Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and his Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems is nominated for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry. In this recording from our 2008 Seminar, Doty reads a selection of work inspired by a visit to Key West in 1997, including a section from his 2007 memoir Dog Years, and the poems "Sea Grape Valentine," "Watermelon Soda," and "Catalina Macaw."

       from "Watermelon Soda"

       Strange island,
       to yield a walking
       hot-pink soda can
       inhabited by a lucky
       Modernist crab,
       carrying on his back
       a tropic shelter
       by Barragan
       or Corbusier,
       perennially modish
       if not quite practical...

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (11:19) / 5.2 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Mark Doty. Used with generous permission from Mark Doty.

Ann Beattie is the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the University of Virginia's Department of English and Creative Writing. A short story writer and a novelist, she has received critical acclaim for her body of work and has been called "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form" by The Washington Post. In this recording from 2008, Beattie reads from a virtuosic essay-in-progress on the subject of ambient sound in works of literature. Beginning with accounts of poet John Ashbery's "managed chance" method of composing, the noises of drunken Parrotheads in Key West, and a discussion of clichés "whose repetition deadens language," Beattie arrives at a luxuriant analysis of technique in the fiction of James Joyce ("The Dead"), Raymond Carver ("Are These Actual Miles?"), and Richard Yates ("The Best of Everything").

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (31:42) / 14.5 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Ann Beattie. Used with generous permission from Ann Beattie.

Maggie Nelson reads two long poems, "The Mute Story of November" and "The Halo Over the Hospital," from her book Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007). In a brief introduction, Nelson gives credit for the title of her book to Annie Dillard, whose essay "Seeing" refers to Marius van Senden's 1932 Space and Sight, about previously blind persons returned to sight.

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (15:10) / 6.9 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Maggie Nelson. Used with generous permission from Maggie Nelson.

This 2008 reading features poet Kevin Young reading a selection of then-recent work, including "Aunties," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "Black Cat Blues," "Hang Dog Blues," "Flash Flood Blues," "Ode To The Hotel Near The Children's Hospital," "Farm Team," "I Walk The Line (for Johhny Cash)," "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," and four odes to food, including "To Chicken," "To Homemade Wine," "To Catfish," and "To Boudin."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (21:51) / 10 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Kevin Young. Used with generous permission from Kevin Young.

Meghan O'Rourke is a poetry editor at The Paris Review, and a culture critic and advisory editor at Slate. This recording from our 2008 Seminar captures O'Rourke's crisp and elegant reading of several poems from her first collection, Halflife (2007), including "Peep-Show," "Sleep," "Descent," "Spectacular," "Inventing a Horse," "Halflife," "Troy," and "Hunt;" and two newer poems, "Ariadne" and "Grief."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (15:44) / 7.2 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Meghan O'Rourke. Used with generous permission from Meghan O'Rourke.

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz reads "Boyfriend," a short story from his 1997 collection, Drown.

I should've been careful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn't you know I woke up in the hallway of our building feeling my head had been been stepped on by my high school marching band. My ass would've been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn't been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, "Motherfucker, I will give you all the space you need."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (9:14) / 4.23 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Junot Díaz. Used with generous permission from Junot Díaz.

Uzodinma Iweala reads from his critically acclaimed debut novel Beasts of No Nation, which tells the story of Agu, a child soldier fighting in a civil war in an unnamed west African country. In this section we are introduced to Agu, his friend Strika, Luftenant, and Commandante, as Agu kills for the first time.

Luftenant is saying don't think. Just let it happen. He is saying that the second you are stopping to think about it, your head is turning to the inside of rotten fruit. Commandante is saying it is like falling in love. You cannot be thinking about it. You are just having to do it, he is saying, and I am believing him. What else can I be doing?

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (17:42) / 8.1 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Uzodinma Iweala. Used with generous permission from Uzodinma Iweala.

Kristen-Paige Madonia was the recipient of our inaugural Marianne Russo Scholarship, and will be a Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West this October. In this recording from 2008, she reads her short story, "Cheap Red Meat," originally published in Pearl.

Every other Tuesday I buy groceries from the woman my husband is sleeping with. This is a new thing– knowing that he's doing the grocery checkout girl. But every week I cut along the printed dotted lines of the coupon advertisements, and paper-clip them to my shopping list on Tuesday, because Tuesday is the big red meat sale at Stuff Your Sack.

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (11:40) / 5.1 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Kristen-Paige Madonia. Used with generous permission from Kristen-Paige Madonia.

Hannah Pittard reads "The Year Helen Turned Forty-One," at the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar: New Voices. It begins:

The year Helen turned forty-one, she developed bronchitis and fell in love. He was tan, wore shorts in the winter, and had fantastically large calves. He rode a bicycle to which he attached his few possessions by way of a plastic grocery bag, and looked about ten years older than Helen. He was devastatingly aloof.

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (14:40) / 6.7 MB


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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Hannah Pittard. Used with generous permission from Hannah Pittard.

Edmund White talks about finding a style and a mode of expression to approach the gay subject matter which has been his life's work. Discussing social, professional, and aesthetic attitudes toward gays and "gay literature," White reveals his experience as an emerging writer in the 1960s, reactions to gay lifestyles at institutions like Time and The Nation, and the varied attitudes among writers he's known, including Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. Along the way, White discusses several of his books, including The Joy of Gay Sex, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, A Boy's Own Story, and Hotel du Dream.
From 2008: New Voices. (41:31) includes 16 min. Q&A.


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Uzodinma Iweala reads from a nonfiction work-in-progress about people living with HIV/AIDS in northern Nigeria. Set in and around a rural hospital in northern Nigeria, the excerpt focuses on a young man named Ifanye, and his struggle with "the something" with which he is infected. From 2008: New Voices (13:35).

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Elisabeth Scharlatt, publisher of Algonquin Books, and Manuel Muñoz, author of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, discuss the hurdles and biases Muñoz encountered along his way to publication. Muñoz's roots in California's Central Valley and his concern with voicing the stories of the Valley shed light on his process and work.
From KWLS 2008, New Voices. (45:13) includes 5 minute Q&A. Muñoz reads briefly from Lindo y Querido at (8:14-11:20).
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A wonderful conversation about the Southern voice in writing with Lee Smith, Tayari Jones and Silas House.

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Silas House reads from his in-progress novel, Yvonna Darling, "about a woman who kidnaps her own child after custody is unfairly taken away from her." Ominously full of the slow summer sounds of cicadas, willow trees, and the song of a whippoorwill, this desperate passage is brought to vivid life by House's rich, Appalachian baritone. (12:03)

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As KWLS Board Member Bob Richardson says in his introduction, Maggie Nelson is "intimately acquainted with the night". Nelson reads from and discusses her books "Jane: A Murder" and "The Red Parts: A Memoir". Both concern Jane, who was Nelson's mother's younger sister. Jane was murdered shortly before Nelson's birth, and the books are harrowing explorations of the circumstances surrounding her death in prose and poetry, as well as soulful imaginings of the aunt she never met.

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In a seminar devoted to New Voices, an interesting perspective was that of Daniel Menaker, who for many years was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. His job was to find those new voices. He spoke warmly and knowledgeably about the challenge for fiction writers: "You must create an appetite for your writing in people who had no idea that they were hungry for it," he said. "And to do that, there must be something new and different in your voice." In this talk from the 2008 seminar, he spoke about how he recognized talented new writers, using as examples some early stories from now-established writers like George Saunders ("old new voices," he called them). Menaker discusses the craft and the art of these stories in a talk that is technical but highly accessible.

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NEW VOICES SPECIAL: Vestal McIntyre read at the 2008 Seminar from his collection of short stories, "You Are Not The One". In "ONJ.com" a woman is delighted with her new sophisticated and witty gay friend, but during a night of progressive party-crashing it becomes clear that he is not as wonderful as she had initially thought.

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Lee Smith gave the annual John Hersey Memorial Address to open the second session of the 2008 Seminar. In a talk that was both extremely funny and unexpectedly moving, Smith recounted her development as a writer when, as a young girl, she would write herself into Nancy Drew and Bobsie Twins adventures. Smith talks about how, after her initial obligatory autobiographical efforts, she discovered that she could find her voice though the creation of the wide variety of characters that she would imagine and create. Smith goes on to talk about the consolation and the re-birth that writing offered in the aftermath of terrible personal loss. Lee's subtle balancing of humor and pain, leavened by her warmth and her sturdy, both-feet-on-the-ground sensibility, is truly affecting--this one kicked off the session with a lot of energy and soul. Right click on link and choose save as:
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Pulitzer finalist James Gleick and theoretical physicist-cum-novelist Janna Levin discuss the tensions between science and art evidenced by her novel, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines." Why stray from the "facts," Gleick wonders, in telling a story of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, two of the 20th century's greatest abstract thinkers? Because, answers Levin, "there is something about the process of thinking on the absolute periphery of what's connected to ordinary human life that you can't describe just by stating the facts." Levin takes Gleick's incisive, nuanced, fraught questions and responds with a grace and power akin, commented Junot Diaz, to "Babe Ruth bombing home runs out the park." Levin fans will also enjoy her archived Colbert Report interview here. (41:30)

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Edmund White, Maggie Nelson, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Patrick Ryan discuss "newness" in authorial voice, using Harold Bloom's idea of "the anxiety of influence" as a jumping-off point. Nguyen's theory of "the Asian once-over," Ryan's "Impostor Syndrome," and Nelson's notion of the "intoxicating" influence of another writer joust toward an agreement that writers must both escape from, and surround themselves with, other voices in order to attain their own.

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To download, right-click here (Mac users Ctrl + click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Junot Díaz. Used with generous permission from Junot Díaz.

The first session of the 2008 Seminar kicked off in fine form with a John Hersey Memorial Address from the marvelous poet Mark Doty.

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