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Sarasota gives Stephen King key to the city
Writer and part-time Casey Key resident Stephen King, who is promoting his latest novel, “Under the Dome,” answered questions at a sold-out event at the Van Wezel in Sarasota on Monday night. He was also presented with a key to Sarasota by city commissioners Suzanne Atwell and Dick Clapp. King also signed copies of his new book before the event.
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When horrormeister Stephen King takes the stage Monday night for a sold-out performance at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, it will mark his first major appearance in Sarasota since buying a winter home on Casey Key eight years ago.
But King sightings around Southwest Florida are not uncommon. He has been spotted at the movies, at his beloved Boston Red Sox spring training games both here and in Fort Myers, at concerts, at Publix and browsing at Barnes & Noble. When Sarasota News and Books was still open on Main Street, King would sometimes stop in unannounced to sign whatever copies of his books the store had on hand.
Although his 2008 book "Duma Key" was set on a fictional island between Casey and Manasota keys, no public appearance in Sarasota was tied to the book. Instead, King appeared at an event at USF Sarasota/Manatee to promote the work of a young author, Lauren Groff, but neither met his fans nor signed copies of "Duma Key."
That book was littered with local references, from the beaches to the Palm Avenue art galleries, and it included an art critic bearing a striking resemblance to former Herald-Tribune critic Joan Altabe.
Those details could only have been gathered by immersion in the area, something King does while trying to remain as far under the radar as possible.
King and his wife, Tabitha, started wintering in Florida in 1997, when, during a particularly harsh winter in Bangor, Maine, they looked at each other and asked why in the world they were still in Maine when warmer climates called. They had always liked Sarasota and decided to rent a house.
"We liked Sarasota because it was funky," King, 62, said in a telephone interview Saturday night.
“We liked Pineapple Street and all the art on Palm Avenue. The town was terrific and we loved it.”
“We found a house that looked OK and it was on Longboat Key,” he said. But Longboat was a little crowded and regulated for the Kings’ tastes.
They spent another winter in Naples, but it was “a little bit stuck-up.”
Casey Key’s greater privacy suited the Kings just right; they bought a house at the northern end of the key in 2001 for $8.9 million, the most ever paid for a house in Sarasota County at the time. In 2007 they bought a second house a couple of miles down the key for their children and grandchildren to use on visits.
Still, it was several years before King felt he had absorbed enough of the “texture” of Sarasota to include its details in “Duma Key” — details such as the cinnamon apple pies at Checkers — “I’m a total Checkers freak,” he confessed — and the now-defunct Waffle House next to Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
People are friendly to King without prying too much into his privacy in Sarasota, he said. He will sign an autograph for a child who asks, but draws the line at cell phone camera shots or being interrupted while he is Christmas shopping.
“I just go around and hang out and people generally don’t bother me, and if they do they’re pleasant,” he said. “I’m sort of dedicated to the idea of living a life. I’m not a museum exhibit or a department store dummy or any of those things. I’m just a guy.”
Still, King is the kind of popular fiction author who draws a big crowd. His tour to promote his new book “Under the Dome” included a big media event with The New York Times in New York on Tuesday. He followed that by signing 650 books at a Walmart outside Baltimore, where “some of those people waited out in the rain for 36 hours,” and another 525 books at a Barnes & Noble in Atlanta.
“I really want this book to work,” said King, explaining why he has broken with his past tradition of not doing open book signings. “It’s a tough economy, it’s a huge book and I put a lot into it.”
The cool kids may never admit they read his books.
But I'm not ashamed to say I have been a Stephen King fan since his second book, 1975's Salem's Lot, led me to keep the lights on at night -- every night! -- while in junior high school.
So joining a crowd of hundreds at the Van Wezel Hall in Sarasota Monday to genuflect before "Uncle Stevie" -- as he calls himself in his most-excellent pop culture column for Entertainment Weekly -- felt just fine.
Turns out, King in person is a lot like his books; funny, down-to-earth, given to entertaining and meandering asides and capable of occasional bursts of profanity.
He took questions from Susan Rife, arts editor at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, who was refreshingly playful and relatively at ease with the superstar novelist. Which made for a pretty fun conversation with a local hero (he and wife Tabitha King have a home in nearby Casey Key).
The highlights:
--His new book, Under the Dome, was first conceived in the mid-'70s, put aside for a long while, and eventually reworked over a few more years. And after finishing an initial manuscript even bigger than the current 1,074-page behemoth, his sister heard the plot and said "Oh, you mean like The Simpsons Movie?" (which is what my wife said when she heard about it, too). Uncle Stevie swears he never saw it.
--He doesn't outline or plan out his books much before writing. To him, writing is more like excavating, pulling out a story which already exists, told to him by a cast of characters he loves. He said many books start with an image in his mind -- Under the Dome began with a press conference featuring emaciated, starving people facing a well-fed press corps. When he heard John Irving talk about knowing the final chapter and final scene of every book when he starts writing, Uncle Stevie said "What fun would that be?"
--For the umpteenth time, he confirms that he's a pretty normal guy who had a pretty normal childhood. The master of the modern horror novel also confided that the only time he saw a ghost was out of the corner of his eye while searching for his coat in a room while preparing to leave a party. It is to Uncle Stevie's credit as a storyteller that he managed to make even this underwhelming story sound compelling.
--But while he claims to be a normal guy, he also talked about taking a motorcycle ride across Australia just before writing Under the Dome and collaborating on a music-drenched audio play which will feature Kris Kristofferson, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello and Roseanne Cash with music by John Mellencamp. So he keep some pretty amazing company.
By the time a couple of city officials came out to hand him the key to Sarasota, you were left in awe by a major talent and publishing dynamo -- he estimated authoring something like 70 books under his various pen names -- who somehow managed to maintain a regular-guy spirit and joy for what he had.
In a business rife with tortured artists and giant-sized egos, it was a welcome discovery, indeed.