L I T T O R A L | the journal of the Key West Literary Seminar

From the Nets

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:24:25 -0500

Men with Jewfish, Key West, ca. 1935. From the Dale McDonald Collection, via the Monroe County Public Library on Flickr Today's haul from the deep:

    • Jewfish, Amberjack, or Black Drum? Carol Frost takes a look at Elizabeth Bishop's Key West notebooks and tries to determine which Keys fish was the basis for her poem "The Fish."

    • "The Symbol," a new poem by Billy Collins, is in Slate.

    • Richard Wilbur reading at the 92nd Street Y

    • Tod Marshal interviews Yusef Komunyakaa for Poetry

    • Kay Ryan is named to a second term as United States Poet Laureate

    • BOMB on KWLS '09 speaker John Wray: "The Lowdown on Lowboy." Wray also joined PaperCuts's Living With Music series.

    • Alan Cheuse's new book, a collection of travel writings, is on shelves now: A Trance After Breakfast.

Gore Vidal | Writer Against the Grain

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:11:17 -0500

photo by Curt Richter Gore Vidal has been one of America's most distinct voices for more than half a century. The author of more than 20 novels, hundreds of essays, and several plays for screen and stage, Vidal is perhaps best known for the eloquent and witheringly sarcastic political commentary that has made him a darling of the American left. With dependably erudite attacks on right-wing figures, this quixotic scion of a privileged political family, friend of the Kennedys and playwright Tennessee Williams, has staked out a unique position in American political and intellectual life.

This recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar consists of an hourlong conversation between Vidal and Jay Parini, his literary executor, a poet, biographer, and critic. Vidal discusses the influences on his work as a historical novelist, his views on the American educational system, and his admiration for figures including Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George W. Bush, then serving his final week in office, is the target of particular scorn, as Vidal levels a litany of complaints accusing his administration of "shredding" the Bill of Rights and striving "to make lying the national pastime." In a question-and-answer session,Vidal discusses efforts to bring Tennessee Williams's final play to the public, as well as his feelings on disgraced financier Bernard Madoff and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(59:09) / 27.1 MB

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. © 2009 Gore Vidal and Jay Parini. Used with generous permission from Gore Vidal and Jay Parini.

KWLS Scholar Engel Inks 2-Book Deal

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:59:52 -0500

Patricia Engel We are delighted to learn that Patricia Engel has signed a two-book deal with New York-based publishing house Grove/Atlantic. The winner of our 2009 Marianne Russo Scholarship, Engel tells us to look for Vida, her debut collection of short stories, in the Fall of 2010. A novel, as yet untitled, will follow. You can read Engel's work online in Guernica, Slice, and Boston Review (here and here). Vida's title story, about a Colombian girl who is trafficked into prostitution in Miami, is in print in Harpur Palate 8.1. Check Littoral again soon for an audio recording of Engel's reading from our 28th Seminar this past January.

Congratulations, Patricia!

Andrea Barrett: 2009: Ship Fever

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:00:37 -0500

Photo by Nick Vagnoni Andrea Barrett's acclaimed novels and short-stories are marked by their investigation of scientific and historical themes. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Barrett explains how she began to write about science and history in the short story form after the disappointment of writing four unsuccessful novels. "With nothing to lose," Barrett recounts, "I began to write about the thing that I actually loved the most, but had never dared to write fiction about before." She follows this account with an excerpt from "Ship Fever," the title novella of her National Book Award-winning first collection of short stories. In it, Lockland Grant, a bright young doctor who has come to the island of Gros Île in 1847 to treat the population of newly landed Irish immigrants, has fallen victim to the typhus epidemic raging through the community.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(11:13) / 5.2 MB

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. © 2009 Andrea Barrett. Used with generous permission from Andrea Barrett.

William Kennedy: 2009

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:22:17 -0500

photo by Curt Richter William Kennedy is best known for the novels of his Albany Cycle. A singular epic of that capital city and its Irish-American clans in the 19th and 20th centuries, the work has earned Kennedy comparisons to James Joyce and Saul Bellow. Among its novels are Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1979), The Flaming Corsage (1996), and Ironweed (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

In this audio recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Kennedy reads two unpublished pieces. The presentation begins with a brief (5:30) essay recounting Kennedy's first short story, "Eggs," and the lukewarm reaction it garnered from his friends and family. This is followed by a reading from the opening chapter of Kennedy's unnamed novel-in-progress. A continuation of the Albany Cycle, this forthcoming novel focuses on Daniel Quinn, a reporter for the Albany Times Union and the grandson of the Daniel Quinn from Kennedy's Quinn's Book.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(29:27) / 13.5 MB

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. © 2009 William Kennedy. Used with generous permission from William Kennedy.

Valerie Martin | 2009A reading from Property

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:17:22 -0500

Photo by Nick Vagnoni Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, including The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories; several novels, including Tresspass and Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich; and a nonfiction work about St. Francis of Assisi.

In this recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Martin reads from her Orange Prize-winning historical novel, Property. Set on a plantation outside New Orleans in 1828, Property is narrated by Manon Gaudet, a slaveowner whose husband has fathered two children with one of Manon's slaves. In the passage presented here, Manon meets with her brother-in-law following an insurrection in which Manon has been shot in the shoulder, the slave has run away, and her husband has been killed.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(13:54) / 6.4 MB

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. © 2009 Valerie Martin. Used with generous permission from Valerie Martin.

Marilynne Robinson wins Orange Prize

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:05:59 -0500

Photos by Michael Blades Marilynne Robinson has been named the winner of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction for her third novel, Home. Robinson, who joined us at the 27th Key West Literary Seminar this past January, was the unanimous choice of the judges, who cited Home for the "luminous quality" of its writing, as well as its ability "to draw the reader into a world of hope, expectation, misunderstanding, love, and kindness."

The Orange, awarded at a ceremony in London last night, is given annually to the best English-language novel written by a woman. It is considered one of the U.K.'s most prestigious awards, and includes a cash prize of £30,000. Past winners include Valerie Martin, and this year's shortlist included Samantha Hunt, both of whom joined Robinson in Key West for our recent Seminar.

Fresh Catch: from the Archives

Sat, 30 May 2009 10:26:42 -0500

We've been drifting over the archives this week and have hauled in a coolerful of keepers. The trophies are below, but make sure to visit our Flickr page for more of these unique images from the early years of the Key West Literary Seminar.

Doyle Bush
The 1989 Key West Literary Seminar examined the American short story and featured informal events at venues including Capt. Tony's Saloon on Greene Street. Here, notorious barman and former Key West mayor Tony Tarracino (r) shares a laugh inside his establishment with longtime Esquire editor and KWLS board member Rust Hills, Sally Fiedler, and her husband, the influential literary critic Leslie Fiedler.

Jeffrey Cardenas
KWLS co-founder and novelist David Kaufelt's literary walking tours offered a writer's-eye view of unique Key West architecture. This 1986 photo captures the tour in front of the Richard Peacon house at 712 Eaton St., then owned by designer Calvin Klein.

Richard Watherwax
The 1993 Seminar, "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop," was organized by poet, critic, and essayist John Malcolm Brinnin. Brinnin, in white, began the Seminar by discussing Bishop with Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

Jeffrey Cardenas
Literary agent Dick Duane was having lunch in New York with David Kaufelt when the idea for the Key West Literary Seminar first came up. Here's Duane at the 1986 Seminar.

Richard Watherwax
Outsider poet and publisher Kirby Congdon has been a Key West fixture for decades. Here, he makes his way through the lobby of the historic San Carlos Institute during a break in the 1993 Seminar.

photographer unknown
At a party during the 1992 Seminar, "Literature and Film," screenwriter, novelist, and sportswriter Bud Schulberg (center) joined former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur (l), author of Key West Writers and their Houses Lynn Kaufelt, fiction writer Joy Williams, and founder David Kaufelt.

Thomas McGuane & James Merrill, ca. 1987

Wed, 20 May 2009 18:30:05 -0500

These studio portraits of novelist Thomas McGuane (left) and poet James Merrill (right) were taken by photographer Lawson Corbet Little in January of 1987. According to Merrill's wristwatch, his session took place at a quarter past one in the afternoon.

McGuane had lived in Key West in the 1970s and early 1980s on Love Lane, Ann Street, and Von Phister Street, while Merrill lived here in the 1980s and 1990s on Elizabeth Street at the top of Solares Hill. Both wrote of the island city, in novels like Panama and poems like "Clearing the Title," and each was an early supporter of the Key West Literary Seminar. At the time these photos were taken, they were participating in our fifth annual event, Writers and Key West.

Little lived in Key West during the 1970s and 1980s, where he photographed other notable authors including Shel Silverstein and Tennessee Williams. We hope to feature some of these images soon.

Robert Pinsky to give Keynote at KWLS 28

Tue, 19 May 2009 17:53:10 -0500

photo by Robert Van Otteren Three-time United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has been named the keynote speaker for the 28th annual Key West Literary Seminar. Pinsky will deliver the John Hersey Memorial Address on Thursday, January 7, 2010, to kick off Clearing the Sill of the World, a celebration of 60 years of American poetry that will feature a total of eight Poets Laureate, including current Laureate Kay Ryan, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and our guest of honor Richard Wilbur.

As Poet Laureate from 1997-2000, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, an enormously popular initiative dedicated to celebrating, documenting, and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives. This unique project resulted in a series of video documentaries showcasing individual Americans reading and speaking personally about poems they love, as well as an anthology, Americans' Favorite Poems, that is now in its 18th printing. In addition to this project, Pinsky has championed poetry's presence in American life with columns in The Washington Post and Slate, television appearances on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report, and videos on internet outlets including YouTube and BigThink. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music; collections of essays including the National Book Critics' Circle Award-nominated Poetry and the World; and translations including the work of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and a landmark version of Dante's Inferno that received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation.

The John Hersey Memorial Address was established by members of the literary community in fond remembrance of Hersey (1914-1993), an acclaimed journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and much-loved figure in Key West, where he lived with Barbara, his wife, for many years. Hersey's writings include the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bell for Adano, Hiroshima, A Single Pebble, and Key West Tales.

A Reading by Richard Wilbur: 2003

Tue, 19 May 2009 11:04:20 -0500

photo by Ellen Warner Richard Wilbur is a former United States Poet Laureate and the only writer since Robert Frost to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice. In this recording from the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar, Wilbur reads and comments upon numerous poems, translations, lyrics, and light verse spanning his career.

Wilbur begins the reading with two poems, "The Reader" and "Man Running," from the then-unpublished Collected Poems, 1943-2004, and continues with "A Barred Owl," "For Charlee," Valeri Petrov's "A Cry from Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being," all from Mayflies. From 1989's New and Collected Poems, Wilbur chooses "The Ride," "Lying," "On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower," Vinicius de Moraes's "Song," and "Hamlen Brook"; from The Mind-Reader, he reads "The Writer" and "A Wedding Toast." Wilbur's early collections Ceremony, Things of This World, and Advice to a Prophet are represented by "Museum Piece," "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," "Two Voices in a Meadow," and "Pangloss's Song: A Comic-Opera Lyric," written for the 1956 musical version of Voltaire's Candide, which Wilbur collaborated on with Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein. Wilbur's reading concludes with several humorous poems, including "A Late Aubade," the two-part "Flippancies" (including "The Star System" and "What's Good for the Soul Is Good for Sales"), "To His Skeleton," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and several verses from his book for children, The Disappearing Alphabet.

Wilbur's hourlong reading was given in memory of John Malcolm Brinnin, an influential early KWLS organizer. In a brief (1:26) introduction, program chair Irving Weinman discusses Brinnin and the regular game of Anagrams he played with Brinnin and Wilbur.

Wilbur joins us again in January 2010 as our guest of honor for Clearing the Sill of the World.

From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes
(1:03:12) / 29.1 MB

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. © 2003, 2009 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.

Samantha Hunt: 2009: Nikola Tesla and The Invention of Everything Else

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:56:43 -0500

photo by Michael Blades

Tesla's drawing for the AC dynamo;
U.S. patent 390,721 Samantha Hunt is the author of The Invention of Everything Else, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Hunt discusses the subject of her historical novel, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, whose revolutionary inventions included alternating current and wireless technology. Briefly employed by Thomas Edison, Tesla routinely found himself on the wrong side of American capitalism and died impoverished and marginalized. In Hunt's passage, Tesla recounts his initial meeting with the financially-driven American inventor who sought to keep Tesla's inventions from reaching the public.

"'Capitalism! Ever heard of it?'
'Yes, I have,' I said. 'I've heard of it. I'm not certain I agree.'
"There's nothing wrong with capitalism,' he told me."
'Except that in order to sell something, a person must first own it, and how can a person own these things that we are inventing? How could I own alternating current? That's like owning thunder or lightning.'
'Men own thunder all the time. That's how America works. And please, I've heard enough about your alternating current. ... AC is dangerous, and more importantly'– Edison drove his finger once directly into the center of my chest– 'my light bulbs don't work on it.'"

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(14:05) / 6.6 MB

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. © 2009 Samantha Hunt. Used with generous permission from Samantha Hunt.

The Trouble with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:47:49 -0500

“Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.”– Wallace Stevens.
Photo of Robert Frost and Stevens at the Casa Marina Hotel in Key West, ca. 1940,
reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

"Robert Frost was on the beach this morning and is coming to dinner this evening." So did Wallace Stevens write to his wife Elsie in February of 1935 from the Casa Marina, a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean where he spent part of each winter in Key West for nearly 20 years. Frost and Stevens today are broadly acknowledged as literary peers, but in 1935 the two poets' reputations were leagues apart. Frost had won the Pulitzer Prize twice, while Stevens had published only a single volume, Harmonium, more than a decade earlier. While Stevens had earned the approval of influential readers including Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, Frost was not among them, once complaining that he didn't like Stevens's work "because it purports to make me think."

While he craved the sort of literary acclaim that Frost routinely garnered, in Depression-era Key West Stevens would have seen his fellow Harvard alum as an equal. After all, Stevens was a highly successful businessman and a familiar semi-resident of the town where Frost was but a first-time tourist. Welcoming Frost to the neighborhood, Stevens presented him with a bag of sapodillas, the sweet tropical fruits of which he'd grown fond in Cuba and Key West, and planned to share conch chowder, another local staple, with Frost that night.

Before the dinner could take place, Stevens and his friend Judge Arthur Powell hosted a cocktail party. As he sometimes did in Key West, Stevens had too much to drink. He later wrote to Monroe, saying "the cocktail party, the dinner with Frost, and several other things became all mixed up, and I imagine that Frost has been purifying himself by various exorcisms ever since." The two poets apparently argued, and Frost was so scandalized by the evening that he gossipped about Stevens's drunken behavior to a lecture audience at the University of Miami.

When Frost's gossip got back to Stevens later that summer, he apologized, insisting he was only being "playful," and would "treasure the memory" of their meeting, which, he reminded Stevens, "I was in a better condition than you to appreciate." Eager to smooth things over, Frost continues, "Take it from me there was no conflict at all but the prettiest kind of stand-off. You and I and the judge found we liked one another. And you and I really like each other's works. At least down underneath I suspect we do. We should. We must. If I'm somewhat academic (I'm more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from words."

Frost's easy disdain for "words derived from words" and poetry that "purports to make me think" suggests how far apart were the sensibilities of the two poets. For Stevens, the author of poems like "The World as Meditation" and "Men Made out of Words," Frost's presence had begun to spoil the "paradise" where Stevens once relished a freedom to "do as one pleases." "Key West is no longer quite the delightful affectation it once was," he wrote to Philip May from the Casa Marina. "Who wants to share green cocoanut ice cream with these strange monsters who snooze in the porches of this once forlorn hotel." To Monroe, he wrote "Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic."

Against his better judgement, Stevens was back at the Casa Marina five years later. The place had become "furiously literary," with the comings and goings of literati so well known that a young Elizabeth Bishop went to "the 'fancy' hotel" one day looking for him, she wrote, "almost provided with opera glasses." Frost was there again, too, traveling with his official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, who set down for posterity the argument between the poets. Echoing Frost's letter to Stevens five years earlier, Thompson's account further caricatures the divergent poetics of these incongruous masters:

    "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you're too academic."
    "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you're too executive."
    "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about– subjects."
    "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about– bric-a-brac."

Stevens never again returned to Key West. In 1954, not long before Stevens died, he rebuffed an invitation to attend Frost's 80th birthday celebration at Amherst, saying coolly "I do not know his work well enough to be either impressed or unimpressed." It is hard to imagine that Stevens had not read Frost, and Jay Parini suggests instead that the two "worked from such contradictory, even exclusive, aesthetics that neither could really read the other with much satisfaction." And so Frost, who wanted "to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over," and Stevens, for whom "Reality is the beginning not the end," would share sapodillas and conch chowder but remain isolated from one another's poetry, in which each was the other's only peer.

Sources: Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens; Letter from Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens, July 28, 1935, from The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, by Lawrance Thompson; Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, by Lawrance Thompson and R.H. Winnick; Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini; Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo, edited by Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis; Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955, by Joan Richardson; and One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux.

2010 Scholarship Program for Writers, Teachers, Librarians

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:46:29 -0500

We are now accepting applications for our 2010 Scholarship Program. Click here for complete details.

The Key West Literary Seminar's three named scholarships- the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award, the Marianne Russo Scholarship, and the Scotti Merrill Scholarship- recognize excellence in a manuscript submission from an emerging writer. Each provides full tuition to our January Seminar and Writers' Workshop Program, support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West, and an opportunity to appear on stage during the Seminar. In addition to these scholarships, we provide limited financial assistance to writers, students, teachers, and librarians who would otherwise not be able to attend the Seminar or Writers' Workshop Program.

In only two years, our scholarship program has supported more than 100 individuals with nearly $100,000 in fee waivers and lodging and travel assistance. This assistance is made possible by extraordinarily generous support from our community. We are grateful to Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida for providing the endowments which will support our scholarship program for years to come; to Judy Blume's KIDS Fund for financial assistance to teachers and librarians; and to our board of directors and the many individuals whose support allows young writers to join the Seminar and Writers' Workshop Program each year.

Visit our Scholarships page for complete application guidelines and a list of past winners.

Thomas Sanchez on Mile Zero: 1989 the George Murphy interview

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:22:21 -0500

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.