Notes On A Writing Life / 25
May 14 2021

Dear All,

As I write the date above – my birthday – I think about birthdays in general, and new beginnings, and change. Beginning on a new book: always a thrill and a challenge. Having, out of the blue, a new idea. Starting again, re-doing, re-visiting, re-writing too.

A week or so ago I cleaned out my writing room, the studio I inherited years ago from Bob Stone. Rather superstitiously, I’d kept some of his stuff, and suddenly I knew that it was time to let it go, that however Bob had encouraged me as a writer – and he did - it was not by some sort of ghostly osmosis through furniture, old rugs, paper-clips or boxes of index cards. I still sit at his desk and look out through the same window, but I know I’m on my own now.

Cleaning out the studio involved throwing five boxes of old manuscripts – my own – into the recycling bin. I thought – nobody is going to want to read these, and even if they did, I don’t want them to be read. I vacuumed, dusted. I mopped and sealed the floor. Then I began again on my own current manuscript: cleaning out sentences, adverbs, adjectives, discursive paragraphs, asides that had nothing to do with the story. I would see what this clean sweep meant and whether my vigorous clean-up would be justified. It just felt right.

Outside, the royal poincianas are bursting into flower all over town – such a Key West sight - but by summer’s end there will simply be carpets of red petals. The mocking-birds are singing all day as they rush about building their nests. It’s all about change, and moving on. I walked past one of the remaining untouched old wooden houses of Key West this morning and remembered a wonderful party we had in the back yard years ago, with lanterns and light projections and music, to celebrate the publication of the latest edition of The Secret of Salt, our one-time literary journal. Before that, it was the home of a reclusive painter, Carolyn Gorton Fuller, who once invited me to tea because I was English and showed me a house full of paintings that nobody had seen. Now, I saw from the notice stuck up on the wall, it is about to be renovated. As I paused to take a photograph, sadness came up for past times, celebrations, people who are no longer here. These old houses are biodegradable, sit lightly on the earth, are quickly given over to mold and decay. They do need attention, and I only hope that the attention this one gets will be gentle and creative, not fast and thoughtless, done only to make money and flip another house on to the remorseless real estate market in this town. For me, it will always be Carolyn’s house, then Kim’s house and the site of our enchanted revels that night.

Change is all around us, and in us, and it happens whether we like it or not. As a person born under the sign of Taurus, I don’t much like it, but I do have to recognize it – and this year’s changes have mostly been good ones, at least where I am on the planet. We change, the world changes, and our work has to change too. So I get back to my rewrite – out with the verbiage! Out with the irrelevancies! In with the new! And I remember Annie Dillard saying that you have to get in the room with a book, with a whip and a chair, at least until you have tamed it, and that she herself cut hundreds of pages from her last novel until it was what it needed to be. I remember her grappling with those cuts and changes, until it was the right shape and size and became The Maytrees – one of my favorites of all time.

May your changes be good ones -

Affectionately, Ros

*Laughing with the late, great Dianne Zolotow.*