Notes on a Writing Life 47
March 14 2023
Dear all,
Clearing out a closet – always a good activity for spring – I came upon some typed diaries I’d written in 1995/6 and abandoning my tidying efforts, sank back into reading what I had written then, very shortly after I first came to Key West. I found entries that surprised me: our memory of a time is sometimes very different from our immediate impression of that time. Key West has changed, I have changed. I was newly married, and now have been married nearly 30 years. There was nostalgia, yes, for people and times that have gone, and for a simpler, quieter, less frenetic life here. I came to a run-down hippyish place at the end of the road, and now I live in a tourist town. Houses then were often unpainted, now they are tarted up and sold for millions. But the main impression I came away with (as I went back to tidying) was that memory changes things, just subtly but continuously. The written word seizes and fixes a time in a way that memory alone does not.
Working cover. Painting by Susan Sugar.
I’m also (synchronistically) awaiting the finished re-edition of my novel of that time, ‘Seas Outside The Reef’, a story of sailing, and Cuban refugees, and down-and-out people coming to town. It’s been beautifully designed by Kim Narenkivicius, with a painting by Susan Sugar for the cover. I’ve written a new introduction, and it will be available for pre-order any time soon.
My friend Marie-Claire Blais, whom I still miss on a daily basis, will have a plaque set upon her house in the Writers’ Compound on Windsor Lane, where John Hersey also once lived. A poem of hers will be set in the pavement there, I hear, and I want to include it here as it so clearly expresses her deep and humane self. The photo of her – looking unusually severe – goes with it.
Your most compelling purpose
must be to free the human in you.
Then you will understand
that others really exist.
Votre but le plus impérieux
doit être de libérer en vous
l’humain.
Ensuite vous comprendrez
que les autres existent
vraiment.
MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
1939-2021
The past is still with us in memory and in writing. Our lost friends speak to us still. The characters I invented for ‘Seas…’ have come back to be with me as I work on the proofs. I’m happy that they will see the light of day again and maybe find new readers, visitors to that older Key West.
As I write, I think of many of you who receive this newsletter, and thank you once again for reading it.
Affectionately, Ros