Notes on a Writing Life / 85

May 14 2026

Dear all,

I 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 plans that have been taking shape over the year are about to come to fruition.  It feels like a significant moment – a threshold.  People are coming from the US, England, France and Australia, coming out of the chaos and noise of the world as it is at present into an ancient city, a quieter place.  No doubt when the Romans were here building their indestructible monuments, there was noise and chaos in Arles; certainly, these have always been a part of history, of which conquests, marauding armies and the careless destruction of lives have always been a part.

Will we humans ever change?  At least, for a week, we hope that the retreat will give us all a new vision to carry forward, a quietness at the heart and creative insights coming from that place.  Some of our participants are my oldest friends; others are new friends, or about-to-be new friends. We are writers, musicians, artists, film-makers.  We are coming together with a purpose – not just to retreat, but to forge new bonds and new ideas, to take our passions and creative abilities further, to listen to what our senses, honed over the millennia we have been on this planet, are telling us.  To listen to the sounds of nature, to watch the passage of light across the sky and the movements of people in the streets and birds over salt marshes, to taste new foods and smell the plants that grow here, to sharpen our senses and remind ourselves that we humans began life as small sentient beings, feeling and smelling and tasting our way into the world. And, to translate new experience into language, as freshly and accurately as we can.

My first morning in Arles, I walked through the market just outside the gates of the town, looking and tasting, accepting all the morsels offered to me to try: melon from Morocco, orange segments from Spain, Provencal olives and almonds, the unmistakeable taste of North Africa in pastilla, sweetness, pastry and meat.  The lemons as big as babies’ heads, the cascades of oranges, new little apricots, the mixture of France, Spain and Morocco that you find in southern French markets: a feast for the nose, eyes and tongue, a taste of the sharp, spicy, sweet and sour such as you never find in the US, at least not in South Florida, where I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sense of taste, as everything I bought seemed to taste of nothing. ( I have to add that I am missing out on mango season now, and that the avocados from my neighbors’ tree have fed us for more than half a year. Fresh-grown things taste good everywhere.)

About the retreat: I think of the French motto “reculer pour mieux sauter” (literally, retreat in order to jump better).  We will be drawing in, in order to go out again, drawing back in order to ‘jump’ back into the world we live in daily.  Finding, tasting, looking, listening, digesting, changing ourselves just a bit along the way; hoping that what we find informs not just our own continuing lives, but those we touch as we pass.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 84

April 14th 2026

Dear All,

Sometimes, 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 its watch and leaving for good.

At this time in Key West, as the blossom gradually fades on the trees and small fruit, cherry-sized mangoes, papaya, bananas, even tiny avocados begin to appear, the season changes and many people leave Key West like the migrating birds, to fly north to their cooler homes. There’s a flurry of departure in the air. Last minute meetings, lunches, dinners are hastily arranged, before the big migration. The streets are already emptier, though the tramp of tourists with drinks in their hands, up and down Duval Street never ends.  It’s spring, and there’s spring-cleaning to do, and an urge to de-clutter, scale down, throw out, make space.  Our houses need refurbishing – our lives, too.

One remedy to too much distraction from writing is the long-standing meeting of three of us fiction writers at our studios.  We meet to read our latest work, discuss plot development, points of view  – and yes, eat and drink together too – on Wednesday nights when we are all in town. To read part of a new manuscript aloud to two other writers is to bring it to life in a new way.  The words, said aloud, have a different heft.  We hear excesses, erase, make notes to polish or simply cut.  Since we each know the stories of our new novels, we can discuss characters as if they are old friends. Would he/she really do that? Think that? Say it that way? I hear my friends talk about my characters and realize that for them, as well as for me, they are alive. They matter. They have lives on and off the page. So, my writer friends offer me a critique that isn’t just criticism, but a thoughtful evaluation of what I have written and of the people I have brought into the room with me – my characters. And I hope to do the same for them.  It’s a very kind and creative way of nurturing another writer’s vision.

Last week, one of us read a piece written from a male character’s point of view – you could call him the antagonist. It’s a new endeavor for her, in a novel that hitherto had been completely told through the woman protagonist’s eyes. Suddenly the man in the story came to life. He had a life of his own, he had agency – he wasn’t just the projection of someone else’s feelings. This hitherto unlikeable character now had a life that was not limited to the page.  We understood him, liked him more – because he had become real, vulnerable in a new way, flawed and human.

I thought: this is what fiction is for. It’s for understanding the other, not just examining ourselves or people like us. It’s for extending our empathy, walking a mile in another’s shoes.  Imagining another’s life. The writer John Berger once said “There can never again be a single story.”  Every story involves more than one person; we are multiple beings, and we operate in a connected world.  Memoir is one person’s story; but I become more and more convinced that the first person – the “I” as I called it when young – risks a dangerous sort of myopia. I want the fiction of the present moment to be inclusive, democratic, as diverse as possible, and as compassionate.  A great example of this is “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai, which should in my opinion have won last year’s Booker Prize.  Do read it, and see.

Meanwhile, our plans for the “Coming to our Senses” retreat in Arles are in place, excursions organized, rooms awaiting the seven creative people who have signed up to come, meals ordered – everything the three of us who imagined this event into being just under a year ago hoped for. We will be focusing on using our senses, feeling our way, and writing from that basic human ability to appreciate and learn from the world around us.  Seeing, listening, tasting, smelling, letting in atmosphere, weather, all that has informed us as an evolving species over millennia; connecting with each other in significant ways.  I think back to the original meeting Nadine, David and I had in Paris last June, when Nadine suggested the whole idea of this event – and I smile. It’s happening in a month’s time, May 16th, and we have so nearly brought it to vibrant life!  What you can imagine can take on a life of its own, and not only in fiction.

Go well, whether you travel or stay at home –

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 83

March 14, 2026

Dear All,

I woke up with lines from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in my head:

    Soothsayer: “Beware the Ides of March.”
           ………….

     Caesar: “The Ides of March are come.”

      Soothsayer: “Aye, Caesar, but not gone.”

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.

As does Cassius’ comment about Caesar, “Man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

Well, we’ll see. It seems to be all that can be said at this moment. The ides of March are mid-March i.e. now.

A young friend came to tea yesterday – she’s an English teacher at the Catholic school here in Key West and she’s teaching “Much Ado About Nothing” to 17-year-olds, who of course, want to discuss love and blindness, reality and illusion. She tells them to persevere with the language they find difficult as 21st-century Americans, because the story is always worth the effort and is always about Now.

And “Julius Caesar” is mostly about over-weening arrogance and its downfall. When I was eleven and saw the film, with John Gielgud and James Mason as Cassius and Brutus, the chief conspirators, and Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, I was already in love with the power of the language. We leapt about all that summer brandishing dustbin lids (garbage bin covers – but they were metal and clashed nicely in duels) and uttering pseudo-Shakespearian oaths.

The older I get, the more I love and respect Shakespeare, and the happier I am that I was named after Rosalind in the forest of Arden. We knew he mattered, of course, as we were told so at school, and you can’t grow up in England without being immersed in him – or you couldn’t then. But now I’m stunned and moved all over again at the freshness, the exactness of language, the insight and wit. The sheer humanness. We need it.

My friend the sculptor John Martini had an opening to his new show last night, called “Wild Kingdom,” and told me that he’s created all his hefty metal sculptures since January – which is why we haven’t seen much of him. Many of the pieces – and his drawings and prints – feature houses set on fire, animals and trees with flames shooting out of them. The drawn faces on the wall show shock and numbness. John shows in the US and in France. His partner, Carol Munder, is my favorite photographer of mysterious objects.

Another treat last week was a five-man band of Cuban musicians, “Cortadito,” who played at the Studios of Key West; they were like the younger brothers, or sons of the Buena Vista Social Club. It was impossible not to dance to them and soon everyone was leaping in the aisles to that inimitable Cuban rhythm, throwing off anxiety and all thoughts of anything else but the music. We so need a world in which art, music, theatre and literature thrive – and in the face of a total ban on any funding for the arts in the State of Florida, Key West is doing well.

(And my studio mate, Jessica, left a rose on my desk the other day…)

Meanwhile, our plans for the Coming To Our Senses retreat in Arles in May are close to fruition and I’m so much looking forward to the week of immersing ourselves in the beauty of that place, with the wonderful group of people who are joining us. We still have a couple of places open and it’s not too late to sign up.

So, let’s dance, sing, make art, talk about Shakespeare, and get safely through the Ides of March!

Affectionately,
Ros

Notes On a Writing Life / 82

February 14 2026

Dear All,

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Last 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 the events and attention given to the male writers who spent time here – Hemingway, Dos Passos, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost – who all have weeks, or festivals, or buildings named after them.  Until recently, Elizabeth Bishop’s house on White Street was only identifiable by a small plaque on the gate that said “Should we have stayed at home – wherever that may be?” A sentiment that many travelers may have had, arriving in strange and uncomfortable destinations. I sometimes wish that tourists would realize it might be a good idea…

   These days, since the KW Literary Seminar managed to buy the house a couple of years ago, and it has been restored to a recognizable version of the poet’s house in the 1940’s, albeit with modern conveniences and a beautifully landscaped back yard, it looks very different from the ramshackle place I walked past for 25 years or more.  After worrying about what would become of the house, everyone in the literary community here is thrilled that it’s now open, restored to its former elegance, and usable for events.

     I’m delighted to have been asked to lead a poetry workshop there on the weekend of February 20-22 – the first workshop to be held in the house, although there have been readings there, and during the Seminar in January it hosted a great party on the last night, on a fine tropical evening.  It’s to be a time and place to write new poems – a ‘generative’ workshop on the lines of the ones I attended, here and at Omega in upstate New York, with Sharon Olds, 20 or so years ago.  Sharon opened the gates for me into a new sort of poetry, one of exuberance, freedom and as she said “going over the page,” i.e. writing at length if you want to. (I’d been living in Scotland, where we thought at the time that poems should be as concise as possible.)  Many of the poems I subsequently published were born in these workshops. The week-long get-together in Omega in 1998 was especially enthralling, as we gathered day after day to hear each other’s new first drafts, ran off to work on them, and enjoyed Sharon’s unlimited enthusiasm.

    I’m not Sharon Olds, of course – but I learned from her a way of conjuring poems out of the backs of our minds and the crannies of our experience, and recognizing that anything and everything can be poetry.  I’m looking forward now to a weekend of new poems, of pushing back boundaries and listening well to each other as we do so.

    Poetry matters – I heard it over and over at the reading we did on February 8, hearing Bishop’s voice.  I reread from time to time the letter she and Robert Lowell exchanged, noticing their care for each other’s work as well as their long friendship. Poetry knits the world together where it has been torn apart – and it’s always the voice of freedom where un-freedom encroaches.

Our retreat in Arles in May is also forming beautifully, and we still have a couple of spaces. It’s not too late to sign up at comingtooursensesretreat.com

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 81

January 14 2026

Dear all,

I 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.  The title was “Pay Attention!” and the subtitle “The long form in a time of short attention.” Do we have enough free attention to read long novels – or any novels at all?

Few of the speakers paid any attention to the topic, but we were given plenty of food for thought.  Colm Toibìn spoke of the tension needed for a novel to succeed – bovine happiness or married bliss will not work – and of the sort of attention to detail that Tolstoy gives us in ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘War and Peace’ so that these scenes stay in our minds forever.  He quoted Levin’s emotion in the former at the moment when his baby sneezes, and Levin is seized with fear for his child. I thought of his description of a baby’s wrists as ‘as if tied tightly with a cotton thread.’  Tolstoy is as good on babies (he had a lot of them) as he is on soldiers at war – Nikolai Rostov riding into battle without having a clue what’s going on.

Pay attention!  It was the over-riding command I heard from teachers at my boarding school. I even remember what it was in German.  We were always being told to do just that. Nobody seemed to realize that young people will pay fierce attention to what they are really interested in – and it’s rarely German strong verbs.

And now, what do we pay attention to? The news? Gossip and rumors? Outright lies? It was a relief to listen to an excellent panel on the works and life of James Baldwin. To hear Gary Shteyngart tell us about his new novel ‘Vera’ which means ‘faith’ in Russian, and that his ten-year-old heroine channels his own anxieties about how our children and grandchildren will grow up.  “The future is next Tuesday” was a statement of his I won’t forget; the present passes in a heartbeat these days, and is gone.

A protest was called, last-minute across America, to demonstrate against the killing of a young mother, Renée Good, in Minneapolis.  So, some of us left the Seminar to go and wave signs on the highway and listen to some good, brave speeches.  Such is life, these days – and death.

And then there were the Golden Globes awards that night, and Jesse Buckley winning best actor  for her incredible performance in ‘Hamnet.’  It was hard to remind oneself while watching that film that she was not really giving birth, and impossible not to remember what that feels like.  Art, writing, theatre and film rescue us from our own limitations, point us where we need to go, connect us with one another in experience.  All mothers watching that scene must have been writhing in sympathy.  The last scene of the film, the first scene in ‘Hamlet’ - Hamlet’s father’s ghost appearing onstage at the Globe, played by Paul Mescal, who plays Shakespeare - was what finally had me in tears; it was the moment when the ghost reaches hopelessly for his lost, living son.  Our ghost parents miss us.  It wasn’t all about revenge, after all.

Finally, a reminder that we still have a few places left at our retreat in Arles, in May.  It’s all coming together, the places are booked, some wonderful people will join us there.  So, if you are at all tempted, get in touch at Comingtooursensesretreat.com   And, we’ll come to our senses together, for that week at least. As for the future, who knows – but we’ll get a lead on it and strengthen our resistance to everything that is telling us that our attention can be deflected from what matters most.

Be safe, be well – affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 80

December 14 2025

Dear All,

As 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 profound and disturbing that we’d not been able to imagine them.  January 20 began an era of what felt like a series of electric shocks, and they continued during the first 100 days of the new regime here.

Personally and collectively, we felt knocked sideways – alarmed, ashamed and helpless. I’m glad to say that since then, we have picked ourselves up somewhat, protested en masse, witnessed acts of extraordinary courage by individual people, supported each other in the best ways we could.  It hasn’t been enough, of course, but it’s ongoing.  I have gained support and encouragement from many: in the media, Rebecca Solnit, Dan Rather, Heather Cox Richardson, the astrologer Pam Gregory - people I have never met but read regularly and who give me not exactly comfort, but reasons to hope.  Hope, as Rebecca Solnit has said, is not a feeling but an attitude.

I left the US in June, glad to be able to take time out in Europe and England.  As the plane rose out of Atlanta airport heading for Paris, I felt relief to be airborne.  My time in Paris was restorative; I wrote, saw friends, walked in parks, went to films, sat in cafes – and read e-mails from those who were still in the US, where ICE was ramping up its attacks on immigrants and fear walked the streets of cities, including my own. People in Europe asked me – will you go back? I wasn’t at all sure. My own country, even though in a political mess too, called to me. I spent weeks alone in Dorset, walking, thinking, writing a bit, swimming, at home in a way that I am really not anywhere else; it’s the place of my childhood.  I visited friends in Deal, in London, in Oxford.  I have a UK passport, I could return; they assured me, welcomed me, made suggestions. I spent time with my adult children, and spent a happy week with my brother’s family in our loved place in Dorset. I went to Amsterdam and stayed for peaceful days with my niece and her little family there. I went back to Paris. I felt loved, accepted, supported, everywhere I went. It was a time of grace.

I’m so grateful for this loving support from you all on that side of the pond; you know who you are.

At last, I left London in September on a flight back to the US, uncertain of what I might find, uncertain of my own ability to be here. My husband met me at the airport in Key West and drove me home through the streets of this town where we have lived for 30 years now, my home port as he once called it. And I found I was at home here, too.  I met friends on the street, saw my neighbors, settled back into my studio, went to swim in the ocean, and after a week or two of adjustment, realized that I can be at home both here and there, and that wherever I am, I can be wholly present. Whatever is going on, it’s not going to throw me off course for long. In Key West, we say – we don’t run from storms, we prepare for them.

I’ve been re-reading Pico Iyer’s book “Aflame” about his visits to a Californian monastery, choosing times of silence in the midst of a busy, travelling life. He says that the point of those times alone and with monks is to be able to go back into the world, changed. It’s not, for him, to be permanently monastic, but to balance out a busy life.  I feel that my time alone in Paris and in England, and my connections with all the loved people on that side of the Atlantic, gave me the ability to come back, and be here, and face along with my fellows, Americans, immigrants like myself, what this country is going through after 250 years as a nation.

Day by day, hour by hour, we choose our point of view.  I’m choosing hope – not exactly optimism, but the hope that believes in an underlying sanity in this universe. It’s a daily discipline, much like Pico’s choice of daily choosing silence, in order to take the quiet fire of it into the outside world.

Affectionately, and bon courage - Ros

PS.  While I was in France, I met up with Nadine Pinède and David Rothenberg and one evening in Paris we hatched a delicious plan, for a retreat in Arles for May 2026.  Here’s the website address:  comingtooursensesretreat.com

While I was in England I signed a contract with Jaynie Royal at Regal House, NC, for my new novel, “Indigo Sky At Noon”, to be published in 2027.  Michael Walmer in Shetland has also brought out a new edition, 50 years on from its first appearance, of my short story collection “No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.”

Sometimes the writing life appears to have its own quiet momentum, running like the underground river Bièvre under the streets of Paris…even if the writer herself may feel that she has gone astray.

Notes on a Writing Life / 79

November 14 2025

Dear All,

I 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” I am now reading, says that a memoir of a writer’s life is bound to be boring, as it will be “I wrote a book. Then I wrote another book. Then, another. And another…”  But as her own new book shows, it’s the bits in between that are interesting – i.e. the life of the person who’s doing the writing.  But that could be boring, too, unless the writer has an unusually interesting life – which they don’t, because they are spending their time sitting at a desk…  A conundrum.

Anyway, this week I received a letter from Canada from a woman I don’t know, but who knows I’m here and was a friend of Marie-Claire Blais.  It’s a first-day envelope with a picture Marie-Claire on the front, a stamp with a photo of her when young, and a quote from her on the back in French and English.  “On écrit parce qu’on a une vision du monde et on veut le partager avec le plus de monde possible. Il y a ce besoin de communiquer et de décrire l’univers.” “We write because we have a vision of the world and we want to share it with as many people as possible.  There is this need to communicate and to describe the universe.” Canadians do everything twice, once in each language.

It shows me too how Canadians treat their prized female authors – Margaret Atwood has already had a stamp with her on it.  Not like here, in the US, where stamps have to be sporty, or animals, or patriotic, or show men doing things.  In England, we finally got around to Jane Austen’s picture on a bank note, 200 years after her death.

So, what do writers do when they are not writing?  Answer: sit around talking to friends, drink, eat, travel, try to pay the bills, fall in love, have kids or not, and occasionally try to sort out the world, which in some places lands them in jail.

We also exhort other people to write.  And this brings me to further news of our Retreat in Arles, coming up this summer, called “Coming To Our Senses.”  I’m so much looking forward to hanging out with the extraordinarily nice people who have signed up so far.  We will be attempted to “write our senses” – describe the universe, as Marie-Claire says, but in a particular and very focused way.  We will start by going and listening to birds.  How do you describe birdsong?  Then, having meals. How write of taste, and sensation?  Do you resort to metaphors – “this wine tastes of old leather shoes and blackcurrant with a dash of sea spray” or simply cop out, like Shelley in his “To a Skylark?”  “Hail to thee, blithe spirit/bird thou never wert” has always seemed to me a feeble way of describing a bird.  “Bird thou wert” would be more honest – but I imagine he simply had to abstract the poor bird and make it into something other-worldly.  We won’t be doing much of the other-worldly – rather looking closely, listening closely, tasting carefully, paying attention to the actual world, the world of Arles, France, and its surroundings in May 2026, and the world of our own sensations.

I hope I have convinced you to think of coming to join us. It’s going to be enormous fun.  I’ll end with a quote from Shelley’s friend Keats, in his “Ode to a Nightingale” where he moves on to the wine tasting part: “O for a beaker full of the warm South/ full of the true, the blissful Hippocrene/with beaded bubbles winking at the brim…”  Here’s to it.  Santé.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 78

October 14 2025

Dear All,

The 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 skin, the shape of clouds, the color of the ocean, darkness at morning and evening, and the sweep and brilliance of sunsets. Living here makes you aware, not of a dramatic change but a subtle one, a shift of emphasis, a taste of newness.

With the fall here, so close to the equator that sometimes even the trees get confused about when to flower, my thoughts turn to spring in Provence and our Coming To Our Senses retreat in Arles, next May. Some of you will have received news of it already, and several people have signed up, so I’m delighted to think that we will be there from May 16 to 23, in the city to which Van Gogh came to live the last years of his life. Light matters to painters; it mattered especially to the Impressionists and those who painted out of doors, en plein air, like Cézanne and Van Gogh. Artists have always gathered where the light is. For Van Gogh, it was transformative; you only have to look at his early paintings of gleaners and potato pickers on winter days in the Netherlands and then his paintings in the South of France to see that.

Light is also what draws people to Key West. Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell, “When somebody says ‘beautiful’ about Key West, you really should take it with a grain of salt... the ‘beauty’ is just the light, or something equally perverse.” Perverse or not, the effects of the light remain.

Leonard Cohen sang, “There’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” We crave the light, and we know it comes and goes. Primitive peoples waited in tension through the winter to see if the light would return. When you arrive in Provence, the light seems to crack you open a little bit; when you arrive in Key West, especially in winter, the clarity of the light gives us the deep blue of the sky, the brilliance of flowers, the color of the water.

And I notice, belatedly, that I write about it all the time. (Light Over Islands, Indigo Sky at Noon.) It’s probably why I came to live here.

The information about the Arles retreat went out to many of you a day or two ago, with instructions about how to sign up and join us if the spirit moves you, so I won’t repeat it all here. But here is our website, with all the details about us, about the place, about the event: www.comingtooursensesretreat.com

I do hope some of you will be able to join us and experience, as well as the early summer light of Provence, the joy of listening to birdsong, celebrating our senses, writing what we see, hear, and feel.

Affectionately,
Ros

P.S. My 50-year-old collection of short stories No Such Thing As A Free Lunch is now available from Michael Walmer, Sandness Press, Little Pradies, 13a Melby, Sandness, Shetland ZE2 9PL; through UK bookshops, Ingram in the US, and Amazon, reprinted with an introduction by the novelist A.L. Kennedy.

Notes on a Writing Life / 77

September 14 2025

Dear All,

I 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, then clearing the table to have dinner with friends. Now, these years later, I’m packing it all up, preparing to sell.  In between, books and poems, dinners and lunches, meetings with new and old friends, family visits, and most importantly, time alone.  The place fits me like a glove, as someone once said, creating a useful cliché in the days when everyone wore gloves. And now I’m peeling it off, or peeling myself off: I’m sending packages, taking piles of books to give to the local library, sorting CD’s, emptying cupboards and closets.  I’ve done this before in life, emptied my own house in Edinburgh, helped to empty my mother’s house after her death, and here I am doing it again. It’s never easy, for someone who likes to create an ambiance, rather than take one apart. Nostalgia can stop me in my tracks. Rereading everyone’s entries in the visitors’ book we’ve kept for friends who have come here. Remembering that restaurant, that exhibition, the time the vacuum cleaner broke, the noise the old washer used to make; the men in the courtyard down below who used to take sausages and cheese out at 8 am with a trundling sound, to drive it all over Paris. The way the poplar in the courtyard has grown.  The geraniums in the window box and how I’m always exhorting people to water them.  The view of the Paris sky over the rooftops at dawn, the water running down gutters, the clang of the downstairs door.  Memories crowd in, and it feels hard. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem about loss “The art of losing isn’t hard to master…”  I think, yes it is, and know that she felt that too.

Then a friend reminds me that behind every loss, there is something new waiting.  Sadness is only half the story; you let go, and happiness of a different sort may come, another point of view, another place, another opportunity.  A poet friend gave me his new book of poems this week, “Un Pas De Coté” – a step aside – and in it I find his theme, that one step to the side can give you a new view, shed a new light, make you notice something you haven’t seen before, glimpse a way through.

Emptying out – a suitable activity perhaps for this time of life.  (How many of us dread the idea that someone younger will find after our death, a meaningless pile of clutter?)  I play Rachmaninov at full volume and cry as I work; then I laugh at the drama, and move on.  The sky of September is blue and wild with white puffy clouds that scoot before the wind, and the leaves are beginning to fall, and chestnuts litter the pavements.  The markets are full of mushrooms and nuts and carts full of different sorts of apples. I love it all, and yet am leaving it. I’ll be back – but not here, not in this place where so much life has been lived, where I have been so consistently happy. I’ll be a visitor, not a semi-resident.  Change happens, and more change. The moon eclipsed last week, after turning red above the street, I’ll be back in the US next week, and as another French friend wrote: “quant à l'avenir – qui sait?”  Who knows what the future will bring?

 Meanwhile, our plans for the Coming to Our Senses Retreat in Arles, May 16–23, 2026, are moving ahead, and we’re putting the final touches in place. I’ll be joined by David Rothenberg and Nadine Pinede for a week of deep listening, mindful reconnection, and creative renewal. You can sign up on our landing page now to be added to the list, and we’ll be updating the site soon with full registration and details: comingtooursensesretreat.com

It’s going to be such a treat, and I’m looking forward to it already.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 76

August 14 2025

Dear All,

I 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 on two occasions; in 2010 with my brother and sister-in-law and friends going from Astorga in northern Spain to Santiago, and in 2018 with another brother, taking the way from Le Puy to Conques, in France.  Last year, I led a writing retreat close to the Camino, at Flores del Camino, and walked some of the way together with the group.  So, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela has been in my life, on and off, for some time.

One of the traditional starting-points for the pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was Arles, in southern France.  So, it seems a fitting place for another ‘retreat’ which will take place in May of next year, 2026.  Our idea of a retreat based on “Coming to Our Senses” may resonate in more ways than one; it’s about paying attention to what our five – or more – senses tell us: hearing, feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting, about general awareness to our sensual selves and the place on the planet where we find ourselves, as well as about place, memory, history.  David, Nadine and I met in France earlier this year, and decided that a retreat using our shared talents, in a beautiful, historically fascinating place rich in birdsong (see below) might be just what the doctor ordered for many of us in this time of complicated and stressful events.  (I’m particularly fascinated by David Rothenberg’s approach to birdsong and music; only recently did I discover that my gloom about there being no more dawn chorus these days was connected to my own hearing loss and need for good hearing aids!)

After the 6-day retreat, there will also be an opportunity for people to walk out of Arles on the Camino – individual bookings in advance – with b&bs along the way.

Here are some of the details.  Our web page will be available shortly.

COMING TO OUR SENSES
A retreat for deep listening, mindful reconnection, and creative renewal

May 16-24, 2026 | Arles, France
10 participants · 3 guides · 8 days

“The world is full of music, and all we have to do is stop and listen.”
— David Rothenberg, Grammy-award winning musician, author, and philosopher

Slow down. Pay Attention. Everything is Connected.

In the flowering warmth of May, Coming to Our Senses invites you to step out of noise and into resonance. This intimate retreat in Provence is a sensorial journey back to the natural world—and back to yourself.

Experience the magic of dawn birdsong with interspecies musician David Rothenberg, author Why Birds Sing. Visit a glorious bird sanctuary in the Camargue and its languorous beaches at Ste Marie de la Mer. Listen to the secret sounds of ponds and the primeval rhythm of cicadas. Learn to use all your senses to write about place. Discover what made Arles a muse to Van Gogh and others, and why it still inspires creatives around the world

For six days, we gather as travelers, seekers, and creatives to attune to the wisdom of birdsong, water, place, and the body’s quiet knowing. Through guided soundwalks, generative writing, and embodied practices, we remember what it means to use all our senses to reconnect with the natural world.

This is not a retreat of escape. It’s a retreat of return.

THE EXPERIENCE
Led by a small team of renowned creatives, Coming to Our Senses weaves sound, writing,
visual awareness, history, and place into a living experience of presence.

Deep Listening & Soundwalks with David Rothenberg
  Explore silence, vibration, and wild soundscapes with award-winning musician,
author & philosopher of nature.

Writing in Place with Rosalind Brackenbury
Craft and uncover stories of place, memory, and belonging with award-winning novelist
and writing guide. Be inspired by Arles as a starting point for the Camino de Santiago.

Arles as Creative Muse with Nadine Pinede
  Discover Arles as muse for Vincent Van Gogh and his deep connection to the natural world.
Nurture your own resilience in the face of life challenges with inner compassion,
delight, rewilding, and poetry.

Shared Meals & curated excursions: Slow food, local flavors, and a rhythm that honors rest and reconnection.

Les bureaux d'Actes Sud, à Arles. © Gérard Julien / AFP

Special outings, such as:
* Savor a private meal with France’s former Culture Minister and founder of an innovative school that centers learning through the natural world
* Tour France’s celebrated publishing house and bookstore Actes Sud, with the editor of their imprint dedicated to books on nature
* Visit a unique bird sanctuary and the unspoiled beaches of the Camargue
* Enjoy a private screening of Nightingales in Berlin, followed by a talk with its subject, David Rothenberg
* Tour the Frank Gehry designed LUMA tower and art complex
* Take in the exhibits at the Fondation Van Gogh

WHO THIS IS FOR
Those who wonder why birds sing, and why they sing together at dawn. Those who long to turn down the volume and slow down the pace of their lives by reconnecting to the ancient rhythms of the natural world.

We welcome curious, sensitive souls, including solo travelers, educators, artists, and seekers—ready to slow down and rediscover their senses. You do not need to be a writer or musician—only willing to listen deeply, look intelligently, be open to new sensations, and show up as you are.

This retreat will be limited to 10 participants.

WHO WE ARE
David Rothenberg is known for his work playing live with birds, whales, bugs, and ponds, performing concerts with these more-than-human musicians, teaching, and writing books about it, like Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, and Survival of the Beautiful. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House  and Lost Steps. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, and Suzanne Vega. In 2024 he won a Grammy Award as part of For the Birds, in the category of Best Boxed Set. Whale Music and Secret Sounds of Ponds are his latest books. Rothenberg has been teaching this kind of thing for more than three decades, to musicians and non-musicians alike.

Nadine Pinede is a lover of nature, the arts, slow food—and lavender. She writes prose and poetry for curious readers of all ages. Her books include an upcoming anthology of Black poets and nature, When the Mapou Sings, An Invisible Geography, and several nonfiction books for children. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times and CNN.com, her fiction in Haiti Noir and her poetry on National Public Radio. Nadine teaches creative writing for the Miami Book Fair and the Highlights Foundation and leads a series on Self-compassion for Creatives for the Writing Barn. She is the first Rhodes scholar of Haitian descent and has worked with environmental activists throughout Haiti and Latin America. Her recent diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome inspired her to create “Coming to Our Senses.”

Rosalind Brackenbury has published poetry, novels and non-fiction and has taught Creative Writing workshops in the UK, the US and Australia.  She was Writing Fellow in 2007 and 2012 at the College of William and Mary, VA, and was Key West’s Poet Laureate in 2015-2017.  She currently teaches creativity classes based on Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way at the Studios of Key West, as well as generative poetry and fiction workshops.  She bases her classes and workshops on the belief that every student can and will find their way to their own creative processes.  In June, 2024 she taught “Writing in Place”, at the Flores Retreat Center, on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Her new novel “Indigo Sky At Noon,” a mystery/love story set in Provence, has just been accepted for publication in 2027 by Regal House Press, NC.

Van Gogh painted Café Terrace at Night in Arles, France, in mid-September 1888.

WHY ARLES?

The magnificent light drew Van Gogh and other pilgrims. In fact, Arles holds a special place in the story of pilgrimage. It’s one of the four traditional starting points in France for the Camino de Santiago, and it’s known as the Via Tolosana. Pilgrims have set out from Arles for centuries, passing through Toulouse and crossing the Pyrenees into Spain to join the Camino Frances.  The city itself was a vital Roman and medieval crossroads, offering hospitality and spiritual grounding for travelers. To gather for a retreat in Arles is to step on to ancient pilgrim ground - a threshold where a sacred journey of return begins.

I would love to see some of you, the patient readers of this newsletter, in person, in Arles next year…

Affectionately, Ros

Full details and pricing coming soon. If you can already feel “Coming To Our Senses” calling to you, please email me directly at rozbrackenbury@icloud.com to be placed at the top of the interest list.

Notes on a Writing Life / A Forgotten Book Returns

A Forgotten Book Returns

Friends, I’m so happy to share this beautiful revival of No Such Thing as a Free Lunch — a long-lost short story collection by Rosalind Brackenbury, originally published in the 1970s with whimsical illustrations by her then-husband, Michael Brackenbury.

Thanks to the small press magic of Michael Walmer and a glowing new introduction by Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy, this vibrant, fearless little book has come back to life — and even made its way into Waterstones’ summer promotion list!

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In the early 1970’s when my children were young and I was relatively young too and in between publishers, I decided to try and publish a collection of short stories.  My then husband, Michael Brackenbury, drew the pictures.  We did it for fun, and it was fun. A small press in Leicester, England, picked it up. The printer made a fuss about working on it as one of the pictures was what is now called “graphic” – well, of course it was graphic, it was a drawing.  It was not any more shocking than anything Aubrey Beardsley might have drawn at the turn of the century. And hey, this was the 70’s.

So this comes with a warning – explicit content, beware!

The energetic and resourceful publisher of forgotten books, Michael Walmer, has re-published this little book, and the Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy, whose most recent novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, was published last year, wrote an introduction which makes me grateful to her forever.  The quotes below are from her:

“In a way, a reissue of No Such Thing As A Free Lunch is entirely apposite. The booklet appeared in 1975. In the UK economic disparity between rich and poor was hovering around its lowest point in our history. And here we may pause to consider the 70’s as a culturally vibrant decade for Britain – not just when it came to music, fashion, film and visual art – and reaching out to Europe. This was a decade of easy booklet publications, underground editions and a diverse publishing landscape stretching from indy magazines, to established literary houses making their way, if not making millions.”

“…Brackenbury’s prose and imagination are generous. They constantly beckon – come and see, come and taste, come and say, come and feel, come and be. The sheer livingness of life is everywhere – in plants, objects, landscapes and animals, in the wild futures people run towards, or amputate before they become too overwhelming.”

“Brackenbury understands that light that prose can give in dismal times, she writes of the comfort in having a hand to hold in the dark. This little collection is a light to follow and hand to hold. I’m so glad it’s back in circulation, here for all of us.”   A. L. Kennedy 2024

Now, Waterstones in the UK has included our book in its list of summer “promotions” and the links to buy it are below. The original copies of this rare book have mostly disappeared – I do not even have a copy – so it’s an opportunity to seize. The offer for this promotion begins on July 28 and runs for just a few days.  Of course, you can buy it after that but it will cost you more!

With my heartfelt thanks to Michael Walmer for his beautiful recreation of a lost work, and to A.L. Kennedy for her glowing introduction of it to the world of 2025, that I simply could not have imagined back in the 1970’s. My stories, and Mike’s illustrations are, as she says, from a more innocent and optimistic time. But I don’t have to blow my own trumpet here, as she has done it for me.

Thanks for reading.

Click on coupon below …

Notes on a Writing Life / 75

July 14 2025

Dear All,

July 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.  Liberty, equality, fraternity – it was all a far cry from the old regime.  Dare we hope that a similar act of courage and decisiveness could take place in our time, setting prisoners free?

Lately, I have become obsessed with trees.  At a time of stress in the world and unusual heat, they cool us down, offer us a long-term vision.  It takes time, for a tree to grow and become mature; they will not be hurried. As a young person, I climbed them, made tree-houses in them and hid from adults in their leafy branches. Trees were ships at sea, castles, hide-outs, look-outs, refuges from the world.  They had personalities and qualities, and as I spent hours in them, I got to know them well – the sycamore, the copper beech, the vast cedar, the rhododendron, they were my familiar haunts.

My tree-climbing days are long gone, but trees figure in life now in a different way – they are our heritage as surely as books and writing, our connection with the past and our ability to survive in the future.  In the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, I went sit once again with my spine pressed against the vast solidity of the cedar that Jussieu planted in the mid-18th century.  In Oxford, where I am at present, I walk early in the University Parks from tree to tree, grateful to the long-dead people who planted them, enjoying their gift of deep shade in a blazing hot summer.  In Key West, where we need deep shade more than ever, ancient mahoganies are felled because they are ‘unsafe’, I mourn for them and feel the extra heat of the sun generated by their absence.

There is a contest being run here at present in the UK by the Wildlife Society, to find Britain’s most venerable tree.  Judi Dench has pointed out that some trees existed before Shakespeare wrote.  There is the cedar that the Beatles sat in, and the vast oak at Sissinghurst that figures in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.  Trees matter – they always have – but now, in these times of climate crisis, they save our day, shelter and protect, make our public places livable.  We need them as never before.

As a child, I loved not only trees, but stationery cupboards.  At our small school in the 1950’s, the stationery cupboard was in a room called the Green Room, which you entered from behind the blackboard.  Here was a treasure trove, a stack of pristine untouched exercise books, and the sight and smell of them gave me untold excitement.  To be allowed to take a new book and open it, to write my name on the page, was a particular, almost erotic pleasure.  I still feel much the same way about clean paper – and knowing that it comes from trees, am grateful in retrospect, for them giving up their material essence, that we may write books that people can hold in their hands.

The connection between trees and writing is of course, our material, paper.  We writers know that we use trees; but we can, happily, recycle paper and re-use it.  I’m glad that my contract with a new editor, Jaynie Royal at Regal House Press, includes a clause on the press’s consciousness about the use of paper, and climate change in general.  And that leads me – I got here by a roundabout route – to announcing that my new novel Indigo Sky At Noon, has just now found a home with this very forward-looking and innovative small publishing house in North Carolina.

Go well, stay cool,

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 74

June 14 2025

Dear All,

After 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 ancient stone building with walls thick enough to keep it cool except in a prolongued ‘canicule’ or heatwave.  (Remember when we used to have ‘heatwaves’?  Now it’s just heat.)

On Saturday, when this post will go out, there is to be a demonstration organized by Americans in the Place de la Bastille, where on July 14 in 1789 the infamous prison of the Bastille was stormed and opened up by revolutionaries.  It’s also the day slated for a military parade in Washington DC.  Who needs a military parade right now? Or ever, come to think of it.

By 1783, six years before the original Bastille Day in France, the American revolution was concluded.  The new country was rid of an autocratic and mentally deranged King, George III, known as Mad King George, who attempted to keep his grip on the colony that was then under English control ( in case there is anyone who doesn’t remember this) and it was so successful that it lasted for 250 years. Enough said?

On arriving in Paris, I felt I could take a deep breath of the air of freedom, as so many refugees to Paris from other countries have done in the past.  It seems to be in the stones, in the buildings, in the air here, even though present-day France is far from free from attempts to reduce or stifle it.  I’m not a refugee, but at present I feel like some of that same gratitude: relieved, deeply thankful to be here, relishing all the aspects of French life that certain people in the US most dislike.

In the late 18th century, the newly freed American colonies were an inspiration to the French in their struggles, and the two countries were close in their aspirations.  Imagine it: Jefferson in Paris, Lafayette bringing ships to aid the Americans in their revolution. Heather Cox Richardson has written extensively about this history recently, and I don’t need to tell anyone what they already know; but it seems to matter to re-iterate it, to remember the hopes and the bold decisions of that century, called the Enlightenment, and to hold out hope for their return.

Meanwhile, I’m shopping in local markets before the temperature reaches today’s full heat,  meeting friends, visiting bookshops, saying hello to everything that has become familiar around here, a second home to me for so much of my life, since I first came to stay in this neighborhood of Paris with my old friends, Paul and Elisabeth, both no longer alive.  We used to walk to all the cinemas of the 5th and 6th arrondissements in the evenings, then come back to their apartment to sip whisky and talk about films, and books – both of them writers, he an actor too.  Several of my close Paris friends have now died, and I miss them.  But the ones who are left are who matter now, and it’s wonderful to run into each other on the ancient narrow street of the rue Mouffetard, sit in cafés to chat, and keep that continuity, that flow of talk, that freedom of speech that is so basic to this place and so necessary to being human.

I’m glad to see the current photographic display on the railings around the church: photos of the actual people who work in the shops in this neighborhood – a baker, a butcher, a flower shop owner, a pharmacist.  We know their faces and exchange with them daily, they make this quartier what it is, we may say “bonjour” and “merci” but they are not usually noticed and celebrated, workers who serve both visitors and locals, who follow in many of the traditions of their medieval forbears on this street.  It’s good to see, too, how the new trees grow, and new square stone cobbles are being set beside the old ones.  Continuity, attention to beauty, concern for enough shade – all are essential to make a city livable, in these changing times.

Take care, and thanks for reading,

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 73

May 14, 2025

Dear all,

    I 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 interested in celebrating her birthday that year – and she died just two months after it. Birthdays have always been big in our family. Two of my brothers and I were all born in the same week (so to speak – actually a couple of years apart) and my mother made three separate birthday cakes during that week and allowed us to have three parties. I think our birthday week was connected to my father’s leaves from the army during World War 2, must have been in August? Anyway, we celebrate all week, and since the weeks of three parties, always call each other, remember each other’s birthdays, meet to celebrate when we can. My youngest brother, born on Boxing Day (postwar) has Christmas to compete with so is rather out of the loop and had his birthday parties organized by already-exhausted adults.

    So, why celebrate? Because we’re here. Because we remember that heady week of presents and parties, every May, during our childhood. Because we miss each other (two in Australia, one in Britain, me in the US). On my brother Robert’s May 8 birthday in 1945, when I was three, I thought all the balloons, parties and fireworks for VE day were really for his birthday. Of course, I was right.

The house near Saint-Remy

    When I turned 80, I threw a party in London and invited my nearest and dearest and they came, my brothers from Australia, four friends from the US, my family and oldest friends in England, my 90-year-old cousin from Italy, several dear friends who have since departed. It was going to be my final birthday party, or so I thought, (not planning on a rapid demise, just cutting back a bit) and it was wonderful, but of course passed too quickly. To continue the festivities, my brothers and I boarded the train to Paris at St. Pancras the following morning and then the TGV south to Avignon, for a week spent together with our families in Saint-Rémy de Provence, walking, talking, eating, enjoying each others’ company. It was a dream come true.

    At my brother Robert’s 80th last year in Brighton, my nephew-in-law Francisco suggested to me that he’d organize my 85th in Italy. I’m going to hold him to it – Francisco, are you reading this? It already doesn’t seem too far away, and God knows, we need treats to look forward to these days. Last year my daughter and I celebrated our birthdays in Paris – she’s another Taurean – and I’m sure we’ll do it again. My friend Margit and I, who share a birthday, have been going out for delicious lunches together for the past 25 years. She was the Food Editor when I was Literary Editor at our local newspaper and now writes the yearly Key West Restaurant Guide, so knows exactly where to go to eat…

    So, why celebrate ourselves in this maybe excessive way, now that we’re not at the sausage-roll eating, jelly-throwing stage of partying? Because we exist, and are happy and grateful to be here, and to be together. Our birthdays are our sun-signs, and if you’re into astrology at all you’ll know that Taureans like us love to eat, drink and be merry. (I started being interested in astrology during the pandemic, listening to online podcasts and going out to stare up at the inscrutable planets from our backyard, when I couldn’t stray from our house. Wanting an explanation, more insight into the processes of the universe? Yes, and needing to situate myself firmly in its structures.)

    So, unapologetically, a few thoughts on birthdays. Happy birthday, May people. And all of you, when the time comes. It matters to celebrate our own existence! Go well, and enjoy yourselves.

Affectionately,

Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 72

April 14 2025

Dear All,

We’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 roller-coasters and anything that throws me upside down) is not good for the human body in the long term.  You could say, life has always been uncertain; yes, we don’t know the hour or the day of our death, as a bottom line.  To some extent, we acclimatize; to some extent, if someone dumps us, we lose our job, nobody buys our novel or painting, we get ill, someone we loves dies, we cope.  But when life is deliberately designed to throw us for a loop every morning, the human organism rebels. It’s the deliberateness of it, I think.  Natural disaster can be terrible, but you can’t blame wind, water or fire.  Being manipulated into chronic uncertainty is different.  In the last four months, there have been shocks in the news every morning; will this happen, will that happen?  Rumors run like wild-fire: will they do this, will they do that?  Will I lose my Social Security, Medicare, job, retirement funds, right to stay in the country, will I be able to vote, get a vaccination, send my child safely to school?  Of course, if you are an immigrant without the right papers – or even with them – it’s far worse. Chronic uncertainty becomes chronic terror.

In his important book “On Freedom” Timothy Snyder writes that freedom isn’t to be granted, piecemeal; it’s essential as a stable background to our lives. Freedom is a state of being, a knowledge that you can live your life as you see fit.  Living without this throws us into chaos and brings up old fears from the past as well as terror of the future. It’s not a healthy way to live.

What to do?  We protest, write to representatives, go on making art, try for stability in our personal lives.  Patti Smith says she turns to music, and sings Dylan’s “Masters of War” song on her Substack. I turn to poetry, and reread – Rumi, of course, and Mary Oliver, that sanest of poets.  I make soup, my husband fixes leaks in the roof, and in our back yard we watch two pigeons make a nest, the mother bird lay eggs in it and sit on them for a couple of weeks until they hatch, so that now there are two baby birds to be fed, who grow and will soon fly the nest.  The processes of nature still go on.

These small events, these earthly things encourage me.  Spring happens, flowers burst open against blue sky, rain allows everything green to flourish and shine.  It’s all still there.  And I try to shut out the rumors, the fear-mongering, the alarm bells, because they are doing my 83-year-old nervous system harm.  But when a friend wept as he told me that a young Guatemalan man who does his garden was picked up by ICE and disappeared last week, leaving my friend to try to tell his fiancée, I wanted to cry with him.  It is real and it is everywhere, among us, hurting us all.

We live in paradox, and in uncertainty.  Human life has always been this way. I was born in the middle of World War 2, and remember sirens, bomb shelters, being evacuated, anxious adult voices.  When so much is destroyed this suddenly and so many people are made to suffer, it’s like trying to get a foothold in an earthquake.  We have to ground ourselves, we have to find a way.  My parents did it, over six long years, and we can too.

Take care, and as Patti Smith says, drink lots of water while remembering those who can’t.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 71

March 14 2025

Dear all,

It’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 that has consoled me for most of my life when the going has been hard.  Talking with other writers, I hear them saying the same thing: it’s hard to focus when the world seems to be falling apart – or being taken apart – around you. But it’s essential. It is who we are. Words matter, truth matters, imagination matters. Language matters. The worlds we imagine have a chance of coming into being, and if we fail them, they will never exist in the imaginations of others, our readers, and in the actual world we inhabit.

I’m reading the words of many others online: historians, philosophers, activists, people with integrity and an eye for truth and falsehood. They often hold me up when I falter, and remind me of what matters.  Beauty matters. The natural world matters. We matter to each other. And human relationships, the stuff of novels, matter a great deal.

A friend sitting next to me last night at a showing of the film “Cinema Paradiso” said, “It matters so much to find things to enjoy at this time” – and we agreed, laughing and even crying during the film.  It’s a time to develop our human capacities even further in this direction, perhaps, and be all the things that Artificial Intelligence cannot.  Compassionate, empathetic, friendly, ironic even, keeping a sense of humor.  Laughing is not something that robots, or tyrants, do.

Home to have lunch, some broccoli soup I made yesterday. Small pleasures count.  The sky is blue, the mango blossom is out, the beaches are full of student spring-breakers and the ocean is at the end of every street.   

I’m sending out messages about the writing retreat I’m leading at the Flores Retreat Centre, in June, as the deadline for application is mid-April.  So if anyone out there is thinking about coming to join me, now is the time to apply.  And perhaps the time for a real regeneration of our spirits?  Join me if you can.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 70

February 14 2025

Dear all – and happy St. Valentine’s Day –

For 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 everything in sight.  As writers, as artists, what do we do that can make a difference?

I’m teaching a class based on “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, as I have done yearly for a couple of decades now, and never has it seemed more timely.  I meet with five women on Monday nights and we commit ourselves for the duration to pursuing our creative endeavors, while at the same time navigating this new and challenging terrain.  All funding for the arts in Florida has been stopped by the former Governor, Ron de Santis, and yet in the galleries and bookshops on this island, never have the exhibitions and readings seemed more vital.  The exhibition at the Studios of Key West this week by the Cuban artist Mabel  Poblet is breathtaking; I pass it on my way to class and go in to get a dose of her inspiration in glittering blue.  I read my regulars online – Rebecca Solnit, Jessica Craven, Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, Dan Rather – and draw both comfort and ideas from them.  It’s like having a bunch of invisible friends.

I bought Pico Iyer’s new book, “Aflame” this week, knowing it would be a keeper.  He is an old friend, from earlier days at the Key West Literary Seminar, and we have corresponded since. He writes of losing everything in his mother’s house in California when it burned to the ground some years ago, of how he first visited the monastery at Big Sur, when he had nowhere to go; of how the nourishment of silence claimed him, one of the chattiest people on the planet, and how it changed his life. Now, he’s changing mine, from the inside, out. We depend on each other, on our words, on our shared experiences, on our togetherness in this world.  In isolation and silence, Pico writes, we learn how to be close to others and be real and useful in society.  And you can find silence anywhere, because it’s inside you – even in a noisy place like Key West where the planes, sirens, traffic and power tools can sometimes seem to be combining to drive us out of our minds.

I am in a silent place in my studio and in my mind as I write this.  I’m following one of the writer Zadie Smith’s ten rules about writing: use your computer where there is no internet access. That way, you can keep the temptation of noise away.  I’ve come in through what I think of as a portal, guarded by two stalwart gumbo limbo trees.  I’ve entered the room that is mine alone, the space that awaited me; it makes a difference. A plane goes over, low – and yet it is outside me, outside this mental space I create once I close the door and sit down at my desk, guarded by the two trees whose branches interlace against the cerulean blue of today’s sky.

And thinking of silence, longing sometimes for peaceful places, ancient places outside of today’s turmoil, I realize how much I want to be in northern Spain again, at the Flores del Camino Retreat Centre, where last year I led a writer’s retreat.  This year, in June, we will assemble there again, tap into the beauty and silence, experience the peace and antiquity of the place, coming together to write from its center and from our centers, connecting ourselves forever with this very special place.  I hope that some of you may join me there, with Basia and Bertrand, our much-appreciated hosts.

Meanwhile – it’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m invited to a dance party on the beach.  So, dance on, and as Emma Goldman is reported to have said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.”

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 69

January 14 2025

Dear All,

Time 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 parties.  The topic this year was “Family”.  Everyone has a family, one way or another, and almost every memoir or novel has family somewhere in its DNA, often discussed directly.  As Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of ‘Anna Karenina’, “All happy families are alike…” before going on to describe the uniqueness and complexity of Anna’s brother’s family.  We may love or like or dislike or even hate our families, we may not speak to each other at all, or we may miss each other so much it feels like heartbreak when we part.  So ‘Family’ was a rich seam to mine. I  particularly enjoyed Andre Dubus III with Dani Shapiro and Brando Skyhorse in a conversation about memoir - how much we can tell, how not to hurt people with our revelations, how to claim our right to tell our own story.

I’ve also noticed how pleased we all were to see each other in our writing/reading family, this last weekend. There’s something special these days about get-togethers in person – is it post-Covid still, or related to our feelings of dread about US politics and what may happen next? Or in reaction to the distancing effects of Artificial Intelligence, (an oxymoron in my view)? I’ve noticed a certain intensified joie-de-vivre, a deliberateness about communicating, joining in, showing up. A re-commitment to community, a refusal to be separated into factions?  Friends of ours are giving a party on the evening of January 20th (when DT takes office) with ‘comfort food’  requested for a potluck supper. The TV will not be turned on.

Another couple of friends, from Asheville, are putting together a fund-raiser with food and music, to raise money for the people in Asheville whose homes were destroyed.  In California, and across the country, money is pouring in to the Los Angeles districts that went up in flames last week.  I hope that this mood will prevail, that the generosity will continue, the helping of neighbors and friends become a norm. We need each other, not robots, not remote control.  We need, and want, to live in community.

A reminder here, too, that the little community we’re setting up for 10 days in late June at the retreat center, Flores del Camino, is open for registration, and limited to 8-10 people – so if you can make it to northern Spain in June to write new poems or prose in a beautiful quiet place,  before taking an optional 4-day walk on the Camino, do apply.

Go well, and get together!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 68

December 14, 2024

Dear all,

I’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 us, even if we are in them for a short time.  Our sense of place may be different from our sense of time; time is a given, short or long - place can be felt either as random or destined, a cross-over with history, an astonished arrival that changes us for good.  Astrologers say that there are places in this world that draw us to them, where we are meant to be.  Sometimes these are places where people have travelled and traded, like Essaouira in Morocco where I was in the 1990’s, or where ships have passed for hundreds of years, as in Key West where I live now; in Spain, the pilgrimage routes are well known, walked by pilgrims for centuries, as people came there to find what they were seeking.

With all this in mind, I’m announcing another Writing Retreat I’m leading, at the Flores Retreat Centre in northern Spain in June 2025 and it’s to be called “Writing In Place.” The Place being the village where Bertrand Gamrowski and Basia Goodwin have their home on a steep cobbled street, with a grassy valley at their back and a view of far hills, and where they have run retreats for over ten years.  We’ll be writing in place, and also on place – what place has meant to us, where we came from, where we have found ourselves, and of course the extraordinarily rich and historic place we’ll be in for that time.  We’ll also be eating great food, grown locally, visiting petroglyphs and ancient churches, learning about the history of this countryside that goes back millennia, and importantly, isolating ourselves for eleven days from the strife and noise of today’s world.  After the retreat, we’ll have the opportunity for a 4-day pilgrimage on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, towards a place that already sounds enchanting to me, as I’m deafened by today’s sirens, car horns, plane noise and power tools - the Valley of Silence.

I was there last June, with eight writers, some professional, some beginners, all of us learning the countryside, walking the Camino, sharing our writing around a fire in the courtyard at night.  This year, it seems even more necessary to be able to withdraw for a while from the challenging world we live in, to find the subtle truths of an ancient place, and write them into poetry and prose.

Go well, wherever you are in these times of uncertainty,

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 67

November 14th 2024

Dear all,

In 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 Paris before we return to the US.

I’ve listened over and over to Lang Lang playing Chopin. I’ve been with my step-daughter Stephanie to the Orangerie, to sit in front of Monet’s vast paintings of water-lilies, in the space designated for meditation and silence.  It was like a draught of clean water. I thought how Monet gave them to the state after the first World War, in which he refused to fight.  He was right – his art meant more than a sacrifice of his life.  He chose to paint, not fight, when all the pressure was on him to join his generation in that massacre.

It's an individual choice, of course.  Politics or art? Struggle or serenity? Sometimes we have to take on both at once.

The collection put together by the German art-dealer Heinz Berggruen was next, in the same museum.  He had a great range of paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Paul Klee and sculpture by Giacometti, and here are a few of them that I photographed.  Again, I thought of Picasso and the Spanish civil war, his painting of Guernica, his escape from Spain to paint unhindered.  Do we escape or stay put and fight?  Paint, write, make music, keep ourselves alive that way, or do we throw ourselves into whatever fray we confront? Again, it’s an open question.  Do we deconstruct reality or represent it?  What is the artist’s role in our time, when so much has become mere decoration, or entertainment?  Do we need to entertain ourselves more – and entertain others? Do we go silent, or speak out?  These are all open questions, urgent for our time, in which humanity faces so many predicaments.  For myself, I found great solace in the juxtaposition of the pears and apples that Picasso painted, and in the steady serene gaze of Madame Cezanne.

A personal pleasure this week was to hear that a collection of short stories I wrote in the 1970’s, illustrated by my then-husband, Michael Brackenbury, is about to be re-published by Michael Walmer in the UK, with an introduction by A.L.Kennedy. It’s called “No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.”  Prophetic, or merely banal?  Sometimes a piece of the past resurfaces and (I hope) makes sense in the present; sometimes our younger selves remind us, surprisingly, what matters. The drawings seem to me to fizz still with an energy that was entirely 1970’s.

Our world has changed again in the last week, and we are all confronting the implications of that change.  Please take care of yourselves, and look at something that makes you smile!

Affectionately, Ros