Notes On A Writing Life
14 April 2021
Dear All,
A few weeks ago, I was invited by some friends to go out for a sunset sail on a rented Catamaran, out of the Key West Bight. The Bight is where Elizabeth Bishop wrote her poem on her birthday, describing its activity as ‘awful but cheerful.’ It’s also where I boarded a smaller boat 27 years ago to sail to my wedding on a nearby island. These days, it’s full of enormous yachts, not shrimp boats, and the tourists, mostly maskless, parade up and down.
One of the guests at this party was the writer Colum McCann, on a first trip to Key West. Of course, having read his work, especially his novel Let The Great World Spin, I was delighted to meet him. He told me about his latest novel, Apeirogon, and how tough it was to convince his publishers about the title, and its theme, Palestine and Israel. I bought it immediately after the boat trip and have to write about it here as the most enthralling book I have read for a long time. It reminded me, as I read, of the obligation of writers to listen. McCann writes about two men, one Israeli, one Palestinian, who have both had young daughters murdered by the other side. It’s about grief, yes, but it’s also about life, love, the need to listen to each other and go on listening, as the only way toward peace and understanding, even if peace and understanding never completely happen. It’s the most empathetic, noticing, ego-free, enthralling piece of writing, and it’s long and claims your whole attention, and it’s nothing like anything I have read before.
Books do change lives. They lend us perspectives we have never thought of, never considered. They put us inside other people’s lives, and heads. They make us weep, and laugh, and then think. I was reminded that reading is more than a pastime, more than a solace, that it’s a necessity in itself. Read Apeirogon. Be grateful that a fairly young Irish writer has gone to places that would alarm and baffle most of us, and brought back a story that has ‘countably infinite sides to it’ (apeirogon) and is told in the form of A Thousand And One Nights.
It’s spring – at least in the northern hemisphere. Everything is flowering here, the mocking-birds are singing, it is not yet too hot, and gradually we feel our way back into life as we used to know it, with parties on boats, friends meeting for lunch, conversations away from Zoom. My daughter Miranda, in Scotland, sent me a photo of the eggs her hens laid and I sent it out as an Easter greeting, but here it is again – so beautiful – for those of you who have not yet seen it.
It’s also April, poetry month, and a sad recent event was the death of Robert Hershon, founder and editor of Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn – the publishing house that has generously published several books of my poetry and has been going strong since a band of wild-haired young poets started it in the 1960’s.
Go well, Bob…
Affectionately, Ros