The Friends continued to offer a remarkable roster of speakers during February, delighting standing-room only audiences. Ann Beattie kicked off the month’s programs on February 5 with a discussion of her recent short story collection, Onlookers, which focuses on the idealic town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lives, after white nationalists held a rally there in 2017. Her stories explore the effect of those horrific events on individuals. “Fiction is not about history but nuance,” she explained. “It is a mechanism of emotional truth.” A former Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, Beattie has been included in five O. Henry Award Collections and in The Best American Short Stories.

Lee Smith charmed patrons on February 12 with her sweetly funny (and sometimes slightly profane) anecdotes about her writing life as she read from her latest novel, Silver Alert, a story of family, secrets, and aging. The novel follows an elderly man who heads off on a joyride with a new young friend, who may have some secrets of her own. Smith began writing stories at the age of nine and selling them for a nickel apiece. Since then, she has written 17 works of fiction, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Guests on Earth, and more recently, Blue Marlin.

The February 19 program, in which beloved author Judy Blume and her long-time friend Pat Scales, former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, discussed book banning, which was followed by the Friends wildly successful annual Gala in the Palm Garden. In their engrossing discussion, Blume and Scales recounted very personal episodes of controversy, censorship, and bans from the 1970s until the present, moving through salient confrontations and court cases of the decades.The speakers urged audiences to “become an agent championing intellectual freedom,” with Blume turning to two young audience members to remind them that “each person owns his or her own mind and thoughts…no one can take that away from you.”

Following the talk, guests stepped into a fairyland in Palm Garden which was festooned with twinkling lights. Many attendees stayed well into the evening, chatting and noshing on the plentiful hors d’oeuvres and other refreshments. 

And, finally, on the delightful evening of February 26, Ariel Delgado Dixon and Allegra Hyde graced the stage, courtesy of The Studios of Key West’s residency program. Delgado and Hyde read from their respective books — Delgado, her novel Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, about two sisters who survive a traumatic childhood, and Hyde, her collection of stories, The Last Catastrophe, which explores a harsh dystopian future brought on by the climate crisis. Each came prepared with a tag team of questions for each other and talked a lot about the writing process, giving valuable insights into their work.