Notes on a Writing Life / 28

Notes On A Writing Life / 28
August 14 2021

Dear All,

   As I’ve been walking across the hills of Dorset, in the south-west of England, I’ve thought about writers walking through the centuries.  A certain thought-process develops as you put one foot in front of the other.  Story is progress, after all - one thing after another.  You turn a mental corner, come across a new view, see something illuminated more clearly than another, just as you do when physically walking. Landscapes open up to you. The placing of a foot upon the earth is a statement, as is putting down a sentence.  Movement, the movement of a body on the ground, demands bone and muscle.  You walk (or run), you think, (or stop thinking) – and movement begins to occur in the mind.  Fragments of dialogue, sometimes, a new theme, a detail that matters, a twist of narrative.  Walking alone across landscape: for me, here, walking across land I have crossed scores of times in my life, a well-known, well-loved path, yet never predictably the same.

“We walk to escape the world we know – in my case to be free of the constrictions of lockdown, the clutter and noise of the place I live in, to stretch limbs that haven’t really stretched for over a year. And something begins in the mind, a connection with the earth, a sense of its reality, and of our own ability to move in it. ”

   Thomas Hardy’s characters come to mind, trudging across this part of the country:  Jude, walking to Christminster, Tess Durbeyfield, the reddleman, Eustacia Vye, Gabriel Oak. It’s the working-class characters who walk, of course; the others cross the land on horseback, asserting the superiority of horsemen.  Yesterday, one person – a woman – on a horse, as I trudged. Yes, I felt brief envy at her surge forward into a canter uphill. But it’s on foot that you feel the oldness of the land, the chalk and stone under grass, and notice the particularities of its wild flowers and birds. Harebells, scabious, even wild orchids.  A hunting hawk. And on the way home, the first tart ripe blackberries from the hedgerow.

   Robert Louis Stevenson walked across the Cevennes in south-western France, with a donkey for company and baggage-carrier. Slow progress. But he was a man from the city, escaping from an unhappy love affair.  Hardy’s characters don’t escape – they trudge on. These days, writers walk deliberately, as RLS did, rather than having walking as their only means of travel.  We walk to escape the world we know – in my case to be free of the constrictions of lockdown, the clutter and noise of the place I live in, to stretch limbs that haven’t really stretched for over a year.  And something begins in the mind, a connection with the earth, a sense of its reality, and of our own ability to move in it. Pilgrimage depends on this:  one foot after the other, on a path made sacred over centuries.  Walking to Santiago de Compostela, blisters and all, a few years ago, I felt my own body altered by it. Something like coming down from space, I imagine, and re-establishing a connection with gravity. We need gravity. We need walking. We need to feel our bones’ connection with the old ways, this ancient earth.

Go well, however you move across the world – in mind, in body. 

Affectionately, Ros  

Notes on a Writing Life / 27

Notes On A Writing Life 27
July 14 2021

Dear All,

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between writing and moving about the world, during this time when so few of us have been able to go anywhere.  How much does free movement inspire our work?  Apart from travel writers, of course, whose stock-in-trade is movement – do we free up our minds when we embark on journeys to new places, when we fly above the earth or cross seas and boundaries and experience other countries?  I think so.  The Australian writer Christina Stead once wrote ‘My imagination really starts to operate at 33,000 feet.”  I have often felt the same.  The plane soars from the ground and you leave behind your earthly concerns and obligations, your seat belt fastened, and only the sky around you, deepening blue as you rise through the clouds that wrap the earth.

    There are, of course, many writers who couldn’t and didn’t do anything like this.  Think of the Brontës, famously plodding across the moor around Haworth.  Think of Jane Austen, at home, always at home.  Think of writers in prison.  But we 20th and 21st-century writers have become used to freely roaming about the world, going where we decide we want to go.  Pascal may have been right when he said that all our ills come from not being able to sit alone in a room – but most writers, who spend a lot of time in that room, also long for the freedom to get out of it.

    I am writing this when I’m about to try to fly to England, with my husband, in among a welter of details to be seen to: Covid tests both here and there, quarantine, documents to prove who we are and where we will be.  I say ‘try’ because nothing is certain any more – or maybe we just know now that this is so. Travel is no longer the easy thing of our youth, when to cross the Atlantic or to wander around Europe you only had to buy a ticket (or stick out your thumb.) National boundaries constrain us, and I for one don’t think that they are good for writers.  We need always to see how other people live, hear other languages, read other literatures, literally change views.  Lockdown may have been good for concentration; so many people sat down to write in 2020 because there wasn’t an excuse not to, or to keep themselves sane. But now? I long for that moment of leaving the earth and taking off into the blue.  I’ll settle back and let my mind loose, see what occurs, and by the time I’ve landed at Heathrow hope that like Christina Stead, I’ll have the germ of a new idea, a phrase, even a dream or the hint of one, to carry back to earth.  

“    I also long to set my foot on an unknown path, to go somewhere I have never been before, to round a corner and see the landscape unfold – as my brother Richard and I did in 2018 when we last walked a section of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, through a wild and beautiful part of France. ”

    I also long to set my foot on an unknown path, to go somewhere I have never been before, to round a corner and see the landscape unfold – as my brother Richard and I did in 2018 when we last walked a section of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, through a wild and beautiful part of France.  The memory is always there, as the postcard of that turning path, disappearing among trees, is pinned up above my desk, in the room in which I have recently spent so many of my days.  But the reality – ah, that’s the draw. Pilgrims and nomads know it.  Walking across countryside, as people did for centuries, the mind and body come together, eyes and ears are refreshed, and the imagination runs free. 

Let’s travel safely – but let’s travel still.

Affectionately, Ros

The English Way.

Notes on a Writing Life / 26

Notes On A Writing Life  26
June 14 2021

Dear All,

“How do you know when something is finished?”  My son asked me on the phone recently, about a piece of writing of his own.  I thought – not until it’s published, and you can’t change it. Not until you can’t go on tinkering with it anymore.  But there are stages of finishedness – the moment when you decide to ship it out and press SEND is one.  I said, “When you feel you can’t do any more to it, I think.”

The writers among you must know the feeling of looking at a piece of work – one day it looks finished, the next you find an enormous flaw. It’s very hard to know what you have done. You can send something out one day, to an agent or editor, and wake the next morning to see the enormous flaw staring you in the face. We have to ask others for help, and trust that other eyes on our efforts will be clairvoyant.  Sometimes, with a trusted reader, this works – sometimes, not.

So, you send a book out, keeping fingers crossed, planets in alignment, work done and re-done, gods of novel-writing placated – whatever it takes.  Then what? The waiting period, the doubt, is painful to writers – and we all go through it, no matter how well or often we have been published.  Each attempt at a creative work is a step into the unknown.

Failure, someone said in the Apollo 13 movie, is not an option.  But failure is always an option, and we know it.  In our success-oriented world, where failing is at least embarrassing and at most, catastrophic, it’s a good time to have another look at the notion of failure.  What exactly is it?  The lack of acclaim by a single person, our peers, society at large?  Is it simply about disappointing ourselves? Perhaps failure is the only way we learn, and success – that ‘siren hiss’ as the poet Anne Stevenson once put it – is the illusion.

So I’m including here a poem I wrote about it, and I’m going back to poetry for a while – poetry, in which you can say or do anything and nobody can argue with you, although they might not like or understand the poem.  Poetry is private property. It doesn’t really deal with success or failure.  It can be obscure, even baffling. It can live in a drawer and not scream to get out. It can live for a lifetime in a memory, a heart.  It’s where flaws can hang out unchallenged, because it has no expectations, is simply not in any race.  At least, that is how I see it.

Meanwhile, in summer here the mangoes drop off the trees, you can hear them rushing through the leaves to hit the ground, and the clouds of midsummer gather and promise rain yet don’t deliver - yet.   Everything to its season.  I’m including another bee photo, sent by my bee-keeping daughter, as bees are successful creatures as long as they are not being poisoned.  They know how to do their lives, and create what only they can create. 

Affectionately, Ros

FAILURE

("Last night as I lay sleeping/ I dreamed—marvelous

error—that I had a beehive here inside my heart and the 

golden bees/ were making white combs and sweet honey

from my old failures. "

—Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly.)

I read you Antonio Machado,

sitting out here with my coffee,

trying not to listen to the noises of the day—

shriek of wood-saw, blurt of traffic

on wet streets—

and think about your golden bees

making white combs and sweet honey

from your old failures—

and so, presumably, mine.

Yesterday’s rejection letter came :

‘we all loved it but unfortunately. . .’

and now you remind me, sleep is

a gathering of bees,

dream is renewal, even an idle

breakfast stretching into the morning

can hold a hidden reconfiguring

of sorts;

that it’s all going on out of sight

as my neighbor invisibly mows his grass

and someone deafens the street

with a leaf-blower;

that not-doing is possibly

our purpose, while the beehive

thrums in the heart; that poets 

will always be read

if we write about

failure, the topic nobody mentions,

except in whispers,

except among bees.

(from INVISIBLE HORSES, published 2019 by Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY. 

Notes on a Writing Life / 25

Notes On A Writing Life / 25
May 14 2021 

Dear All,

As I write the date above – my birthday – I think about birthdays in general, and new beginnings, and change.  Beginning on a new book: always a thrill and a challenge. Having, out of the blue, a new idea.  Starting again, re-doing, re-visiting, re-writing too.

A week or so ago I cleaned out my writing room, the studio I inherited years ago from Bob Stone. Rather superstitiously, I’d kept some of his stuff, and suddenly I knew that it was time to let it go, that however Bob had encouraged me as a writer – and he did - it was not by some sort of ghostly osmosis through furniture, old rugs, paper-clips or boxes of index cards. I still sit at his desk and look out through the same window, but I know I’m on my own now.  

Cleaning out the studio involved throwing five boxes of old manuscripts – my own – into the recycling bin.  I thought – nobody is going to want to read these, and even if they did, I don’t want them to be read. I vacuumed, dusted. I mopped and sealed the floor. Then I began again on my own current manuscript: cleaning out sentences, adverbs, adjectives, discursive paragraphs, asides that had nothing to do with the story. I would see what this clean sweep meant and whether my vigorous clean-up would be justified. It just felt right.

Outside, the royal poincianas are bursting into flower all over town – such a Key West sight - but by summer’s end there will simply be carpets of red petals. The mocking-birds are singing all day as they rush about building their nests.  It’s all about change, and moving on.  I walked past one of the remaining untouched old wooden houses of Key West this morning and remembered a wonderful party we had in the back yard years ago, with lanterns and light projections and music, to celebrate the publication of the latest edition of The Secret of Salt, our one-time literary journal.  Before that, it was the home of a reclusive painter, Carolyn Gorton Fuller, who once invited me to tea because I was English and showed me a house full of paintings that nobody had seen. Now, I saw from the notice stuck up on the wall, it is about to be renovated. As I paused to take a photograph, sadness came up for past times, celebrations, people who are no longer here. These old houses are biodegradable, sit lightly on the earth, are quickly given over to mold and decay. They do need attention, and I only hope that the attention this one gets will be gentle and creative, not fast and thoughtless, done only to make money and flip another house on to the remorseless real estate market in this town. For me, it will always be Carolyn’s house, then Kim’s house and the site of our enchanted revels that night.

Carolyn Gorton Fuller, Key West

Change is all around us, and in us, and it happens whether we like it or not.  As a person born under the sign of Taurus, I don’t much like it, but I do have to recognize it – and this year’s changes have mostly been good ones, at least where I am on the planet.  We change, the world changes, and our work has to change too.  So I get back to my rewrite – out with the verbiage! Out with the irrelevancies! In with the new!   And I remember Annie Dillard saying that you have to get in the room with a book, with a whip and a chair, at least until you have tamed it, and that she herself cut hundreds of pages from her last novel until it was what it needed to be. I remember her grappling with those cuts and changes, until it was the right shape and size and became The Maytrees – one of my favorites of all time.

 May your changes be good ones -   

Affectionately, Ros

Laughing with the late, great Dianne Zolotow.

Salt, an indigenous journal.

Notes on a Writing Life /24

Notes On A Writing Life
14 April 2021

Dear All,

A few weeks ago, I was invited by some friends to go out for a sunset sail on a rented Catamaran, out of the Key West Bight.  The Bight is where Elizabeth Bishop wrote her poem on her birthday, describing its activity as ‘awful but cheerful.’ It’s also where I boarded a smaller boat 27 years ago to sail to my wedding on a nearby island.  These days, it’s full of enormous yachts, not shrimp boats, and the tourists, mostly maskless, parade up and down.  

One of the guests at this party was the writer Colum McCann, on a first trip to Key West. Of course, having read his work, especially his novel Let The Great World Spin, I was delighted to meet him.  He told me about his latest novel, Apeirogon, and how tough it was to convince his publishers about the title, and its theme, Palestine and Israel.  I bought it immediately after the boat trip and have to write about it here as the most enthralling book I have read for a long time.  It reminded me, as I read, of the obligation of writers to listen.  McCann writes about two men, one Israeli, one Palestinian, who have both had young daughters murdered by the other side.  It’s about grief, yes, but it’s also about life, love, the need to listen to each other and go on listening, as the only way toward peace and understanding, even if peace and understanding never completely happen.  It’s the most empathetic, noticing, ego-free, enthralling piece of writing, and it’s long and claims your whole attention, and it’s nothing like anything I have read before. 

Books do change lives. They lend us perspectives we have never thought of, never considered. They put us inside other people’s lives, and heads.  They make us weep, and laugh, and then think.  I was reminded that reading is more than a pastime, more than a solace, that it’s a necessity in itself.  Read Apeirogon.  Be grateful that a fairly young Irish writer has gone to places that would alarm and baffle most of us, and brought back a story that has ‘countably infinite sides to it’ (apeirogon) and is told in the form of A Thousand And One Nights. 

It’s spring – at least in the northern hemisphere.  Everything is flowering here, the mocking-birds are singing, it is not yet too hot, and gradually we feel our way back into life as we used to know it, with parties on boats, friends meeting for lunch, conversations away from Zoom.  My daughter Miranda, in Scotland, sent me a photo of the eggs her hens laid and I sent it out as an Easter greeting, but here it is again – so beautiful – for those of you who have not yet seen it.

It’s also April, poetry month, and a sad recent event was the death of Robert Hershon, founder and editor of Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn – the publishing house that has generously published several books of my poetry and has been going strong since a band of wild-haired young poets started it in the 1960’s. 

Go well, Bob…

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 23

Notes on a Writing Life 23
March 14 2021

Dear All,

Last week I was invited to go to a real cinema to see a real film. A friend who is on the Board of our local Arts cinema, responsible for choosing movies to be shown in the near future, took a small group of us into a cinema that had most of its seats blocked off, where we sat scattered and masked in the dark.  What a pleasure – I’d almost forgotten, after a whole year, what it’s like to be immersed in a good film, to cry and laugh unseen but not alone.  How different it is from sitting in front of a small screen at home, open to interruptions and the invasions of everyday life (though I’m not knocking Netflix, far from it.)  The film was the beautiful Supernova, made by Harry Macqueen and starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci.  I’m not going to describe it, as this is a newsletter about writing, after all; but writers are also part of the world, deeply affected by other art forms, inspired and informed by film as by perhaps no other medium.   

After a lifetime of loving cinema – from the first Tarzan movies my father took us to see, to lying about our ages to get in to La Dolce Vita in Geneva in the 50’s with my younger brother – ‘we’re twins and we’re 18,’ we swore – through my first year at college, spent almost entirely at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge – cinema has been as essential to me as reading, sleeping – or dreaming.  I see the scenes in my fiction as if they were on a screen, and can remember them as such years later.  Do other writers do this? I have no idea. What would our novels be like if we had never seen films?  What was it like for those pre-cinema writers, the Victorians, the Russians, all those 19th-century writers?  How differently did they experience form, narrative, exposition?  You can feel the difference, I think. No flashbacks, no jump-cuts, no memory sequences, none of the techniques of cinema.  They set the scene in great detail, because they had to. Their only templates were dream, or of course, theatre.  The magic of celluloid, now digital, has transformed our art.

Now I will come clean and say that if I had another life, I would want to be a film director.  And also that my as-yet-unfulfilled dream is to have a film made from one of my books or stories and to be involved in the making of it.  Why? Something about that magic, that sleight of hand born of relentless hard work, transformed into an experience that can bring such pleasure.

So, back in the Tropic cinema, at 10.30 on a Friday morning, I sat in the dark and wept throughout Supernova – at the scenery (English), at the story, at Stanley Tucci’s face, at the warmth of the huggy family party in the Lake District, at the ability of those two actors to express love, fear. anguish, irritation, mutual understanding, everything that a couple can go through.  Transcendent. And I came back to my own work to try to find in it some of that elusive, hard-worked, transforming honesty. What a challenge.  

“Following this, I had a long lunch with the two others in a small writers’ group we have, talking well into the afternoon about our books, publication, ideas, problems – where we’re at. It was the first time for a year.  It felt almost illegal – and so exciting.  After all the Zooming and whatsapping and Facetime and the things we ingenious humans have invented in order to go on seeing each other’s faces, hearing each other’s words, it was incredible to eat and drink together and simply talk.”

Following this, I had a long lunch with the two others in a small writers’ group we have, talking well into the afternoon about our books, publication, ideas, problems – where we’re at. It was the first time for a year.  It felt almost illegal – and so exciting.  After all the Zooming and whatsapping and Facetime and the things we ingenious humans have invented in order to go on seeing each other’s faces, hearing each other’s words, it was incredible to eat and drink together and simply talk.  Normal life again, and yet – not normal, because it felt like such a treat.  A cinema and a restaurant!  For all of you who are still not able to do such things, I wish them for you.  I don’t think we’ll take them for granted any time soon. And yes, they have been and are so much a part of the writing life. As Julia Cameron wrote in her 1990’s book, the Artist’s Way, we need our Artist Dates, our fallow times, our fun.

My second novel A Virtual Image, first published in 1971 is now available from Michael Walmer, North House, Melby, Sandness, Shetland ZE2 NPL, mikewalmer@ yahoo.co.uk. as well as from the usual online places.  (A 60’s road trip through France, with lots of wine, sex and a sort-of mystery. I now see how influenced I was – for better or worse – by French New Wave cinema.)  Thanks to Janet Burroway for her inspired new introduction.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 22

Notes On A Writing Life / 22

February 14 2021

Dear All,

There’s a new moon in Aquarius as I write this, and the mango blossoms are rushing out where I live (apologies to all of you who are snow-bound) and as we come up to Valentine’s Day I wish you all love and at least one loving human connection. 

Writing and reading continue to organize my days for me, even if I’m distracted at present by the fascinating and awful details of the impeachment trial of the US’s last president.  

My book of the month has been “Square Haunting” by Francesca Wade, a five-fold biography of five remarkable women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London, at various times during and between the wars in the 20th century.  They are: HD the American poet, Dorothy L. Sayers, crime writer, Virginia Woolf, Jane Harrison, classical scholar and linguist and Eileen Power, lecturer in medieval economics at the LSE.  Together, they reminded me of the vital question of women’s lives – how to have both work and love, without one being sacrificed to the other.  One after another, they struggled with love affairs with both men and women, babies both wanted and unwanted, miscarriages of both children and books, lack of money, public criticism, sudden fame, and one by one, as if drawn to the place, they came to Mecklenburgh Square – quiet, affordable, less rackety than Bloomsbury itself, houses in which a single person could rent a room.  

After I had finished reading this book, I somehow managed to finish rewriting the novel I’m working on.  Writing is rewriting; writing is revising; writing is also knowing what questions you want to ask, and even try to answer.  What is the connection between these five women and the story I am trying, with difficulty, to tell?  Is it too fanciful to imagine them lining up behind me, telling me – of course you know what to do? This is your subject: pick it up and run with it, as far as you can.

I thought about the geographical closeness of these women – two of them actually inhabited the same house, same bedroom, although not at the same time.  (Two others even slept with the same man, who seemed to haunt the square from time to time.) 

Here in Key West, writers live in close proximity, even though these days we don’t see each other all that often.  How do we affect each other’s work? By a word exchanged in the grocery store, a question asked at the pool, on the way to the beach, in conversations in studios and back yards, masked and distanced now but still talking. Is there an atmosphere created in a certain place that makes creative work there more likely?  How do we invisibly, secretly, as if by osmosis, egg each other on?  These are all questions I don’t have answers for, except to say – who knows?  Does the fact that Elizabeth Bishop lived two blocks away from my house help me in my day-to-day efforts?  That I used to run into Jimmy Merrill in the grocery store?  That Annie Dillard shared this studio space for years? That I know that Marie-Claire Blais is hard at work writing in her house today, just down the street?  New writers come to town, and we pass on – something, perhaps. An expectation, a reminder that writing matters, that we don’t do it alone.   

Happy Valentine’s Day! 

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 21

January 14 2021

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 21

Dear All,

Welcome to 2021!  In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected President of the US, I went to my local bookstore in search of sanity, as did many others that morning in November.  No novel, no poetry could quite capture the anxiety of that day; I chose James Shapiro’s 1606:  The Year of Lear.  Now I come back again to that year when conspirators were being burned at the stake for having attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, led by one Guido Fawkes; when the whole kingdom of England was in turmoil – and when Shakespeare finished King Lear and wrote Macbeth. Plague had been rampant in London and James I, the Scottish king, was newly on the throne.  Lear portrays a crazed king, threatening revenge; Macbeth a good king, murdered by a couple mad for power. Shakespeare saw it all – and wrote. It does put things in perspective – a perspective of 500 years. Nothing, it seems, is new on the face of the earth. 

I also go back gratefully in these turbulent days to Shakespeare’s contemporary, Michel de Montaigne, writing in his country house near the river Dordogne in the 1570’s and ‘80’s as hungry mercenaries roamed the French countryside looking for plunder.  He who gave up public office after a near-fatal fall from a horse in 1569 to write his essays, all based on the question ‘How to live?’  These past times can tell us a lot about the chaos of the present – and I think, the role of a writer, who has to try to make sense not just of events, but of the human mind and soul.  

Another good book for this moment is Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story in which she picks apart the difference between the raw material of the situation and the craft and nuance of the story to be told.  Here, in the US at this moment, we have the situation, ongoing as I write, but we do not yet have the story – just the raw ingredients, to be sifted by time.

On a different and more personal note:  my second novel, A Virtual Image, originally published by Macmillan, is to be re-published on January 25 by Michael Walmer. I look at it from the perspective of 50 years, and see my 27-year-old self, already married and with a baby, indulging in extreme nostalgia for earlier days when I ran around Europe all summer with a friend, doing exactly as I pleased.  The narrator, who is also 27, now sounds to me drunk, or high on something for most of the novel – it’s a trip, in several senses of the word.  I can’t remember anything about the political background at the time I wrote it, or even much about my daily life then.  But I do remember the excitement of getting down that story, a remnant of days when we were young and carefree and thought we were the bee’s knees.   

Affectionately, and with wishes for a good, safe, new year in 2021 - Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 20

December 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 20

Dear All,

At the end of this strange and disconcerting year, I’m thinking about the people who have left us, as well as the way we connect with each other as friends, as writers and readers.  My friend Alison Lurie died on December 3 at 94; she who has over the years supported me in my work, shown me innumerable kindnesses, thrown a publication party for me, given me a dining room table, shared lunch with me on many occasions, either at her house or mine or in a local oyster bar – she loved oysters – and who always called me as soon as she got back to town – “When can we get together?”  So many things she said come back to me. 

     “If you’re happier writing than not-writing, then write!”  

     “People always like reading about women having adventures.”  

     “What are you writing?  Sounds good! But what about…?” 

Why is it that a fellow-writer asking the question “Are you writing?” has a quite different effect than the same question from a non-writer – “Are you (still?) writing?”  With another writer, it’s a gentle invitation to talk about our shared occupation, to divulge, to complain, to celebrate and to offer the question back – “Are you?” It’s a signal that we can move on from our lives, politics, gossip, houses and (once upon a time) vacations. It’s a sign that we can go in deep, talk of plots, characters, vague ideas, problems even, and that this will be mutually shared.  With a non-writer, it’s different – a one-way street.  “Yes,” I usually say, and move on to something else. The ability to share news of our work with another writer is delightful, and is at the basis of writing communities – and, luckily for me, of so much of life in Key West. Alison, I will miss you – but so much of who you are and what you did and said remains with me, and as far as I can, I’ll pass it on.  The wisdom and wit, the sometimes acerbic remarks, the laughter, the practicality.  You have made such a difference to my life. I am honored to have been among your friends.

The other supports of the writer’s life are of course, the books we read.  In this year of lockdown and isolation, books have become more important than ever, and “What are you reading?” is the question that I and my friends ask each other most often. A book is a companion, for the duration.  I go down to my local bookstore and browse, mask and gloves on, and choose a new book as I once would have planned a trip. Where do I want to go, and with whom?  My find of this last month fell into my hands as I was, slightly miserly, thinking I’d choose a paperback rather than splash out for a new hardback this time.  It was The Golden Age by Joan London, published by Europa, and after reading the first page I thought – yes!  It’s exciting to find a book that nobody has talked about – at least not to me – with an author I’ve never heard of. Joan London is Australian, the novel is set in Western Australia in a children’s polio hospital in the 1950’s, and if that doesn’t sound enticing, then let me reassure you – it is a beauty of a novel and should be considered a classic. 

What do I want for next year?  Well, a new President, of course.  For my friends and family to flourish. For good change in all we do.  For meetings in real time, face to face without fear, for hugs and embraces and a coming back together after this time apart – but not really apart, as I do feel I am in touch with all of you.  I raise this glass (even though the photo was taken earlier this year, at Hidden Beach in Key West) to wish you all well.

Be well, be safe, and a happy Christmas –

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 19

November 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 19

Dear All,

This summer, I started writing a memoir.  “From World War Two To Covid 19 With Some Light Relief In Between,” perhaps… 

And here we are in November, so this present moment where I plunged in – literally - is already the past, even though during the long summer of our going nowhere, everything seemed to have stopped.  Time, history, our lives have all moved on, as of course they always do.  

This is how I began:

I’m in my friend P’s swimming-pool on a hot steamy Saturday afternoon in Key West.  It’s July, a time of year when usually I try to be elsewhere to avoid the heat – but not this year. This year, we are going nowhere. This year, 2020, we are simply here.  I’m lollygagging around in the nearly blood-heat water of the long blue pool partly shaded by palms and aurelias, and she’s perched in the shade of an umbrella, dressed in shorts, barefoot, telling me about her new writing project.  I’m envious – she has a writing project, she sounds excited about it and knowing her, it will be a brilliant, witty and intensely readable book.  She asks me if I’m writing, and I have to dredge up the old excuses – too hot, too old, too worried about what’s happening in the world, too lazy.  “That doesn’t sound like you,” observes my lucid friend, and I have to admit, it doesn’t.

“Everything I write about in novels seems out of date,” I hear myself complain. “People having meals in restaurants, getting on planes, having sex – you know.”

“Why don’t you write a memoir?  I’d love to read about your early life,” she says.

“You would?”  I tread water, float, look at her.  The thing about being an immigrant to another country is that nobody knows where you came from, or why, or what it was like to be - back there.  I have close friends here who know very little about my former life, except for what leaks out as autobiographical from my novels.  Unless somebody specifically asks, you don’t tell.  And it’s mostly still true that people in the United States think that you came here to improve on your old life simply by being here.

My excuses wither. Too hot – well, yes, 96 degrees Fahrenheit most days, that’s in the high 30’s where I came from, and 95 per cent humidity with it.  But there’s air conditioning, isn’t there?  Too old – she’s exactly the same age as me, born in 1942, and here she is excited about her new book, so that won’t wash.  Too worried about the state of the world – well, we do what we can, and apart from marching and voting and showing up to rallies and vigils from time to time, I am not really responsible for the future of the United States, or of the rest of the world. Perhaps I’m just responsible for what I do, or don’t do. For what I may write.  Too lazy – yes, I sleep all night, then nap in the afternoon after lunch, and a lot of the time I spend swimming. I’m a pool slut, not having one of my own, and will jump in wherever and whenever I can. The beaches are closed – it’s the fourth of July weekend, tourists are down from Miami, so the bars, beaches and much of Duval Street have been closed to protect us from the coronavirus they are certainly bringing to town. Sometimes this summer I have been down there early, to have the beach to myself.  Swimming has become a meditation and an addiction: I swim, therefore I am. This long pool at P’s house used to be my refuge during the many summers in Key West when the heat stung and sweat poured off me all day, before I began to escape to Europe for the summer months.  As long as I’m swimming, I feel as if I’m doing something. My stroke has improved, my breathing is deeper and easier, my whole body is firmer as a result – but above all, it’s the pleasure of being in water, in that element.  This isn’t laziness, I tell myself, it’s keeping fit, keeping sane.  Then there’s the other reason I’m not writing – I’m waiting to hear from my agent about the last novel I sent her, so it’s quite normal that I’m not writing. I give my friend this extra piece of evidence as she peers down at me over her sunglasses. “That’s not an excuse,” she says firmly. Okay, touchée.

“ The photo I have found to go with this month’s letter is of a drawing my father made of me when I was one year old and he was on leave from the war. I found it after his death in 1991, and it now hangs on my studio wall.”

There are times in life when somebody tells you something so incontrovertible that you just have to gasp and accept it.  I can remember several of these occasions, and exactly who said what to puncture some bubble of illusion I was in, and bring me down to earth.  When that happens, you just have to swallow it and probably do a U-turn. It’s humbling, but also a relief. 

So P. goes back into her cool house – “Enjoy your swim!” – and I push my body through the blue water, the blue an illusion made by the blue-painted pool’s bottom, and turn on my back to look up at vast white summer clouds poised like the barrage balloons of my childhood in the blue of the summer sky.  A memoir. My life.  What is there to discover here?

Since beginning on this ramble through my seventy-plus years, I’ve discovered a kind of form to my life, and as a result seen aspects of it that I’d not been aware of before.  Several of my friends tell me they have also started memoirs; I wonder how many ‘Covid’-induced memoirs there will turn out to be.  The great thing about memoir-writing, I discovered, is that you already have the story. It lives inside you; it always has. 

The photo I have found to go with this month’s letter is of a drawing my father made of me when I was one year old and he was on leave from the war. I found it after his death in 1991, and it now hangs on my studio wall. While trying to take the photo I saw that of course I couldn’t avoid the reflection of my present self, shadowy but there, as if I’d been there all along.

Be well, stay safe -

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 18

October 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 18

Dear All,

              And so we go on.  I heard this week that my second novel A Virtual Image, published in 1971 is due out at the end of the year from Michael Walmer, whose wonderful mission in life is to re-discover ‘neglected authors,’ with a new introduction by the novelist Janet Burroway.  Thoughts of return persist – the return of the virus, of course, and of our seemingly endless engagement with it, but also of returns in general: old friends reconnecting, lost manuscripts revived, old novels given a new lease of life, new work to be rewritten.  I read Janet’s introduction to my book, written when I was 27 in another world, and marveled at what she had found in it. Did I write that, did I mean that, why was I telling this story?  And then I returned to my current work in progress, re-working a novel intended to be a sequel to Without Her. (What happened to those people? What did they do next?)  Rewriting, you discover depths in a work that you did not imagine were there. You re-cast, re-imagine, re-write, re-view. The characters are not quite who you thought they were. And so on. The whole idea of sequels (or prequels) testifies to the fact that an author could not let go of characters she had created, or did not want to.  Something has to continue. Something further has to be solved. The end is not yet in view.

“Thoughts of return persist – the return of the virus, of course, and of our seemingly endless engagement with it, but also of returns in general: old friends reconnecting, lost manuscripts revived, old novels given a new lease of life, new work to be rewritten.  I read Janet’s introduction to my book, written when I was 27 in another world, and marveled at what she had found in it. Did I write that, did I mean that, why was I telling this story? ”

     This feeling of recommitment both to old work and new seems to me to fit the times in which we are living.  Keep the old, if it works – if not, discard it. Find the true thing in amongst the obsolete, or false.  Keep life alive.  Looking at these two novels, one written when I was 27, the other – well, 50 years later – I find traces of the later book in the earlier one and hints of characters I was yet to develop.  Two young women, setting out to discover the world, and themselves… It’s still the theme.  And when one of them is left, what then?

    I need continuity, at this time. We all do. But I also need to winnow out what matters from what doesn’t, what works at a deep level from what is purely anecdotal.  That’s the challenge.

    Meanwhile, the bees go on doing their work and my daughter Miranda writes to me of how they prepare for winter, how summer bees die off and winter bees are born.  Several poets have written bee-poems – Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, Antonio Machado among them.  Bees are at the heart of what matters. But they also seem to be ruthless about discarding the old stuff, making way for the new. In the spring, she tells me, she will begin harvesting the honey they make from the heather on the hills of the Scottish Borders, but right now they are feeding themselves up for the winter.

Be well, be safe –

 affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 17

September 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 17

Dear All,

September, and we come towards the end of a strange season  - summer for some of us, winter for others. I’m somewhere mentally stuck in about April/May… The pandemic keeps us at home still and each day resembles the one before.  So, what has been the protocol for writers?  I’m still keeping to my rather rigid writing routine – hours in my studio before anything else – and I’m finding it works. Showing up, as someone wrote, at the page.  It seems to be a time for revising, revisiting, repairing, re-doing at all levels.  I – and maybe many others – dig out old pieces of work, review them, discard or re-work – and edit the ones we are currently working on.  Everything seems to be up for review – our way of life, assumptions, occupations, relationships, plans if we have any, our diets and spending habits and received ideas. How we actually stay alive.  It’s a time for re-visiting almost everything we do and questioning it; it’s also a time – still – for hunkering down and doing what we can do, here and now.

I remember summers in my teens, revising for exams.  That was more about cramming information into our heads to be regurgitated later, than of radically questioning anything. I sat outside, working on my tan along with my historical dates and treaties. The exam came, and you passed or failed, were welcomed into glory or cast into disgrace.  I discovered a way of passing exams by memorizing a lot of obscure quotations and peppering my essays with them.  I also turned questions I didn’t like on their heads, challenging their very existence and answered the questions I wanted to answer instead.  It got me only so far – I’m sure examiners become used to such ruses. But it gave me a taste for invention, and a sense of independence. Yes, there was always a better question to be asked, and a more incisive response.  I had fun with exams, from then on, even though I only got mediocre results.  5 out of 10 for imagination, perhaps.  

“While California burns and Florida waits through hurricane season and election season with bated breath, I want to write about the world we’re losing – no, not a golden age, just an age of relative balance and sanity. I think of my dear friend, Roger Deakin, and his life and books dedicated to wild swimming and exploring woods. What question would he be asking, if he were still here? And Mary Oliver, with her famous question, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?””

The question of a book, whether novel, memoir or biography is anyway one you set yourself.  A question comes to mind and you spend time, energy and all your spare thoughts, trying to answer it. On the way you may forget about it – or maybe it wasn’t the right question after all.  Or someone else asks the question, and you make it your own.  A writer friend of mine gave me the suggestion, decades ago: if there is a problem, make it your topic. So, if you can’t write the story you want to write, start writing about the problem, make it central. I’ve found this a useful way to proceed. Before starting to try to leap over obstacles as in a steeple-chase, have a long look at the obstacle you want to leap over. Perhaps it is the subject of the book, the raison d’être of the race? 

At present, several people I know are writing dystopian, futuristic novels. Perhaps it’s to scare them about the future so that the present doesn’t seem too bad – I don’t know.  I’d love to read a novel about a better future, these days, but perhaps that is pie in the sky.  So I go back to the past, for my reading: Hamnet, the beautiful new novel by Maggie O’Farrell about the plague in England in the 16th century and Shakespeare’s young son; The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton, with all those prissy New Yorkers with no real cares in the world and only her own sharp pen to tell us how off-beam they were. While California burns and Florida waits through hurricane season and election season with bated breath, I want to write about the world we’re losing – no, not a golden age, just an age of relative balance and sanity. I think of my dear friend, Roger Deakin, and his life and books dedicated to wild swimming and exploring woods.  What question would he be asking, if he were still here? And Mary Oliver, with her famous question, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” We’ve time to think about this now, perhaps as never before.    

Meanwhile, here is a lovely video I call ‘The Blue Hive’ that my daughter Miranda in Scotland made, about her bees.  The bees are busy, working hard, and they know exactly what to do.

Be well, stay safe – and thoughts to my friends in California, especially.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 16

August 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 16

Dear All,

New times demand new ways of creating, and look, we are doing it.  I see my friends, other writers, musicians, actors, use the technologies that have sprung up so inventively over the last few months. Back in February, I didn’t know what Zoom even was. Facetime, Whatsapp, Crowdcast – they didn’t exist for me.  But these days I watch my friends perform in their basement in upstate New York, I spend an hour talking with a poet in Quebec, I check in to watch writers far away talking on Zoom and Crowdcast, because we can’t do what we used to do, crowd in to bookstores, cinemas, theatres, cafés, concerts.  It’s not the same, of course, as being there in the flesh – but I can’t help thinking, it’s a lot easier to sit in my room in front of my computer, dressed from the waist up like a TV presenter, nobody able to see that my shorts are scruffy and my feet bare, than to have  to drive long-distance to readings, stay in hotels overnight, and dress from head to toe.  This last week, I was interviewed about Without Her on Crowdcast for Books & Books in Key West, by the novelist Katrin Schumann, whom I know from Key West but who was actually in Boston. People showed up to listen and watch from all over the country, and we had a good time.

Yes, we’re all missing each other. We long to hang out in person, at length, to hug and breathe the same air, share food, be spontaneous.  But that the technology exists for these virtual meetings does make a huge difference, and now that I’m not scared of it anymore, I welcome it.

“ I’m trying to forget that I’m usually away in Europe at this time, walking with my brothers, going on delightful trips and seeing my old friends and family. I’m pretending I’m on a writing retreat, and so is Allen. We separate for most of the day to write, and talk at meals about what we have done, or what problems have come up. He’s out in the science-fiction future, I’m mostly in the memory-rich past. We’re extraordinarily lucky, I know, to have each other and to be able to do this. ”

One of the interesting questions I was asked during that interview was – how has the pandemic affected your life as a writer? I realized that after a few weeks or even months of feeling totally at sea, all my habits and assumptions challenged and the world of writing seemingly as remote as everything else, it did not need to change much at all. I’m trying to forget that I’m usually away in Europe at this time, walking with my brothers, going on delightful trips and seeing my old friends and family. I’m pretending I’m on a writing retreat, and so is Allen. We separate for most of the day to write, and talk at meals about what we have done, or what problems have come up. He’s out in the science-fiction future, I’m mostly in the memory-rich past. We’re extraordinarily lucky, I know, to have each other and to be able to do this.  But I also think back to all the years of my life when I longed for time to write, and it was rare and often even impossible to find.  Teaching, other work, bringing up kids, family life, involvement of all sorts take up our time when we’re young. Now, we have time. A whole lot of it. But as I sit writing, treating it once again as a job I have to get back to, I try to remember those other times, my youthful desperation, the way I had to write at top speed to get anything done at all, the urgency and panic.  I’m telling myself to slow down, take my time. I’m on a writing retreat, here in steamy Key West – no dinner parties, no social life, no obligations, no house guests, no movies that will change next week, no meetings, none of the demands, pleasant though they may be, that stop us getting on with what we most want to do – and I’m beginning to notice that it makes a difference.  There are still the sunsets, though, and the dramatic clouds of August arching over us all.

Stay well – 

affectionately, Ros

My next interview about Without Her, recently out in paperback from Delphinium Books, will take place on August 24. Check the website at Books & Books, Coral Gables, Miami to sign up for the event.  I’ll be talking with the novelist Diana Abu-Jaber at 7 pm EST.

Also, for the month of for August, Amazon are offering the Kindle version of The Lost Love Letters of Henri Fournier in the US at 99 cents, and in the UK, Paris Still Life at 99 pence. 

Notes on a Writing Life / 15

July 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 15

Dear All,

This last month, I’ve been at home in Key West still hunkering down as the virus Covid 19 increases its hold on Florida. No Bastille Day break-out, no travel to France this year.  It seems to be a time to appreciate where we actually are, and to take stock and be grateful.  

I think back over 25 years of being a writer here in a community of writers who have become close friends, steady allies and supporters of my own efforts, and of how that came about. We need our communities; nobody flourishes alone, whatever the myths may tell us.  Friendship grows over time and through dozens of small actions and conversations, through simply hanging out; all the things we took for granted, and are now hardly possible.  When I arrived here I had no idea that so many writers were my neighbors on this island and would become my friends.  I gradually met most of them when I was literary editor of a local newspaper, Solares Hill, whose editor David Ethridge asked me to review at least one book a week, and gave me free rein to choose my books.  

The English poet Judith Kazantzis came to town and took me to parties – the first I remember being at David Jackson’s house, a couple of years after his partner Jimmy Merrill’s death.  People gave a lot of parties in those days. We have all grown older and less energetic about entertaining, drinking, eating and staying up late but I remember from back then sumptuous parties given by Lynn and David Kaufelt, at which I felt as if I’d strayed into the pages of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.  

Judy Blume and George Cooper came to live here permanently and have now been running their bookshop, Books & Books, and hosting readings for several years.  Old Island Books on Fleming was the place for readings in the 1990’s, with Liz and Genevieve Lear providing a welcome, drinks and snacks as we crowded in to hear Richard Wilbur, John Malcolm Brinnin and others. When Margaret Atwood and Valerie Martin rented the house across the street from us and invited us to tea – cucumber sandwiches, no less - we got to know them and their husbands and invited them back.  Alison Lurie threw a publishing party for one of my novels. Harry Mathews was always an enthusiastic blurber for my work – “I love writing blurbs!” I’ve had so many generous blurbs written for me that I now feel I want to help any younger writer with blurbs myself. We have to pass on what we are so freely given. 

“ I took the photo of Bob and Annie as we all left John Martini’s and Carol Munder’s Christmas lunch, the last great feast we all had before the virus hit and we had to stay home.  It looks a little elegiac now, but at the time I just liked their matching red jackets as they walked arm in arm in the setting sun.”

I’m writing about literary friendship today because of the recent death of Bob Richardson, biographer of Emerson and William James, Annie Dillard’s husband, dear friend to so many of us, who died just after his 86th birthday at the end of June. Bob and I did not see each other often, but I was always aware of him there as a sort of literary godfather. He asked me to speak on a panel at the Literary Seminar, the year when he was Chair. He invited me to write a book about Virginia Woolf for the “Muse” series at the University of Iowa Press. He wrote letters to support my applications for a Guggenheim, while reminding me with a grin that it was always a long shot and probably wouldn’t work. He was always asking me what I was writing, and from both him and Annie I’ve always felt a steady stream of appreciation and encouragement.  

I heard him say one year at the Literary Seminar that Key West is a good place for a writer to live because nobody who settles here can be ambitious.  Ambition and excellence are not the same thing. 

I remember how Bob and I held the opposite ends of a banner when we marched against the Iraq war, and that we had seven people, a rooster and a dog with us. The last time he and I talked was when we sat next to each other at Christmas lunch on Sugarloaf last year, 2019.  He told me as we ate our turkey and drank our wine that he was writing a book about Resilience. I thought, who better.  Resilience fitted Bob Richardson. He navigated illnesses over the last years with uncommon grace and was always smiling and slightly ironic, finding other writers and other people more interesting than himself.  I hope that the book soon sees the light of day.  We need it now – resilience – as never before in our lifetimes. Our lives change utterly, our numbers diminish, our friends disappear, and resilience - thankyou Bob - is the way we survive, encourage each other, and go on writing.

I took the photo of Bob and Annie as we all left John Martini’s and Carol Munder’s Christmas lunch, the last great feast we all had before the virus hit and we had to stay home.  It looks a little elegiac now, but at the time I just liked their matching red jackets as they walked arm in arm in the setting sun.

Recent news: the paperback version of my novel Without Her is due out in late July, and I have two online reading and discussion events coming up – at Books & Books in Coral Gables on August 4, in conversation with Diana Abu-Jaber, and at Books & Books in Key West on August 7, with Katrin Schumann.  The book can be pre-ordered from Delphinium Books or any good bookstore.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 14

June 14 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 14

Dear all,

So, another month on into this disquieting summer, what goes on? I read other writers on what a writer’s role is, should be, always has been, and try to arrive at my own thoughts on this. The clues seem to be in what I am searching out to read, to watch, to pay attention to, and how I choose to spend my time.  Writers are just ordinary people who spend a lot of time writing or thinking about writing. I’ve been re-reading my contemporary and inspiration Patti Smith, she who always seems to travel so light, throwing a few eclectic items into a bag and setting off into other worlds – or simply into cafés, to read and think about writers who in turn inspire her. I hope she is sitting safely in a café somewhere now, drinking endless coffee and writing in another Moleskine notebook. 

““The centre cannot hold; things fall apart…” What, where, how? What was coming at me out of the future, if poetry was this? I wrote to my parents afterwards to say that Yeats came to speak to us, and my mother wrote back that actually he was dead, so he can’t have; but in a real way, it was Yeats who spoke to me that day. ”

I hear the voice of W.B. Yeats in my head.  “The Second Coming” is being much-quoted at the moment and I remember when I was about sixteen, hearing it for the first time in the voice of a white-haired Irish actor who visited our school. My hair stood on end. I was transfixed with a sort of prophetic shock. I didn’t understand, I wanted to understand, and I feared it. “The centre cannot hold; things fall apart…” What, where, how? What was coming at me out of the future, if poetry was this? I wrote to my parents afterwards to say that Yeats came to speak to us, and my mother wrote back that actually he was dead, so he can’t have; but in a real way, it was Yeats who spoke to me that day. “Sailing To Byzantium.”  That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. (Key West in hurricane season?) It was like seeing Banquo’s ghost pop up in front of me when aged twelve or so I sat in the front row at the Old Vic to see “Macbeth.” Ghosts, prophecies, voices from the past that might be from the future. I was almost terrified to begin trying to write poetry myself.

But writers are ordinary people, and have to join in with what is actually going on around them too. I don’t think we have any special role as leaders, except involuntarily. There are writers I’d follow anywhere – Rebecca Solnit, George Monbiot, Patti Smith, Margaret Atwood at the moment – but not because they think of themselves as leaders. We all have to pay attention, and learn. I went down to the rally for Black Lives Matter a week or so ago in our town and felt immensely cheered by being among other people for the first time in months, young and old, black and white, all wearing masks, all with a common grief and cause. It’s all about showing up, I think, even if you may take years to know the outcome. Take a short cut from the poets who strike you like lightning, and the words of your forebears, and just go forward, and take a knee in humility, take a risk. Just try – and I’m learning American history as I go – to pay attention, to learn.

We have also had a campaign recently going to “re-imagine Key West,” the place where I live. Can we imagine into being a town where inequality does not rule, where greed is tempered and mass tourism will not overwhelm both us and the natural world it depends on? Can imagination, coupled with political will and ecological knowledge, make the change? It remains to be seen, as does so much else. 

On a more mundane note, a box of books arrived unexpectedly on my doorstep. The thrill of unpacking new books again – the paperback copy of Without Her that is due out in July, unexpected simply because I’ve become so used to nothing working as planned, but here it is, my publisher delivered and my spirits rose.

Be well, be safe, and trust the future –

Affectionately, Ros 

The new paperback version of Without Her can be pre-ordered here from Amazon or from Delphinium Press.

Grinnell Street Rag

Last night we sat on broken chairs
to hear the guitar man across the street
play us the old songs.
Two tiny girls danced in their skirts,
people paused on their bicycles.
We sipped our wine from jars
and no cars passed.
This is how it used to be, we said,
back in the day.  When the island
was quiet and we could play and sing
and hear each other speak
and sit out on the street.
It’s like finding an old love, we said,
or someone we used to love but no longer can.
Here it is, our old love -
the island they call paradise,
stripped of all pretension
traffic, tourists, planes and massive ships-
death ships we call them now -  
free of its blight, 
calm, as the sun sets, lovely,
ours again tonight.

Notes on a Writing Life / 13

May 14, 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 13

Dear All,

So here we are on the two-months-in of the lock-down, that is already being eased up in several places – and it’s May, my birthday month and that of two of my brothers, as well as my daughter and two of my close friends. Fellow Taureans, have the best time you can! Raise a glass!  We are good at it.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents – I’m here because of them – and of what they went through in World War 2.  Five years of war, and for the civilian population and many others, a far longer and more intensely anguishing version of lock-down, with no end in sight, (and daily bombing of cities, e.g. London, where I was born.)  It’s made me think, we can do this, we have the capacity, it’s so little compared to their experience, and that of people in the Great Depression here in the US too.  Don’t let’s take risks too soon.  And, look at the trees!

Here are a couple of my recent poems for this month.  

Ancestors

My husband shovels dirt and compost, hefts the spade
as his Kentucky grandfather did in a lost century.
He hauls wood, carpenters a floor;
cuts, saws, hammers, makes our foundation firm.
These days, these home-bound days, I make soup,
scrub and scour surfaces, do laundry, hang out clothes,
as my mother did in post-war England.  
As if our ancestors rise in us, sensing the threat 
of lethargy or gloom, and fill
our hands with tools and paring knives,
give us our useful projects to complete: 
make a floor, clean closets, hang out sheets to dry.
As if they reach through us, those old ones
used to tasks and hardship, living through war,
bad harvest, illness no-one could cure.  As if
they see us clearly in our modern age, our phones
and screens, our idle hands, our deep anxieties.
We find their skills in us, learn through them to survive, 
enjoy the day, and know it’s all we have.  
My daughter an ocean away, raises hens, grows lettuce,
plants a tree. We talk on the phone of eggs, seeds,
makeshift recipes. Who is it, I wonder,
generations back, who speaks through her?
Who, inside me, listens and knows so well that voice? 

And another one: (enough about laundry for now?)

Clean Sheets, Again

Early I lift the wet sheets to the line
under the jasmine tree and pull them taut
to bleach in one more day’s
relentless sun. No rain for weeks.
The sky’s pillow-case blue, beach-towel blue.
Already the brick path burns my feet as I
return to gather in the armfuls,
dry in an hour. The cloudy meringue-crust
embrace of billowed white, scribble
of shadow on a shifting canvas
to spread across our big bed and fold
corners as my mother showed me,
she in me as I bend and tuck, where
blue petals scatter still from the flowering
plumbago, where we’ll lie later
washed cool from the outdoor shower.
One more night. Twenty-five years on,
And the outdoors in here with us,
jasmine, plumbago, sun and light.
We sleep after our labor - as if we were young
and nest-building again, because it’s spring
and the birds do it, because time has stopped
and so much else does not matter.
As if we were young, sleep comes easy
with the weight of our old tiredness.

Be well, be safe, 

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life 12

April 14, 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 12

April is poetry month here – and I’ve been thinking about poetry as aid and comfort, as inspiration, challenge and even rescue. A friend has been around town pinning up well-loved poems in public places: John Masefield’s Sea Fever down by the sea port, beside boats that are going nowhere.

 Dear All,

An extra post for an extraordinary Mayday. Mayday! The universal distress signal, a call for help.  Also, across much of the world, a day for workers’ celebration and holiday. We might  remember both, at this moment, when everyone is feeling the distress and many people are either out of work, or working too hard.  April is poetry month here – and I’ve been thinking about poetry as aid and comfort, as inspiration, challenge and even rescue. A friend has been around town pinning up well-loved poems in public places: John Masefield’s Sea Fever down by the sea port, beside boats that are going nowhere. Fragments of poems come to me at odd times:  when I am hanging out laundry, Richard Wilbur’s lovely image of angels “some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses…” popped up. (Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World). Poetry moves in with us, comes close and whispers to us in times of stress. I look for balance, find William Blake’s “Man is made for joy and woe/ and when this you surely know/safely through the world you go.”  I feel sadness, remember George Herbert’s “Sweet spring, full of sweet hours and roses, a box where sweets compacted lie.” (Virtue).   I feel judgmental and hear Shakespeare’s “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare will always let you know what’s false and what, true. It’s as if we are all contemporaries now, time seems to have stopped, and the wisdom of poets from the past is with us more than ever.  Both William Carlos Williams and Auden noticed that nobody can live well without poetry.  Auden wrote in In Memory of W.B. Yeats “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”  (What poetry will we be hurt into in our time, I wonder, by crazy America?)  And Yeats himself knew what to do when stressed – “I went out to a hazel wood/because a fire was in my head.” (The Song of Wandering Aengus.)

I don’t have my mother’s ability to reel off poetry – she could recite Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold by the yard.  But I do want to commit favorite poems to memory, more systematically than I have, simply because I want them close, in my head not just on the page or screen.

There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, of two poets – Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly? – making a pact to write a poem a day each and not judge it.  “What if they are not any good?” one asked. The other replied “Lower your standards.”  With this in mind, I embarked a week or two ago on writing a poem a day, suspending judgment in the interests of simply getting something down.  I’m continuing this practice, for as long as it takes – and yes, it means ignoring the critical voice, just keeping going. (I’ll come back and be critical later.)  I conjured up the voices of three writers I admire and love, who have also been teachers of mine in the past, so I can hear their actual voices in my head: Jane Hirshfield, Billy Collins and Sharon Olds (she who first told me when I arrived from the UK that in America it was all right for a poet to go over the page.)  With three such godparents, poems may have half a chance. And, the times we live in seem to welcome them out into the light of day. 

Be well, be safe.

Affectionately, Ros

Without Her, and my latest poetry book, Invisible Horses, published May 2019, is available from Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, New York. To see more, click the button below …

Notes on a Writing Life 11

April 14, 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 11

Dear All,

In our houses and apartments, we are being forced to learn new ways of being – with each other, with the outer world. There are love affairs, quarrels, reconciliations. There is solitude and introspection. There is death – and also, recovery.

    Nearly a month into lock-down here, and I want to write about other writers this time, and the pleasure and inspiration they give me.  Everybody I know is reading – when not watching Netflix or talking on the phone to families and friends – and the topic of what to read feels urgent these days.  (We’re mostly the lucky ones not out there working in hospitals and grocery stores or teaching kids at home.) We exchange news of books as once people talked of new restaurants, the latest movie at the cinema, plans for trips.  At a pause in writing myself, often discouraged, sometimes not, I go back to hours of reading as I did when I was a teenager and my cousin and I spent the summer vacations reading David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair.

     Writers feed off other writers.  Encouragement comes from all quarters – I read Emily Gould on LitHub on “How to write when writing seems pointless” and take heart.  Thanks, Emily, that was timely.  A friend in California tells me what he is reading and we agree to read the same books and discuss them.  Our enterprising local bookshop, “Books and Books” will deliver a book in town by 4 pm if you order it by phone before noon.  So I have Ocean Vuong and Ben Lerner waiting for me in shiny hardbacks (no restaurants, no cinema, no theater, no trips – so, books.)  I have a vivid memory of when I was nine or ten and my grandmother bought me a subscription to the Harrods Library, so I got two books a fortnight  - and I never discovered who chose them for me.  The dark green van pulled up outside our house and two firm hardback books, two new authors – I remember Jack London and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in particular – were there for me to discover.  The only problem was that they had to go back, and I wanted to keep The Yearling forever, that story set in a state called Florida on the far side of an ocean I never thought I would cross.

“Books are like boxes of seed – the seeds are words, and the spaces between them where something miraculous happens are what carries them.”

     Books are like boxes of seed – the seeds are words, and the spaces between them where something miraculous happens are what carries them.  I’ve just finished Edna O’Brien’s collected short stories – what a stylist she is - and am in the middle of Anthony Doerr’s remarkable collection, Wall of Memory.  These are writers who spin their words out like the whirling winged seeds of lime trees, to fly and take root.  I read them, and want immediately to get back to writing myself.  Yes, we can do this, yes, it is worth it, yes, it’s what matters – this description and interpretation of the world we’re in, these insights, these characters alive or dead, this magic.  

    You could say that the world is currently at a standstill.  But fish are teeming, tides go in and out, plants grow and thicken, the mockingbirds here go on trilling and nesting. People are working harder than they ever have, in dangerous conditions, to help each other. In our houses and apartments, we are being forced to learn new ways of being – with each other, with the outer world.  There are love affairs, quarrels, reconciliations.  There is solitude and introspection. There is death – and also, recovery. There are hours shared with children – how I loved, and so did 7 million others – the singing of “One More Day” by the Marsh family of Faversham in England.  There are all the things that we are capable of, going on everywhere, inside our heads and between those of us who are sequestered together.  We wait like people in a Jane Austen novel for something to happen. (Will a stranger ever come to town again?)  We are stuck with each other like people in Hardy’s rural villages.  We are living through a revolution, as surely as people in Zola’s novels did, even if we don’t quite know what it is, or will be.  I have wondered recently if novels will be written about this strange time; but of course they will be, because it is one of the most fascinating in history. It’s both crisis and transformation. It is part of us, and we, writers and readers, can all play our part.

Go well, be safe. Affectionately, Ros

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The Great Changes

Nobody comes.
The streets are emptied, wide,
the sky is quiet.
Life – what we thought of as life –
is stopped. The life
that was always here goes on:
butterflies, lizards, birdsong.
We live in our singular days
waiting to hear – what?
That we are not, and never were the point?

When the great changes come,
they are like the lurch
of a missed step. An absence.
A waking in the night to know the fearful heart.
Is this how the world rights itself?
Quaking, silenced, is this how we learn?  

Notes on a Writing Life 10

April 1, 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 10

Mango tree. “We are all in this together, and whatever we can do – sing, write, invent, dance, play drums, tell stories, read poems aloud – will save us.”

Dear All,

I’m writing a mid-month letter to keep in touch, as in the last two weeks, time has both stood still and seemed to be going on forever, and things change so fast.  I hope this finds you all well and in good spirits…as far as possible.  Maybe you are writing, reading, watching screened movies – we are all desperate for narrative, outcomes and insight.  I was going to write “at a time like this” – but really, there has been no other time quite like this.  

People ask me “Are you writing?” and the answer is, hardly at all.  It’s an ideal time for getting down to something, sure, but the something these days seems to be the business of staying well, fed, alive and in touch with those we love.  But there are probably brave souls out there writing new poems, plays, even novels, new versions perhaps of the Decameron by Boccaccio – with added social distancing - Camus’ The Plague – suddenly become a best-seller – or Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. I hope so. What they will look like, sound like, is impossible to imagine – maybe plays like Sartre’s Huis Clos (“No Exit”) or with Beckett-like people stuck in place; maybe apocalyptic visions or sketches of a world to come.  Poetry lives well in a crisis – it always does.  I read about Iranians hanging out banners with poems on them from their balconies, much as the Italians played music and sang from theirs.  Poetry relies on neither narrative nor outcome; it flourishes in the wild places of human experience.  But, fiction?  A friend sent on a parody of the first lines of well-known novels. “Mrs. Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself. Then she realized that of course the florist was shut and the party cancelled.”  

The whole party has been cancelled, world-wide.

I have been working on an old-fashioned novel in which people go out to dinner, take planes to places, and even touch each other.  The whole world of this book is now – I hope temporarily – out of date.  All novels deal with time, space and human interaction.  For now, maybe the plot is what happens within the closed spaces of locked-down houses and apartments, what happens on the phone, or when the characters look out of the window into empty streets.  We’ll see.  Fantasy may flourish, or science-fiction, or sheer nostalgia for last month, last year.

For now, it seems important to notice, record and communicate.  These days that pass like Groundhog Day, or a nightmare, or simply comfortable house arrest, depending on where you are, may bear fruit in fiction one day, but for now I want to notice what is happening, the shifts of feeling, the weather, the plants that flourish here around me, the color of the ocean, which we can’t visit but that is cleaning itself gradually now that its water is not churned up by cruise ships and jet skis, and of the quieter, cleaner sky.  I want to remember the kindness and helpfulness that is, in spite of fear, growing between people who realize now how essentially we need each other. So, I’d like to encourage journal-writing, that allows both for introspection and paying attention to what is around us. Poets will write poems, no doubt about that.  Everyone can have a try at a poem. And singing is good, and dancing in one’s room.  The other day I paused on my way home from a walk, outside the house of a friend who is a jazz drummer and listened to him playing behind his shutters as if he had an audience – which he did, as I stood invisible to him, loving his rhythms.  We never know who will receive our art. 

We are all in this together, and whatever we can do – sing, write, invent, dance, play drums, tell stories, read poems aloud – will save us.  I think we’ll come through it, into a different world – but meanwhile, let’s celebrate the one we’re in, with all its rules and restrictions and obligations to change our ways.   Here, the mocking-birds are nest-building, taking no notice of us at all, and I hear them sing from dawn to nightfall as they go on their way.

Affectionately, Ros

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As well as Without Her, my first novel, A Day To Remember to Forget, is now available from the Book Depository and of course Amazon. I wrote it 50 years ago and it now has an introduction by Dame Margaret Drabble.

Notes on a Writing Life

March 14, 2020

NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 9

On the occasion of a reading I did at Books & Books in Coral Gables last October, my husband bought me an elegant gold-colored fountain pen that fills with cartridges of brown ink. It makes me think of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” – “Between my finger and my thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.”

Dear All, 

   On the occasion of a reading I did at Books & Books in Coral Gables last October, my husband bought me an elegant gold-colored fountain pen that fills with cartridges of brown ink.   It makes me think of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” – “Between my finger and my thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.”  It reminds me of my ink-stained school days, my right-hand middle finger perpetually swollen and stained with blue ink.  I remember having to write exam questions, my hand flying, aching, across the page; having to stop like a long-distance runner for a quick drink, to fill my pen with a squelch.  I remember school desks with rusty ink in their inkwells, and bottles of blue-black Quink, and blotting paper – remember blotting paper?  For so many people, these things will now seem as remote as having to cut your own goose feather to the right sharpness for a quill, or having to write by candlelight.  All writers, for many centuries wrote this way.  No wonder fewer people wanted to be novelists, or even write at all.  

     But it didn’t change all that much with the arrival of the typewriter. I remember getting my first one, inherited from my grandmother, an Olivetti portable with which I was going to conquer the literary world. I remember carbon paper, how it folded on itself and wrinkled and stained your fingers if you wanted more than one copy. I remember white-out if you wanted to change a word or correct a mistake.  Starting over again if you wanted to rewrite or correct; writing out a whole novel three or four times at least.  And then there was the schlepping off to the Post Office, the agony of handing over the hefty parcel to be shipped to an agent or editor, the going home empty-handed as if you had just given up a baby for adoption.  There were the horror stories of leaving a manuscript on a train – (Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley.)  Or having it burned after your death by your surviving spouse - (Richard Burton’s wife, Isabel. Not the actor, the other one - explorer and translator of The Perfumed Garden). Wives!  Or having it burned for you in revenge (see Hedda Gabler, Jo March).  Books, especially novels, were fragile, easily lost or destroyed, hostages to fortune.  In movies, the energetic writer pounded away in a garret to produce the pages, and heart in mouth, with brown paper wrapping the precious thing, sent it out hundreds of miles away across an ocean or the Australian outback to seek its fortune – as in the film My Brilliant Career – to hear weeks or months later that it had been accepted and was a work of genius.  The myth was strong: this thing is a part of you, and easily lost or destroyed, like a part of your soul. But it also houses genius, as your soul no doubt does too.

     Do we feel the same way as we write on our computers, cut and paste, make copies, save to the Cloud or wherever, fiddle away easily editing, correcting, cutting, adding?  When we press SEND to propel our baby out into the world?  Where nobody can steal, burn, cut up or otherwise attack what we have written – only ignore it? 

     I’m profoundly grateful, in my advancing age, for my laptop computer.  It’s like switching on a light as opposed to heaving coal. And, though I do love the feeling of the soft giving nib of my fountain pen as it slides across paper and the Treasure-Island-ish dried-blood look of the brown ink, an affectation I adopted in my early twenties, I don’t use it all that much except for signing books or birthday cards.  It just reminds me of how a writing life used to be, with its lost pleasures and deep anxieties, and that nightmare I still have, of having lost my only copy.  Did Hemingway never even consider carbon paper? Or was it a manly thing to go unprotected?  But I ramble. It’s easy to do, the way we write now.

Affectionately, Ros