Notes on a Writing Life / 33
January 14 2022
Dear All,
The photo above is not of a space craft suddenly landed on our island – it’s the pop-up book tent for the 39th Key West Literary Seminar, which took place last weekend, transformed for the first time into an outdoor event with stage, tents and a magnificent view of the sunset. This is how writers managed to get together here in yet another year of Covid, to sit and listen in sun and occasional sprinkles of rain, to come together and yet sit apart, to discuss that most human of concerns: Desire.
It was sometimes profound, sometimes raunchy, always entertaining. I loved the way that writers took encouragement from each other over the course of the weekend to dare to read the riskiest, sexiest, most controversial sections of their work, and the way that each presenter seemed to be saying: do it, dare it, write it your way.
Desire is of course the motor of the novel. Not just sexual desire, although there’s still much mileage to be had from the transgressive, adulterous, shameful or hilarious aspects of sex. Every novel is surely fueled by a narrator’s or a character’s desire for Something. “What do your characters want and what are they are prepared to do to get it?” as one participant asked. Desire is also provoked in the reader to know more – who did it, why, and what happened? Will they get together? Will they live or die? You can’t write or read a novel without invoking the tricky gods of desire, often illicit, always compelling. So, to have a whole weekend in which to discuss the topic, listen to readings, laugh out loud, lose some inhibitions and go on asking the question - what do we really want? - was exhilarating. As someone said to me during a break, “We couldn’t be having this conversation in very many places in America…”
Some of my highlights were: Deesha Philyaw reading from “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” Judy Blume’s statement “I miss the hormones but I have a good memory,” Billy Collins’ poem about Victoria’s Secret, and above all Jamie Quatro’s impressive first novel “Fire Sermon” in which she manages to say new, subtle things about the ageless question of passion vs. fidelity and how the two may be maintained.
All writers desire to go on writing, and most to be published. Some of us want fame, or love. Others simply to tell the story that is ours to tell. The image of the next story, novel or poem floats ahead of us, tugs us on. In the end, what we find we desire most is simply to get back to work.
May your desires for 2022 be fulfilled in interesting ways…
Affectionately, Ros