Award-winning and best-selling authors, poets, and editors will gather for the next edition of The Annual Key West Literary Seminar (KWLS) for the theme: "Pay Attention! The Novel, or The Long Form in a Time of Short Attention."
The seminar describes this year’s theme as an attempt to understand how the novel, as one of the slowest art forms, is working today in a world of shortened attention spans.
The series of ticketed and public panels, book signings, and Q&As will take place from January 8–11 at the San Carlos Institute on Duval Street.
Things get started on Jan. 8 with the John Hersey Memorial Address, keynote speech by Rachel Kushner, and gala reception before turning to the widely attended seminar programming, talkbacks, and special events.
Speakers will include Kaveh Akbar ("Martyr!"), Nicholas Boggs ("Baldwin: A Love Story"), P. Scott Cunningham (executive director O Miami), Vinson Cunningham ("Great Expectations"), Angela Flournoy ("The Wilderness"), Quiara Alegría Hudes ("The White Hot"), Marlon James ("A Brief History of Seven Killings"), Chris Kraus ("I Love Dick"), Patricia Lockwood ("No One is Talking About This"), Gary Shteyngart ("Vera, or Faith"), and Colm Tóibín ("The Master") among many others.
Arlo Haskell, executive director of the KWLS, expects the seminar to explore living in a time of great writers and novels while being bombarded with content from all directions.
"Our phones are buzzing, our social media feeds scroll without end, everybody and their cousin has a podcast we're supposed to listen to, and you can't even fill your car up with gas without being forced to watch a 15-second celebrity-filled news break."
"And the novel, as a form, is this big, slow, time-consuming thing. It's actually the slowest art form we have. A really good novel takes hours of your day, day after day, sometimes for weeks, to finish."
Haskell expects the audience to dig into questions that surround what writers are doing to ensure that we actually pay attention and how they are getting readers to turn off the screen and the noise in favor of this slow wonderful thing.
And acknowledging the particularly busy year for breaking news both at a national and local level, Haskell believes that the fact that so many people are paying attention to these issues is a good sign for civic engagement and shows that we live in an aware community.
On the other hand, he cautioned, it is easy to fall into a click-and-refresh habit. In the end, he thinks we would all be better off, individually and as a collective, if we put the screens down, open a book, and give ourselves the gift of that immersive experience of reading a novel.
Key West Literary Seminar
JAN 8-11 | San Carlos Institute
kwls.org
