Notes on a Writing Life / 35
March 14 2022
Dear All,
Sometimes events in the world overwhelm us and writing has to expand to a new consciousness of what actually is.
This month has been one of those times. None of us know what will happen, the future seems in jeopardy once again, and all we have is hope, and each other. I’m thinking of the brave souls in Ukraine, and also, nearer to home, our friends and neighbors who have been fighting so strongly to preserve our waters from pollution, in the campaign against the monster cruise ships that still come to our island and kick up silt, killing marine life. Coincidentally, their colors are the same – yellow and blue. Here are some yellows and blues to be seen about Key West at this moment.
My book of the month has to be Rebecca Solnit’s “Orwell’s Roses” – essays about George Orwell, gardening and revolution, hope and roses – as she manages to leap over conventional thinking and make unexpected connections. She has written about hope already, not in any vague way, but in naming the things that do allow hope to grow, and in pointing out how both it and despair are contagious. If you are not spreading one, you are probably spreading the other. Compost or poison. I never knew Orwell was a gardener, toiling over his rose bushes, but now I do.
For myself, I am taking the plunge into publishing a novella I wrote years ago and never sent out. It’s called “Elena, Leo, Rose” and is about three people, their friendship and love affairs, set against 1980’s Europe and its past history. I can’t help thinking of Rick in Casablanca: “the lives of three little people” not amounting “to a hill of beans at a time like this” – but here they are, with their hill of beans. It’s being designed as we speak way up in the mountains of Northern Spain by Kim Narenkivicius, with a cover taken from a drawing by artist Madeleine Strobel. Deciding, choosing, working together over the last few weeks has felt both creative and exciting for all of us. Sometimes you just long to take the means of production into your own hands. The Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Greig has said of it, “Elena, Leo, Rose is very much in the territory of the classic French film Jules et Jim… a fine, short book about the joy of being alive, in time, with friends, lovers, or alone,”
Courage, hope and good writing to you all,
Affectionately, Ros
