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