KeyWriters - Longboat Key News

Page 14
Friday, March 4, 2011
Longboat Key News
KeyWriters
Writers nurture craft on Longboat Key
Clyde Farnsworth and Elisavietta Ritchie Farnsworth (Lisa) drove to Longboat Key from
Washington, D.C., this winter saying “our fingers were too frostbitten to type there.”
KAREN O’DOWD
Contributing Writer
odowd@lbknews.com
Longboat Key is a great destination for the peace
and quiet writers need to carry on their life’s work —
writing. Clyde Farnsworth and Elisavietta “Lisa” Ritchie
Farnsworth drove this winter to Longboat Key from
Washington, D.C., saying, “Our fingers were too frostbitten to type there.”
Here on Longboat, as guests at La Playa Condos, they
were nurtured as they worked by the balmy breezes
and warm sunshine filtering through the palms, and
they were invigorated by the sparkling gulf waters by an
occasional swim and daily beach walks.
“We have never taken a day off from writing something, even on vacation between swims and bike rides,”
they said.
Ritchie’s latest book, “Cormorant Beyond the
Compost,” was launched during their stay on Longboat
at an event co-hosted by former Longboat resident
Martin Tucker, editor emeritus of the distinguished journal “Confrontation,” and graphic artist and poet/writer
Elisabeth Stevens. Stevens also conducts interviews on
the arts and literature scene through the Web-based station RadioSRQ.com, and Lisa was a recent interviewee.
The Farnsworths also helped to inaugurate a Writers’
Roundtable event at the Longboat Island Chapel Library,
enjoying the interaction with Longboat Key writers.
Lisa was born Elisavietta Yurievna Artamonoff in
Kansas City, Mo., and seems to have lived everywhere
else. With a Russian émigré father, she learned Russian
and French as a child. As a freelance writer, editor, teacher and translator, she has traveled widely, including for
the United States Information Service (USIA) as a poet,
meeting her counterparts in other countries.
Clyde Farnsworth, whose mother was French, wrote
for the New York Herald Tribune and United Press
International before a 35-year stint with The New York
Times, overseas about half that time. He wrote two nonfiction books and one book of fiction, “Shadow Wars,”
which was an Amazon.com thriller-of-the-month. He is
“shopping around” his recent film script, but is currently
deep into writing a memoir, “Clydesworth,” on the intersection of two lives in journalism. Clyde’s father, also
Clyde Farnsworth, was a journalist whose first job was
as a police reporter for a weekly news magazine in St.
Petersburg, Fla. Occasionally in their careers, father and
son ended up working side-by-side in faraway places
such as Prague, Brussels, Vienna and The Hague, but for
different newspapers.
“We got married just before going to Canada, where
Clyde was the one New York Times correspondent for
over (sic) five years, then we were off to Australia,” says
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LBK Special/Karen O’Dowd
Washington D.C. authors Clyde Farnsworth, and Elisavietta Ritchie Farnsworth came to Longboat Key for new book launch, and to
enjoy a combination of Gulf-side writing and vacationing.
Lisa. “I was writing stories that became the collection
“In Haste I Write You This Note,” poems that went into
“The Arc of the Storm,” an occasional article, and taking
photographs for Clyde’s articles.”
Clyde says he was always working on books and
articles.
“The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times
Magazine, among others, also published my pieces.”
Even on vacation Lisa is busy with the Washington
Writers’ Publishing House, a pro bono press for
Washington area writers, “which is a labor of love for
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all of us,” she says. She was president of the poetry division, then the fiction division and continues as a fiction
editor. Her previous books and “chapbooks” include:
“Real Toads,”“Awaiting Permission to Land,”“Spirit of the
Walrus,”“Arc of the Storm,”“Elegy for the Other Woman”
and “Tightening the Circle Over Eel Country,” to name
a few.
“I am working on my short stories and an almost
novella-in-progress while in Florida,” she said,“but never
know when a poem will come.”
Books by Elisavietta Ritchie and Clyde Farnsworth are
available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.
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