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.

Places on the retreat are limited to 8- 10 participants.  You can register and learn more about the retreat at this link: Floresdelcamino.com/writing-in-place.

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

Notes on a Writing Life / 66

October 14, 2024

Dear all,

This 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 all probably know what happened north of us – the devastation caused by high winds, typhoons, hard rain and flooding rivers.  Our friends up in Asheville have borne the brunt of Helene, and those near Sarasota, Florida, of Milton, and many are without water, electricity, food, mail and even roofs over their heads.  It has been a tough season.

Here, we waited for a day while the hurricane lingered near the Yucatan peninsula, gathering strength; the following day, we had wind and hard rain in sudden downpours and some flooding near the beaches from a storm surge - but nothing life-threatening. I managed to keep on working on the last edits of my mystery novel, with Chopin playing loud to drown the sound of the wind, and all the shutters closed tight.

We were lucky – and thankful.  A bonus was that the avocados crashed down from our neighbors’ tree like hand grenades, and we went out afterwards to pick them out of soaked grass.  It’s a memory I have from hurricane Georges, in 1998:  avocados rolling in the gutters, lobsters thrown up on the beach. A feast amid chaos.

Life in Key West is often made up of these strange contrasts, as is our weather.  After 30 years here, I am almost used to it – but can still feel that frisson of foreboding when the wind begins to intensify and rain lashes our old wooden house.  My husband is a dab hand with a generator and a chain-saw and even gets up on the roof to check for where leaks may appear;  when I was younger, I didn’t look for these talents in a mate, but now value them thoroughly – and when the wind roars at night, I’m incredibly glad of a hand to hold in the dark.

Go well, stay dry, be safe!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 65

September 14 2024

Dear All,

I’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 this week, not much going on here except hoping that a majority of Americans will come out and vote for her.

Exactly a year ago this week, I was in Paris, having lunch at the Closerie des Lilas with my wonderful agent, Kimberley Cameron, and her husband David.  I was standing by the statue of the Napoleonic general, Marshal Ney, and watching the water gush from the most striking fountain in Paris, when Kimberley walked up to me and led me into the restaurant where Hemingway used to eat his lunch. I’d been there once before, with my husband, 30 years ago, as we embarked on a new life together.  We still remember the ‘canard in its dangerous sauce’ as I wrote in a poem at the time. And the profiteroles.

I’m reminded by this last year’s memory to write something here about the role of an agent in a writer’s life.  Without a literary agent, it’s hard, almost impossible, to get anywhere in publishing.  From my earliest days as a writer, when in the 1960’s I was introduced to my then agent, Richard Simon, I’ve considered agents as my friends and chief allies.  The good ones hold your hand, listen to you when you complain or moan or even weep about publishers’ rejections, encourage you, return your phone calls at once, let you believe once again that you may be a really good writer. (The not-so-good ones scare you, remind you of your least favorite teacher at school, don’t get back to you, don’t stick up for you and leave you in the lurch when they can’t sell your book: they exist too.)

I first met Kimberley at a Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico.  My former agent had retired, and her successor had not been able to sell my current novel, and dropped me – it happens.  So I set in train publishing that book, “The Third Swimmer” with a ‘hybrid’ publisher I knew,  simply because it mattered so much to me, I knew it had to exist.  Then I met Kimberley.  She was on a panel of agents and one thing she said struck me – “We need you more than you need us.”  Really?  I found her after the session and asked her – prompted by my friend Galen - if she’d like to have a drink.  We sat in the lounge of the Hotel de las Minas and sipped white wine and chatted and I gave her a copy of my novel “Becoming George Sand.”  She later told me that she read it on the plane, loved it, and would be delighted to represent me.

That was in 2015.  We met again at her house in San Francisco in 2019, when I was in town for a reading.  Altogether, she has sold four books for me – and what’s more, she has seen me through arguments with editors, difficulties with plots, plans for future work and everything that comes up in a writer’s life.  It’s nearly ten years since we got together and I consider her a close friend.

So, the lunch at La Closerie was a celebration of all that, and in the middle of our three-course lunch behind the screens and bushes that protect the dining room from the street, she even came up with a title for my latest novel. She’s sending it out as I write, after I did a rewrite (her suggestion) during this last year.

A shout-out for agents, then. But, how do you get one? My answer is, go to events, show up for things, maybe ask writers you know who their agent is. Don’t waste time sending out thousands of letters to people you don’t know. Go for the personal connection where possible, trust your gut response, dare to approach them. They are human, too. And as Kimberley said, they need us more than we need them.

Back to election time now – and fingers crossed for the woman with the great laugh and the ready wit and a lot of good ideas. It’s time.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 64

August 14th 2024

Dear All,

I’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: togetherness and then aloneness and then togetherness again, time after time. Tides go in and out; life goes in and out, we fill and empty, empty and fill.  We accumulate, and then we let go.

Recently, after a family discussion, my brothers and I decided that sadly, it was time to let go of our shared apartment in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, and sell.  After seventeen years of meeting there, being alone there, sharing and enjoying, it’s time.  I’ve worked on three novels there, soaking up the ambiance of a city I have loved since I went there first at 18.  I’ve spent time with Parisian friends, with my husband, with my daughter and son, with each of my brothers.  It’s been a delight, and has changed our lives.  But now, we know it’s time to let it go – and so I’m writing about it here in case anyone reading is interested in a pied a terre or even a permanent home in a lovely part of Paris, midway between the Jardin de Plantes and the Jardins du Luxembourg, near the rue Mouffetard and two markets, between the metro stations of Gobelins and Censier-Daubenton….  If so, get in touch with me before it officially goes on the market this autumn.

Letting go feels hard – letting go of people, beloved places, houses, even possessions.  But there is a time for it, and I know from experience that once you let go, something else comes into your life. It’s the endless process of living, one time, one place leading into another.  I’ve said goodbye to so many friends lately, and yet they return in my dreams to tell me that this not the end.

I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle:  “The art of losing isn’t hard to master…” But I think it’s hard.  I’m a Taurean, I don’t much like change.  At the end of the poem, she tells herself, “Write it – as disaster.”  The last loss in her poem is that of a beloved person, and this is the hardest of all; and yet we have to do it, over and over, during our lifetimes, and go on.

So – on a lighter note – Paris is still there, and I will certainly go back there, if not as a co-owner, as a visitor with a lighter step, not having to deal with the EDF or the phone company, not going up to Place d’Italie to buy a new fridge or washing machine, not attending endless meetings of the Syndic., not fixing things when they wear out and generally doing the maintenance that ownership involves.  I’ve enjoyed learning how to do all of the above, and next I’m going to enjoy renting or staying in a hotel, looking out of a window that is not mine, and who knows, even writing something new about Paris, about changing times.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 63

July 14th 2024

Dear All,

Well, 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 though, for the parties of the left to band together and prevent the Rassemblement Nationale – the extreme right – from getting a majority. The tactical vote, based in horror at the idea of a basically fascist party ruling France, was brilliantly orchestrated over just a few days.  Now, the big problem is going to be how these disparate parties govern the country after having formed that hasty alliance…

 I left France a couple of days ago to cross by boat from Dieppe in Normandy to Newhaven on the coast of Sussex, a good old-fashioned and very peaceful way to travel.  The sea was flat calm, the rain poured down in torrents all the way.  Then I got on a good old-fashioned train and trundled my way across the rain-soaked south of England.  Does England feel different after its own dramatic election last week?  Maybe it was my imagination, but maybe also people were cheerier, more outgoing, and there were more smiles along the way.  It makes a difference to be not just the sick man of Europe, but a country devoted to a new experiment in democracy.  As Keir Starmer pointed out in the Commons, this is the most diverse parliament ever, with more women too in top posts.  Rachel Reeves, the first woman Chancellor in 800 years.  Diane Abbott, a Black woman and a left-winger,  the ‘mother’ of the House.

To move on from politics – it’s been hard to do, this last week – I visited the church of Saint-Valéry in Varangeville-sur-Mer while staying with a friend.  It used to be more than a kilometer from the sea; now it’s perched on the edge of a high cliff.  It was built in the 11th century and then in the 16th a whole other church was built on to it.  These carvings are I think remarkable, and remind me of the carvings on capitals in the southwest of France, and in Spain, on the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.  There is the pilgrims’ shell – the coquille Saint-Jacques – and the crossed staves of a pilgrim; this was a staging post for pilgrims from England, on their way south.  The mermaid and a man sticking out his tongue remind me of medieval humor, and the ‘green man’ often found in English churches and cathedrals.  Our roots in Christianity may be solid, but beneath them there is a sly paganism, as these sculptors often show.

Traveling in Europe, finding our common roots in so many places, witnessing the transformations and manoevrings of politics, I’ve been able to take my mind away from the US election, somewhat.  I’m reminded, by events in France and England, that anything is possible. You just have to decide, not lose your nerve – and vote!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 62

June 14 2024

Dear All,

I’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 mountains, some with snow still on their slopes.

To be offered this space to rest and write is truly wonderful.  The silence is deep, apart from the regular tap-tap-tap of pilgrims’ sticks on the stone road up the village; I’m reminded of the sound of Blind Pew’s stick in ‘Treasure Island’, although there’s nothing menacing here. Tap-tap-tap. ‘Buen Camino’ and on they go up the hill.

We came here yesterday after 12 days of a writing retreat in Castrillo de los Polvazares, at the Flores del Camino Retreat Center.  12 days of writing, walking, eating, talking, bonding.  The theme of my part of the retreat was to connect the idea of pilgrimage with the arc of our own lives and with the narrative movement of memoir and fiction.  Eight women came to join me and it was an extraordinarily rich time, so much so that I decided against my earlier decision to walk the Camino again afterwards, to Santiago de Compostela.  I did it with my brother and sister-in-law 12 years ago, and remember reaching our destination exhilarated and exhausted, with a real sense of achievement.  But I’ve given up on the idea of destination, I realize. I walked some of the Camino towards Foncebadon early this morning, up a wooded track with a couple of white horses dozing nose to tail in the shade, looked out across the valley, and turned back for breakfast and writing.  It still felt special, it was still as beautiful.  I paused, looked around me and pilgrims passed, ‘Hola. Buen Camino,’ and I thought – this is all I need.  I’ll walk some more, while I’m here, on these enchanting paths. The point is no longer to ‘get there’.  The point is to be right here.

Swallows swoop before my window. The light changes, blue deepens, shadows darken. Elder and broom are flowering. It’s morning on this one particular day in June.

To get to know one place on this pilgrimage route is enough.  This ancient building holds me and gives peace.

Affectionately, Ros

Thresholds

 The cold keys heavy in your hand;

one fits the lock in the green door,

you step across the threshold,

light patterns the floor.

Here is the unfolding

inner world of cats and geraniums

Another door, your own,

another key, another opening –

a bed, a desk, a chair;
 

now all you have to do is step inside,

unpack the things you brought,

breathe out,

 
find the next threshold, the one

so far inside you did not know

until you came here, what you waited for.

Rosalind Brackenbury, June 2024 at Flores

Notes on a Writing Life / 61

May 14 2024

Dear All,

I’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 speckled with daisies and people sat on green chairs in the sun.

I thought of how markets have existed here since the middle ages, and how beautiful the stalls are, with their heaped fruit and vegetables, their fish laid out in order, their buckets of flowers.  It’s such a human way to shop, with a greeting, a request, a thank-you and a “bonne journée” as you go on your way, having received the brown-paper bagged lettuce or cherries or apples that you’ll carry home.  Markets have existed all over Europe for centuries – only in the US, it seems, do they seem like pale imitations, if you can find them at all.  Of course, I do shop at Franprix and other Paris supermarkets for toilet paper and so on, but it’s in the street market that shopping for food becomes a joy.

I’m here for a couple of weeks before going on to Spain, for the writing retreat at Flores that Kim and I and the Flores residents, Basia and Bertrand, have been planning for months.  Eight people have committed to crossing the Atlantic to be with us there, to write, and I’m thrilled to imagine what we will see, do, and discover in the course of our time there.  Do one thing every year that you have never done before, I’ve decided: and inhabit one new place, at least.  Switch to another language, another way of doing things; see things from a different perspective; take a few risks.  Today, May 14, is my birthday – my 82nd trip around the sun, as someone pointed out to me recently.  (No need to ‘go into space’ as we are there already!) The following day is my daughter Miranda’s birthday, and she’s coming here to join me, to celebrate.  We’ll be visiting markets, I know it, choosing ripe fruit and vegetables, browsing through little fresh cheeses, finding stalls with clothes we’ll probably long to buy.  The markets are just where they always were, and to return to them is to rediscover a lost pleasure, an aspect of ourselves as a couple of Taurean foodies, that is never far below the surface.

My next newsletter will be from northern Spain, after our retreat, as I set out to walk some more of the Camino, towards the far west, the city of Santiago de Compostela, city of bells and incense, and to Finisterra, where Spain meets the Atlantic.  It seems to matter this year to move in the tracks of former civilizations and ancient customs – to rediscover, perhaps, what we need most now, and how we may attain it, to reach the far shore of Europe where it looks across the ocean to the New World, as it was once called…

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 60

Notes on a Writing Life / 60  
April 14 2024

Dear All,

Springtime 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 everywhere.  There’s already a slight sense of winding down after the season, which has been frenetic.  We residents breathe two sighs - of relief that the town will be less crowded, but also of sadness to see friends depart for the north.

This will be a short newsletter, as I’m beginning to prepare my departure too – I’m flying to Paris in early May.  Our plans for the Writing Retreat in Spain are in place, and eight brave souls have so far committed to crossing the Atlantic to be with me and Kim at the Flores Retreat Center.  There are still a few places left, if anyone has a last-minute urge to be in a beautiful place, writing!

Here is the link again, just in case.

  I am planning to do at least some of the walk on to Santiago de Compostela and hope to find a companion to do it with me.  It’s a transformative experience, walking into that unfolding landscape, moving somehow in tune with the universe – even with blisters and a tired back, coming ever closer to the very edge of Europe.

Meanwhile my recently published books are available online.  It’s been a busy winter, bringing out three books one after the other, and I’m ready for a break!  Who knows what will come next?

Affectionately, Ros

Morning in May

Grass grows in the night
and early the mockingbirds begin
their fleet courtships over puddles,
upon wires, in the new green
of the Spanish limes.

Their white striped wings flash
as they flirt and dive.
Wind in the chimes pulls music
from the air, the sky’s cleared
of its vast complications.

In the pause before summer,
the wild sprouting of absolutely
everything: hair, nails, the mango’s
pale rose pennants, tongues of birds
singing daylong.

Words, even, and sudden embraces,
surprising dreams and things I’d never
imagined, in all these years of living,
one more astonished awakening.

from "Bonnard's Dog" published by Hanging Loose Press in 2015

Notes on a Writing Life / 59

March 14, 2024

Dear all,

I’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 across the countryside, trying to keep up with his stride.  As sulky teenagers, we protested, pulled from our loud music and cigarettes in darkened rooms, to walk with him, play tennis or swim.  He was the lover of wild swimming – any patch of water, river or sea or stream, would do; and of rock-climbing, and other dangerous pursuits. An avatar – sometimes overdoing it - of testing oneself and emerging triumphant, ignoring scratched knees and children’s complaints.

These days, I find him in me as I walk, swim, or simply stand on the beach feeling sun and wind on me, after a swim.  When I see one of my three brothers even at a distance, walking, I see that distinctive swinging stride of his.  We have it in our genes.

And, at nearly the age now that he was when he died, I appreciate his example as I probably didn’t when young.

This year, I’m planning to walk at least some of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, a walk I have done with two of my brothers at different times.  I have a view of a winding path between trees pinned on my studio wall, and I long to follow it again.  Walking, my mind moves into gear, thoughts begin to form, poems to emerge, ideas to take shape.  First, I empty my mind; then I begin to move.

The Writing Retreat at Flores, in northern Spain, will be the precursor to the walk – a pause, a step aside from the world and time, a moment for what my mother, quoting the Bible, used to call ‘amendment of life.’ And writing.  Who knows what we may write?  Then, we’ll walk – those of us who love to do so, who long to follow the winding road and let our feet take us where our dreams evolve.

Here is one of the posters for the Writing Retreat that I’m putting up around town in Key West in the hopes that people here may answer the call.  But if you read this, wherever you are, and are tempted, just go to the QR code on the poster, and you will be taken direct to the Flores website.  However experienced a walker or writer you are, or if you simply want to do something in your life that you’ve never done before, do come and join us.  We’ll be walking in the footsteps of thousands of pilgrims on a sacred road towards the very edge of Europe. And I’ll be walking with my dad.  Buen camino!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 58

February 14  2024

Dear All,

The 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 online.

Time to celebrate!  And it’s Valentine’s Day too…

Meanwhile, Kim Narenkivicius and I continue planning the June writing retreat at Flores Retreat Centre, in Spain.  The theme of the retreat will be writing as pilgrimage, tracing the inner and the outer journey, as it takes place on the ‘French way’ part of the pilgrimage route towards Santiago de Compostela.  I’ve planned a series of days writing around the spirit of place, the details and atmosphere of place, ourselves in the world (the immediate world around us) and the ways we map experience of place and time.

My own journeys on the Camino – and earlier, in the Atlas mountains of Morocco - have taught me that you don’t know a place really until you walk it – or walk into it.  After a few days walking from Astorga in 2010, I began to feel the countryside moving towards me as I moved into it, as if it came forward to hold me.  This is something you have to experience, not describe. So for two weeks after the writing retreat, there’s the extra possibility of walking to Santiago de Compostela, for those who choose to do it.  Personally, I find writing begins inside my head when I’m either walking or swimming.  Movement in space, the body’s effort, the winding road or open sea all play their part.  In June, we will visit local churches and petroglyphs to get a feeling for the place, then write, then walk.  For people who can’t envisage walking a hundred or more kilometers, there are taxis!  Everyone who wants to write something in particular, who wants simply to start writing, or who is an experienced writer already, is welcome.  You don’t know what you can do, until you take the first step.

Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way” has informed my own life and the almost-yearly classes I’ve led in Key West;  some of her themes and ideas, like writing morning pages, will be incorporated.  Mainly, I’ve lived and taught from the idea she threw to me in the 1990’s, that process is the point, and if you do something – write, paint, play music – regularly, not only will you improve at it but all sorts of unforeseen options and offers may come your way.  My own new process is learning modern dance from an inspired teacher; yes, I could have started that 30 years ago, but the point is, I’ve started it now.

So, I hope to see some of you at the retreat in June!  Attached is the website with details and prices.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 57

14 January 2024

Dear All,

A 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 Amazon, as I mentioned last month, and are about to be produced in e-book form.  I’ll be signing copies at Soul House, the beautiful store on the corner of Southard and Frances in Key West, run by Oakleigh Waits and Susan Beale.  Come by 3:30 – 5:30 on January 25 – Virginia Woolf’s and Robert Burns’ birthdays!

In this newsletter I want to tell you more about my novel, “Bone Whispers”, out on February 14 – Valentine’s Day – on which day I’m inviting my little writers’ group out for a festive lunch.

The novel is set in Dorset, in England, and it’s a story I’ve had in mind for a long time, though I’m not sure quite why.  It includes childhood memories of the post-war era in England, as well as 21st-century sections set in my country of origin.  The contemporary part is set in 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, on a scorching summer in which climate change is making itself felt and a drought went on for months.  It invokes Thomas Hardy and his novel “The Return of the Native” as my protagonist returns to the place where she spent summers in her childhood and youth.

I left England in the early 1980’s, to move to Scotland, where I lived for 12 years, before moving to the US in 1993, and I have only visited my native country yearly since then.  What is it about getting older that makes you want to go back to your roots?  I remember saying somewhat glibly years ago that trees need roots, not people – and now, I’m feeling rather differently about this.  Not that I want to move back, physically, but that it mattered to me in writing “Bone Whispers” to explore what it means to be English, as I think one really only can when looking back from another country and another society.  So, the native returns, and the book, published in the US, bridges a divide for me, connects my native story with my American experience, and I hope gives my readers a bit of both.

Images courtesy of Flores del Camino Retreat Centre.

One of the more delightful projects of 2024 promises to be the writing retreat that Kim Narenkivicius and I are leading in June, from 1st to 12th, at the Flores del Camino retreat centre along the pilgrimage trail in northern Spain.  With excursions to visit local churches and petroglyphs, exploring sacred geometry, working with earth pigments and close access to the Camino de Santiago (as well as, of course, time to write in comfort and with good food laid on!) this will be a wonderful way to treat ourselves to an oasis of calm and connection with history. All levels are welcomed. Also, Kim is crafting the “Part II” onward walking pilgrimage to Santiago directly after the writing portion of the retreat from the 12th to the 24th of June. So, if this intrigues you and is exactly what you need to do this year, stay tuned. We will be sending out the final details shortly. You can also contact me via the link below to be placed on the email list.

I’m off this weekend to the Literary Seminar in Key West that takes place this weekend: “Florida: The State We’re In.” (Pun of course intentional.)  I’m looking forward to hearing what writers from our state have to say, on this place that enchants and baffles us all, and is under threat from rising seas, book censorship, educational mayhem, political chicanery and all the rest. We’ll be under water here in a while, long or short – but for now, we meet down near the ocean’s edge, come rain or shine, in a place where the beauty of the natural world is still eviden and the sun goes down in a blaze of original glory every night.

Stay well!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 56

14 December 2023

Dear All,

A 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 white tail feathers…so:

  Two books of mine are about to appear from Open Boat publications: the first, a republished version of “Seas Outside The Reef,” a novel about Key West in the 1990’s, the second a collection of short stories, “Light Over Islands”, also set in Key West, written over the last 30 years. The Key West/New York artist Susan Sugar has generously offered her paintings for the two book covers.

My new novel, “Bone Whispers” will be published by Epicenter Press on February 8 – more on that next month.

Celebrating the Key West we have lived in and loved for so long, Margit Bisztray and Lena Perkins had a launch of their beautiful new book “A Sense of Place” at the Marquesa hotel last week; the old gang was all there, and we pored over photographs of houses, street signs, trees and empty beaches that are no longer what they were. But the theme is not just nostalgia – it’s about change, and cherishing memories while creating new things of beauty.

Cricket and Allen

With this in mind, and the realization that in this current moment, in which so many people are suffering, it’s hard to focus on one’s art or even set time and attention aside for it, I’m starting a new 12-week class on “The Artist’s Way” at the Studios of Key West on January 9 at 5.30.  For anybody who is in town, and who may have been asking themselves the question – what use is my art in a world like this?  Or – how can I be selfish enough to take time to do it? – do come and join in.  The class asks for a commitment to our art, whatever it may be, and to give it priority for 12 weeks in the company of other like-minded people.  Whether you are beginning on something new, trying to finish an old project or simply wondering what on earth to do next, it’s for you. We’ll also be incorporating some ideas from Julia Cameron’s later book, “Walking in this World.”

I do have hopes for 2024 – as Rebecca Solnit says, “Hope is an attitude, not a feeling.”  And, to leave you with a few words that have meant a lot to me over the years:  there’s a Civil War (1640’s)  grave in the east of England of a man who “did the best of things in the worst of times and hoped them in the most calamitous.”  How’s that for an epitaph?

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 55

November 14 2023

Dear All,

This 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 obviously infuriating if much-loved woman, I then moved on to “Quartet” and “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie” her earliest novels, and am working my way through her oeuvre.  Why Jean Rhys, why now?  She’s a sharp anti-dote to the sanctimoniousness of our time.  It’s also comforting to me to think that a novel can strike such a chord nearly 100 years after it was written. I think of her, forgotten, poor and old, living in a mobile home in Devon in the 1950’s, not knowing that in a future century someone will be loving her work. And, she is so at odds with the mores of 2023: her heroines drink and take drugs and fall for impossible men and have sex with them, sometimes paid, and there’s no sign of redemption – only the honest yet ironic accounts of women’s lives, the refusal of hypocrisy or blame; the author’s own dry wit. I think she’s far more psychologically acute than Hemingway, who was writing at the same time in the same city – Paris – though she read and admired him.  And there’s the added pleasure of her sense of place and atmosphere, the 5th and 6th arrondissements, so anyone who knows this part of Paris can follow her down those same streets.  Her world is of seedy hotels, cheap restaurants, bars, prisons and railway stations. Her constant theme – poverty and its humiliations.  Happily, her last novel “Wide Sargasso Sea”, a prequel to “Jane Eyre,” published in her old age, brought her renewed fame and money and she lived to be nearly 90.

Her books show me that there are pendulum swings in fame and fortune: greeted as avant-garde in the 1930’s, her books fell out of favor after World War 2, as people wanted reassurance and upbeat stories. In the 1960’s they were re-published, in the UK and the US, as remarkable works of their time.  These days, we are back with censorship, ‘niceness’ and heroines we can approve of.  Go figure, as people say…

My own new novel “Bone Whispers” is due out from Epicenter Press in mid-February 2024. A new collection of Key West short stories, “Light Over Islands,” as well as a re-edition of “Seas Outside the Reef” will also be available shortly. For an advance read of the “Light Over Islands” stories and a weekly series, illustrated by my daughter, Miranda Brackenbury, “A Game of Snakes and Ladders” about 50+ years of being published and not-published, go to rosalindbrackenbury.substack.com.

Here is one of Miranda’s beautiful illustrations.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 54

October 14 2023

Dear All,

When 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 Israel, half an hour’s walk from where the Egyptian border was at that time. We were 19 years old and had come by Turkish boat to Israel from Marseille.  Kfar Aza, a new kibbutz, was started by people of our own age who had recently come from North Africa.  We helped them to build and paint new huts and houses and worked in the grapefruit fields. We sometimes walked down to chat with the two bored United Nations men – young Scandinavians – who were guarding the border, at the edge of no Man’s Land.  We flirted and sang and danced in the evenings. It seemed like an innocent time.  Our friends at Kfar Aza would now have been grandparents or great-grandparents, if they stayed on.  There were still only 750 people living there – until this week.

It matters to me to mourn that place and its murdered inhabitants today, as you mourn a place where you were young, and got your hands in the earth, where you were all idealistic and energetic together - because idealism was possible, as it can only be when you do not see the whole picture. And that mourning means that now, in 2023, I have also to mourn the people we were not told about, the Palestinians.  Because of Kfar Aza, I must also mourn the bombed refugee camps in Gaza and the ongoing destruction of Gaza city.    

To re-iterate what I wrote last week in a Substack post last week: do please read “Tracing Homelands”, an excellent, thoughtful, timely memoir by Linda Dittmar of growing up in Israel and later, discovering its hidden history.  It’s published this week by Olive Branch Press – whose name, today, means everything.

We must not get stuck on an ‘eye for an eye’ – the rhetoric of revenge - in 2023. We must not allow ourselves to become ‘eyeless in Gaza.’  Surely we have to do everything we can to demand that the killing must stop.

Meanwhile, back in Key West, where I live:  I have two books about to appear from Open Boat Publications this fall, one a reprint of my 1990’s Key West novel of love, death and illegal immigration, “Seas Outside The Reef” and the other a collection of short stories set in Key West,  over the last 30 years, “Light Over Islands.”  Both have beautiful covers made from paintings by Susan Sugar, designed by Kim Narenkivicius.

Both books will be available for pre-order soon and I am planning a launch party in Key West in mid- November, and I’ll hope to see some of you there!  My new novel, “Bone Whispers” will be out in February from Epicenter Press.

Go well, be safe – affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 53

September 14 2023

Dear All,

Thirty 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 back of the mule.  We walked into the High Atlas, camped out at night and in the daytime walked through green valleys full of almond blossom and villages made of earth where the main street was a dirt track and no vehicle could possibly pass. We ate around a small fire, washed in rivers, came to places where horse and camel markets appeared on bare red plains, saw mountains tipped with snow.

This week I read the news of the earthquake, saw Taroudant on the disaster map, remembered how we had to pull our indigo scarves across our faces to protect ourselves from a sandstorm when we arrived, and how we set off, early that February morning.

It makes a difference to know a place, to have felt it with your feet, to have camped on its earth and stopped to rest in its villages.  It makes it real. Abstract, distant disaster insults its victims by making them unimaginable.  Where we have walked on this earth is real to us.

Dis-aster: a separation from the stars.

A  German film, “Red Sky” (‘Roter Himmel’) I saw this week: a writer insists on ‘working’ on his novel (actually goofing off) while his friends mend the roof, cook food, fix a wrecked car; he ignores what is going on around him even as they suffer and die in a forest fire; only after all that can he write a successful book.  There was something so repugnant about this that I was stopped in my tracks.

It was a portrait of total solipsism.

So, what do we writers do?

Here in Paris, during an unexpected heatwave – isn’t everything unexpected these days? – there is still peace in green parks, ancient trees, life going on: a Paris market, beehives that have been in the Jardins du Luxembourg for nearly 200 years.  It’s loving what we have that matters for a start.  Only then can we really work to save it - and after that, if we have to, mourn it as it deserves.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 52

Notes on a Writing Life / 52
August 14 2023

Dear All,

     Time 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 habit of having to ‘work’; the urgency that tends to fill our days.  Noise, pollution, extremes of climate – yes, I feel privileged to be away from them and for a first time really appreciate the changeable English weather – sheets of rain, mist over the hills, then sun breaking through.  Clean air, cold sea.  Solitude, an underrated thing.
    There’s also, for a writer, the gift of emptied days, days of watching birds and squirrels - and two young stags there on the green today as I walked to the village shop.  I walk around with no particular goal, then return to this cottage to add to an existing story, or prune a paragraph from a work in progress.  What used to be, when I was younger, ‘boring’ or ‘bad weather’ has been transformed, partly by age, partly by events in the rest of the world. Now, it’s all a treat.

   Time to read, too. I’ve been immersed in fine novels by Alison Macleod (‘Tenderness’, ‘Unexploded’) and by Andrew Greig (‘Rose Nicolson’).  The latter is a rare historical novel that lets you feel just what it was really like to live in a particular past time: here, to live through the 16th century Scottish Reformation in Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Paris – and realize how terrifyingly short and violent life could be, how religion and politics divided people, how, as one character puts it, ‘everyone thinks they are right.’  The language of this poetic but fast-moving novel is so exact and lovely.

     Meanwhile I am putting together a collection of my short stories set in Key West, “Light Over Islands.”  It’s to be a companion volume to the reprint of “Seas Outside The Reef.”  Both books will be available this fall from Open Boat Editions.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 51

July 14 2023

Dear All,

I’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 can’t believe my luck at having even a week here to think, talk, walk, write and simply soak it all in.  The house is for sale, so neither of us will be able to come here again, sadly. It would make a marvelous writing retreat, with 6 bedrooms and 2 extra little cottages…

Green rural France: how infinitely soothing it is to walk along the edge of forests, under tall trees, to sleep in darkness and silence.  The silence of the woods, though, is disturbing – few birds.  Each time I see a flash of wing or hear even a chirp, I feel happy.  But industrial agriculture has taken its toll everywhere with pesticides, and goes on doing so.  (If you care about this, do send a dollar, euro or pound to Avaaz, the international organization doing its best to ban pesticides.)

For a writer, for anyone, this is a chance to retreat from what we think of as ‘the world’ and understand what a difference it makes to any creative endeavor.  ‘The world’ is noisy, polluted, argumentative, seems to be dying – do I focus too much on the end of things?  This hidden world still exists, and being in it even for a week is nourishing me already.  It’s like having been given an essential vitamin. (Yes, there are drawbacks, ticks for example.)  When I first arrived here, my thought was – I want to stay here for the rest of my life.  But no – I would miss everyone. I’m too social for that.

Any chance of somebody coming through with lots of money for a writer’s retreat?  I imagine teaching ‘The Artist’s Way’ here…

I think of the word ‘retreat’ – often used for encouraging creativity – and wonder when, and what from, we first needed to retreat. Our families, work, the rest of life?  (Doesn’t retreating mean going backwards?)  We are, after all, deeply involved with ‘the world’ and it may need us.  Perhaps ‘recreation’ would be a better word.  What are we creating, if not images of a better world, echoes of ourselves in it, blueprints for a real future?

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 50

Notes on a Writing Life / 50    
June 14 2023

Dear All,

This is going to be the shortest newsletter ever, as I am about to flit across the Pond to France and then England.  We’re also coming up to number 50!  I can’t believe I’ve kept this going for so long; but it is still a pleasure, and all the more so for the messages and encouragement I get back from readers in return. Thank-you!

It’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 juicy kiss.  Mmmm.

News of my upcoming novel: “Bone Whispers” is at last in production with Epicenter Press in Seattle, and should be out by 2024.  It’s about England after the second World War, about children caught up in something beyond their understanding, about the reckonings that come with adult life.  It’s set in Dorset, in a place I love, and its inception came from a local shop-keeper (who is in the book) asking me a few years ago why I don’t set a novel right there.

Apart from that – and there’s nothing to do to it right now – I’m taking the summer off.  Unless, as it so often happens, in the midst of doing nothing, an idea pops up and I’m off to the races again…

Next month, I’ll be celebrating le quatorze juillet with you, in place.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 49

Notes on a Writing Life  48
May 14 2023

Dear All,

Last year I was in London, celebrating my birthday among lilac, rhododendrons and daffodils and the ancient trees of Hampstead Heath; this year I am in Key West for my ‘solar return’ in among the royal poincianas and flowering frangipani, with the mocking-birds and feral chickens courting all around.   

My mind is on trees in cities and how they are treated: this month a favorite tree on a Key West street was cut down only days after a friend and I walked and stood marveling in its deep shade, and she took a photograph. Walking under it, you could feel the temperature drop several degrees. The street was cool. Now there is just a stump – no shade, no bird habitat, no negative ions.  Just a space for someone to build an air-conditioned box.  Nearer even to home, there are permits out for three of our magnificent royal poincianas to be destroyed – the icon of Key West, they are putting out their flaming blossoms and people are afraid that they will drop their scarlet confetti on their cars, I suppose.  At a time when shade is so vital in our over-heated town, when birds and insects are already depleted, when we need these trees to watch over us – destruction, in the name of progress.  Are they crazy?

A 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 and my father, undaunted by rain, took me and my school friends on a damp picnic, made a camp fire, and we cooked sausages. And to last year, when so many of my family and friends gathered in London to celebrate.

This year, I’ll be on the beach here, early, before the crowds appear. Perhaps I’ll see the ospreys in their nest on a high pole, perhaps a swarm of leaping fish, perhaps the heron fishing for his breakfast.  And at night, Venus bright and near to encourage me for the coming year.

The photo was taken last week on a friend’s boat as we headed for an uninhabited island at sunset - another good adventure…

Happy Birthday all earth-loving Taureans!

Affectionately, Ros