Pico Iyer, Tom Arnold and the Key West Literary Seminar

I’m in Key West; drove down Thursday from Fort Lauderdale for the Key West Literary Seminar on the Literature of Adventure, Travel and Discovery. In the evening Pico Iyer gave the opening address, speaking for 80 minutes without notes and almost without pauses to a packed and dazzled crowd of mostly older citizens. Sketched his story—born in England to Indian parents who then moved to California, currently living in rural Japan—and the themes of his writing—interchange of cultures, traveling for contradictions, travel as a dialogue between a person and a place, an interest in the romance rather than the clash of cultures, etc. Leaving I heard an elderly woman ask her friend, “Did he say he lives in royal Japan?”

Walking to the gardens of the Key West lighthouse, practically everyone in pairs or groups, I sensed a presence behind me. Slowing my pace I saw a young woman.

“Are you going to the lighthouse?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Silence.

“How’d you like the talk?”

“It was good.”

Silence.

Now she turned the back of her head to me. I pretended it was to look at the houses across the street.

“Is this your first time in Key West?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Are you a travel writer?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

I thought that, for a travel writer, she showed an unusual lack of curiosity. But perhaps she was just demonstrating her skill, honed through countless adventures around the globe, at fending off unwanted advances. But I wasn’t making an advance. I was just trying to start a conversation. Isn’t that what literary gatherings are all about?

At the entrance she fled into the gift shop restroom. I traveled through the buffet line and searched for a table of people who didn’t look like travel writers. Found many. Settled on one in the corner with a couple from Key West and a woman from California. The Key West couple said they were really from Iowa, spending half the year there and half here. The women said they had statues of chickens in the yard modeled after the American Gothic painting. This was more like it. I pulled out a postcard of my book and gave it to them (isn’t self-promotion the other thing literary seminars are all about?) “It’s got a chapter on Iowa,” I said. The man said Tom Arnold was his nephew; I told him Arnold’s hometown was mentioned in the chapter.

Two women asked if they could join us. They were from Dubuque, they said. Immediately, my hand moved to my sportcoat pocket for a postcard.

The one woman was a recently retired judge, looking for a new pursuit. Her friend was a grant writer, interested in trying another kind of writing. The friend told of traveling to see the Tour de France and sitting in a restaurant next to Robin Williams, who came over and entertained them. More stories followed, then a group photo, as if it were our last night of a weeklong cruise.

I caught Pico as he was leaving and said hello. (I hadn’t seen him since my visit to Japan in 1998.) I told him about the woman who wondered if he lived in “royal Japan.” “That’s even better,” he said, with that trademark delight in life’s miscommunications.

As I was leaving, Rolf Potts introduced himself, and I joined him and Tim Cahill and his wife. Walking down Duval, we stopped to listen to a street fiddler from Sweden. He played a tune from Rattvik, after I told him I had been there years ago for Midsummer.
 
“That pretty much confirms Pico’s point,” I said as we walked away.

—South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick will be guest blogging all this week.

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