Cover painting: Lincoln Perry ↗, Beach Frolic 4, watercolor, 12 × 9 in.
Forthcoming memoir
A Thousand Helping Hands
A Writer’s Life in Key West
Open Boat Editions · Publication date to be announced
In her forthcoming memoir, Rosalind Brackenbury returns to the places, friendships, and encounters that have shaped her life as a writer. Key West is at its heart, but the stories travel beyond the island, following the connections between writing, community, departure, and return.
Attentive to the spirit of place and interspersed with her own poems, the memoir offers a personal account of a literary life and the people who have helped give it form.
Excerpt
From the opening pages
I first heard of Key West in an old stone house inside the Medina in Essaouira, a fortified town on the west coast of Morocco. Places connect, inter-connect. That place, built by the Portuguese, where the trade routes from Africa converged, where for centuries merchants had come to meet the long caravans and carry goods, cotton, indigo, gold, across the Mediterranean to southern Europe. And then, this other place, the one I heard of for the first time, on the sea-route from South America, from the silver mines in Potosi. The island, near where the Spanish ships had gone down, leaving their treasure scattered on the ocean floor. Where people came still, hunting for its riches – and more.
From the manuscript in progress. © Rosalind Brackenbury.
Future announcements
Receive news of the memoir
Ros writes a monthly letter, Notes on a Writing Life, where news of the memoir will appear. Separately, her Substack gathers newer essays and observations.
