Soft Targets, whose focus is political inquiry, poetry, and literature-in-translation. Her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award.

Telex from Cuba takes place in Oriente Province and Havana, Cuba, during the 1950s. We learn about the American businessmen in charge of the country's sugar and nickel mining operations, and the Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians who work in the mines and cut the cane in a form of indentured servitude. Meanwhile, from their base in the mountains above the sugar and nickel operations in Preston and Nicaro, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army battle the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose surrender on New Year's Day fifty years ago introduced hope to the Cuban underclass and fear to the businessmen who relied on their cheap labor.

Kushner will join us for the second session of the 27th annual Key West Literary Seminar, January 15-18, in the theater of the historic San Carlos Institute, which stands today as a museum to an earlier Cuban revolutionary, José Martí. In this final interview of our 2008 series, conducted by email over the holiday season, Kushner talks about the experiences of her mother's family living in Cuba, the real Christian de La Mazière, and the process of creating fiction from the Cuban revolution.


Littoral: From the book jacket, we know Telex From Cuba is based in part on your mother's experiences as a child in Oriente, on land owned by the United Fruit Company. How much of the book is family history? Are there characters that are closely based on your mother's family, and the people they knew?

Rachel Kushner: The original spark, my idea to write the book, was due to the fact that my mother had lived in Cuba as a child, and I'd gone there with her and two of her sisters to see the strange, former American colony in northeastern Oriente Province where they'd spent part of their childhood. The historical circumstances upon which I attempted to build my novel– an American colony in Cuba, and the various roles the people who lived there played in the revolution– was a fictional schematic that I borrowed from real life, the lives of my mother's family and the people they knew and that I discovered, independently, through my own research. I did, at least initially, draw heavily from the mountains of archival material my grandparents had left behind: every letter they'd written from Cuba had a carbon, they saved every calling card and receipt and budget book and party invitation– I mean everything– so I had access to this very rich archive of the lives of the Americans who managed and controlled Cuba's sugar and nickel– the country's most valuable resources. But the novel itself is a work of fiction. I am a fiction writer, not a memoirist, not a historian. As a literary figuration, it is ruled by the imagination, and structured by it, too. If the book were simply a fictionalization of my family's history, it would have been a rather dreary exercise– not because their lives were in any way dreary, but because fiction has to rise up organically and reconfigure the past on its own terms, via a logic that's aesthetic, not factual. I learned this the hard way. At first, I was rather attached to some of the details I found in my (long-deceased) grandparents trove. But those details so often caused problems. They weren't invented, and so they lacked the suppleness of context. The invented detail fits with the mind's own contextual logic. The "real" detail, by contrast, is often so much less believable. Much of what creates "my" Oriente Province is a synthesis, a false reality I was only able to generate after sifting through the details of the real place.
    Overall, the proposition of Americans of various sorts leaving the States to live in a colonial outpost, running away to become more themselves, or get their share of what they think they deserve, and the tacit race and social hierarchies they encounter, and comprise, is a proposition I worked out after having thought a great deal about my own grandparents' lives. So in that sense the whole project is subtended, or ghosted, by the experiences of my family. But as I said– fiction is fiction, and not "about" any real person's life. And because of the mysterious process of writing fiction, and its special integrity, I wince a little when people describe my novel as "based on." Publishers rely so heavily on back-story to promote novels these days– because they think it sells, and maybe it does– but novels don't simply enact the real as it took place. They do something else, stranger and more complicated.

L: Where did your mother's family go after the revolution? Did they ever return? Did you grow up with an awareness of Cuba and Castro, or did this come later?

RK: My family actually left before the revolution. I think my grandfather was fired. He was very disappointed to leave Cuba. My grandmother, far more closed-minded, was happy to leave the "natives" and their lack of love for iceberg lettuce and proper English. The episode in my book of the Americans who get rescued by aircraft carrier because the town is being strafed by Batista's military planes is drawn from a situation that really occurred in Nicaro, but my own family was not there for it. They ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after having first moved back in with their own parents, in St. Louis. They had to split up their children because my grandfather was unemployed. Although this occurred before the Cuban revolution that ejected the Americans from Nicaro, the predicament is in some sense the same: having escaped the US only to wind up returning, jobless and on some level estranged.
    After my grandfather regained his footing, got a job and re-established a life in Tennessee, I know that he was very amused by Castro. He saved all kinds of clippings from the early sixties, and paid attention. He'd spent his time there, of course, and he was not surprised by the comeuppance– especially because Nicaro played a particular role in the whole thing. The rebels were right above Nicaro, and Fidel later railed against the Americans for owning and controlling Cuba's incredibly valuable nickel mines.
    My mother and aunts are all quite far to the left, politically, which is unusual for Americans who lived in Cuba, but for them, it is that experience that politicized them. I had heard about Cuba my whole life, my mother always cooked Cuban dishes, played Cuban music, talked about her childhood as this wonderfully free time in her life. I went with them to Cuba, for the first time, in 2000, which is when I started writing the book. They were the only ones of the Americans who had lived in Preston and Nicaro ever to go back to the United Fruit and nickel enclaves, respectively. Most of the people who lived there were unsympathetic to the revolution and had no desire to see what became of their once-elegant world, the sovietization, the pollution, the shabby state of their country club and manager's row. But my mother and her sisters still feel very connected to the place. Quite simply, they're rather pro-Fidel, because the people they saw working in the canefields and the nickel mines and as servants in their parents' homes have all benefited from the revolution. Obviously this is a sticky issue, and not everyone feels this way, but my mother and her sisters lived there, and I respect the context in which they have made their political judgments. As a student of Latin American politics, my awareness of Fidel, growing up, was that he was the first Latin American leader to stand up to the U.S., and as a child, this impressed me greatly, lack of political freedoms and embargo-related privations notwithstanding.

L: How much time did you spend in Cuba? Where? How did you get around the travel ban?

RK: I spent about two months there, all told. Mostly in Nicaro, which is in the Nipe Bay region. But also Havana, Santiago, Holguín and that whole province: Preston and Banes, the two United Fruit towns; Moa, the other nickel-processing town; Birán, where Fidel grew up. Professional researchers may travel legally under a general US Treasury License, a far easier way to go. I flew direct from Miami.

L: Your Christian de La Mazière is a real villain– an execution instructor and a double-dealer involved simultaneously with the Castros, Batista, and Prío, as well as the notorious dictators of neighboring Hispaniola, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What is known about the real La Mazière? What made him appealing as a character?

RK: I'm so glad you asked about La Mazière, who takes up a good portion of my book, and is the character whose interiority is most exposed to the reader, and yet so often my novel has been described as being told by the two young Americans, as if the French Nazi were this curious blind spot. To me, he is very much at the center of things. While I'm amused that you call him a villain, as the designation is an acknowledgment of his affective role, I don't quite see him that way myself.
    At one point Everly has a kind of musing on her little sister's amorality and the difference between that and immorality, and in a way it echoes La Mazière (although perhaps the distinction would be his own– that he is not in opposition to morals but outside of them). In fact, you're probably right that he is a scoundrel. Certainly the "real" La Mazière, upon who my character is based, is very much of a scoundrel. He was an aristocrat who wrote for a fascist newspaper during the war and then, in August of 1944, just before the allies rolled into Paris, he fled east and enlisted in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS.

Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels including, most recently, The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, and Summer Reading; and a book on the craft of fiction titled The Company of Writers. She has taught writing workshops at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and right here at the Key West Literary Seminar. She will return to Key West and the Seminar for a third time this January, as a moderator for our 27th annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, and as a faculty member in our writers' workshop program. In a telephone conversation yesterday, we learned what to expect from Wolitzer's workshop, and gathered some tips about how to assess the quality of a manuscript.


Littoral: How would you explain your approach to teaching a writers' workshop?

Hilma Wolitzer: I was in my 30s when I took my first workshop, at the New School with Anatole Broyard. The very first thing I ever heard about my work, the first comment in the class, was "That's the most boring thing I ever heard." Broyard stepped in and said "I don't see how your comments are useful to the writer. You have to say why you were bored, and what you would do to make it less boring." In that moment, I learned how to teach.
    Honesty and charity have to prevail. You have to ask questions of the manuscript: Do I believe this? Do I care? Am I compelled to keep reading? I encourage everybody to comment on everybody's work; and I ask the person who wrote the manuscript to not defend his or her work against criticism until everyone has spoken. It's not exactly a courtroom, but certain evidence comes out– if 10 people say they don't believe in a character, this is evidence against the manuscript. On the other hand, writers are not always aware of what they do well. If you can point out one good sentence in an otherwise not-so-good manuscript, that's very helpful to a writer.

L: Are there good books about how to write?

HW: More helpful than reading how-to-write books is reading well-written books. Right now, I'm reading a book that I'm crazy about– a contemporary novel called Old Filth by a British writer named Jane Gardam. I almost want to force this book on writers. David Nasaw is another writer I greatly admire. He's compelled to be truthful– it's part of his ethic– and he's a wonderfully lively and engaging writer. William Kennedy is a splendid writer; his novel Ironweed is a book that can teach anybody about writing and about invention and about language. Good writing conveys certain essential truths about how we live with one another; and that's what we're trying to achieve in this workshop- to make writing of quality not just better, but, as Grace Paley said, "truer."

L: What does a Key West Literary Seminar writers' workshop feel like?

HW: It begins as a group of strangers, like a pickup basketball game in a schoolyard, and people learn how to play as a team. Now it's not a contest– we're not trying to find the best writer; no one's going to win. If your manuscript becomes better, then everyone wins. These people come together and they talk about something quite intimate– their work– and they get to know each other very well in a very short period of time. I find that people generally are really supportive of one another and not competitive. After all, the aim of the workshop is revision, not suicide.

L: Are you ever too old to start writing?

HW: No! I was in my mid-40s when my first book was published. I encourage people to start writing at any age– you don't have to have great legs like an athlete or a dancer. You just sit at your typewriter or your computer in your pajamas and you're invisible. Only the work becomes visible.

Thomas Mallon is a novelist, essayist, critic, and former literary editor at GQ. He has received the Ingram Merrill Award for outstanding work as a writer, and is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. As the author of historical novels including Henry and Clara, Bandbox, and Dewey Defeats Truman, Mallon is known for richly imagined characters and situations set within crucial moments in United States history. As a critic, he regularly writes about new works of historical fiction; and a collection of his essays, In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing, includes two important pieces on the genre, "Writing Historical Fiction" and "The Historical Novelist's Burden of Truth."

Mallon's most recent novel is Fellow Travelers, an account of a Washington D.C. love affair between Hawkins Fuller, a handsome State Department official, and young Timothy Laughlin, a fervent anti-communist and Senate staffer. Through Laughlin and Fuller, we witness the so-called lavender scare of the 1950s, in which State Department employees suspected of homosexuality were fired as security risks; and are given a ringside seat for the sordid endgame of the Army-McCarthy hearings run by notorious Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In this installment of our ongoing interview series, Thomas Mallon talks about Fellow Travelers, the rumors of Senator McCarthy's own homosexuality, the Obama-McCain election; and the current state of historical fiction, including works by Gore Vidal and William Kennedy, both of whom will join Mallon in January 2009 during our 27th annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.


Littoral: Are Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin based on real people in any way? Why did you choose to cast these characters in a well-documented era in Washington?

Thomas Mallon: Fuller and Laughlin aren't based on any particular historical figures. Both contain bits and pieces of people I've known in my own life, which makes them like the characters one finds being created by just about any novelist of the "non-historical" sort.
    In this regard, though, one thing in particular interested me about Laughlin. When I started to make notes on him, the first thing I put down was "Date of birth: November 2, 1931"– exactly twenty years earlier than mine. I realized that in some ways I was going to be writing about what my own life might have been like had I been born two decades earlier.

    As for putting him and Fuller into this well-documented era: in this respect, they fit in with a lot of the people in my novels– minor figures, invented or real (take Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, from Henry and Clara), who get caught up in major historical dramas. The roles that Fuller and Laughlin play in actual events are sufficiently small that I don't think their presence on the scene disconcerts well-informed students of the period, the kind of readers who actually know, say, Charles Potter and the other members of the McCarthy committee. Even to such readers the presence of a staffer like Tim would seem believable.
    In any case, this has become my preferred avenue into history– the plausible presence of a small person who's seeing big things.

L: How is Fellow Travelers different from your other work? Are the rumors of McCarthy's homosexuality given more credence in your novel than in the historical record?

TM: Fellow Travelers is different mostly, I guess, in terms of subject matter. (The basic method and techniques are pretty much the same.) My novels had often contained a lot of politics, but homosexuality hadn't before this one been more than a leitmotif (a couple of minor characters, like Frank Sherwood in Dewey Defeats Truman).
    As for the McCarthy rumors: I suppose my book does give them more credence– or at least attention– than the historical record does, but there were certainly whisperings at the time about gay experiences McCarthy may have had from Wisconsin to the Wardman Park Hotel. His rather sudden marriage in middle age struck his detractors as suspicious.

    It's often been suggested that Roy Cohn had some sort of hold of McCarthy, whereas Fellow Travelers invents a situation in which it's David Schine who has something on the senator. I don't, of course, know the true nature of McCarthy's sexuality. In the novel I portray him as somebody with a sloppy libido that's governed by alcohol. He's mostly homosexual but likely to grope anyone when he's had too much to drink.

Australian-born writer Geraldine Brooks is the author, most recently, of People of the Book (2008), a novel about the stories uncovered during the conservation of the sacred Hebrew text known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Her previous novel, March (2005), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As a journalist for The Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and '90s, she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. Her husband of twenty-four years is fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Horwitz. Both Brooks and Horwitz will join us in January 2009 for our twenty-seventh annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Brooks will deliver the keynote address to open our first session.

Our conversation with Brooks begins with March, which tells the story of Captain March, known to readers of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as the character of the father and husband who has left the family to fight in the Civil War. Brooks based her Captain March upon Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's real-life father, whose surviving letters and diaries reveal a close friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The fictional character of Captain March therefore develops alongside two founding myths of American history- the abolitionist cause during the Civil War and the intellectual currents of Concord, Massachusetts- while also providing an imagined backstory to a classic of American literature. The literary risks of such an imaginative weaving of truth and fiction are great. The reward of the Pulitzer, America's top literary honor, rarely given to a foreign-born writer, is proof of her exceptional talent. Brooks talks about this book and her love for books; about Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone; the "Tony Test," reading in the bath, and ordinary, everyday Geraldine.


Littoral: When you had finished with March, did you imagine it would meet with such success?

Geraldine Brooks: Of course not! You'd have to be delusional.

L: How did you feel about it, in that interim before public reception?

GB: I think with any book, there's an odd period when you've had to let it go. You've pushed the deadline and your editor's patience to the end, and you have to stop revising and tinkering. Then, alarmingly, it's out of your hands. There's a kind of nervous uncertainty: could I have done better? Will someone, anyone, want to read it?

L: In an interview with Dave Weich, you said, "As a reporter, if you don't know the truth, you can't write it, but in fiction you can make it up." I think that "make it up" part bothers some readers of historical fiction. Have readers been duped, who believe they know the history better after reading historical fiction? How does historical fiction contribute to our understanding of history?

GB: It's nothing to do with duping. It is the novelist's job to imagine, and my implicit contract with the reader is clear enough: This is a novel; I hope you enjoy the fruits of my imagination. I think if you call it a novel, you can do what you like, but you need to explain later what it is that you did. I believe the least one can do is offer an afterword, setting out where the facts end and the fiction takes over.
    Through the vehicle of story, I think it is possible to lead reluctant minds to consider our earlier selves. People who would not pick up a narrative history book will perhaps pick up a novel and find their interest engaged by predicaments from the past. I really believe in following the line of fact as far as it leads, to make a good strong scaffolding for the imaginative enterprise. Then, when you come to the place where that line of fact frays and disappears, I let imagination take over.

L: Your husband is a fellow Pulitzer-winner, and is also an author of a well-received book on the Civil War. We're looking forward to having you here together in January. To what extent do your literary interests and convictions overlap? To what extent do they differ?

GB: We started out as newspaper reporters together, united in the service of fact. Tony continues to write factual books; he says I've "gone over to the dark side," as he puts it, "making stuff up." He's an enthusiastic reader of fiction, though, so that makes him a great first reader for me. He's very impatient– if a novel doesn't grab him he won't keep reading. That's helpful to me: to see if my early drafts can pass the "Tony Test." During our long marriage, we seem to have managed to drag each other towards our respective interests. He brought me around on the Civil War; I turned him on to the wonders of international travel.

L: As a writer married to a writer, do you always think of yourself as a writer? Or is there still another self, an ordinary, everyday Geraldine?

GB: There's definitely Schlepper Geraldine. And, to be honest, she's a much more important person in the world than Writer Geraldine. If I stopped writing today, it would be years before anyone noticed. If I stop taking out the trash, feeding the dogs, and picking up the groceries, the howls of protest would be almost instantaneous.

L: I admire that sentiment very much. But, don't you hope for a lasting literary reputation? Did your career as a journalist inure you to good writing and hard work being taken out with the trash?

GB: I hope people will read and enjoy my books, that's it. Really. Anything else is just delectable gravy.

Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 in Durham, England. He is the author of fifteen published novels and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Three of his books– Pascali's Island (1980), Morality Play (1995), and Sacred Hunger (1992)– were shortlisted for Britain's premier literary honor, the Man Booker Prize; Sacred Hunger won the Booker in 1993. Unsworth's sixteenth book, Land of Marvels, a historical novel set in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I, will be published in January, 2009. He will deliver the John Hersey Memorial Address at the Seminar on January 15. Unsworth lives today in rural Italy with Aira, his wife. In this installment of our ongoing interview series, Barry Unsworth talks about the effects of expatriate life, of aging, and the role historical fiction plays in understanding our past and our present.


Littoral: What are you working on now?

Barry Unsworth: I have a new novel in mind, but I haven't started seriously working on it yet. I am at that very early– and very pleasant– stage, when the idea is exciting and the sense of potential very great, and there is none of that feeling of inadequacy that will come with the attempt to put the words down, an inadequacy in oneself and in the resources of language, experienced every time and always forgotten again. The novel will be set in contemporary Rome and will try to deal with some of the masks and mythologies of that extraordinary city in the course of its long life, and with the fortunes of a cosmopolitan group of Roman residents.
       I have lived here in rural Italy for the last 16 years. It has affected me in certain ways– affected the way I write and what I write about, and the way I view the world. A beautiful country and likeable, highly gifted people, betrayed by their own history of disunity and the weakness of state institutions. Corruption, the abuse of power, intricate connections between politics, business and organized crime– I suppose you find these things everywhere, but you find them here in spectacular fashion.

L: As a novelist, you've often chosen historical settings over contemporary ones. Why do you choose to write historical fiction?

BU: I don't think it has been so much a choice as a sort of gradual process determined by accidents of circumstance– like many things in life, I suppose. I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn. The seed was there, I think, but I didn't start writing historical fiction until much later. Pascali's Island (1980), which was my sixth novel, was the first to be set in the past.
      Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate. The result has been a certain loss of interest in British life and society and a very definite loss of confidence in my ability to register the contemporary scene there– the kind of things people say, the styles of dress, the politics etc.– with sufficient subtlety and accuracy. So I have turned to the past. The great advantage of this, for a writer of my temperament at least, is that one is freed from a great deal of surface clutter. One is enabled to take a remote period and use it as a distant mirror (to borrow Barbara Tuchman's phrase), and so try to say things about our human condition– then and now– which transcend the particular period and become timeless.

L: I'm curious about your relationship to language. Spoken language, of course, is mostly absent from the historical record. As an expatriate, I would think that you are daily obliged to speak a language not your own. Two questions, then: What is involved in recreating the idioms in which your historical characters speak? And, how has living in Italy affected your relationship to English?

BU: As you say, it's rare to find examples of direct speech in the documents of the past. You can find speech patterns in the literature of some former periods- Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, for example, the 18th-century novel, even in medieval love lyrics or drinking songs. And journals can be helpful, being often written in a more intimate and colloquial style.
      If you go back far enough, or if the characters have become legendary, it ceases to matter; Achilles or Caligula or Robin Hood can speak in more or less any way you choose. I think the problem arises when you want to be true to the period and at the same time comprehensible to the reader. You can't make your characters speak in the language and idiom of their own time if the language of the period would seem archaic. It would put too much strain on the understanding and would seem false in any case. There might be various ways of dealing with this, but I have generally found it sufficient to avoid anachronism and contracted verbal forms. If the novel is set in the 14th century, for example, you wouldn't make one character say to another, "You look great in that dress," or "Let's get on with the job." The extra degree of formality that results from avoiding such blunders does not, in my opinion, inhibit the writer's powers of expression or stultify his or her prose, in fact it can stimulate invention.
      How my relationship to English has been affected by living away from the country is difficult to know; it would be a slow and probably imperceptible process, a sort of linguistic decay, which one would hardly be aware of from day to day. My style has grown terser and sparer, less exuberantly metaphorical, less joyous in a way. But that may well be due to the sobering effect of the years. Anyway, as I draw nearer to 80, I like to interpret it that way.

Thomas McGuane, Tennessee Williams, and James Kirkwood at the wrap-party for the film adaptation of McGuane's Ninety-two in the Shade, ca. 1975, at Louie's Backyard in Key West.

Thomas McGuane's Key West novels— Ninety-two in the Shade and Panama —are in a class of their own. They portray the volatile Key West of the 1970s, when a legion of do-it-yourself drug smugglers thrived and cocaine was plentiful, cheap, and, more or less, socially acceptable. McGuane's heroes, Thomas Skelton and Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, chart that Key West with intelligence and recklessness, lust and candor, violence and acute observation. Since Hemingway in To Have and Have Not, no one has rendered the feel of the streets, shores, and waters of Key West so well as McGuane did in Panama.To read it today, thirty years after its publication, is to hear the bones of that not-so-distant place creaking beneath today's clean veneer, to ghost-walk from lunch at La Lechonera to a fishing trip at the Cay Sal Bank, to watch kids playing at Astro City, to drink at the Full Moon Saloon, and to walk cross-town again and again in the mid-day sun from an overgrown Casa Marina to the oyster-shell paved parking lots between Caroline St. and the Gulf.

McGuane sold his Key West home in the early 1980s. He returned often to visit friends, and even joined our honorary board of directors. In 1984, he sat down with longtime KWLS board member, Liz Lear, for a conversation in the home of Bill Wright, also a former board member. They talk about Key West and why he left, about the threat of nuclear annihilation and the ocean, about writing, about writers, and about dogs. Originally published in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review 36/2 (1986). Reprinted in Conversations with Thomas McGuane, edited by Beef Torrey, University Press of Mississippi (2007). Reprinted here with permission from Liz Lear.

A Conversation with Thomas McGuane
Liz Lear / 1984

This conversation took place in a house in Key West that McGuane had rented from fellow writer Bill Wright. It was a warm tropical night in March of 1984. We sat around a dining room table piled high with books and the just completed manuscript of Something to Be Desired. Through the open French doors a lighted pool glimmered and the soft breeze carried the floral scent of something nameless but sweet. From an adjacent room, the clear young inquiring voice of McGuane's daughter Anne occasionally interrupted the story being read to her.

LL: I have always been intrigued with what attracts creative people to certain places. I wonder what or who brought them here and what makes them stay. Why are you in Key West?
TM: I first came to Key West as a boy with my father to go fishing. When I decided to come back here as an adult, it was because I associated the island with writers, reading, and writing.
    American writers love exotic atmospheres, and yet really don't want to live outside of the country. Key West is one of those places that allow them to have it both ways. It's a southerly town without the burden of southern history. It's intrinsically a nice place. I enjoy the ambience of a place where Spanish is spoken. I like that fecund smell the island has. I love to be out on the ocean: for better or worse, I'm still a sportsman and the ocean is one of the last frontiers where we can live in a civilized way next to that great wilderness.

LL: Did you always want to be a writer? When did you start?
TM: Yes. I always wanted to be a writer and I began when I was ten— at least to try.

LL: Did you ever do any other work?
TM: I never really made a living, of course. I worked as a boy and young man at odd jobs, the same kind of thing other kids did. I worked at a gas station. I worked as a cowboy— cowboy is too big a word for it: I worked on a ranch in an unskilled way. Then I went off to school and was just hell-bent to write, to read and write, and that's it.

As a book reviewer for National Public Radio for more than a quarter-century, Alan Cheuse has been called "The Voice of Books on National Public Radio." Cheuse is also the author of several novels, a memoir, two short story collections, and a collection of essays on reading and writing. He last joined the Literary Seminar in 2003, and will return this January as a panelist and writers' workshop instructor when we explore Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Cheuse's forthcoming book, To Catch the Lightning, is a historical novel about photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) and his struggle to complete "The North American Indian," his epic project of photographing all of the native tribes of the western United States. I had a chance to talk with Cheuse recently, about NPR, Curtis, and the role novelists have in the writing of history.

Littoral: Why did you choose to write about Curtis? And why did you write it as a novel?

Alan Cheuse: I first encountered Curtis's photographs of the American Indian while I was in college. In fact I remember the first time I saw them. The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a great old rerun house, mounted an exhibition of them in the lobby in the late nineteen fifties. That was the first time I saw Curtis's work. I have long forgotten what movie I saw that evening in Cambridge, but I never forgot the faces and tones and settings of those portraits.

My research led me to Curtis the historical figure– photographer, self-made ethnographer, naive entrepreneur, difficult husband, and, through it all, devoted father. My novel, I hope, knits this all together in an inventive, forward-moving, uniquely presented way, giving especially the feel of his life, which narrative by historians doesn't usually do. Which is to say, historians usually work from the outside in, and novelists move in the other direction. I don't mean to pick a fight with historians here, but this is the way I see it. I suppose some of them might see a novelist waltzing through the field, picking up forget-me-nots and knotting them into a necklace and calling it history. But I'm not calling my novel history. I'm calling it a novel. I've written a novel about American journalist John Reed, and about an American woman painter based mostly on the life of Georgia O'Keeffe. The Curtis novel forms, at least in my own mind, the third in a kind of triptych about American artists, larger than life, but, I hope, still alive in our imaginations.

L: As I understand it, Curtis' photographic negatives were awarded to his ex-wife Clara in the divorce settlement. Rather than see this transaction through, he destroyed them. Was the relationship between Curtis' professional and personal lives always so fraught?

AC: There's a scene in the novel in which Curtis and his daughter Beth (she took Curtis's side in the quarrel) and a few friends have a destroy the negatives party. Like most artists he found it difficult to draw a line between his professional life and personal life. He gave thirty years of his adult life to the project, but he was in spite of everything devoted to his family. Early on it was easier than later, when he became the Curtis history knows (who was the Curtis who knew history and its effects). He tried heartily to keep his family intact, but he couldn't. He tried to be a good man– as his oldest child and only son said toward the end of the photographer's life, "he was the best man I knew."

Kristen-Paige Madonia, the winner of our inaugural Marianne Russo Scholarship, and a speaker during this year's New Voices Seminar, has been selected by The Studios of Key West as their very first visiting literary artist. She'll be staying in TSKW's "Mango Tree House" for one month beginning in October, just in time for Fantasy Fest and, if she's lucky, the tail end of the season for the mammoth mango trees on TSKW's compound. I had a chance to talk with Kristen-Paige about her plans yesterday:

Arlo: What will you be working on during your residency at The Studios of Key West?

Kristen-Paige Madonia: I plan to work on my second novel. It's about a sixteen-year old embarking on a cross-country trip from West Virginia to San Francisco. This trip is prompted by the discovery that she is pregnant, and by her on-going ambition to locate her paternal father, whom she has never met. My intention with this project is to give voice to a character exploring the transition between childhood and adulthood.

A: Didn't you move from Virginia to the west coast? What role does your own life play in this novel?

KPM: Well, yes, I've made that cross-country trip too many times to count, but this novel isn't only about the physical trip from one side of the US to the other, it's also about the psychological journey of my character. It seems it is becoming more typical for people to move more frequently, whether it be an attempt at self-reinvention or a general anxiousness in society, so I'm trying to explore themes of rootlessness and restlessness in addition to the ever-changing definition of the "modern American family."