Letters from Ros
Notes on a
Writing Life
Books, weather, journeys, friendship and the world around the work, in letters signed, affectionately, by Ros.
90 letters, 14 July 2019 to 14 September 2026
The Story Runs Alongside Life: passages from the letters →
Recurring threads across the letters →
2026
- 8914 September 2026I’ve just returned from Oxford, where I went to the 60th anniversary celebration of “Resurgence and Ecology” magazine at Wadham College. The theme, “One With The Earth” was all about us being part of nature, not separate from it. We are…
- 8814 August 2026We’re in eclipse season, with the eclipse of the sun on August 12 totally visible in parts of Europe, and partially visible from the UK. The countryside in England, as across Europe, is uniformly brown and dry; I’ve never seen a summer…
- 8714 July 2026It’s very nearly two months since we began our retreat in Arles, France, called “Coming To Our Senses.” Two months, for me, of travel and family connections; of selling our Paris apartment; of visiting my children and old friends. It’s…
- 8614 June 2026With happy memories of the beautiful house in Arles where we met last month to “Come to our Senses,” I’m writing on a cold wet London morning. What a change: this is hardly weather for June. But these days, there’s not much point in…
- 8514 May 2026I am sitting in my little rented house in Arles, right opposite the Roman arena, on the corner of a winding cobbled street, writing this on the day before my birthday. Our “Coming to our Senses” retreat is due to start on May 16th, so the…
- 8414 April 2026Sometimes, Life seems more present than Writing, and actual writing takes a back seat. But we remind ourselves that it is still there, waiting, like a patient lover when we’re late for a rendezvous. We hope it’s not thinking of checking…
- 8314 March 2026I woke up with lines from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in my head: I often think of the soothsayer’s warning at this time in March, but this year it seems more appropriate and has more resonance than ever.
- 8214 February 2026Last week, on February 8, we celebrated Elizabeth Bishop’s birthday with a reading of her poems, a huge carrot cake and copious cocktails that I think she would have liked. We have ‘Elizabeth Bishop week’ in Key West now, to balance all…
- 8114 January 2026I wish you a happy New Year, and wish us all some peace and sanity… The 43rd annual Key West Literary Seminar has just ended here – four days of focusing on writing, which is the topic I have spent most of my life thinking about and doing.…
2025
- 8014 December 2025As this is my eightieth newsletter and the last one of this year, I’m going to indulge in a backward look across the year, as well as perhaps dare a forward look. This time last year, we in the US were teetering on the edge of changes so…
- 7914 November 2025I named this newsletter “Notes on a Writing Life” a few years ago, when I began its monthly entries – but what, I suddenly think, is a writing life, exactly? Margaret Atwood, whose witty and informative “ Book of Lives, a memoir of sorts”…
- 7814 October 2025The season is changing here in Key West, with days of autumn rain and a drop in temperature at last. People say that we don’t have seasons here, but it’s not true; you feel the change in the sound of rain on leaves, a tiny breath of air on…
- 7714 September 2025I first came here to our family’s Paris apartment in the 5th arrondissement in 2008, and stayed for most of the summer, writing a novel. I’ve sat at this round table beside the window for so many summers, working on fiction and poetry,…
- 7614 August 2025I am writing from the quiet and leafy greenness of rural Dorset, which is where this particular “camino” is – but it could almost have been in Galicia, in Spain, or in south-western France, where I walked the way to Santiago de Compostela…
- 7514 July 2025July 14 is, of course, the day that the Bastille was stormed in France in 1789. There were not many left to liberate in the Bastille that day, but many of them had grown old in jail and must have emerged perplexed by the new order.…
- 7414 June 2025After various problems at the new Key West airport, a computer insisting that I needed a visa to visit France and England (I don’t – it was wrong), I have just arrived in Paris. It’s hot, but not as hot as Key West, and I inhabit an…
- 7314 May 2025I wrote the above date, that of my birthday, and thought of writing about birthdays. Some people love to celebrate them; others, for their own reasons, don’t. I worried about my 89-year-old mother when she told me that she wasn’t…
- 7214 April 2025We’ve now had nearly four months of living with extreme uncertainty – here in the US, and in consequence, in many places across the world. What is it doing to us? Living life like a roller-coaster ride (confession: I have always hated…
- 7114 March 2025It’s a beautiful spring morning in Key West and I’m back in my studio to pay attention to my latest novel, that has been languishing here for at least a month. It’s a relief, to be back writing fiction – to re-enter that imaginary world…
- 7014 February 2025For the last few weeks, I’ve been looking for ways to deal with the extraordinary situation in the United States that we find ourselves in: deliberate chaos, created by a group of people acting like kids in a tantrum, determined to break…
- 6914 January 2025Time flies when you’re having fun! And the annual Key West Literary Seminar, that took place this last weekend, is always fun. I’ve dipped in and out of it this year, catching some great readings and discussions and a couple of good…
2024
- 6814 December 2024I’ve been thinking about the topic of Place in our lives – the place where we arrived this planet, that we may love forever or escape from as soon as we can; the places we choose, the places that come to mean something deep and abiding for…
- 6714 November 2024In the wake of the US elections, after so much battering at our psyches from news items, opinion polls, shattering results and post-mortems, I feel that art, music and literature have my hungry attention, during these last few days in…
- 6614 October 2024This will be a brief newsletter, after two busy weeks having to pay attention to both hurricanes Helene and Milton as they (mercifully) passed us by and continued up through the Gulf of Mexico, missing us by a hundred and fifty miles. You…
- 6514 September 2024I’m writing to you from Key West, where brain fog due to heat and humidity nearly made me forget my date with you and the newsletter… Apart from the pleasure of watching a smart woman demolish a bullying man in a so-called ‘debate’ on TV…
- 6414 August 2024I’m writing from sunny Dorset, where early this morning I was the only person on a wide empty beach at low tide. My family and friends’ departures the other day felt like a tide going out, a low moment, and this is the way of things:…
- 6314 July 2024Well, the date above reminds me that of course the Bastille fell to the Revolution on that day – but events in France this last week were nowhere near as dramatic, or, thank God, as bloodthirsty. It was a bold last-minute turn-around…
- 6214 July 2024I’m writing from my friend Kim’s beautiful little guest house ‘The Stone Boat’ in Rabanal, northern Spain, looking out from my window on to ramshackle stone walls, poplar and fruit trees, distant green hills and even more distant…
- 6114 May 2024I’m writing this in Paris, on a sunny afternoon with just a few high clouds in the blue sky. This morning I walked through the Port-Royal market and on to the Jardins du Luxembourg, where the trees seemed impossibly green and the grass was…
- 6014 April 2024Springtime in Key West is always lovely, but this year after an unusually rainy winter, it is especially green and bursting with buds and flowers, young mangos ripening, mockingbirds beginning their flirtations, roosters pursuing hens…
- 5914 March 2024I’ve been thinking about my father this week: he died on March 11 1991, just a few weeks after his last game of tennis. He was all about keeping moving – both physically and intellectually. As children we followed him on long marches…
- 5814 February 2024The date above happens to be the publishing date for my novel “Bone Whispers”, as mentioned in my last newsletter. You can now order it from any good book store, or online – and I’d be grateful if you might think of posting a review…
- 5714 January 2024A happy 2024 to you! May it turn out to be peaceful and creative… My chickens are coming home to roost. I’m delighted to say that “Seas Outside the Reef” and “Light Over Islands,” two books set in Key West, are now both available on…
2023
- 5614 December 2023A friend, Eric Anfinson the painter who owns Mockingbird Studios, says that when a mocking-bird comes into your back yard it is time to get your work out into the world. Well, the mocking-bird visited us last week with a flick of his/her…
- 5514 November 2023This month, back in Key West, I’m deep in the novels of a writer who published in the 1920’s and 30’s and then disappeared from view – Jean Rhys. Beginning with Miranda Seymour’s biography of a talented and hard-working writer and an…
- 5414 October 2023When I saw the words ‘Kfar Aza’ in a horrific headline this week, I was carried back to 1961, when I and my friend Helen from Girton College, Cambridge, spent part of our long summer vacation in a very small, new outpost in southern…
- 5314 September 2023Thirty or more years ago, I walked out of Taroudant in Morocco, with a writer friend from Scotland, Andrew Greig, and our guide whose name was Ahmed and a mule with her mule-man, our tents and cooking utensils and clothes strapped on the…
- 5214 August 2023Time off is such a valuable thing, and this summer I have been privileged to spend such time in cool green places where it’s quiet and the hubbub of the world largely passes me by. Time off from what, though? Too much involvement; the old…
- 5114 July 2023I’m not in Paris watching fireworks for Bastille Day – they do have anyway rather a bad reputation these days, anyway. I’m in the green quiet depths of the Normandy countryside in an ancient house belonging to my friend’s family, and I…
- 5014 June 2023It’s mango season in the land of the mango eaters and I’m knocking back as many as I can before I leave. There’s nothing like a mango warm from the sun, its thick freckled skin peeled off over the sink, and a bite into it that feels like a…
- 4914 May 2023A paraphrased quotation from William Blake sticks in my mind: to some, a tree is just a green thing that stands in the way. I love the month of May, though, wherever I am. My memories of birthdays go back – to a wet day when I turned eight…
- 4814 April 2023I was asked recently in an interview how I started wanting to be a writer. The answer was, reading and being read to, as a child. There was a magic in books that I wanted to capture and pass on. This hasn’t changed. Robert Richardson’s…
- 4714 March 2023Clearing out a closet – always a good activity for spring – I came upon some typed diaries I’d written in 1995/6 and abandoning my tidying efforts, sank back into reading what I had written then, very shortly after I first came to Key…
- 4614 February 2023February in Key West is buzzing once again with artistic and social activities, artists’ openings, readings, get-togethers such as we have not had since Covid hit and made us all stay at home. It feels different, somehow – we greet each…
- 4514 January 2023Two weeks into the New Year, and our first pink hibiscus flower appeared at breakfast time. It’s too cold for the iguanas to be out and about, munching their favorite salad, so it has a chance of survival for a day at least. Today, the…
2022
- 4414 December 2022It’s a season here of hawk migrations and buzzards kettling high up in the sky. The other day I saw a hawk fly up out of our back yard with a small iguana in its claws, and soar easily away. The snow-birds, human ones, are coming back to…
- 4314 November 2022I read recently that Pythagoras, in answer to the question “What is the purpose of life on earth?” replied “To observe the heavens.” I didn’t get this directly from Pythagoras, whom I haven’t thought about since learning his theorem at…
- 4214 October 2022Years ago, at the end of the last century, I began teaching yearly classes based on Julia Cameron’s very successful and well-loved book, The Artist’s Way. Many of Key West’s artists and writers got to know each other better through these…
- 4114 September 2022I wonder how many other writers have experienced this: characters who just refuse to go away. The book is finished, the conclusion drawn – and yes, that really was the ending you wanted. But if for some reason, the characters go on,…
- 4014 August 2022Whenever another artist asks if they can use a line of writing of mine in a work of theirs, I feel a thrill that the words themselves will be re-used, re-invented, translated into another field. It’s like that with translation, too. Here…
- 3914 July 2022Do the books we choose to take with us on our journeys and vacations set the mood for us? And, why do we choose what we choose? I’ve been thinking about endings. Last books, unfinished books, books that don’t see the light of day, and here…
- 3814 June 2022I was astonished to hear recently that the Times Literary Supplement had given a whole page review to my three earliest novels, written in the 1970’s and re-published recently by Michael Walmer. The critic, who has to be a lot younger than…
- 3714 May 2022Sometimes things come together in a satisfying and almost uncanny way: the publication of my novella “Elena, Leo, Rose” this coming week coincides with my birthday, and the party I am giving for close friends and family in London, where I…
- 3614 April 2022In these days of terrible news and so much uncertainty in the world, I was enchanted to get this short video, sent to me by a friend in Portugal. It gave me joy and I asked if I could send it on to others: so here are two people doing…
- 3514 March 2022Sometimes events in the world overwhelm us and writing has to expand to a new consciousness of what actually is. This month has been one of those times. None of us know what will happen, the future seems in jeopardy once again, and all we…
- 3414 February 2022This month, I had the honor to be asked to write an essay on the paintings of two friends who were showing them in an exhibit here in Key West. Judith Murray and Robert Yasuda are, quite simply, extraordinary artists. Writing about…
- 3314 January 2022The photo above is not of a space craft suddenly landed on our island – it’s the pop-up book tent for the 39th Key West Literary Seminar, which took place last weekend, transformed for the first time into an outdoor event with stage, tents…
2021
- 3214 December 2021The island where I live, Key West, is known for among other things its community of writers and artists. People ask me sometimes – where do the writers meet? For the last few decades, the community of writers here has been a matter of a…
- 3114 November 2021What do you do when you are in between books? I asked a writer friend recently. It’s an uncomfortable time. You have sent off your manuscript, it has left home to try to find its way in the world, and you know you will have to wait weeks,…
- 3014 October 2021A couple of weeks ago I stood among crowds at the Place de l’Etoile to see the wrapped shape of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. It was a misty evening at sunset and the soft blue-gray color of the material that had been wrapped and tied…
- 2914 September 2021Last week I sat on a stone bench beside the Seine on a quiet Monday morning in Paris and watched a crane lift a piece of the new roof of Notre Dame into place. The dangling red hand that picked up the piece – minute fraction of the complex…
- 2814 August 2021As I’ve been walking across the hills of Dorset, in the south-west of England, I’ve thought about writers walking through the centuries. A certain thought-process develops as you put one foot in front of the other. Story is progress, after…
- 2714 July 2021I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between writing and moving about the world, during this time when so few of us have been able to go anywhere. How much does free movement inspire our work? Apart from travel writers, of course,…
- 2614 June 2021“How do you know when something is finished?” My son asked me on the phone recently, about a piece of writing of his own. I thought – not until it’s published, and you can’t change it. Not until you can’t go on tinkering with it anymore.…
- 2514 May 2021As I write the date above – my birthday – I think about birthdays in general, and new beginnings, and change. Beginning on a new book: always a thrill and a challenge. Having, out of the blue, a new idea. Starting again, re-doing,…
- 2414 April 2021A few weeks ago, I was invited by some friends to go out for a sunset sail on a rented Catamaran, out of the Key West Bight. The Bight is where Elizabeth Bishop wrote her poem on her birthday, describing its activity as ‘awful but…
- 2314 March 2021Last week I was invited to go to a real cinema to see a real film. A friend who is on the Board of our local Arts cinema, responsible for choosing movies to be shown in the near future, took a small group of us into a cinema that had most…
- 2214 February 2021There’s a new moon in Aquarius as I write this, and the mango blossoms are rushing out where I live (apologies to all of you who are snow-bound) and as we come up to Valentine’s Day I wish you all love and at least one loving human…
- 2114 January 2021Welcome to 2021! In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected President of the US, I went to my local bookstore in search of sanity, as did many others that morning in November. No novel, no poetry could quite capture the anxiety of that day; I…
2020
- 2014 December 2020At the end of this strange and disconcerting year, I’m thinking about the people who have left us, as well as the way we connect with each other as friends, as writers and readers. My friend Alison Lurie died on December 3 at 94; she who…
- 1914 November 2020This summer, I started writing a memoir. “From World War Two To Covid 19 With Some Light Relief In Between,” perhaps… And here we are in November, so this present moment where I plunged in – literally - is already the past, even though…
- 1814 October 2020And so we go on. I heard this week that my second novel A Virtual Image, published in 1971 is due out at the end of the year from Michael Walmer, whose wonderful mission in life is to re-discover ‘neglected authors,’ with a new…
- 1714 September 2020September, and we come towards the end of a strange season - summer for some of us, winter for others. I’m somewhere mentally stuck in about April/May… The pandemic keeps us at home still and each day resembles the one before. So, what has…
- 1614 August 2020New times demand new ways of creating, and look, we are doing it. I see my friends, other writers, musicians, actors, use the technologies that have sprung up so inventively over the last few months. Back in February, I didn’t know what…
- 1514 July 2020This last month, I’ve been at home in Key West still hunkering down as the virus Covid 19 increases its hold on Florida. No Bastille Day break-out, no travel to France this year. It seems to be a time to appreciate where we actually are,…
- 1414 June 2020So, another month on into this disquieting summer, what goes on? I read other writers on what a writer’s role is, should be, always has been, and try to arrive at my own thoughts on this. The clues seem to be in what I am searching out to…
- 1314 May 2020So here we are on the two-months-in of the lock-down, that is already being eased up in several places – and it’s May, my birthday month and that of two of my brothers, as well as my daughter and two of my close friends. Fellow Taureans,…
- 1214 April 2020April is poetry month here – and I’ve been thinking about poetry as aid and comfort, as inspiration, challenge and even rescue. A friend has been around town pinning up well-loved poems in public places: John Masefield’s Sea Fever down by…
- 1114 April 2020In our houses and apartments, we are being forced to learn new ways of being – with each other, with the outer world. There are love affairs, quarrels, reconciliations. There is solitude and introspection. There is death – and also,…
- 1014 March 2020Mango tree. “We are all in this together, and whatever we can do – sing, write, invent, dance, play drums, tell stories, read poems aloud – will save us.” I’m writing a mid-month letter to keep in touch, as in the last two weeks, time has…
- 0914 March 2020On the occasion of a reading I did at Books & Books in Coral Gables last October, my husband bought me an elegant gold-colored fountain pen that fills with cartridges of brown ink. It makes me think of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” –…
- 0814 February 2020Last week I was invited to read and discuss my novel Without Her at the Monroe County Library in Key West. The very lively and enthusiastic audience came up with some interesting questions. It’s always stimulating to try to answer…
- 0714 January 2020I’ve been thinking about crop rotation in medieval England – ( no, not as a topic for literature, but in the context of having to rest and recuperate for at least a month.) Two fields were planted up each year, and one left to lie fallow.…
2019
- 0614 December 2019Well, life as John Lennon said, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans… But I’m getting back after a brief excursion into unexpected illness, to thinking once again about the writing life, with my first novel due to be…
- 0514 November 2019Reading at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California. (The store’s name derives from the first line of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”) I’ve been back a week or…
- 0414 October 2019As I set off to do a series of readings in bookstores of Without Her, in Miami and Key West and in San Francisco and Berkeley, I’m thinking about the difference that writers experience between the private and the public in a writing life.…
- 0314 September 2019Having been grounded by a fall from a horse in Dorset (not the horse’s fault – entirely my own) and landed flat on my back, I’ve had time to think about my early writing life, and the publication of my first book “A Day To Remember To…
- 0214 August 2019I’m writing now from Dorset where my family have been coming for nearly every summer since World War 2 – so I’m back again in my original home, and loving every minute of it. The hotel in the photograph here, called Knoll House, is one I…
- 0114 July 2019I hope to send out a note, or longer, every 14th of the month – my birthday happening to fall on a 14th of the month, and it’s around the Ides on the Roman calendar (see JULIUS CAESAR!) Oh, and it’s Bastille Day this month too, and I’m…
Unnumbered
Letters Ros sent outside the numbered sequence.
Newer writing
Ros on Substack
The letters above are the long correspondence. Substack is a separate home for newer essays, poems and observations as the writing develops.
Issues numbered 1 to 89, preserved as Ros wrote them.