Chapter One of our forthcoming 32nd annual Seminar, The Dark Side, is now fully subscribed and closed to new registrants. A waitlist has begun.

There is still time to register for the Final Chapter, which will take place January 16-19. Speakers at the four-day event, dedicated to the mystery, crime, and thriller genres, will include some of the most prolific and widely-read authors in the world. Among them are Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher novels recently brought to the screen by Tom Cruise; Michael Connelly, whose works include the popular Lincoln Lawyer series and have been translated into over 36 languages; and Sue Grafton, whose “A” is for Alibi inaugurated one of the world’s best-known mystery series, (now up to “V” is for Vengeance). In order to explore and contextualize the enduring popularity of genre writing, The Dark Side will also feature acclaimed “literary” figures like John Banville, the Booker Prize-winning Irish author who pens crime-novel page-turners under the psuedonym Benjamin Black; former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins; and Percival Everett, whose novel Assumption turns the crime procedural on its head.

The Final Chapter is also expected to sell out well in advance of January, and we urge all who are interested to register as soon as possible. Registration fee is $575. This includes entry to all talks and panels, beginning Thursday evening and concluding Sunday around noon. Evening receptions and meals are also included. A $100 deposit is required, with the remainder due in the fall.

D.T. Max delivered the John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Address on the evening of Friday, January 18.

D.T. Max, New Yorker staff writer and author of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, peppered his talk about the communal grieving of the gifted and troubled writer with plenty of levity. An anecdote about DFW’s mother Sally elicited much laughter from the crowd. She was such a grammarian, Max said, that if she saw a grocery checkout sign that said “10 Items or Less,” she would go to the manager and say, “No, no, it’s 10 Items or Fewer.”

Max balanced the lightness of his talk by recalling the big questions that haunted him as he worked on the biography, published within five years of its subject’s suicide. “Can you do proper work in this timeframe? What are you losing?” he wondered.

“I think it’s odd to talk about a grieving biographer, but it’s true. It happens. I loved David, and I missed him in this world. In writing the book, I was reanimating him. I wanted him for a friend. His death was so new, it still seemed possible for me.”

Kate Moses on imagining the lives of Sylvia Plath and her children.

On Saturday morning, Kate Moses began her talk, titled I write as if an eye were upon me: On Empathy and Responsibility, by describing a dream in which she found herself consoling a distraught and weeping Sylvia Plath. The two sat together, surrounded, Moses said, by “all the books”—those written by Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, as well as Moses’s fictionalized account of the last months of Plath’s life, Wintering.

In her dream, Moses tried to console Plath by reading to her, but to no avail. No detail from any book would help, it seemed. This dream—brought on, one assumes, by Moses’s immersion in the details of Plath’s life—led Moses to talk about fiction as a means of cultivating empathy, of understanding one’s subject more intimately. More specifically, she spoke of the recent New York Times article “Your Brain on Fiction,” which explains how reading about an event can actually light up the parts of our brains that would fire had we actually experienced the events described on the page.

Reading as a means of inhabiting the lives of others, especially other writers, is a theme that came up previously at this year’s Key West Literary Seminar, and Moses also spoke of reading and researching as a means of developing a greater capacity for understanding. The idea of responsibility also came up as Moses discussed her fear of interpreting the lives of Plath’s children, an infant and three-year-old at the time of their mother’s death, and thereby somehow overshadowing their own recollections of those times. Instead, she used her own experiences of motherhood to detail her interpretation of Plath’s family life, and relied on the poems in Ariel to help compliment the exterior and interior view of Plath that she was trying to create.

Moses ended her talk by telling the audience of a time when she was uncertain about whether she was doing her subject justice, perhaps leading to the dream she described at the outset. Moses said it was her friend and neighbor Diane Middlebrook, author of a biography of Ted Hughes, who consoled Moses with these words about writers and their subjects: “While we have them, we take good care of them.”

Jennifer Cornell of Small Chef at Large sustains the KWLS crowd again this year.

How to feed hundreds of voracious readers? Ask Jennifer Cornell, chef-owner of Small Chef at Large, now in her fourth year of catering the Key West Literary Seminar. If you missed the food before she took charge, you’re lucky. The plucky and petite Cornell has brought the sustenance up to par with the seminar itself. And she knows it.

With a menu as nourishing and interesting as the ideas shared on stage, over breakfast, and at all the cocktail receptions and parties, Jennifer has become a key character in the story of KWLS.

What considerations do you factor in to feed this crowd?

It’s a different menu every seminar. I try to invent new recipes every year. No one will ever eat the same dish twice. The seminar brings lots of vegetarians, or at least, people who don’t eat much meat. We mainly focus on seafood and poultry.

What about the recipes, do they reflect the seminar?

I try to consider it, but actually…no. The best part of catering is the creativity. It’s not the same damn thing after the other. We don’t work with recipes. My chefs and I read magazines. We get ideas, and then play with them until we land on something great. Most importantly, we make everything ourselves, the sauces, the dressings. All made from scratch.

What are some standout dishes this year?

We did a lemon-thyme-risotto cake topped with a grilled Key West pink shrimp and a mango aioli for Friday night’s cocktail party. Those were great. I also really liked the cranberry-pistachio pate we did this year, and the Asian crab salad with crispy wontons. For Saturday’s dinner at the Truman Little White House we did a sour orange Yucatan chicken with cashews, chili powder and cumin, with crispy achiote potatoes. A few years ago, a New York Times food writer asked me for our conch chowder recipe. I gave it to her, minus one ingredient.

Big events like this must be hard work.

I sleep in the summer.

Brenda Wineapple at KWLS on Friday afternoon.

Brenda Wineapple took the stage yesterday with a cup of Throat Coat tea and the beginning of what sounded like a nasty cold. She apologized to the audience and joked that they would not get to hear her normal voice, which is “quite beautiful.”

Attendees of the Key West Literary Seminar were treated to her insights on the importance of biography. Her stories and references came furiously, from her introduction to the form at her grandmothers’ bedside table (“It was a genre I didn’t understand or much care for”) to her former professors’ naysaying about writing others’ stories. She quoted Emily Dickinson and Geoff Dyer. She defamed biography as an invasion of privacy.

And yet it matters to those who read it and write it. Biography is more than the sum of its parts; more than an “unbearable sequence of happenings” or “dreary resuscitation.” It allows us to perceive the private sides of those in the public eye, and to empathize with them.

In closing, she said, “It’s as hard to write a good life as to live one.”

Colm Tóibín delivers the John Hersey Memorial Address to open the final session of “Writers on Writers.”

In Colm Tóibín’s revelatory keynote address to launch Session Two of the thirty-first annual Key West Literary Seminar last night, he shared his experience of reading and identifying with the works of the English poet Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop, who did much of her best work on this subtropical island.

Tóibín opened the talk, titled “On Grief and Reason,” by recounting an interview in which Gunn referenced “The Gas Poker,” one of the few poems he had written about his mother, who had committed suicide when Gunn was a boy. “Obviously this was quite a traumatic experience; it would be in anyone’s life,” Gunn had said of finding the body. ”I wasn’t able to write about it ’til just a few years ago. Finally I found the way to do it was really obvious: to withdraw the first person, and to write about it in the third-person. Then it became easy, because it was no longer about myself.”

In 1964, Bishop had written in a letter to a friend, “Although I think I have a prize ‘unhappy childhood’, almost good enough for the text-book—please don’t think I dote on it.” In her poems, Bishop avoided addressing the circumstances that left her an orphan, but of “In the Village”—a story she admitted to be “completely autobiographical,” published in The New Yorker in December 1953—Tóibín said, “The pain was in the tone, in the ways the mother’s scream and then the mother’s disappearance were given equal billing with everything else that was noticed by the child. The scream was all the more powerful because it was almost, but not quite, shrugged off as nothing.”

Tóibín’s realization that Gunn and Bishop shared an overwhelming avoidance to confront what mattered to them most continues to hit him with “considerable emotional force.” Tóibín recalled the death of his own father during Tóibín’s childhood and his growing awareness, as an adult, that he had almost completely blocked out the experience. “And now I had come across it in Bishop and Gunn,” he said last night, “grief masked by reason, grief and reason battling it out.”

Don DeLillo has described Tóibín as a writer who “never says too much and never lets us grow too comfortable.” With his reading of Gunn and Bishop as an indication of what matters most to him, we look forward to reconsidering his own novels, stories, and plays, paying close attention to what he describes in their work as “the space between the words,” knowing that “something important was being hidden and something equally important was being said.”