Literary Seminar 2024 - Florida the State We're In

My opening remarks for Friday, January 12, at the Key West Literary Seminar:

The lectern and stage this year feature the KWLS logo - Audubon’s frigatebird. Photo by Nick Doll.

Good morning - I’m Nancy Klingener and I have the great honor to be the president of the board of the Key West Literary Seminar - and the program chair for this year’s event. Thank you for joining us after last night’s terrific keynote from Jeff Vandermeer - and for traveling to this far end of the state. I’d also like to thank my fellow board members and especially the program committee who helped shape this event - Michael Blades, Meg Cabot, Michael Nelson, Diane Shelby, Emily Weekley - and of course our Executive Director Arlo Haskell.

As I wrote in my program essay, I have been pitching this as a topic for as long as I’ve been on the board, close to 20 years. But I am glad it’s taken this long - not only because many of these writers would not have been here back then - because they were probably in grade school at the time - But also because in the intervening years I have gained so much more perspective and information about this state where so many of us live, and love - and fight for, even when it is literally trying to kill us.

I was born, raised and educated in New England but I was at least aware that writers lived in, and came from Florida. I was assigned to read The Yearling in junior high because apparently entering adolescence isn’t hard enough without having to read a bunch of books where the animals die. I was fortunate enough to be assigned Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school in the 1980s. That high school was pretty progressive, though I did have a Hemingway-worshipping English teacher who told me he’d visited Key West once but didn’t like it because of all the gays. In college, I read Condominium by John D. MacDonald and I started hearing about this Carl Hiaasen guy, especially when I took classes with a newly arrived professor named Madeleine Blais, who had won a Pulitzer for feature writing at the Miami Herald, in part for her profile of Tennessee Williams in Key West.

I got to Florida with an internship, then a job with the Miami Herald in 1989. Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry were among the stars at the paper but my role models were the people who had made it from the lowly Neighbors section up to the big paper a couple years before me - people like Tananarive Due, who were from Miami and who were unbelievably kind and generous to a clueless young woman who had spent her entire life in rural new england. When she quit the paper a couple years later to follow her calling and write fiction, I was even more impressed.

It sounds a little counter intuitive but I have come to believe that Florida is a place that we - and the rest of the country - should take seriously. I know that’s not our brand. But in some weird ways, we are simultaneously forerunners and on the forefront of the history of this country, especially if you’re talking about settlement by Europeans - and those they brought here.

The Spanish claimed Florida in 1513 - decades before the English made their first, doomed attempt at colonizing Virginia and almost a century before they got a foothold in Jamestown. And they brought enslaved people here long before 1619 - obviously not a distinction to be proud of, but one that we must recognize and acknowledge as part of this state and country’s history.

Another first - according to the Florida Museum of Natural History, some 800 Spanish sailors, soldiers and settlers held a Mass of Thanksgiving and then put on a feast with local Indigenous people near the Matanzas River - more than 50 years before that meal in Massachusetts that gets all the attention.  

So Florida, in the relative terms of American history, is ancient. But it’s also constantly reborn and renewed. In the last year, almost a thousand people a day moved to the state. From Silicon Valley and the midwest. From the Caribbean and the former Soviet republics. The new arrivals are here looking for safety, or opportunity - or let’s face it, a state with no income tax. If they stick around long enough they can join the chorus of people complaining about how much better it used to be when they got here, whether that was generations or a couple years ago. Which in some ways - fair. Some changes are hard to watch and they’re not for the better. But new people also bring new ideas, enterprises, perspectives. And that helps maintain one of Florida’s most important qualities as far as I’m concerned - it is very rarely boring. Which really makes it the perfect literary subject.

So Florida, I would say, is on the edge. Literally, we’re on the edge of the water, if not under it. Yet. Incidentally - there’s a tidal gauge just over there on that big pier we call the outer mole - they’ve been taking tidal measurements in Key West Harbor since 1913. I checked with our local weather service bureau the other day and in that time the sea level has risen one foot four inches. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot this weekend about Florida’s future on the environmental front.

Socially, we’re also on the edge - the state has been surprisingly forward thinking at times with measures like a very broad public records law, and rules about what public officials are at least SUPPOSED to do in the sunshine. Florida has also at times been shockingly reactionary and brutal with massacres like the ones Gilbert King has documented. And atrocities like the Dozier school that Tananarive has reimagined in a way only she could, as the daughter of Florida freedom fighters and the grand niece of a young man who died at Dozier.

While we were putting together this Seminar, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I feel about Florida. I’ve decided it’s kind of like family: I love it in a deep, abiding way that I can’t shake even if I wanted to. It drives me crazy. I enjoy ridiculing it but bristle just a bit when outsiders use us as a punching bag. And thank you, Dave Barry, for occasionally punching back in the most entertaining of ways. One thing I never doubted, probably from the moment I walked into Books & Books and attended my first Miami Book Fair in 1989, or my first Key West Literary Seminar a couple years later, is that Florida is a literary place.

The writers at this seminar show the depth and diversity of Florida’s literary talent. And that’s just those who are here with us this weekend.

 In my job at the local public library I put together the email newsletter and for the January edition, I included a book list of Florida fiction.* Any place where the chroniclers include Zora Neale Hurston, Elmore Leonard, Lauren Groff and Tananarive Due is a place I want to know more about.

Even though I’ve lived here for almost 35 years, I suspect by the end of this weekend I will have learned so much about this state we’re in - and that my to be read list will get even longer.

*This list includes one book per writer and only has books from the Monroe County Public Library collection, so - not comprehensive!

Reporting away again in Margaritaville

Meagan Bryon of Hoboken, N.J., added a shaker of salt to the memorial at Jimmy Buffett’s Shrimp Boat Sound studio in the Key West Bight on Saturday. Photo by Rob O’Neal.

Ten years ago, on Sept. 2, 2013, I unexpectedly found myself on All Things Considered, reporting on Diana Nyad’s successful swim across the Florida Straits, from Cuba to Key West.

Two days ago, on Sept. 2, 2023, I unexpectedly found myself in the New York Times, reporting on how Key West was coping with the loss of Jimmy Buffett.

I was flattered when first contacted by the Times editor, but I initially tried to turn down the assignment. I had JUST been texting a friend about how I felt relieved not to be a journalist when I heard this news. I am not a Parrot Head - I don’t mind his music and I get the appeal but it just wasn’t the soundtrack of my youth or one of the reasons I moved to, or stayed in, Key West - as it was for so many. I will admit I have always found it more than a little ironic that someone who built an empire from the Margaritaville ethos said he left Key West because it was “too commercial.” And I just felt like now was not the moment to gripe about that.

But someone talked me into it, so I made sure my camera had a battery and a card in it, threw a notebook into a backpack and rode my bike downtown to check out the scene and talk to some people. I also called up others I knew for some added context and color. Every single person I approached was generous and open about sharing their experiences, feelings and thoughts about JB and his impact on them and on the island. The journalism gods smiled on me even more, when I saw the great Rob O’Neal had already filed the perfect photo for the story.

I was glad to include the detail about the special locals-only shows that JB added when he was here in February - fittingly, his last Key West gigs and a real service for all of those who were heartbroken when they couldn’t get into the amphitheater shows. I’m kind of sorry now that I didn’t line up for tickets and see one of those shows, but I felt then like I’d be taking a space from someone who really REALLY wanted to be there. I did see him play once, in the early ‘90s, at Margaritaville when he just popped up on stage (my friend Amy Woods, a reporter at the Key West Citizen, was a hostess there and would let us know when JB was in town and might play). I appreciated more the other acts he brought into town, especially one called Evangeline that he produced on his record label. (Note to self: see if they’re on Spotify and/or go up into the attic and dig up that CD.)

I don’t hold him single-handedly responsible for Key West becoming “too commercial.” The new, wider Overseas Highway bridges (completed in 1982) with the bigger freshwater pipeline had a lot to do with that. So did the creation in the 1980s of the Tourist Development Council, funded by taxes on tourist lodging and used mostly for promotion - a feedback loop of astounding force in a place with limited supply and high demand - leading to some of the highest room rates and year-round occupancy rates in the country.* I’d rather not join the incessant chorus of people declaring the island is ruined because it has changed from how it was when they first got to know it. I recently wrote a whole essay about that - you can read it for yourself in a couple weeks in a new anthology called Key West Sketches: Writers at Mile Zero (pub date: Sept. 19 - please buy a copy if you’re interested; proceeds benefit the restoration of the Elizabeth Bishop House).

Sometime late Saturday or early Sunday, I realized my Facebook feed filled with tributes and memories and personal reflections and the big coverage this news got nationally were a testament to not only the allure of trop rock and the idea of an easy life in a sunny place but, I think, to how badly people want to belong to a community. Whether it’s Deadheads or Beyonce, Red Sox Nation or MAGA, people are so happy when they feel like they are part of an affinity group. Loving the Keys - and, especially living here - sometimes feels like an affinity group, even if one that can be more accidental than intentional. And the Internet and social media, for better and worse, have made finding your affinity groups so much easier. People used to make fun of Trekkies, now it feels like there’s a con in every city with a space big enough to hold one.

I never interviewed Jimmy Buffett. I’m not into celebrity stuff or stories that hundreds of other people are also reporting (also part of my initial reluctance). I much prefer to tell stories that people DON’T already know. But I was glad to make sure Key West was as authentically represented as possible in national coverage. And to convey the voices of people from here about the impact of someone who will be an island icon forever.

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*I know this will never happen because it would require a change in the guiding legislation but if I were suddenly given superpowers and could change ONE THING about the Keys, it would be using a big chunk of the lodging tax money to fund a really good public transportation system here. I grew up with a free bus system that covered a lot of territory in western Massachusetts (the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority). It was funded by the local towns but also college students. In the Keys, public transit would help solve SO MANY problems. Affordability - especially for the workers who staff those hotels and restaurants and attractions. Traffic. Parking. Drunk driving. Golf carts and scooters all over the damn place. And it’s so much greener than all those cars and other vehicles taking us around. Sorry! End of rant.

I like these. I really, really like them

For a long time, what is often called genre or commercial fiction has become a greater share of my reading. Not sure whether it’s getting older, or the stresses of recent years, but in my free time I’m inclined to seek joy, escape, solace - whatever you’d like to call it. Most of that reading is in romance and crime fiction, though I occasionally wander into fantasy and science fiction.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the case for why we should stop apologizing for reading - and loving! - books that will never be on a Pulitzer shortlist put better than in this recent essay from the L.A. Review of Books. And now I also need to watch the Speed Racer movie, I guess.

In the spirit of owning what you love, here are some recent reads, listens and viewing that made my life better in recent weeks.

Reading

Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe is what people who know from fantasy describe as low fantasy - that doesn’t mean its quality, it means what I used to call realistic fantasy. These are books that take place in our world but involve magic or other fantastic elements. Think Harry Potter, or A Discovery of Witches. This is also in some ways a book about books, another subgenre I love.

Those of us lucky enough to attend the Key West Literary Seminar - or go to the first Friends of the Key West Library Speaker Series event - earlier this year got to see S.A. Cosby in person and from that experience I can say, if you get a chance to hear him talk, take it. Since he was here, his latest novel, All The Sinners Bleed, has been published and like his previous works, it’s a page-turner that also has real insights into character, place and history. The story of a Black sheriff in the Virginia town where he grew up resonates on all kinds of levels. And even if it’s a bit of a bonkers serial killer plot, that didn’t keep me from caring about what would happen to Titus Crown, professionally and personally. And hey, seemingly impossible serial killers are among us, as the recent developments in the Gilgo Beach case show. I learned about that case 10 years ago from Lost Girls by Robert Kolker, one of the best true crime books I’ve read and notable for how it focused on the women who were killed and why police did not take their disappearances seriously at first.

Another writer who was at the Seminar this year was Annette Gordon-Reed and at the Seminar I bought her book, On Juneteenth. I finally read it and finished it, fittingly enough, on Juneteenth. It’s a small and slim work of nonfiction, something I have come to appreciate.

And it’s a lovely blend of memoir and history, telling the story of Texas, where the Juneteenth holiday was born, both through Gordon-Reed’s personal lens and the longer perspective of the state’s journey. Not surprisingly, Texas is a lot more complicated - and interesting! - than its reputation and I learned a lot in its relatively few pages. (Small aside: as a city that stayed under Union control throughout the Civil War, Key West had its own interesting emancipation story, which Dr, Corey Malcom, lead historian at the Monroe County Public Library’s Florida Keys History Center, recently researched and wrote about.)

Romance has a near-infinite number of subgenres and some of them are pretty goofy. Like, say, balloon animal shifters who are in a menage a trois. I haven’t read those books, but I’m very happy they exist - someone wanted to tell this story and they got to do so. And is it REALLY less plausible than, say, the exploits of Jack Reacher or Jack Ryan? On a slightly more realistic note, one of my favorite romance sub-genres is STEMinist - as in science, technology, engineering and math. I don’t think anyone’s doing that better than Ali Hazelwood and her latest, Love, Theoretically, is her best yet. It includes enemies-to-lovers, a dash of fake dating and a LOT of excellent shade about academic politics. The emails from Elsie’s students that open each chapter are hilarious and I’m afraid probably all too realistic.

Another romance I read recently (though it’s been out for almost a year) is Ship Wrecked by Olivia Dade - the third book in her series that started with Spoiler Alert. That was a charming love story with an actor in a Game of Thrones-ish saga and a writer of fan fiction about the series. The second and third books also involve actors from the show (and plus-size, body-positive heroines, which is nice to see) - and this one might be my favorite, especially because it takes the busting on the showrunners (CLEARLY based on GOT showrunners) to a new level.

Listening

I really love a good limited series podcast, especially one that digs into a story I would not otherwise have known about. Some examples: In The Dark (both seasons), The Dream (especially the first season), White Lies (I have only listened to the first season so far). A recent example that is especially impressive because it comes from a local public radio outlet is The 13th Step from New Hampshire Public Radio. It’s an expansion on their blockbuster story last year about rehab entrepreneur Eric Spofford, his behavior and how vulnerable people who are recovering, or trying to recover from, addiction are.

I’ll leave it to you to make your own conclusion about the ethics of making huge amounts of money from recovery. But it’s especially concerning that in this case, the home of the podcast’s primary reporter, one of her colleagues at New Hampshire Public Radio, and the home of her parents were all vandalized with the strong message that she should stop her investigation.

Fortunately, she did not, and the FBI recently made some arrests in the case. Still, it’s a chilling example of attempted intimidation.

On the way-more-fun listening front, last month Mark and I saw The Beths for the second time, in Orlando. You don’t have to take my word for how great they are - they made Obama’s summer playlist. If you want to listen to a band that plays with joy, check them out.

If you want to know where to start, I’d go with Future Me Hates Me, the album or the song. But really, you can’t go wrong with anything.

Watching

I grew up in a Star Trek household - we all watched the re-runs and liked them. So I was excited for Star Trek Discovery - especially because I was already a fan of Sonequa Martin-Green, Jason Isaacs and Michelle Yeoh. But ugh that first season with all the boring Klingon backstory. I was up for Picard, too - who doesn’t love Patrick Stewart and I liked his new ragtag band - but the TNG fan service was too much for me in that last season.

When I heard about Strange New Worlds I was worried - because we all know what happens to Capt. Pike, right? But … it turns out they handle that in a really interesting way. I already liked Anson Mount from Hell on Wheels. And it has Melanie Scrofano, aka Mrs. McMurray from Letterkenny and Wynonna Earp. It’s got a nice blend of the folks we know (Spock, Uhura, Nurse Chapel) and some new additions. And most importantly, it gets the balance of of adventure-of-the-week and longer storylines just right.

Plus, in recent weeks they’re just getting goofy. First there was an episode where the cartoon characters from Lower Decks crossed over to the Enterprise. And this week they did a musical episode, with the requisite accompanying nonsense “scientific” explanation. It was perfect.

Reviews, both from professional critics and people I know, have been very mixed for Wes Anderson’s latest movie, Asteroid City.

I loved it. I love all of Anderson’s movies, to varying degrees (my husband and I are both The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou loyalists, but I will accept other people’s rankings).

Some viewers seemed to find its artifice off-putting. I liked it, the whole movie that is a TV show about a play. I bought into the characters both as their characters in the play and, in some cases, as the actors playing those characters. As always, I adore Anderson’s visual palette and his analog nostalgia. I wouldn’t be writing this blog and you wouldn’t be reading it in the pre-digital world and I wouldn’t get to text my friends about everything from the Tour de France to the latest Wes Anderson movie. But damn, sometimes I miss that world where you weren’t tempted to constantly check your phone just in case you’re missing something.

I also appreciate very much that Anderson, in The French Dispatch and this movie, is playing around with how the story is framed. And more significantly, that he appears to be moving on from his previous obsession with father-son relationships. I mean, I get it. They’re important. But there is also a lot more to life and I think in these latest two movies he’s reaching out and exploring in different ways love, loss and why making art matters in the first place.

Plus his movies are just so damned cool to look at.

I saw Barbie, too, and found it entertaining throughout but nobody needs another opinion on that movie.

Definitely getting swampy around here

In case you hadn’t heard, the upcoming (January 2024) Key West Literary Seminar will focus on Florida. And we have one hell of a lineup so it’s worth booking now. Hard to believe we were all trying to stay warm at the last one, with the “feels like” temperatures reaching the triple digits around here even before we officially reached summer.

On a recent roadtrip, my husband Mark and I did some prep by listening to Dave Barry’s new novel, Swamp Story. If you read and liked Big Trouble - or even just watched the excellent movie adaptation of it - this is one well worth a read. Or a listen - Dave reads it himself and does a fantastic job. It’s Florida absurdity in the best Elmore Leonard-Carl Hiaasen spirit and because it’s Dave Barry it’s funny as hell. He’s so funny he won a freaking Pulitzer, and I’ve always loved his work best when he’s taking a swipe at something serious. My all-time favorite of his columns was when he covered the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and he was good enough to keep that one on his website because God knows it would take Indiana Jones to unearth it from the Herald archives. In the new book, there is some nice, subtle shade thrown at the New York Times and its climate change reporting which doesn’t sound all that funny but it is. It really, really is.

This is an especially good book to listen to if you’re doing a Florida roadtrip, which we were - we even drove back on Tamiami Trail, where much of the action takes place, so that was a fun meta-moment. It’s so good that I enjoyed it even though I was experiencing a migraine. Really! It helped that Mark was driving and I could just shut my eyes to avoid the light and motion and whatever else was setting off the evil pulsing in my brain. But this story was definitely a helpful distraction. Thank you, Dave, and see you in January.

Back with the books

Key West Library branch in 1992. I took this photo for the Miami Herald. Now it’s part of the library’s Florida Keys History Center image archive.

Nine months ago, I returned to the Monroe County Public Library, this time in a new capacity. My job is Community Affairs Manager.

People ask me what that means and I say “information, outreach and engagement.”

If they still look blank, I tell them my mission is to let everyone who lives in the Keys know what the Monroe County Public Library can do for them (hint: it’s a lot more than books and movies).

I feel like I just started in some ways, but I’m having fun. One of my first projects was to get the Today In Keys History column online on the library website, as well as distributed daily on social media. (You can find it on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.)

More recently, I’ve been working on email newsletters for each of our five branches plus the Florida Keys History Center. You can sign up here! We’ll never sell your email address and unsubscribing is quick one-click without any of the annoying oh, wait, won’t you consider staying or telling us why you’re leaving nonsense.

I love working at the library for a lot of reasons, not the least that being surrounded by books makes me happy. My co-workers are so cool and helping patrons get what they want or need is really satisfying.

People sometimes ask if I miss journalism. I really don’t. The relentless pressure to produce in a smallish newsroom that has 20+ newscasts a day, the anxiety about accuracy and fairness and everything else a story needs to be - it’s all a lot when you’re my age. And when I heard about big breaking news toward the end, instead of the adrenaline rush a journalist should feel, I would feel dread. So I knew it was time to get off the front lines.

I do miss writing, some, so I’m going to do some of that here when the spirit moves me. For the next few months, it will probably move me most often about the Key West Literary Seminar - I’m chairing our program for 2024 and our topic is Florida. We have an incredible lineup of writers coming - if you haven’t registered, I hope you’ll consider doing so.