Notes on a Writing Life / 38

Notes on a Writing life 38
14 June 2022

   I was astonished to hear recently that the Times Literary Supplement had given a whole page review to my three earliest novels, written in the 1970’s and re-published recently by Michael Walmer.  The critic, who has to be a lot younger than I am, wrote at length and very even-handedly about each book.  Then she brought up the question of whether novels from the last century were worth re-publishing.  She made a distinction between re-discovering and re-visiting novels - one that I found hard to grasp. Mine were to be re-visited, from a sort of nostalgic viewpoint but not re-discovered.  So no, they were not any kind of lost classic - but they weren’t bad about being young and female and presumptuous enough to think that the world might be your oyster in the aftermath of the 1960’s.

     Now of course I can’t tell whether my own work is worth anyone’s attention or not – I never could, as any writer would probably admit.  You hope, of course, to improve with age – not necessarily true, but possible. You get better at most things – cooking, playing tennis, juggling three balls in the air – if you practice them every day. Sometimes, a book will leap out of the past – Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, never imagined by her in the 1980’s to be a foreteller of 21st century America.  It’s all a bit of a toss-up. As a writer, you can’t know. Will this book last?  Will what you wrote at 25 or 30 have anything to say to people when you are 80?  Were you right about anything? Does it matter?  You throw your hat in the ring, over and over, and take a chance on it each time.

     One interesting fact is that the original reviews of these three books in the TLS were very different from the recent one…   Link to the review here.

I’m in Venice, after a series of changed plans and an unexpected invitation. It’s quiet. No traffic, no sirens, no ambulances, police cars, no planes over head. What a relief…

From my window – from my bed even – I see the campanile of S. Marco, jutting up behind the gardens and the garden wall, over the roofs of the city.  The gardens are green and have three identical garden sheds with green doors.  Allotments, I wonder?  Walled gardens at the heart of the city. A blackbird sings, and I can hear every note. Wet orange flowers spill over the wall, and a vast magnolia is in bloom.  Rain today, and people with umbrellas on the bridges, patches of color in the gray.  I walk down our alleyway in Dorsoduro, turn left and along the canal to where my hostess and I had our first glasses of prosecco last night to welcome me here.  I go on to visit the church of S. Raffaele and find the little sculpture on the outside wall, the angel with folded wings and the boy Tobias and his dog.  Venice is cool and gray and damp and there are few people around as I walk towards the Zattere and along it as far as the Ca’ Foscari university building. Huge reconstructions are going on everywhere. It’s a city continually under repair. The waves slap up at the waterfront and there’s plenty of boat traffic, but there are no cruise ships. They have been banned from coming into the city waters. Hurrah!

There’s no need to go anywhere, do anything, be anywhere, see to anything – the great gift of free time, in a city I love, has been my most unexpected and wonderful birthday present of all.  R. and I meet for drinks and at meal times and eat salad, prosciutto, artichokes and flat little white peaches.  We’re here ‘to work’ which may mean spending a lot of time not doing anything very much but letting wells refill, thoughts wander, time pass, ideas come and go – and not having any other considerations except to feed ourselves.  At our age, we know we don’t have to produce anything, justify ourselves, compete or even try.

I never dreamed of having this time in Venice, on a quiet street, in luxury – with a huge bed, an equally huge bath tub, a desk covered in Morocco leather just like my grandfather’s, and uncounted quiet hours, to do or not to do – to just be.  To lie in bed and look at the campanile, for as long as I like. It’s a writer’s dream.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 37

Notes on a Writing Life 37     
May 14 2022

Sometimes things come together in a satisfying and almost uncanny way:  the publication of my novella “Elena, Leo, Rose” this coming week coincides with my birthday, and the party I am giving for close friends and family in London, where I was born.  Kim Narenkivicius of the new imprint Open Boat Editions has been working with me and with Madeleine Strobel, who has provided her drawing for the cover art, to produce a beautiful little book.  The novella is a hard form to publish in traditional ways, it seems. It’s not a novel, not a short story: it has its own time and pace.  I love novellas, and sometimes people forget what they are because they seem just as meaty as a novel, only more condensed. Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, for example.  Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

So when Kim asked me if I had anything unpublished that she could design and produce for me, I sent her this story of the 1980’s, grounded in 20th-century European history. A story of love and friendship, politics and place.  The production of it – allowed by the existence of Whatsapp, the internet and digital photography as we all live in different countries – has been such a pleasure, all along the way. I’d forgotten the excitement of making one’s own decisions, in concert with others – creating something together, changing our minds, having new ideas, trying this and then that, to see what is most harmonious.

So, I’m back in London to celebrate my birthday in the city of my birth. London in 1942 was being bombed to pieces by Hitler. My father was in the army. My mother took me as soon as possible out of the city to live with her mother.  I look across at Ukraine today and see the same wrecked buildings, shattered lives.  When I planned this party, I had no idea that Europe could see all this and feel it again, of course, and London, the city of 2022, is now whole, and totally rebuilt. But there’s an echo in the novella I think – the sense that history is always with us, and that we love, celebrate and live our lives always in a place of uncertainty, not knowing what may come next.

  The lilacs are all out here today and I remember my mother saying that they were madly in flower at the time of my birth, perfuming the air even with the burning.  Flowers and bombs, perfume and stink. It all goes on.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 36

Video by Erick Janssen

Notes on a Writing Life / 36
April 14 2022

In these days of terrible news and so much uncertainty in the world, I was enchanted to get this short video, sent to me by a friend in Portugal.  It gave me joy and I asked if I could send it on to others: so here are two people doing something beautifully, in harmony – dancing the tango at the edge of the sea.   

In this short video, the couple are unaware of any watcher, unaware of being filmed – so in a sense it is a stolen private moment. I would like to say to them, whoever they are, thank you. Thank you for doing this, being there, expressing for me all the ephemeral excellence of being human; thank you for sharing your moment with the world.

This image, the dance, the sinuous interaction of bodies, the complete seriousness of the tango, seemed to me the image that I wanted for now.  Art is serious play. Dance is both discipline and grace. What humans are capable of – the gamut of our capacities and emotions – is immense.  Does it simply matter to choose, and to choose again? To write the poem, to film the moment, to insist that this, as well as that other, is who we are?

Writers, we have to deal with the entire spectrum, or are selling our readers short.  Love and death – they are the stuff of the novel, that D.H. Lawrence called “the one bright book of life.” 

For poets, so much can be encapsulated in a line, a turn of phrase, a suggestion of both fragility and strength. 

The lines of poems that we remember become spells, to be repeated in darkness. “We must love one another and die.” (Auden).  “I went out to a hazel wood because a fire was in my head,” (Yeats).  “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver) “Sit, feast upon your life.” (Derek Walcott).  “Let there be nothing on earth but laundry/ nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam/and clear dances in the sight of heaven…” (Richard Wilbur).

“Let there be nothing on earth but laundry/ nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam/and clear dances in the sight of heaven…”

— Richard Wilbur

These are some of my own talismans, to carry into dark places. April is poetry month, here in the US.  It’s also, in Key West, the month of wildly singing mockingbirds and flowering trees that blaze up in the streets and ospreys mating on their high perches. A stunning beauty awaits us every morning.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing life / 35

Notes on a Writing Life / 35
March 14 2022

Dear All,

Sometimes events in the world overwhelm us and writing has to expand to a new consciousness of what actually is.  

This month has been one of those times.  None of us know what will happen, the future seems in jeopardy once again, and all we have is hope, and each other.  I’m thinking of the brave souls in Ukraine, and also, nearer to home, our friends and neighbors who have been fighting so strongly to preserve our waters from pollution, in the campaign against the monster cruise ships that still come to our island and kick up silt, killing marine life.  Coincidentally, their colors are the same – yellow and blue.  Here are some yellows and blues to be seen about Key West at this moment.

My book of the month has to be Rebecca Solnit’s “Orwell’s Roses” – essays about George Orwell, gardening and revolution, hope and roses – as she manages to leap over conventional thinking and make unexpected connections.  She has written about hope already, not in any vague way, but in naming the things that do allow hope to grow, and in pointing out how both it and despair are contagious.  If you are not spreading one, you are probably spreading the other. Compost or poison. I never knew Orwell was a gardener, toiling over his rose bushes, but now I do.

For myself, I am taking the plunge into publishing a novella I wrote years ago and never sent out.  It’s called “Elena, Leo, Rose” and is about three people, their friendship and love affairs, set against 1980’s Europe and its past history.  I can’t help thinking of Rick in Casablanca: “the lives of three little people” not amounting “to a hill of beans at a time like this” – but here they are, with their hill of beans.  It’s being designed as we speak way up in the mountains of Northern Spain by Kim Narenkivicius, with a cover taken from a drawing by artist Madeleine Strobel.  Deciding, choosing, working together over the last few weeks has felt both creative and exciting for all of us. Sometimes you just long to take the means of production into your own hands.  The Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Greig has said of it, “Elena, Leo, Rose is very much in the territory of the classic French film Jules et Jim… a fine, short book about the joy of being alive, in time, with friends, lovers, or alone,” 

Courage, hope and good writing to you all,

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 34

Notes On A Writing Life / 34
February 14 2022

Dear All,

This month, I had the honor to be asked to write an essay on the paintings of two friends who were showing them in an exhibit here in Key West.  Judith Murray and Robert Yasuda are, quite simply, extraordinary artists.  Writing about painting is a challenge - like moving into another language.  Here is my short essay:

Murray/Yasuda paintings.    Painting/Place

Robert Yasuda - Life Line
2013, Acrylic, fabric on wood, 84 x 72 inches

The painter climbs ladders, reaches out, moves like a spider spinning across a vast expanse.  You don’t often get to see this usually private activity.  The first touch of brush to canvas – that ‘stick of wood with hairs on it’ as Robert Yasuda called it – that activity that first took place in the deep caves of pre-history, when our first artist ancestors touched color to the forms of rock.  It’s like watching someone dream – that reach into the unconscious, that initiation of conversation with the painting-to-be.  I watched both these artists at work, on video on their web sites, and thought of the Yeats poem, ‘Long-legged Fly.

     ‘There on that scaffolding reclines 

      Michael Angelo.

      With no more sound than the mice make,
his hand moves to and fro.

      Like a long-legged fly upon the stream 

      His mind moves upon silence…’

The artist’s first tentative and then surer brush strokes seem to interrogate the painting, to suggest that the whole of it is to be uncovered, released into view.  What does the painting know? These paintings know color, they know suggestion, they know the inchoate imagination; they also know that the eye of the beholder will see them change and shift, the longer the gaze, the steadier the contemplation.  In the age of the quick glance, the rapid hunger for information, these paintings say – slow down, take the time it takes.  I stood in front of Yasuda’s ‘Origins’ hung on a gray wall, and saw it change color, as if it blushed.  It was green and then it was pink – it shifted and changed as a sunset does.  These paintings are organic, built up in layers, releasing their essence slowly, altered by the light, and by the eye and movement of the beholder.  

Judith Murray - Currents, 2017, Oil on linen, 50 x 54 inches

With Judith Murray’s sparks and showers of gold, a different energy is released – that of the universe of shooting stars, sun-spots, volcanic eruptions.  Her palette is that of the cave-painters, yet she brings the viewer into the airy eruptions of meteor and star-dust. Again, what do these paintings know?  I watched her in her video begin on a bare canvas, the first marks like hand- or foot-prints, the outlines of a cosmic movement just beginning.  The sculptural use of paint, its expression on a flat surface, its thick curls and sharp edges – all this was to follow. Her work is full of a dashing energy, passionate and exact.  My eye created fish-shoals, water reflections, rain showers - but that was my own literary side attempting translation. Paint is paint.  

A writer longs often for the plastic simplicity of paint. Words are approximations, always, language a scrim for what lies behind it.  Here, in the paintings of both these artists, I found the essence of paint as language in itself, its purity, its simple ‘I am.’  It escapes any notion of art as commodity, comes from a time when no artist expected to sell a work – its integrity is decades-old. You don’t get to create paintings like these in less than a lifetime of dedicated attention. And paintings have a home, too, they have a native place, a home port, no matter where they are carried in the world.  Key West light informs these paintings, I think, the way the light of the South of France informed those of Cézanne and Van Gogh.  It’s not about the literal place, so much as its ambience, the particular light in which landscape and skies appear, and the way that plays in the mind of the artists, as well as that of the observer.  The fact that Murray and Yasuda have chosen to show their work together for the first time in Key West – their home port – is a compliment to our island and its inhabitants.  It is also timely, born of a world whose fragility we feel. Our obligation to it is to look – really look – to pay attention, and let these paintings speak.   

“A writer longs often for the plastic simplicity of paint. Words are approximations, always, language a scrim for what lies behind it.  Here, in the paintings of both these artists, I found the essence of paint as language in itself, its purity, its simple ‘I am.’  ”

"Into Egypt" - it's available from Mike Walmer, Sandness Press, North House, Melby, Sandness, Shetland ZE2 9PL

https://www.michaelwalmer.com/titles

I also received copies this week of my own third published novel “Into Egypt” from the publisher Mike Walmer. This came out originally in 1973 with Macmillan in the UK. I based it largely on a trip I made to Israel at the ripe age of 19.  Now, in these days of anxiety about political correctness, cultural appropriation and other bugbears of authors, I re-read it with a slight sense of dread. How did I dare to plunge into the politics of another country after just one visit?  How did I dare to preface it with a quote from T.S. Eliot?  Chutzpah, if not utter rashness.

But when you are a young writer, you have to dare everything. It’s up to the publisher if they choose to publish it – and at the time, I had few qualms. Now, as a much older writer, I still want to say: we must write as we want to, on the subjects that we need to write about, and simply do the best we can. 

Happy Valentine’s Day –
Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 33

Notes on a Writing Life / 33
January 14 2022

Dear All,

The photo above is not of a space craft suddenly landed on our island – it’s the pop-up book tent for the 39th  Key West Literary Seminar, which took place last weekend, transformed for the first time into an outdoor event with stage, tents and a magnificent view of the sunset.  This is how writers managed to get together here in yet another year of Covid, to sit and listen in sun and occasional sprinkles of rain, to come together and yet sit apart, to discuss that most human of concerns: Desire.

It was sometimes profound, sometimes raunchy, always entertaining.  I loved the way that writers took encouragement from each other over the course of the weekend to dare to read the riskiest, sexiest, most controversial sections of their work, and the way that each presenter seemed to be saying: do it, dare it, write it your way.

Desire is of course the motor of the novel. Not just sexual desire, although there’s still much mileage to be had from the transgressive, adulterous, shameful or hilarious aspects of sex.  Every novel is surely fueled by a narrator’s or a character’s desire for Something. “What do your characters want and what are they are prepared to do to get it?” as one participant asked. Desire is also provoked in the reader to know more – who did it, why, and what happened? Will they get together?  Will they live or die? You can’t write or read a novel without invoking the tricky gods of desire, often illicit, always compelling.  So, to have a whole weekend in which to discuss the topic, listen to readings, laugh out loud, lose some inhibitions and go on asking the question - what do we really want? - was exhilarating.  As someone said to me during a break, “We couldn’t be having this conversation in very many places in America…”

Some of my highlights were: Deesha Philyaw reading from “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” Judy Blume’s statement “I miss the hormones but I have a good memory,” Billy Collins’ poem about Victoria’s Secret, and above all Jamie Quatro’s impressive first novel “Fire Sermon” in which she manages to say new, subtle things about the ageless question of passion vs. fidelity and how the two may be maintained.

All writers desire to go on writing, and most to be published.  Some of us want fame, or love. Others simply to tell the story that is ours to tell. The image of the next story, novel or poem floats ahead of us, tugs us on.  In the end, what we find we desire most is simply to get back to work.

May your desires for 2022 be fulfilled in interesting ways…

Affectionately, Ros  

Notes on a writing life 32

Notes On A Writing Life 32
December 14 2021

Dear All,

The island where I live, Key West, is known for among other things its community of writers and artists.  People ask me sometimes – where do the writers meet?  For the last few decades, the community of writers here has been a matter of a loose-knit web of friendships, shared interests, neighborliness.  We have never deliberately ‘met’ I think, except at the many parties there used to be in the 1990’s and early years of this century. Simply, on a small island we meet unofficially, by chance or in ones and twos, or at the yearly Literary Seminar (the one organized event for writers) or at book-signings, art openings, celebrations of one sort or another.  We are here, we know about each other’s work, we show up for each other’s events. We go off and come back – so we are also in Cape Cod, California, Montreal, Paris, New York, Mexico, knowing this tiny island as our hub.

“Nobody’s life and writing exemplified this attitude more than Marie-Claire’s. Her many novels, plays and stories concern individuals, a community, as well as the dramas and catastrophes of the wider world. There were no limits to her ability to enter into the minds of a vast, diverse cast of characters.  She has peopled this island, and the world.”

So when one of us departs – dies, leaves, or becomes ill and has to stop writing – we feel it.  On the last day of November, our dear friend Marie-Claire Blais died at home in her house here. The gap she has left is huge, and painful.  One writer friend said to me, “I didn’t know her well but she was part of my life.” Just so. She was a part of us all, and of this island that she loved.  Her death diminishes us, as John Donne said – “No man (or woman) is an island.” We are each  a part of the whole.

Nobody’s life and writing exemplified this attitude more than Marie-Claire’s. Her many novels, plays and stories concern individuals, a community, as well as the dramas and catastrophes of the wider world. There were no limits to her ability to enter into the minds of a vast, diverse cast of characters.  She has peopled this island, and the world.

One of the last things she said to me: “If a writer is ill, and does not write, she will die.”  She was writing right up to the last minute, two days before her death. When I go to my studio now, I’m doing it with her in mind, in respect for her commitment to her art, her discipline.

She was also a genius at friendship. Generous, interested, always asking eagerly, “But how are you?” We talked, for years, about our work, the books we were writing. We biked around the island, drank at Louie’s Back Yard in a rain storm and came home soaked and laughing. We lived close through hurricanes, ate pizza during the Covid pandemic in my backyard. We sat at the edge of the beach at the Casa Marina at sunset with my husband Allen – this last October, for her birthday - and listened to the ocean in darkness as we ate dinner.  I feel immensely privileged to have been her friend. In the midst of sadness, always gratitude. At the heart of loss, the gift of those years in her company. 

She gave me a copy of her latest novel, the last time I saw her, on November 25 of this year. Its title – “Un coeur habité de mille voix” (A heart inhabited by a thousand voices) is such an apt description of herself – of that ardent and inclusive heart of hers that finally gave way. 

      On the last page of the book, a lost cat comes back: 

“We saw Comtesse come in, shaking the snow from her fur, I told you she’d come back, said René, ready to welcome the little cat who had been lost in the snow, I told you, Olga, that Comtesse would come back.”
(my translation from her French).

When I read it, I felt that about Marie-Claire – she will always be coming back home.

Affectionately, Ros

(And this is Monsieur Henri, the big tabby who was curled up next to her on that last day. He is now looking for a new home.)

Notes on a Writing Life / 31

Notes on a Writing Life 31
November 14 2021

Dear All,

What do you do when you are in between books? I asked a writer friend recently.  

It’s an uncomfortable time. You have sent off your manuscript, it has left home to try to find its way in the world, and you know you will have to wait weeks, even months to hear of its reception.

Read, my friend told me, and go shopping.  I’ve added: wander around town looking at the island where I live, trying to see it through fresh eyes even though I have lived here nearly 30 years. Shopping, yes – buy something that you love. Talk with other artists at work, or during a coffee break. Initiate conversations with your spouse, who in my case is deep in writing his own book anyway. Make soup. Think of people who may need to be asked, how are you doing? Look through old work – although that can lead to confusion. And read, always read – other people’s novels, old favorites, people who usually inspire you, looking for the writer who will show you, sometimes with a brief remark, an insight between sentences: this is where you are going, or need to go.

I was stopped in my tracks this week by a cri de coeur from the writer Ben Okri (Every Leaf a Hallelujah, The Famished Road). He posits a new kind of ‘existential creativity’ to cut through the apathy and denial of our times, to save ‘this most precious and beautiful of worlds, a miracle in all the universe, a home for the evolution of souls…which we are day by day turning into a barren stone in space.’ ‘We have to be strong dreamers’ he writes in the Guardian newspaper. ‘What is called for here is a special kind of love for the world.’

Poets have expressed, over and over, this kind of love.  Scientists have told it how it is, and we have not paid enough attention.  Painters in love with the beauty of the world – well, they are legion. So what is it that novelists must do, I wonder?  Some are already doing it – Richard Powers in his The Overstory – for example. Non-fiction writers too – Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane. Many novelists are writing dystopian fiction – but does imagining dystopia over and over not simply terrify us into a sort of numb paralysis? Should we abandon the traditional problems of the novel – our love for and inability to get on with each other on this earth, our misbehavior and as the end of Casablanca reminds us ‘the problems of three little people’ that ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans’?  Can there still be humans in the garden?

I remember Julia Cameron’s insistence in her 1970’s book The Artist’s Way, on the importance of what she calls Artist Dates.  An aimless walk, an exhibition, a meal out, a movie, a gift to yourself. It’s so easy to forget that we are even allowed these things, time taken away from the desk, let alone that they are necessary. Especially in what Okri thinks are the end times. But it’s where thought, and creativity, begin.

Affectionately, Ros 

Notes on a Writing Life / 30

Notes On A Writing Life 30
October 2021

A couple of weeks ago I stood among crowds at the Place de l’Etoile to see the wrapped  shape of the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris.  It was a misty evening at sunset and the soft blue-gray color of the material that had been wrapped and tied around the monument matched that of the autumn dusk.  What was it like, and what did it remind me of? What is the difference between a wrapped object or building and a naked one?

Christo Javacheff and his partner in life and art Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, had been working on this design for decades, and it was in this year of Christo’s death that it was put in place.  Hundreds of workers installed the wrap, and would take it down again. Meanwhile, it was mysterious, an object that no longer declared itself as a statement of military power and success in battle.  It became a portal, a gate leading somewhere, an object of veneration. It had become completely other, fascinating in a way that it had never been. What was overt had been covered over – as the Pont Neuf had been years ago when similarly wrapped, transformed into a gold Christmas cracker to pull across a river. 

Was that it? Do we long for the hidden, the transformed, the indecipherable?  (Could we wrap statues, instead of simply pulling them down? Here stands – nobody in particular?) 

Why is a wrapped and tied gift so inviting? A veil pulled over reality such an invitation to dream?

I admit to loving the mysterious, the ambiguous, the suggestion rather than the simple fact.  Back in London I sat with an artist friend, Madeleine Strobel, on the floor of her house and looked through her recent work: little bound books, with hidden writing and the mysterious marks that were based on bare trees’ branches, half-shown footprints in snow and mud – the tracks of people walking during the pandemic, alone and in twos.  I thought of poems, that show without telling. Of stories that hint at outcomes, rather than declaring them. Of the half-known, tentative ways forward that we are all asked to consider in this age of uncertainty. Clues in a twig, an animal print: the trackers’ knowledge.  Of a society less superficially sure of itself, more instinctive.  Of wrapping ourselves and our creations in a cloak of silence – no explanation needed. 

Go well, go canny as the Scots say.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 29

Notes on a Writing Life / 28
September 14 2021

Last week I sat on a stone bench beside the Seine on a quiet Monday morning in Paris and watched a crane lift a piece of the new roof of Notre Dame into place.  The dangling red hand that picked up the piece – minute fraction of the complex puzzle of this immense enterprise – came down quietly against the blue sky and picked up the right object without apparently any effort.  

I thought about the effort that had gone into orchestrating this action.  There was no human in sight on the crane; perhaps the ghost in the machine was a hidden person, one man working alone out of sight, or perhaps it was a robot performing the pre-planned action. 

I thought of the humans who had built the cathedral in the first place: hundreds of masons, carpenters, hydraulics experts, rope makers, loggers bringing in the immense oak trees needed to provide the roof beams, all without the precision and electronic ease of what I saw in front of me today. The sheer human effort, the scaffolding, the risk of climbing to the rooftop, the accidents, the danger involved. The thousands of pieces of material needed to fit the whole edifice, to make it stand upright, to soar, as it did for hundreds of years until the great fire of a few years ago tore out part of the roof. 

I thought of the way we make art, not just incredible buildings.  The choice of the right color, the blob of paint, the angle of stone or wood, the word, the sentence, the cut and shape of the whole painting, or sculpture, or play, or film, or book.  The exactness needed. The cutting away of excess. The eye that has to choose, and add or subtract. The fit of detail to the whole.

What’s necessary, to make the created thing stand up, be proof against the elements, even soar to the sky.

We’re all in it together, when we create – whether it’s the roof of Notre Dame, or the fashion shoot I watched half an hour later being filmed at the edge of the Ile Saint-Louis, where I sat on another bench in the Place Louis Aragon and watched take after take as a young woman posed against the flow of the river.  The exact angle matters. The light has to be just right. The metal object dangling from the red hand of the crane, swinging across the sky, has to be carried to the exact right place.  The camera has to find its angle.  Or nothing works.

Then I came home and rewrote for the twentieth time or so, the last sentences of a novel that has perplexed me all year. 

I’m so grateful to have been able to travel this summer, and hope others have, or may soon.

Affectionately, Ros

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