Notes on a Writing Life / 45
January 14 2023
Dear All,
Two weeks into the New Year, and our first pink hibiscus flower appeared at breakfast time. It’s too cold for the iguanas to be out and about, munching their favorite salad, so it has a chance of survival for a day at least.
Today, the 40th Key West Literary Seminar begins – “Singing America” – celebrating Black literature. I believe it’s a first in this country, and it’s about time. Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker kicks off with the Keynote Address, and there’s going to be a Gospel choir. I’m looking forward to hearing some terrific writers, including the poets Jericho Brown and Rowan Ricardo Phillips, novelists Deesha Philyaw, (“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies”) and Tayari Jones (“An American Marriage”) and to reconnecting with my Haitian writer friend, Nadine Pinède, who is writing about Zora Neale Thurston and editing an illustrated collection of Black poetry on the natural world. We met a few years ago when she was writer in residence here, have a date to eat ‘pulpo’ together, every year, at a favorite restaurant.
And, on a different note, I have been reading Diana Abu-Jaber’s 2016 memoir “Life Without A Recipe,” and am struck by how vital it is for writers who are mothers both to write and to read memoir about combining these two often conflicting occupations. How on earth did we do it? I ask myself fifty years on from my children’s birth. Somehow, we did. Diana’s memoir takes me back there, to those early years, and reminds me to revere any writer who has also brought up children – and that’s many of us. I myself started to write again when my daughter was a baby, because the psychiatrist I was seeing for post-natal depression told me to. Two hours a day, she stipulated. And that led, not miraculously but steadily, to my first published book.
The little sculpture here, I bought in an estate sale held at Judith Gaddis’ house in Key West after her death. It’s by her partner, Duke Rood, who created incredibly delicate sculptures out of pieces of found wood. I always regretted not buying one when he was alive, so I bought this for my husband for our wedding anniversary in December. This tiny figure with its arms raised seems to me to be blessing us, our house, and our endeavors.
A happy New Year to you,
Affectionately, Ros