Travel Blog

It was a perfect weekend for the Miami Book Fair. On Saturday morning, David Kirby – following two poets not from the School of Uplift – read a poem about gratitude that listed the many things he is grateful for. Afterwards, his book The Winter Dance Party, was nowhere to be found, something for which he was clearly not grateful. But, unfazed, he said he would tell people it had sold out.

Kirby’s old friend Billy Collins read shortly after in the frigid auditorium. Among the poems were some very short ones, like “3 AM.”

My hand is asleep.

At least it’s a start.

During the Q&A, a teacher of writing asked for some tips. Collins told her to get the students to read, admitting that that is difficult these days. Young people don’t read books, he posited, because they don’t want to be alone. With their phones they never are.

The teacher specifically asked about novels, and Collins said that poetry and fiction are “two different countries.” He added that “being a poet doesn’t require any interest in other people,” while novelists need to look into other people’s lives.

Yesterday, I went to hear Charles Bock, Priyanka Mattoo, and Carvell Wallace. In an interesting twist, Wallace read an excerpt from Mattoo’s memoir and Mattoo read an excerpt from Wallace’s. This worked surprisingly well, considering that Wallace’s memoir is about growing up Black and queer, and Mattoo’s is about her family’s exile from Kashmir. She said that she had never written anything (besides screenplays) before she sat down to write her memoir, excerpts of which were subsequently published in the New York Times and The New Yorker.

Following them were Eric Weiner, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Shalom Auslander. Handler said that he carries a notebook with him wherever he goes; not a fancy leather notebook – he noted the Moleskin trailer outside at the street fair – but a cheap spiral notebook. I dug in my bookbag and retrieved the green memo notebook I had bought at Walgreen’s. An elegant notebook, he said, would make him feel even more pretentious than he already did taking notes.

Like many good writers, they had been precocious readers when young. Handler told of picking up Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal at the town library when he was a boy. Auslander said that, around the age of 16, he walked into Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan and asked the salesclerk if they had anything funny. The man gave him a book by Kafka. He enjoyed it so much that he returned and asked if they had anything else that was funny. The man gave him Beckett.