by Sara Nimis

Novelist, poet, and cultural critic Bushra Rehman opened her talk by inviting the audience to breathe together, to locate the seat of the courage and generosity required for such work in our own bodies.

Through her own story, Rehman made the case for bringing family secrets to light and offered tools for overcoming the fears that keep family stories hidden.

Having run away from home to “Jack Kerouac around the country” (including Key West), Rehman describes herself as both the family truth-teller and the family’s biggest secret. She stands by the direction her life has taken.

Rehman has unearthed important historical information buried under family secrets. She discovered that an auntie who features in her writing once traveled on a train that carried refugees across the newly drawn borders of India and Pakistan in 1947, during the bloody partition of British India. Such trains were targeted by armed mobs as they crossed contested regions, earning the name “ghost trains” from witnesses when the trains would arrive at their destination with no survivors. She also discovered light in what she calls the “black matter” around experiences she has narrated out of taboo, including the everyday texture of community and spirituality.

Rehman offered seven tools to break through the fear of harming those we love, all drawn from her Two Truths & a Lie workshop. First, when you find yourself caught up in fear of harming your relationship with those you love, just make a mark on the page in front of you. Second, know that what is written need not be published; focus instead on writing for your own clarity and healing. The publishing process takes enough time that by the time your work sees the light of day, the writing itself may have transformed those relationships.

Third, honor your characters with multidimensional portrayals. Caricature is a betrayal. Fourth, let readers see your own flaws in characters based on yourself. Fifth, tell those who are disturbed by your work of bringing secrets to light: “I don’t make you look bad; you make you look bad.” Hiding is stifling.

Sixth, forgiveness is essential. The writing must reflect either forgiveness of the subject of the work, or forgiveness of oneself, as the author, for failing to forgive. Finally, be braver than you think. You must write it, because the alternative is to hate yourself.

The talk closed with a reading from Rehman’s novel-in-progress, a scene from a bookstore in Manhattan navigating violent responses to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In the scene, Rehman used a series of interactions between characters of different backgrounds to sketch the tension between an impulse to protect her already embattled Pakistani community from purposeful religious provocation and a responsibility not to side with the enforcement of silence.

Sara Nimis is a 2026 KWLS Teacher & Librarian Scholarship recipient. She is a language and culture educator living on the ancestral lands of the Ojibwe and Dakhota Anishinaabe. She has taught at the Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji, MN, Sewanee: The University of the South, Miami University of Ohio, and Georgetown University. Her writing includes scholarly research, essays, verse, and fiction.

by Kamaria Korta

“Why I Am Unable to Write a Short Story” served as both the title of the Saturday night closing presentation and a perspective on novels from two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as he wrapped up the KWLS schedule. Opening with his familiar wry humor, Collins suggested that perhaps he suffers from a “curiosity disability,” one that makes sustained interest in fictional characters less appealing than the concentrated attention poetry allows. The celebrated poet explored the imaginative and practical differences between prose and poetry, describing prose as a kind of literary virus: “it wants to fill the page.” Poetry, by contrast, does not sprawl but settles: it chooses to “occupy space.”

From there, Collins leaned into metaphor, personifying the two forms. “Prose watches from outside the house, peering into the windows while poetry resides in the house, observing those looking in.” In this description, poetry feels regal and prose a bit common, not less than but not quite equal, either. “Poetry flies and prose falls,” he stated, a distinction that I pictured in my mind—poems as winged birds I have yet to see—while I saw prose more like a toddler racing through a crowded restaurant (one that still has a smoking section).

That same quiet attentiveness surfaced when Collins spoke about being an only child, a detail he shared with pointed gratitude. Peering over his glasses, he ruefully described his solitary childhood—one in which space and parental attention are never divided. He lamented for the child that is basking in lone parental adoration, only to be supplanted by an interloper swaddled in a hospital blanket. In jest, he told the audience that those of us who were only children had a VIP line for book signings.

His latest collection, Dog Show, reflects that inclination for solitary affection, in its playful meditation on man’s best friend. Collins’ love of dogs and all the ways they can enrich one’s life is woven throughout the pages. His poem Reverant is one of my favorites as it expresses a dog’s cynical perspective on its life and its owner. The last stanza ends with the dog informing the owner that all animals can read and write, but only dogs are poets—cats, and everyone else, writes in prose.

In spite of this assessment and though dogs appear frequently in Collins’ poems, his temperament feels decidedly more catlike to me. His demeanor on stage seemed measured, thoughtful, unbothered…catlike. The kind of presence that may stand on the edge of a room but still hold attention.  After Sunday’s seminar, I stood in the book signing line to deliver this thought to Mr. Collins and ask if he’d ever owned a cat. He shared how in the past while he was touring his wife had adopted two cats at separate times. He smiled, “The first cat I was fine with, but when she told me about the second one, I was not happy.” I asked if it was because he didn’t care for cats? “No, the first cat was fine, it didn’t need another cat! It was an only child.”

Kamaria Korta is a 2026 KWLS Teacher & Librarian Scholarship Recipient. Korta is a dedicated educator with twenty years of experience who specializes in fifth-grade social studies. She creates lessons that connect history, economics, and geography to students’ real lives. This year, she launched a journal writing project with her students, which will be compiled and published as a collaborative book. Beyond the classroom, Korta has recently embraced storytelling, winning the Moth StorySLAM and earning a spot to compete in an upcoming GrandSLAM.

by Alison Kreiss

How does the writer transform “the messiness of Self”– “this amorphous baggy collection of perception”–into Art? With this softball question, moderator Bernard Schwartz launched Saturday afternoon’s session with Kaveh Akbar, Leslie Jamison, and Chris Kraus.

“Self can be illuminative rather than obstructive,” said Jamison, mantis arms gesticulating, “and is ideally a conduit to interest in others and the world.”

Akbar sat criss-cross applesauce, confessing his imposter syndrome (“one of these things up here is not the other” and “I’ve only written ONE novel…”). “Not writing,” he said, “is the easiest thing in the world, but writing is a magical move against entropy, an intoxicating miracle.”

Kraus–the central oracle in red–reiterated from her talk Friday that she regards her writing as “reportage” that is “never transcription, always construction” that requires meticulous “selection and composition.”

The conversation encompassed Hafiz to Chomsky to Lorca, from Gwendolyn Brooks’ commandment to “Fight first, then fiddle” to Borges’ map that becomes as large as the land it represents, to Zbigniew Herbert’s precept that a writer is either an ox yoked to the plough or a cat pouncing on a flash of inspiration. Akbar told us that he fell for his partner, Paige Lewis, when they suggested a third alternative: writer as porcupine. In medieval bestiaries, porcupines were trained to roll in patches of ripe berries, returning with offerings of nourishment. Jamison suggested she is most like the tree frog who borrows the eggs of others to fertilize her own.

David McConnell opened Friday’s session by describing Key West as a land of “honky tonk lotus eaters.” These three writers have written powerfully about the many ways art and addiction are enmeshed, from Akbar’s poems Portrait of the Alcoholic and anthology Another Last Call to Kraus’s intersection of redneck Iron Range meth epidemic with a partner’s struggle with booze in The Four Spent the Day Together. Jamison delves obsessively into drinking and writing in The Recovering, which she explained is structured like an AA meeting to “tell many stories” and “imagine different endings.”

Returning to the writer’s persona, an audience member asked, “How do you want readers to see you?”

“I don’t want a reader to see me,” said Kraus. “I want the reader to see what I’m seeing.”

Alison Kreiss teaches English at Flathead High School in Montana, received a 2026 KWLS Teacher & Librarian Scholarship, and is the author of Ordinary Swoon (Foothills Publishing Montana Poets Series). She relates to the slow gestation of the black alpine salamander.

by Bobbie Marquis

When Leslie Jamison and James Wood took the stage on Friday afternoon for the last discussion of the day, a packed auditorium waited to hear how they would address the seminar’s topics. Each has achieved critical acclaim—Leslie for her courageous and beautifully written memoirs and James for his novels and, most notably, his brilliant essays of literary criticism. Clearly, they have both been “Paying Attention.” I wondered how they would speak to “The Novel.”

What followed was an enlightening discussion about their experiences with writing in both fiction and nonfiction. Leslie noted that they, like ships passing in the night, shared a place of “fruitful crossover.” She has a new novel coming out next year, and James has written a memoir about his father that will also be published next year. They spoke about the similarities and constraints and the unique sense of freedom in writing fiction or nonfiction.

James recalled a comment that Colm Toibin had made in his morning discussion about noted LBJ biographer Robert Caro. When Caro wrote about Johnson flying back on the plane and being sworn in as president after Kennedy was assassinated, the details were factually accurate, but more than that, they gave the scene fictional weight. As Colm said, “Caro’s biographies read like novels.”

James gave two other examples of the power of detail, one in nonfiction, one in fiction. In George Orwell’s essay “The Hanging,” as Orwell observes a man marching toward the gallows, it is the small gesture of the man swerving to avoid a puddle that brings him to life. This is much like the scene in War and Peace where Pierre, in line to be executed, notices a man in front of him adjusting his blindfold to make himself more comfortable. One of these stories is made up, and one may have happened. In both instances, it is the fine details that bring the scene to life and drive home the powerful images of humanity.

Leslie observed that the reader can see more if there is not too much. She gave the example of Picasso’s creature drawn from three lines. She noted that being a reader of fiction has caused her to observe the world differently, that scenes in real life can often seem like part of a novel, reminding us that for each person we see, there is so much more that doesn’t meet the eye.

James asked Leslie what it was like for her over the last two to three years to be working on fiction. She answered, “It feels great.” Leslie’s first book was a novel, and she described that she found a kind of freedom when she shifted to essays and memoirs. She has found the shift back to fiction “like a boomerang, but extravagantly freeing.”

The inspiration for her new novel came as she was reading to her four-year-old daughter the story of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. In this version of the story, the minotaur was a baby, and her daughter asked if the baby’s mother would go with her into the labyrinth. The answer was no. The image of a child wandering about in the darkness of this world, a darkness from which the parent cannot protect them, she knew that it would be through fiction that she could get to the “vitality” of the story, where it would feel most alive. She sought to explore themes she has always explored in her nonfiction as well and noted that fairy tales can hold our darkest fears, which is why we read them.

When Leslie asked James about his experience writing the memoir of his father, he described it as a wonderful writing experience, where it was easier to hold onto the railing of his father’s actual life than to write a fictional narrative. He noted that fiction and nonfiction have different liberties and limitations. The limitation of nonfiction is that you are writing about something that has happened rather than something that has not happened. There is an “ongoingness to the memoir project that doesn’t come into fiction.” Fiction must come to an end. Something has to stop, which is why, in fiction workshops, we speak about endings and why endings challenge us.

Both James Wood and Leslie Jamison have achieved mastery in the writing craft. Listening to them speak about their new projects, which crossover between fiction and nonfiction, gave those of us in the audience new insights, made clearer by the contrasts.

Bobbie Marquis earned her MFA degree from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University. She is the executive director of the Johann Fust Library Foundation in Boca Grande, Florida, where she produces an author series and publishes “Island Booknotes,” a magazine of poetry, essays, book reviews, short fiction, and a catalog of the foundation’s literary events.

by Michael Sadoff

Executive Director Arlo Haskell delivered brief comments yesterday before the presentation of this year’s Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award for a Short Story. He shared that KWLS launched the Emerging Writers Awards in 2008, when the seminar’s theme was “New Voices,” and that Cecelia Joyce Johnson, who passed away recently, continued to fund the award in perpetuity to bring young writers into the KWLS community. She was also a longtime judge of the award.

This year’s award recipient, Jack Foraker, illustrated exactly why these new voices matter. He read from a story describing the AI-assisted childrearing efforts of a trillionaire tech bro, one who bears a resemblance to a certain universally disliked CEO. We come to realize the story’s narrator is the generative AI system itself, which recounts how the trillionaire uses AI to choose a baby name, interpret the baby’s emotions, and plan the boy’s education (math and science only).

If you believe that fiction writers must explore the misguided ways of people and, when necessary, sound the warning alarm, it becomes clear that each successive generation has a job to do. Who best to challenge the threat of Gen AI than the writers coming of age during its dawn? Who best to make sense of this senselessness? Or, if making sense of things isn’t quite possible in the case of Gen AI, who best to explore the peculiar crisis we find ourselves in today?

A quick scan of almost any literary event shows how critical it is to foster young writers. Gen Z and young millennials are in short supply at most of these events, especially young men. The reasons are many and complex, and I won’t pretend to understand them or expound on them here. Only young writers themselves can explain what’s holding them back or keeping many of them away. Let’s invite them into the community, so they can tell us what’s happening.

Michael Sadoff’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast Online, South Carolina Review, Sixfold, and other journals. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Online: michaelsadoffwriter.com

by Marsh Muirhead

In her opening remarks last Thursday evening, board president Nancy Klingener referred to 19-time attendee Billy Collins as the paterfamilias of this, the 42nd annual Key West Literary Seminar.

The reason is obvious. Billy is universally beloved, profound yet accessible, and very, very funny. His dry wit and excellent timing are that of a very cerebral stand-up comedian. He has the ability to connect with each individual listener as if in a one-on-one relationship, talking, perhaps, to someone in the next room.

At his Sunday morning reading, “The Family and Poetic Claustrophobia,” I had the pleasure of sitting next to a woman new to Billy (her comments to her partner indicated as much). Her responses to the twenty plus poems that Billy read alternated between hearty laughter and the oooohing and aaaahhing of epiphany, at the surprising turns in the little journeys of poems that touch every aspect of human experience.

In the 122 pages of his latest collection, Water, Water, Billy regards Lord Byron, Amsterdam, Chet Baker, Adam, Plato, an astronaut addressing him from the space station (this actually happened), Emily Dickenson, Oriana Fallaci, Edward Hopper, Robert Frost, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Willie McCovey, and Mary Queen of Scots. Many of Billy’s most enthusiastic fans are older, boomers surely, who are able to appreciate the dazzling assortment of cultural and historical references, people who are likely good at Trivial Pursuit.

In the interest of transparency, I admit to being a devoted fan—I have all of Billy’s books (most signed) and I’ve attended every one of his Seminar appearances. And I was laughing and ooooohhhing with the same appreciation and pleasure as that woman sitting next to me this morning.

Marsh Muirhead is a retired dentist and pilot. He has been attending the KWLS since 1987. His work has appeared in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, The Carolina Quarterly, Cutthroat and elsewhere. His commentaries are a regular feature on public radio KAXE in Minnesota. He has published two collections of haiku and teaches a class in haiku at the Studios of Key West.

by Katie Mitchell

On a morning when the world is indeed burning with flames too real to be a metaphor, Ayana Mathis, Lydia Millet, and Emily Roboteau sat down for a conversation entitled “The Radical Potential of Mothering: On Children and Building Worlds While the Earth Burns.” Roboteau opened the hour by reflecting on their time together the day before on a catamaran surrounded by miles of blue water, and as audience members, we deeply understood the dissonance she was referring to. We are, after all, in sunny Key West escaping for a few days of literary inspiration as the newsreel in the back of our minds details the climate change catastrophes all around us.

The central question of their talk was how to reckon with this dissonance and how to mother in a time when the future is so grave and uncertain. While their work spans different genres, all three women hold the same thread in their writing. Millet’s A Children’s Bible illuminates the angst a younger generation feels about the world they inherited while Mathis’s The Unsettled explores generational legacy and the cord that binds grief and hope. Roboteau’s essay collection Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” weaves science, anthropology, and personal reflection to reveal the complexities of parenthood in the times we live in.

While each writer held her own perspective, together they reminded us that yes we live in uncertain times when the scope of climate disaster is beyond our comprehension, but nevertheless there are models of how to find resilience and how to mother those we love with nurture and care. They referenced Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Indigenous Alaskan community Roboteau highlights in her essay collection, and as Mathis explained, through their experiences, we know that we can “create communities of deep love” despite the fires around us. We know this because others have done it before in communities plagued by forces determined to eradicate their humanity and value profit over human life..

As a teacher and a mother, I left the talk with pages of scrawled notes and a feeling of being both held and challenged. Perhaps mothering is not just a role we fulfill when we are in a family system, but as Roboteau reminded us at the end of the talk, “mothering is an ethic” and an act of radical care. To channel our anger, to roll up our sleeves and get to work, to imagine new worlds and possibilities beyond this one, and to remember that hope is an action and not just a feeling. These are the things motherhood requires of us, but more than that, perhaps that’s what our earth requires of us, too.

Katie Mitchell teaches English in a suburban Atlanta public high school school and strives to create a classroom environment where students can learn and grow, find their own voice through the written word, and use literature as a doorway to better understand the world around them. She also writes creative nonfiction, and her work often explores motherhood, grief, and love of place. She is a 2025 Teacher & Librarian scholarship recipient.

by Darren Chase

John Irving delivered the John Hersey Memorial Address to a rapt and appreciative audience Thursday evening. The Oscar- and National Book Award-winning author began his presentation on “The Bildungsroman and the Alternative Family” by acknowledging his debt to his heroes, Dickens and Melville. Like himself, he said, these authors were drawn to depicting unconventional family structures. According to Irving, a bildungsroman “is a genre that illuminates the psychological and moral development of the main character.” In Great Expectations, Dickens’ orphaned protagonist Pip finds a nurturing caregiver in his sister’s blacksmith husband, creating a loving family against all odds. Ishmael and his shipmates form a cohesive crew in Moby Dick despite the abuses of their tyrannical captain. In the manner of a classic bildungsroman, the forming and sustaining of these alternative family arrangements is a process that develops character and creates a compelling story.

Irving drew us further into the seminar’s theme of “family” through readings from his own work. From Melville, he quickly turned to his sixteenth novel, Queen Esther, in which the character of Dr. Larch, (previously appearing in Irving’s seminal novel, Cider House Rules) takes a more central role. Wilbur Larch, director of St. Cloud’s Orphanage, is sure that Thomas and Constance Winslow are the only parents who could possibly adopt the orphaned adolescent, Esther. There are two issues: The child is too old to be adopted by most families and she is Jewish. Irving read two sections of his novel that expound on this conflict. The first was an exchange between the prospective parents and the orphanage’s staff, a scene that highlighted the exceptionalism of Irving’s character. (She is “a special girl,” “loved and looked up to by all the girls,” a determined, spirited and dynamic presence.) The passage also conveyed Thomas Winslow’s principled nature. (He is “intolerant of intolerance,” refusing to engage with the town’s rampant antisemitism.) Dr. Larch bonds with the girl by listening attentively to her tell the story of her biblical name, engaging wholeheartedly with her nascent self-awareness. This interchange constitutes the beginning of yet another expedient, but meaningful surrogate family structure that catalyzes change in the young Esther and in her “family” of orphanage staff and adoptive parents.

The final chapter of Queen Esther is set in Jerusalem in 1981, when Esther is 76. As Irving expounded in his responses to the audience’s questions, he spends a great deal of time researching his subjects. The last time the author visited Jerusalem was in eighties. He returned in July of 2024, in his words, “to see again everywhere I was, now more than forty years ago.” He remembers Esther’s development from an “angry little girl who is three, almost four, when she was left at the orphanage” to a woman of 76 in the early 1980s. He ended his with talk with the words, “My characters come from the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, but Esther’s story is as old as the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible.” Thus, Esther’s formative journey is one that “illuminates the psychological and moral development” of not only the author’s subject, but the writer himself.

The resonant culmination to the evening came when Irving took two questions from the audience. He elaborated on his own background, his own bildung, if you will, describing how, by growing up in a boarding school among diverse schoolmates, and then living outside his country of origin as an adult, he has cultivated a sense of contentment with his own “outsiderness.” He spoke about how the process of engaging with people unlike himself was “a wonderful way to know that [I] don’t know the world.” In closing he said, “Foreignness is an intrinsic feeling for a writer. You’re already more of an observer than a participant, even before you know it.”

Darren Chase teaches ESL at New Design High, a public school in New York City. His writing has appeared in Pangyrus, Cagibi, Sisyphus, eMerge Magazine, The Red Noise Collective, Humans of the World and On the Run. His forthcoming novel is tentatively titled Robot Guru. He is a long-term member of Bruce Benderson’s writing workshop. He is a 2025 Teacher & Librarian scholarship recipient.