Writers on Bicycles: Literary Key West

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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For years I’ve known Carey Winfrey as the longtime editor-in-chief of Smithsonian magazine, a colleague in the publishing world. Funny that we both wound up in Key West after retirement. When I got here I produced four or five official Fantasy Fest videos. When Carey settled into the community he made a film about Key West writers. He was always more highbrow than me.

In 2012, Carey and Jane Winfrey began videotaping more than 30 Key West writers about what has made this island community such a literary magnet.

More specifically, their documentary is titled “Writers on Bicycles: Literary Key West.” In it, they interviewed dozens of local writers — from Judy Blume to Robert Stone, Rosalind Brackenbury to Edmund White, John Leslie to Brewster Chamberlin, William Wright to Meg Cabot. And more.

Now the Winfreys’ film is being rescreened at the Tropic Cinema on March 22. The film will be followed by a Q&A. The showing is to benefit the Tropic.

Surveying the arrival of various authors to the island, Key West was described as everything from a “backwater village” where “all the sidewalks were cracked and people rode old bicycles” to being “on the map at the end of things.”

“There were always chickens,” noted Richard Wilbur.

Harry Shapiro described the island as “slightly chaotic.” Alison Lurie saw it as a “place where you can be mildly eccentric.”

Ros Brackenbury wondered if she’d “meet any normal people.”

Laurent deBrunhoff loved “the wind in the palms,” while his wife embraced the “warm weather in the winter.”

Michael Mewshaw was rewriting a book and looking for “a nice place in the sun” where he also had “access to a tennis court.”

Many writers wound up here by “a series of chances really.”

Harry Matthews recalls James Merrill describing Key West as having a “very agreeable cultural climate.”

The names of Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams and Wallace Stevens and John Ciardi and Ralph Ellison and Tom McGuane and Hunter Thompson are evoked by many of the current writers interviewed in this film.

“One part of Key West that I love is having a writer’s community here,” says Judy Blume. “I like knowing there are so many people here doing the same awful thing that I do.”

“I’ve never seen a more supportive community,” observes Robert Richardson. “People rush to say congratulations, you got a nice review.”

“The rhythm of the days is perfect for a writer,” says Edmund White. “You’re left alone during the day pretty much and you can write and the weather’s beautiful ….”

As you might gather from this, Carey and Jane Winfrey’s film “Writers on Bicycles” didn’t spend a lot of time talking about bicycles.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com