14 January 2024
Dear All,
A happy 2024 to you! May it turn out to be peaceful and creative…
My chickens are coming home to roost. I’m delighted to say that “Seas Outside the Reef” and “Light Over Islands,” two books set in Key West, are now both available on Amazon, as I mentioned last month, and are about to be produced in e-book form. I’ll be signing copies at Soul House, the beautiful store on the corner of Southard and Frances in Key West, run by Oakleigh Waits and Susan Beale. Come by 3:30 – 5:30 on January 25 – Virginia Woolf’s and Robert Burns’ birthdays!
In this newsletter I want to tell you more about my novel, “Bone Whispers”, out on February 14 – Valentine’s Day – on which day I’m inviting my little writers’ group out for a festive lunch.
The novel is set in Dorset, in England, and it’s a story I’ve had in mind for a long time, though I’m not sure quite why. It includes childhood memories of the post-war era in England, as well as 21st-century sections set in my country of origin. The contemporary part is set in 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, on a scorching summer in which climate change is making itself felt and a drought went on for months. It invokes Thomas Hardy and his novel “The Return of the Native” as my protagonist returns to the place where she spent summers in her childhood and youth.
I left England in the early 1980’s, to move to Scotland, where I lived for 12 years, before moving to the US in 1993, and I have only visited my native country yearly since then. What is it about getting older that makes you want to go back to your roots? I remember saying somewhat glibly years ago that trees need roots, not people – and now, I’m feeling rather differently about this. Not that I want to move back, physically, but that it mattered to me in writing “Bone Whispers” to explore what it means to be English, as I think one really only can when looking back from another country and another society. So, the native returns, and the book, published in the US, bridges a divide for me, connects my native story with my American experience, and I hope gives my readers a bit of both.
Images courtesy of Flores del Camino Retreat Centre.
One of the more delightful projects of 2024 promises to be the writing retreat that Kim Narenkivicius and I are leading in June, from 1st to 12th, at the Flores del Camino retreat centre along the pilgrimage trail in northern Spain. With excursions to visit local churches and petroglyphs, exploring sacred geometry, working with earth pigments and close access to the Camino de Santiago (as well as, of course, time to write in comfort and with good food laid on!) this will be a wonderful way to treat ourselves to an oasis of calm and connection with history. All levels are welcomed. Also, Kim is crafting the “Part II” onward walking pilgrimage to Santiago directly after the writing portion of the retreat from the 12th to the 24th of June. So, if this intrigues you and is exactly what you need to do this year, stay tuned. We will be sending out the final details shortly. You can also contact me via the link below to be placed on the email list.
I’m off this weekend to the Literary Seminar in Key West that takes place this weekend: “Florida: The State We’re In.” (Pun of course intentional.) I’m looking forward to hearing what writers from our state have to say, on this place that enchants and baffles us all, and is under threat from rising seas, book censorship, educational mayhem, political chicanery and all the rest. We’ll be under water here in a while, long or short – but for now, we meet down near the ocean’s edge, come rain or shine, in a place where the beauty of the natural world is still eviden and the sun goes down in a blaze of original glory every night.
Stay well!
Affectionately, Ros