Category: Newsletter

Mixed Doubles: From Bethany Ball, author of WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS

January 4, 2019

Spencer Wise photo by Molly Hamill

Our own Judy Blume raves about Bethany Ball’s WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS, as does Booklist, writing, “Ball, with great humor, profound wit, and notable insight, vividly captures a singular family . . . This novel from a most promising writer has been compared to the work of Isaac B. Singer and Grace Paley, as well as Nathan Englander and Jennifer Egan. Try Eudora Welty with sex and Jews.”

Bethany will be giving a joint book talk with author Spencer Wise, Thursday, January 17th at 6:00 p.m. at B’Nai Zion Synagogue, 750 United St. in Key West. This event is free and open to the public. Please join us for what is sure to be an insightful and engaging conversation.

Leading up to this fun double-bill, I had the opportunity to ask both Spencer and Bethany a few questions.

Q. What do you like best about having a tour buddy?

A. Spencer and I have the same agent, the wonderful Duvall Osteen. She had sent me his book in galley form. When he asked me to do his launch reading with him in New York City, I jumped at the chance. We have a good rapport. I can feel a little jittery with public events, but not with Spencer. He’s really funny and generous and kind. Everyone who meets him loves him. And our books go well together. Ex pat Jews, old patriarchs who find themselves a little outre and not with the new times, and the younger generation trying to break out of the mold that they feel was cast for them long ago. Our books also deal in depth with the world outside of the United States which I’m always happy to explore both as a writer and a reader.

Q. What do you like about Spencer’s novel, THE EMPEROR OF SHOES?

A. Spencer is a wonderful storyteller. He gets you hooked right from the very beginning. THE EMPEROR OF SHOES tackles a topic we are all interested in: what does it really mean that everything we own and wear and buy for our kids is made in China? Who are the people working in these factories? It’s political and real but warm rather than dark and at times it’s really funny.

Q: Tell me a little about how you came to write your novel?

A. My book started out as several stories I was playing around with. The first was the chapter, Guy Gever Stands in the Fields. I had lived in a kibbutz for about half a year with my ex kibbutznik husband and young son. I have lived with and around kibbutzniks for almost twenty years. It was something I was dying to write about! I was fascinated by the concept of communal living in the mold of Marxism and what that meant for a generation of people my own age. Later, I wrote stories about Israeli Navy Seals and then an American woman named Carolyn and an Israeli woman who accidentally leaves her young son alone while she travels to the United States. I decided to take those three or four marginally related stories and write in the connective tissue. Out of all that was born WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS.

Q. What are you reading and recommending?

I just read a wonderful time travel novel called The Heavens by Sandra Newman coming out from Grove next month. It’s literary but wonderfully readable. A writer friend of mine gave me the new edition of Just Kids by Patti Smith with the photograph that I’m rereading. I love her very grounded mysticism.

Q. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new novel about a group of families in a satellite town of New York City. I was kind of a lonely only child growing up without a lot of family or community so I like to populate my books – as I once did my imaginary games – with a lot of people. Reading them is fine but I would feel lonely and claustrophobic writing a book from the POV of just one person!

~Robin Wood, Associate Manager

Going Viral: Talking to Caitlin Kunkel, co-author of NEW EROTICA FOR FEMINISTS

January 4, 2019

by Robin Wood

If you haven’t visited comedy site The Belladonna, “a comedy and satire site by women and other marginalized genders, for everyone,” go check it out.

No really, we’ll wait.

Okay, come back now. You’re welcome.

We are excited to present comedy writer Caitlin Kunkel, co-founder of The Belladonna and co-author of NEW EROTICA FOR FEMINISTS. Kunkel will appear in-conversation with local comedian and journalist Gwen Filosa Saturday, January 19, at 6pm, followed by a book signing.

Kunkel is visiting Key West for the first time and we had a chance to ask her a few questions about transforming a web-post into a book, staying busy and checking out iconic movie locations.

Q. Tell me a little bit about The Belladonna. How did it come to be? How did you come to be working with your partners? Besides being funny, what’s your goal with the site?

A. The Belladonna is a site that features comedy and satire written by women, for everyone. The four co-founders (myself, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor, and Carrie Wittmer) were each part of a private Facebook group for female comedy writers, and there was increasing discussion about how there seemed to be a dearth of reputable satire sites that accepted outside submissions from contributors, and even fewer that celebrated or nurtured specifically women’s talents and voices.

A number of members in that group mentioned they’d stopped writing comedy entirely, because their early efforts had been met with unnecessarily cliquish or exclusionary behavior, or negative feedback, or no feedback at all. Other members had occasionally piped in to suggest that women from that group should start their own publication, but no one had taken the reins.Then in November 2016, Carrie posted “I want to start a website, who wants to start one?” I responded, so did Fiona, and I looped in Brooke who I knew in real life. So it was completely chance how to came to be – we just each had the same purpose and desire! We actually ran the site and got the book deal prior to all four being in the same room together. So a lot of trust and remote working was involved!

Our goal is to provide a space where beginning writers can get feedback (we tell every submission why it’s not right for us), and writers at all stages of their careers can benefit from a growing platform to showcase their unique voices.

Q. How did you come to write the original post that became NEW EROTICA FOR FEMINISTS? Any hint that it would take off the way it did? What’s your sense of what captured people’s imagination and made it go viral?

A. It truly felt like the piece chose us! We were deep in daydream schemes about how to potentially monetize The Belladonna (a frequent topic of conversation for us), cheekily dreaming about having our favorite flavored sparkling water company (LaCroix–wildly popular in the US, a real cult following) somehow just foot the bill for everything and send us truck upon truck of the stuff. And why not have, say, Tom Hardy make those deliveries? Is that not how corporate sponsorship works? Perhaps we don’t understand commerce after all.

One of us said (in jest) ‘you know, that’s our million dollar idea–that sounds like erotica the women of New York would pay good money for’. We decided then and there to write a comedy piece in that vein–what would erotica for feminist women look like–and it flowed out of us so quickly and naturally as we realized all the ways actual romance and porn tropes are in service to traditionally cisgender male desires and urges, and the women are largely there as objects to be had rather than protagonists.

We did NOT expect it to go viral – we wrote the whole thing in about a day, and we thought we would get some views back to The Belladonna from McSweeney’s [where the piece was published], but that was about as big as we dreamed. It started to take off the same day it was published, and then we watched, mouths agape, as it kept spreading. We think that the format of erotica lets people slip into each vignettes themselves, and the central of ideas of fantasies that should be reality can be expanded to SO many different scenarios and areas of life. So people could appreciate the piece, but also appreciate the main satirical point of view pretty easily.

Q. What was the expansion/revision process like? What does the book do that the original post couldn’t?

A. One of the interesting things we saw in the response to the initial McSweeney’s piece was that people tended to prefer completely different vignettes for different reasons. Typically in a humor piece, there are a few lines that people cluster around, but here, different elements were sticking out to people. So looking at the initial group of 12, as well as our early brainstorms of new material to put into the proposals, we started to see groups and methods of classifying them. There were a lot that skewed pop culture, we knew we wanted to touch on parenting, and being able to look at historical sources gave us a lot of inspiration. Building out a table of contents helped us show publishers how this 800-word piece could become a 10,000 word-plus book. We could then also brainstorm and write around each chapter heading and see where we needed more and less entries, rather than write an amorphous bunch of jokes and try to organize them.

The book also let us write some significantly longer vignettes, mostly in the Historical and Literary sections. It’s hard to do a literary parody of Lolita in four lines, so having a little more space to have a clear point of view really helped! It also lets you vary tone a bit more – in a piece with 12 vignettes, they each have to play the game pretty clearly to fit together. But the 47th vignette in the middle of the book could break format a little, or be weirder. So it let us build in more variety.

Q. What are you reading and recommending?

As we wrote our comedic book, I read a lot a serious books on women and/or society this year! The three that stood out to me were Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister, and So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Each of these is excellently written with the author’s particular voice clearly shining through.

For fiction, I’m a huge Stephen King fan (I thank him in the acknowledgments of the book!), and I reread The Stand this year, as I do most years. I loved Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, which is like feminist sci-fi/dystopian fiction, and in somewhat of that same vein I truly enjoyed the thought experiment of reading Naomi Alderman’s excellent book The Power.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. We’re working on continuing to grow The Belladonna and create more opportunities for women in comedy! Personally, I’m taking a hiatus from teaching satire, which I’ve done for The Second City in Chicago via online teaching for seven years, and I’m focusing on my own writing full-time. I’m the writer for Live Wire Radio, a variety show that airs on public radio across the country, and that is extremely fun and challenging job. I’m also one of the producers of the very first Satire and Humor Festival, coming to NY in March of 2019! And I’m continuing to tour and talk about the book. So I’m focusing on my own writing as well as community building. I love to keep busy.

Q. Have you been to Key West before? What are you most looking forward to here?

A. I have NEVER been to Key West, and I just want to walk to the end and stare out over the ocean at the southernmost point of the continental US! I grew up in Rhode Island, and being close to the water never ceases to give me a major thrill. I also saw the movie True Lies pretty young, and the iconic scenes on the Overseas Highway gave me an appetite to drive on that road someday.

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager

Meet Andrew Simonet, TSKW Artist in Residence, author of Wilder

December 6, 2018

by Robin Wood

Andrew Simonet, author of debut young adult novel Wilder and current Artist-in-Residence at The Studios of Key West will give a talk Tuesday, December 11, at 6 pm at the store. The presentation “13 Thoughts on Writing and Fighting,” is geared towards teens and adults and will include excerpts from Wilder, stories from Andrew’s life, and reflections on masculinity and violence.

Andrew draws from a wide range of professional and artistic experiences from his work as a writer, choreographer, teacher, documentarian and artist advocate. We recently sat down to talk about writing process and the importance of artists having the skills, knowledge and community to build sustainable lives.

One of Andrew’s projects, Artists U, is a collaborative professional development workshop for and by artists designed to equip them with the tools for the business side of managing an artistic life, including financial and strategic planning. Andrew has written a book called Making Your Life as an Artist and, as part of his Studios residency, is teaching a workshop called “Building a Sustainable Life as an Artist.”

He has had a multifaceted career, running a dance company, teaching high school, building Artists U, and now publishing a YA novel. I asked him how all the pieces fit together and how he ended up following this particular path.

“I started dancing when I was 19 and it changed my life,” Andrew says. He’d always participated in theater and sports. “For me, dance has the physical movement and energy of sports combined with the creativity and artistic expression of theater.”

About 14 years ago, as Andrew was serving as choreographer for his dance company, Headlong Dance Theater, the desire to write “just showed up.” Writing, he says, is very different from the collaborative, social process of dance, but creatively the process felt seamless.

Since leaving the dance company to focus on fiction writing, Andrew has participated in a number of residencies, enjoying the opportunity to meet different artists and experience different communities. He thought spending time in Key West would have the added benefit of helping him flesh out the setting he planned for a follow-up to Wilder, but things didn’t work out quite as expected.

Though he completed the sequel, it didn’t get picked up by his publisher. That’s one of the things you have to know and accept about publishing, he says, “there are a lot of gatekeepers.” Knowing how to deal with rejection and move on to the next project is one of those key skills in building a sustainable life as an artist. “There is value in doing the work. [That project] made me a better writer,” Andrew says.

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager

A Q&A with Rosalind Brackenbury, author of The Lost Love Letters of Henri Fournier

December 6, 2018

by Robin Wood

If you’ve been keeping up with novelist, poet and short story writer, Rosalind Brackenbury, you might know that she was literary editor at Key West newspaper Solares Hill, and you might know she was Key West’s second Poet Laureate (2014-15), but you probably don’t know that her first job locally was as a deck hand on the Schooner Wolf.

She’s didn’t talk much about her deck hand days, when she and Jessica Argyle, author of No Name Key, got together Dec. 18 2018 to discuss Roz’s new novel The Lost Love Letters of Henri Fournier. But she did answer a few questions for us, including talking about the real-life letters that inspired her new book.

Q: What was the genesis of The Lost Love Letters of Henri Fournier?

A: The Lost Love Letters had its genesis in my finding in a rural used book store in France, a copy of Fournier’s embryo second novel as put together by some Italian academics in a sort of proof-style format.

I’d always loved Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Domain) and this got me excited – I hadn’t known he was writing another when he went to war. Reading about him brought me to Pauline Benda, his lover from 1912-1914. A French writer friend sent me in Key West an enormous package of books and photo-copied letters and excerpts of writing by and about Pauline. I read, translated, starting thinking about a novel.

It was far the most difficult one I’ve ever written.

The second “layer” – Seb interviewing the old Pauline – came next, as yes, I am fascinated by old age these days! Then a reader in London suggested a third ‘layer’ with Seb in the present. He was a woman at first, but then I wanted the challenge of a male protagonist. And so on, for years…

What fascinates me about juxtaposing history and contemporary stories is the idea that we do all face very similar challenges in life, when it comes down to it – but deal with them in different ways, because of the times we live in. I’m hooked on writing about war and its aftermath, having been born in the middle of one – but this time it’s World War I. I’m a historian by training but a novelist by choice – a sort of hybrid, I suppose.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve just finished a lot of edits on a novel coming out next July, called Without Her. Also edits of a poetry collection Invisible Horses, due out in May. So – looking forward to writing rather than editing!

Q: Where are you when not in Key West?

A: I spent most of the summer months in France and/or England and Scotland. Paris, because it’s great for writing and I’ve always loved it. England, Scotland, because my family and old friends are there. I love Key West for winter weather – yes, becoming a snowbird – and so many friends, and our house here in Old Town that my husband has worked endlessly on, and the ocean – and it’s now my “home port.”

Q: How did you end up in Key West?

A: I went to a poetry reading on Caroline Street 25 years ago, met a man – the rest is history.

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager

Meet the Summer Art Contest Winner: Cricket Desmarais

November 6, 2018

by Robin Wood

The winner of our Summer Art Contest is Cricket Desmarais with “On the Blue Shores of Silence,” inspired by On the Blue Shores of Silence by Pablo Neruda. I caught up with Cricket after her Friday morning yoga class in the Sanger Galley at The Studios of Key West and asked her about her prize-winning art.

Q: Tell me a little about yourself as an artist?

A: It’s hard for me to talk about myself as an artist. I just know that I feel most alive and right inside when I’m actively engaged in some form of art making—painting, writing, choreographing & dancing, taking photos, or performing. I love it all, and would make art all day, every day, if I could.

On that note, having a studio at The Studios of Key West has been somewhat of a game changer for me, not only as a beautiful space in which to work, but the mental space and “permission” to make my own work matter, too. Powerful medicine.

Q: Tell me about the process for this painting?

A: Right now, I’m mostly working with encaustics—an ancient art form that uses beeswax, damar resin, oil pigments, & heat—which I’ve also been teaching for a few years at The Studios. I am in love with the hypnotic quality of it all. It forces me to slow down while also finding a balance between pushing myself to a new place & process & knowing when to stop. It’s not a medium that you can be super controlling with, which can be pretty frustrating at times. I often have a very particular idea but have to allow for it to go in the direction it seems to be going in for it to work, even if it’s not what I had in mind. A very different process to the writing work I do for clients at my desk, which is all about precision, facts, strategy, and deadlines.

Q: How did you come to pick your inspiration book? Is it something you have loved and reread, did it just strike you? Is it a literal image from the book or an interpretation?

A: On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea is a beautiful book put out by Harper Collins in 2003 that celebrates what would have been the 100th birthday of one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda. It collects 12 of his ocean poems translated by Alastair Reid and paired with abstract paintings by Mary Heebner. There are so many incredible lines in it that fully transport me to that salty, watery world I love and that dreamspace world between worlds within us that Neruda is so skilled at naming without compromising its intangible quality. He speaks to me at a very cellular level, and his ocean poems even more so.

I can’t say that my piece is derived from any specific line or poem in the book, but it is definitely born from a desire to express my own defined interpretation of the poems, which is very different than Heebner’s. The floating figure in my piece is of my younger daughter, whose neuro-challenges all but disappear when in the ocean. I wanted to create a sense of peace and being held, but the direction it took also invoked a bit of anxiety in me. At times she seemed to be floating alone in the middle of the ocean, and the blue pigment kept melting under the image and blurring into her skin tone. In hindsight, I think my process with it reflects a sort of acknowledgment of the ocean’s power and indifference to us, and the concern I hold for my child. It was a hard piece to call finished. (I often feel that way with most of my visual art work).

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager

Q&A with Jack E. Davis, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

September 28, 2018

by Robin Wood

Photo: University of Florida, Bernard Brezinski

Store co-founder George Cooper says of Jack E. Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf, “Davis takes us from the beautiful past of the Gulf as fount of life for native tribes, to its decline into an ecosystem under attack from development and pollution. A must read for anyone who cares about the vast sea on our doorstep.”

We were able to ask Jack a few questions to get you in the mood for what is sure to be an insightful discussion of the environmental issues that have shape this important waterway.

(Don’t miss the reading and signing with Jack Davis, Friday, Oct. 5 at 6pm.)

Q: After your book on the Everglades, what made the Gulf a particularly compelling topic to you?

A: I wanted to do another biography of a place and thought of the Gulf since I had grown up on it. A quick check revealed that no one had written a comprehensive history of the Gulf, and given my lifelong relationship with it, the topic seemed a good fit for me. I guess it was.

Q: You frame much of the story of the Gulf through the stories of notable people. Can you say a bit about this use of biography as a narrative device?

A: I wanted nature to be at the forefront of this history because I see nature as a historical agent that shapes the course of human history. This is to say that I did not want human events to dictate the narrative, as is the case with most histories. So I organized the chapters around natural characteristics of the Gulf: estuaries, fish, birds, the beach, intense weather, islands, rivers, etc.

But this is a book about the human relationship with Gulf nature, so I had to bring people into the story. It made sense then to use human characters and their stories to help frame the narrative in each chapter and to keep the reader’s interest. Some of the characters were familiar to me, but many emerged as I was researching and writing, and they turned out to be compelling ones. They, among other things, made writing the book fun and inspirational.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from The Gulf?

A: I wrote this book for a national audience rather than just a regional one. I want readers to know that Americans, all Americans, have both historical and ecological connections to the Gulf and that the Gulf is more than a mere oil sump or hurricane alley, that it has a rich history beyond media sound bites that is very much a part of the larger American experience. I determined for this book not to be about the 2010 BP oil spill.

Q: What did you do to celebrate winning the Pulitzer Prize?

A: Hah! There is not much of a story behind the celebration. Learning of the prize is more interesting. It came as a complete surprise. I was in my office on campus in a meeting with a graduate student, reading him the riot act about his sloppy writing, when the office phone and cell phone started to ring. Pesky solicitors, I thought, But neither stopped, and my cell phone was also exploding with texts. So I looked at one, from my editor, Bob Weil, saying I had won. I had no clue that the Pulitzer winners were being announced or that Bob had nominated me (the publishers nominate the books and the finalists aren’t announced until the winner is announced).

I muttered, “Holy shit,” and then fell speechless. I had to push the phone across the desk for the student to read it. His eyes bugged out because, I think, he knew his meeting with me was over (his final paper was perfect, by the way).

Two hours later, I rode my bike home, as I always do, my sleek bike rattling from my shaking, adrenaline-spiked body, thinking that of all days this should not be one in which a car hits me. My 13-year-old daughter met me at the door. Her mother had called her with the news, but she played me, asking, “Sooo Dad, how was your day?”

Later, five close friends came over with dinner and champagne, all of us happy and getting happier, and I wondering how this had happened, trying to translate it into my life and to associate my name with the prize.

Q: What are you reading and recommending currently? Fiction, nonfiction, for fun or edification?

A: I prefer nonfiction to fiction but do not avoid the latter by any means. I just finished Jill Lepore’s new book, These Truths, a superb narrative history of the US. Just before that, I read Lauren Groff’s collection of short-stories, Florida. Lauren and I live in the same neighborhood, and I love when she uses it as a setting, as in the first story of the book. I know the exact sidewalks her protagonist is walking, but the true conveyance is Lauren’s lyrical words and phrases. I read the New Yorker assiduously, and on my bed stand is Barry Lopez’s elegiac Crossing Open Ground, 40 years old and still highly relevant. I’m also eager to dig into Ray Arsenault’s new biography of Arthur Ashe. I read for fun and edification, the latter of which includes studying the narrative and sentence constructions and word choices of the authors. For example, when Lauren used “gambol” in one of her New Yorker stories, I decided to find a place for it in The Gulf. I did.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I’m deep in the writing of a book on the cultural and natural history of the bald eagle, which is employing the working title Bird of Paradox: How the Bald Eagle Saved the Soul of America. Additionally, one of my former PhD students, Leslie Poole, and I are editing a second edition of The Wild Heart of Florida, a collection of personal essays about natural Florida.

~Robin Wood, Associate Manager