The Key West Literary Seminar is underway — we just wrapped up the first session; there’s still room in the second session and if you’re a literary foodie at all, this is one of those rare opportunities for your passions to combine. One topic that keeps coming up, as it has since we began discussing food as a theme for the Seminar, is the question of literariness (if that’s a word). One of my fellow board members, whom I respect a lot and like even more, dislikes it when the writers get off the topic of writing and literature and just start talking about food.
I disagree. And here’s why:
First of all, there is plenty of talk about writing itself and to be honest, a diet of just that gets to be too much for me, especially since we’re dealing with a double session here.
Second, we have gathered some of the smartest, most articulate people in the country who know from food. Why on earth would we NOT want them to talk about this subject, about which they are passionate and knowledgable — and often quite funny. Not just the known funny people like Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount and Billy Collins, but Julia Reed was a revelation to many of us — the woman should have her own standup act — and even an eminence such as Madhur Jaffrey had the auditorium laughing out loud many, many times. Isn’t their foodiness the very reason we brought them, along with their proven literary chops? When the subject is “more literary,” say a genre like memoir, we don’t object when the writers discuss some topic that is the focus of their work, do we? The whole point of the Seminar, to me, is to hear directly from the writers telling stories, about themselves, their own work and about other people, stories that are funny or sad or significant in some way. It’s stuff you just wouldn’t hear otherwise and it is very different hearing spoken by the writer herself than it is reading on the page.
