Last Friday I got to go to the afternoon session of the Key West Literary Seminar. Now I have never been to a literary seminar or any kind of book related convention (Everything is usually on the main land) so I wasn’t really sure what to expect but it was so much fun!! Have you guys ever been to a literary seminar or a book convention? I would love to go to a book con, I bet it would be so much fun!
So anyway, I went on Friday with two of my coworkers from the library to the afternoon session. The line up of speakers was Eric Shanower, Madeline Miller, Meg Cabot, and Naomi Novik. Eric Shanower was first with his talk, “Age of Bronze: Retelling the Trojan War for Comic Book Readers” which was about his comic book series, Age of Bronze. I confess that at the time of his talk I hadn’t read any of his books. As of writing this though, I have the first book checked out from the library and I have read a few pages. It’s really good! If you are a fan of Greek history this would be a good one to check out.
The next speaker was Madeline Miller talking about her book her book Circe. Her talk was called, “Writing Back to Homer”. This was my favorite speaker of the day by far. She is just a great public speaker! I felt very at home listening to her talk about books and her research and all that fun bookish stuff. She read an excerpt from Circe to start off the talk and then discussed her research and her writing. It was so nice to just sit and listen to someone that really loves their subject talk about it. She did talk a lot about how when Homer wrote The Odyssey, Circe was really only a foot note to the story and she wasn’t in the story to much even though Odysseus and his men stay with her for a whole year! She really wanted to take that little blip in The Odyssey and turn it into a whole book from the perspective of this great witch, Circe. I loved listening to her and I’m really excited to read some more of her books.
The last panel of the day was Naomi Novik and Meg Cabot talking about young women in fairy tales and it was moderated by Nancy Klingener. The panel was called, “Giving Young Women a Voice: Fairy Tales in the Modern Age”. This was a really great talk and both ladies were really amazing. I loved listening to them talk all about modern day fairy tales. They both had really great insights into modern day fairy tales and how they are written and consumed. I really liked the talk and I’m looking forward to reading some of Naomi Novik’s fiction in the future.
After all of the panels and talks there was a book signing! I got to meet Meg Cabot and got my book signed by her! I literally could not stop smiling afterwords. It was so cool to get to talk to her for a few minutes! Unfortunately, then I had to go back to work for the last few minutes to close up the library. I’m looking forward to hearing from you all! I hope you are having a great week so far! Come say hi on Twitter!
I’m sorry there are so many exclamation points in the last paragraphs 🙂
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