The Sancho Panza Literary Society

About this Organization

The Sancho Panza Literary Society was founded as an independent society of ideas--a forum for unmitigated artistic expression and vigorous debate, in residence each summer at the hauntingly beautiful and historic Trinity College Dublin (where all the ghosts speak in verse and even the architecture has pathos). Don Quixote is lauded as literature’s ultimate dreamer, but his sidekick, Sancho Panza, knew that they were just tilting at windmills, and went along to explore the unknown anyway; and that is the kind of imagination that we revere, and exactly what sustains us when everything else falls away. This becomes more essential now, as the colleges devolve into myopic career factories, and no one contemplates anything. I traveled back from Dublin after our inaugural with one prevailing ambition—to make the rest of my career about projects like this.