Notes on a Writing Life / 54

October 14 2023

Dear All,

When I saw the words ‘Kfar Aza’ in a horrific headline this week, I was carried back to 1961, when I and my friend Helen from Girton College, Cambridge, spent part of our long summer vacation in a very small, new outpost in southern Israel, half an hour’s walk from where the Egyptian border was at that time. We were 19 years old and had come by Turkish boat to Israel from Marseille.  Kfar Aza, a new kibbutz, was started by people of our own age who had recently come from North Africa.  We helped them to build and paint new huts and houses and worked in the grapefruit fields. We sometimes walked down to chat with the two bored United Nations men – young Scandinavians – who were guarding the border, at the edge of no Man’s Land.  We flirted and sang and danced in the evenings. It seemed like an innocent time.  Our friends at Kfar Aza would now have been grandparents or great-grandparents, if they stayed on.  There were still only 750 people living there – until this week.

It matters to me to mourn that place and its murdered inhabitants today, as you mourn a place where you were young, and got your hands in the earth, where you were all idealistic and energetic together - because idealism was possible, as it can only be when you do not see the whole picture. And that mourning means that now, in 2023, I have also to mourn the people we were not told about, the Palestinians.  Because of Kfar Aza, I must also mourn the bombed refugee camps in Gaza and the ongoing destruction of Gaza city.    

To re-iterate what I wrote last week in a Substack post last week: do please read “Tracing Homelands”, an excellent, thoughtful, timely memoir by Linda Dittmar of growing up in Israel and later, discovering its hidden history.  It’s published this week by Olive Branch Press – whose name, today, means everything.

We must not get stuck on an ‘eye for an eye’ – the rhetoric of revenge - in 2023. We must not allow ourselves to become ‘eyeless in Gaza.’  Surely we have to do everything we can to demand that the killing must stop.

Meanwhile, back in Key West, where I live:  I have two books about to appear from Open Boat Publications this fall, one a reprint of my 1990’s Key West novel of love, death and illegal immigration, “Seas Outside The Reef” and the other a collection of short stories set in Key West,  over the last 30 years, “Light Over Islands.”  Both have beautiful covers made from paintings by Susan Sugar, designed by Kim Narenkivicius.

Both books will be available for pre-order soon and I am planning a launch party in Key West in mid- November, and I’ll hope to see some of you there!  My new novel, “Bone Whispers” will be out in February from Epicenter Press.

Go well, be safe – affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 53

September 14 2023

Dear All,

Thirty or more years ago, I walked out of Taroudant in Morocco, with a writer friend from Scotland, Andrew Greig, and our guide whose name was Ahmed and a mule with her mule-man, our tents and cooking utensils and clothes strapped on the back of the mule.  We walked into the High Atlas, camped out at night and in the daytime walked through green valleys full of almond blossom and villages made of earth where the main street was a dirt track and no vehicle could possibly pass. We ate around a small fire, washed in rivers, came to places where horse and camel markets appeared on bare red plains, saw mountains tipped with snow.

This week I read the news of the earthquake, saw Taroudant on the disaster map, remembered how we had to pull our indigo scarves across our faces to protect ourselves from a sandstorm when we arrived, and how we set off, early that February morning.

It makes a difference to know a place, to have felt it with your feet, to have camped on its earth and stopped to rest in its villages.  It makes it real. Abstract, distant disaster insults its victims by making them unimaginable.  Where we have walked on this earth is real to us.

Dis-aster: a separation from the stars.

A  German film, “Red Sky” (‘Roter Himmel’) I saw this week: a writer insists on ‘working’ on his novel (actually goofing off) while his friends mend the roof, cook food, fix a wrecked car; he ignores what is going on around him even as they suffer and die in a forest fire; only after all that can he write a successful book.  There was something so repugnant about this that I was stopped in my tracks.

It was a portrait of total solipsism.

So, what do we writers do?

Here in Paris, during an unexpected heatwave – isn’t everything unexpected these days? – there is still peace in green parks, ancient trees, life going on: a Paris market, beehives that have been in the Jardins du Luxembourg for nearly 200 years.  It’s loving what we have that matters for a start.  Only then can we really work to save it - and after that, if we have to, mourn it as it deserves.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 52

Notes on a Writing Life / 52
August 14 2023

Dear All,

     Time off is such a valuable thing, and this summer I have been privileged to spend such time in cool green places where it’s quiet and the hubbub of the world largely passes me by.  Time off from what, though?  Too much involvement; the old habit of having to ‘work’; the urgency that tends to fill our days.  Noise, pollution, extremes of climate – yes, I feel privileged to be away from them and for a first time really appreciate the changeable English weather – sheets of rain, mist over the hills, then sun breaking through.  Clean air, cold sea.  Solitude, an underrated thing.
    There’s also, for a writer, the gift of emptied days, days of watching birds and squirrels - and two young stags there on the green today as I walked to the village shop.  I walk around with no particular goal, then return to this cottage to add to an existing story, or prune a paragraph from a work in progress.  What used to be, when I was younger, ‘boring’ or ‘bad weather’ has been transformed, partly by age, partly by events in the rest of the world. Now, it’s all a treat.

   Time to read, too. I’ve been immersed in fine novels by Alison Macleod (‘Tenderness’, ‘Unexploded’) and by Andrew Greig (‘Rose Nicolson’).  The latter is a rare historical novel that lets you feel just what it was really like to live in a particular past time: here, to live through the 16th century Scottish Reformation in Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Paris – and realize how terrifyingly short and violent life could be, how religion and politics divided people, how, as one character puts it, ‘everyone thinks they are right.’  The language of this poetic but fast-moving novel is so exact and lovely.

     Meanwhile I am putting together a collection of my short stories set in Key West, “Light Over Islands.”  It’s to be a companion volume to the reprint of “Seas Outside The Reef.”  Both books will be available this fall from Open Boat Editions.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 51

July 14 2023

Dear All,

I’m not in Paris watching fireworks for Bastille Day – they do have anyway rather a bad reputation these days, anyway.  I’m in the green quiet depths of the Normandy countryside in an ancient house belonging to my friend’s family, and I can’t believe my luck at having even a week here to think, talk, walk, write and simply soak it all in.  The house is for sale, so neither of us will be able to come here again, sadly. It would make a marvelous writing retreat, with 6 bedrooms and 2 extra little cottages…

Green rural France: how infinitely soothing it is to walk along the edge of forests, under tall trees, to sleep in darkness and silence.  The silence of the woods, though, is disturbing – few birds.  Each time I see a flash of wing or hear even a chirp, I feel happy.  But industrial agriculture has taken its toll everywhere with pesticides, and goes on doing so.  (If you care about this, do send a dollar, euro or pound to Avaaz, the international organization doing its best to ban pesticides.)

For a writer, for anyone, this is a chance to retreat from what we think of as ‘the world’ and understand what a difference it makes to any creative endeavor.  ‘The world’ is noisy, polluted, argumentative, seems to be dying – do I focus too much on the end of things?  This hidden world still exists, and being in it even for a week is nourishing me already.  It’s like having been given an essential vitamin. (Yes, there are drawbacks, ticks for example.)  When I first arrived here, my thought was – I want to stay here for the rest of my life.  But no – I would miss everyone. I’m too social for that.

Any chance of somebody coming through with lots of money for a writer’s retreat?  I imagine teaching ‘The Artist’s Way’ here…

I think of the word ‘retreat’ – often used for encouraging creativity – and wonder when, and what from, we first needed to retreat. Our families, work, the rest of life?  (Doesn’t retreating mean going backwards?)  We are, after all, deeply involved with ‘the world’ and it may need us.  Perhaps ‘recreation’ would be a better word.  What are we creating, if not images of a better world, echoes of ourselves in it, blueprints for a real future?

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 50

Notes on a Writing Life / 50    
June 14 2023

Dear All,

This is going to be the shortest newsletter ever, as I am about to flit across the Pond to France and then England.  We’re also coming up to number 50!  I can’t believe I’ve kept this going for so long; but it is still a pleasure, and all the more so for the messages and encouragement I get back from readers in return. Thank-you!

It’s mango season in the land of the mango eaters and I’m knocking back as many as I can before I leave.  There’s nothing like a mango warm from the sun, its thick freckled skin peeled off over the sink, and a bite into it that feels like a juicy kiss.  Mmmm.

News of my upcoming novel: “Bone Whispers” is at last in production with Epicenter Press in Seattle, and should be out by 2024.  It’s about England after the second World War, about children caught up in something beyond their understanding, about the reckonings that come with adult life.  It’s set in Dorset, in a place I love, and its inception came from a local shop-keeper (who is in the book) asking me a few years ago why I don’t set a novel right there.

Apart from that – and there’s nothing to do to it right now – I’m taking the summer off.  Unless, as it so often happens, in the midst of doing nothing, an idea pops up and I’m off to the races again…

Next month, I’ll be celebrating le quatorze juillet with you, in place.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 49

Notes on a Writing Life  48
May 14 2023

Dear All,

Last year I was in London, celebrating my birthday among lilac, rhododendrons and daffodils and the ancient trees of Hampstead Heath; this year I am in Key West for my ‘solar return’ in among the royal poincianas and flowering frangipani, with the mocking-birds and feral chickens courting all around.   

My mind is on trees in cities and how they are treated: this month a favorite tree on a Key West street was cut down only days after a friend and I walked and stood marveling in its deep shade, and she took a photograph. Walking under it, you could feel the temperature drop several degrees. The street was cool. Now there is just a stump – no shade, no bird habitat, no negative ions.  Just a space for someone to build an air-conditioned box.  Nearer even to home, there are permits out for three of our magnificent royal poincianas to be destroyed – the icon of Key West, they are putting out their flaming blossoms and people are afraid that they will drop their scarlet confetti on their cars, I suppose.  At a time when shade is so vital in our over-heated town, when birds and insects are already depleted, when we need these trees to watch over us – destruction, in the name of progress.  Are they crazy?

A paraphrased quotation from William Blake sticks in my mind:  to some, a tree is just a green thing that stands in the way.

I love the month of May, though, wherever I am.  My memories of birthdays go back – to a wet day when I turned eight and my father, undaunted by rain, took me and my school friends on a damp picnic, made a camp fire, and we cooked sausages. And to last year, when so many of my family and friends gathered in London to celebrate.

This year, I’ll be on the beach here, early, before the crowds appear. Perhaps I’ll see the ospreys in their nest on a high pole, perhaps a swarm of leaping fish, perhaps the heron fishing for his breakfast.  And at night, Venus bright and near to encourage me for the coming year.

The photo was taken last week on a friend’s boat as we headed for an uninhabited island at sunset - another good adventure…

Happy Birthday all earth-loving Taureans!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 48

Notes on a Writing Life 48
April 14 2023

Dear All,

I was asked recently in an interview how I started wanting to be a writer. The answer was, reading and being read to, as a child. There was a magic in books that I wanted to capture and pass on.  This hasn’t changed.  Robert Richardson’s seminal book “First We Read, Then We Write” backs me up on this – as do so many other writers.  I see us now as connected to each other by a long series of links, this one to that one, passing on something of infinite value to humans for their life on earth. D.H.Lawrence said that the novel is “the one bright book of life.”  And before the novel ever appeared, there were of course plays, poetry, going back over centuries, ever since humans began to speak.

I’m reading, and loving, a novel by the English writer Sarah Winman at present, called “Still Life.” I picked it at random off a library shelf – books somehow find us, even to the extent sometimes of falling on our heads or at our feet.  It’s set in Florence, and it reaches out a hand to E.M. Forster in salutation, and carries his idea of “only connect” forward into the late 20th century (in the book) and onward into our time.  It’s about people loving each other, forming community, in the face of war, heartbreak and a great flood that engulfed Florence in the 1960’s, and it warms my heart now in the 2020’s, an era Forster could hardly have imagined.

I’m also, this week, doing an interview at the Studios of Key West with the writer Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, whose memoir “Daughter of Spies” is newly published by Regal House. Alsop’s mother was English and came to the US pregnant and alone at 18, in a military convoy, towards the end of World War 2.  Her story fascinates me – this incredibly brave young woman, who left everything behind her to join her new American husband, the first (and maybe the last) man she ever kissed.  It sounds romantic, put like that, but I can easily imagine how hard it was for her. She was also, incidentally, a spy for MI 6 at the age of 17, when officially working in the Passport Office.  Sarah Winman’s main character is also an ex-spy. What is it about spies and novelists? Perhaps we come from the same source… John le Carré thought so, as expressed in the volume of his marvelous letters, “A Secret Spy.”

A new novel, a new memoir – and with them come fresh images, old stories writ new, and above all, keys to how to live life.  At a time when some people are trying once again to ban certain books and control what others read, I marvel once again at the power of the written word. It’s wonderfully subversive.  It enters your mind privately, with never an outward sign. It’s like a message written in code, especially when you are young, to help you go forward in life.  Of course the book banners are afraid of that.

Go well – go on reading!

Affectionately, Ros    

Notes on a Writing Life / 47

Notes on a Writing Life 47
March 14 2023

Dear all,

Clearing out a closet – always a good activity for spring – I came upon some typed diaries I’d written in 1995/6 and abandoning my tidying efforts, sank back into reading what I had written then, very shortly after I first came to Key West. I found entries that surprised me: our memory of a time is sometimes very different from our immediate impression of that time. Key West has changed, I have changed. I was newly married, and now have been married nearly 30 years. There was nostalgia, yes, for people and times that have gone, and for a simpler, quieter, less frenetic life here.  I came to a run-down hippyish place at the end of the road, and now I live in a tourist town. Houses then were often unpainted, now they are tarted up and sold for millions. But the main impression I came away with (as I went back to tidying) was that memory changes things, just subtly but continuously. The written word seizes and fixes a time in a way that memory alone does not.

Working cover. Painting by Susan Sugar.

I’m also (synchronistically) awaiting the finished re-edition of my novel of that time, ‘Seas Outside The Reef’, a story of sailing, and Cuban refugees, and down-and-out people coming to town. It’s been beautifully designed by Kim Narenkivicius, with a painting by Susan Sugar for the cover. I’ve written a new introduction, and it will be available for pre-order any time soon.

---

My friend Marie-Claire Blais, whom I still miss on a daily basis, will have a plaque set upon her house in the Writers’ Compound on Windsor Lane, where John Hersey also once lived. A poem of hers will be set in the pavement there, I hear, and I want to include it here as it so clearly expresses her deep and humane self.  The photo of her – looking unusually severe – goes with it.

Your most compelling purpose
must be to free the human in you.
Then you will understand
that others really exist.

Votre but le plus impérieux
doit être de libérer en vous
l’humain.
Ensuite vous comprendrez
que les autres existent
vraiment.

MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
1939-2021

The past is still with us in memory and in writing.  Our lost friends speak to us still. The characters I invented for ‘Seas…’ have come back to be with me as I work on the proofs. I’m happy that they will see the light of day again and maybe find new readers, visitors to that older Key West.

As I write, I think of many of you who receive this newsletter, and thank you once again for reading it.

Affectionately, Ros

Marie-Claire Blais (Read the NY Times obituary here)

Notes on a Writing Life / 46

Notes on a Writing Life 46
February 14 2023

Dear all,

February in Key West is buzzing once again with artistic and social activities, artists’ openings, readings, get-togethers such as we have not had since Covid hit and made us all stay at home. It feels different, somehow – we greet each other, relieved and grateful that we can.

Lincoln Perry @ Jag Gallery, Key West

One of my favorite contemporary painters, Lincoln Perry, is back in town with a new show at Jag Gallery and a new book called ‘Seeing Like an Artist.’  It’s a joy to read - lucid, humane, informative, personal.  It reminds me of going round galleries with my painter brother, Richard Crabtree, and with other artist friends. It’s like having someone take me by the hand and show me what matters and even how it was done. And more, it somehow revives my hope for us all, reminding me of the beauty of what humans do and can create.

Susan Sugar @ Salt Gallery

Another favorite painter, Susan Sugar, has a small but beautiful show of her sea- and sky-scapes at Salt Gallery.  Her paintings are quintessential Key West – changing skies, calm and then stormy seas. Her painting ‘Close to Midnight’ drew my attention particularly. Yes, this is what we live with on this island, day and night.

I’m doing a reading of my novella, ‘Elena, Leo, Rose’ on February 16, on the rooftop at The Studios of Key West, called ‘Hugh’s View’ and one of the best places to see a Key West sunset. I’ll be in conversation with my studio mate, Jessica Argyle, whose own new book ‘Sidetrack Key’ is selling like the proverbial hot cakes.  And my husband, Allen Meece, launched his new sci-fi novel ‘Brave New Mars’ at the end of January – for any of you who love science fiction, space and the stars.

These same stars are vivid and clear above the island, these winter nights. We’ve lived for months under Jupiter, now we see Venus big and bright in the west after sunset. I hear that all the planets are now moving forward – and perhaps we are too.

Affectionately, Ros

lincolnperry.com
susansugar.net
jessica argyle
allenmeece.com

Notes on a Writing Life / 45

Notes on a Writing Life / 45
January 14 2023

Dear All,

Two weeks into the New Year, and our first pink hibiscus flower appeared at breakfast time.  It’s too cold for the iguanas to be out and about, munching their favorite salad, so it has a chance of survival for a day at least.

Today, the 40th Key West Literary Seminar begins – “Singing America” – celebrating Black literature. I believe it’s a first in this country, and it’s about time. Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker kicks off with the Keynote Address, and there’s going to be a Gospel choir. I’m looking forward to hearing some terrific writers, including the poets Jericho Brown and Rowan Ricardo Phillips, novelists Deesha Philyaw, (“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies”) and Tayari Jones (“An American Marriage”) and to reconnecting with my Haitian writer friend, Nadine Pinède, who is writing about Zora Neale Thurston and editing an illustrated collection of Black poetry on the natural world. We met a few years ago when she was writer in residence here, have a date to eat ‘pulpo’ together, every year, at a favorite restaurant.

And, on a different note, I have been reading Diana Abu-Jaber’s 2016 memoir “Life Without A Recipe,” and am struck by how vital it is for writers who are mothers both to write and to read memoir about combining these two often conflicting occupations. How on earth did we do it? I ask myself fifty years on from my children’s birth. Somehow, we did. Diana’s memoir takes me back there, to those early years, and reminds me to revere any writer who has also brought up children – and that’s many of us.  I myself started to write again when my daughter was a baby, because the psychiatrist I was seeing for post-natal depression told me to.  Two hours a day, she stipulated.  And that led, not miraculously but steadily, to my first published book.

The little sculpture here, I bought in an estate sale held at Judith Gaddis’ house in Key West after her death. It’s by her partner, Duke Rood, who created incredibly delicate sculptures out of pieces of found wood. I always regretted not buying one when he was alive, so I bought this for my husband for our wedding anniversary in December. This tiny figure with its arms raised seems to me to be blessing us, our house, and our endeavors.

A happy New Year to you,

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 44

Notes on a Writing Life 44
December 14 2022

Dear All,

It’s a season here of hawk migrations and buzzards kettling high up in the sky. The other day I saw a hawk fly up out of our back yard with a small iguana in its claws, and soar easily away.  The snow-birds, human ones, are coming back to town – old friends to greet, newcomers, always people to be stunned by the beauty of these days in Key West.  It’s all about the light, really. The planes are noisy overhead and the streets full of cars, but the beach is still quiet in the morning, and the water clear after a change of wind.

 Jessica's novel is to be published at the end of December.

In the studio where I go to write, my companions are getting their work out. Rebecca Bennett has a show of her paintings opening on January 5 at TSKW and is working steadily.  Jessica Argyle is putting the final touches to her new novel, “Sidetrack Key”, set in the Florida Keys after the 1938 hurricane, the one that wrecked the railroad and killed so many veterans. I am teaching the ‘Artist’s Way’ class at the Studios of Key West – we had our first meeting last week – and also finishing up work on a mystery novel, the first one I have ever attempted.  It’s fun, and a challenge, especially to someone who has paid little attention to the machinations of plot in the past.

Once again, I value the chance to work alongside other artists, talk about what we’re doing, occasionally have coffee, sometimes read aloud our work, or show a new painting – or simply come here, close our doors and get on with what we have to do.  I am in a room that used to be Robert Stone’s, and I write at his desk. Jessica is in Annie Dillard’s former room. The vibes left by these people stay with us.  We don’t easily divulge our location, but know that its privacy is part of its appeal, a place where we can come largely unnoticed and ‘go to work.’

     Artists need this, and few of us are fortunate enough to have it. In the ‘Artist’s Way’ there’s a lot said about valuing yourself and putting your art first, before the other distractions of life, and the ability to go to a studio is - perhaps especially for women – a valuable thing.  I’m writing a weekly summary on Substack.com for people who want to follow the course and see what we, the 12 people meeting in Key West this winter, have discovered. Each time I start the course, I’m struck by both the diversity of people who come, and their willingness and enthusiasm to do the work.  This time, we are painters, actors, teachers, novelists, a playwright and a chef, for a start.

I know, it’s what in the US is called “The Holidays” that can last from Thanksgiving to mid-January if you let it!  We are following the course each week, through Christmas and New Year’s, so as not to get lost in festivities, obligations, all the distractions that can let a writer or artist wake up in mid-January having forgotten what it was they meant to do.  Paint every day? Finish a story, a poem, a novel? Simply show up at the page?

Enjoy it all, anyway –
Affectionately, Ros

PS   My novella “Elena, Leo, Rose” is now available on Kindle, and in print at Books and Books, Key West.

rosalindbrackenbury.substack.com

Notes on a Writing Life / 43

Notes on a Writing Life 43
November 14 2022

Dear all,

I read recently that Pythagoras, in answer to the question “What is the purpose of life on earth?” replied “To observe the heavens.”  I didn’t get this directly from Pythagoras, whom I haven’t thought about since learning his theorem at school, but from reading Emmanuel Carrère’s recent thought-provoking book “Yoga” this week…

And there we were, my husband and I in our night clothes, standing in the back yard at 5 am on election day in the US, November 8, to watch the eclipse.  It was a total eclipse of the moon in Taurus, as well as a king tide, and it was on this particular day.  We didn’t see it, as it was already too far down in the western sky, behind houses, so we didn’t actually observe the ‘blood moon’ obscured by the shadow of the earth.  But we ‘observed’ it in another way, I think now.  We paid attention to it.  We woke as if with an alarm clock, and stumbled out of the house to ‘observe the heavens,’ and here we were, staring up into the sky as we often do, the skies of Florida being usually clear at night.  Jupiter, unusually close, has been our bright companion for months now. Over the yard, we see Cassiopeia and the square of Pegasus; above the roof, Saturn, Altair and Deneb.

I’m talking about this here because it can get so easy to be sucked into tension and anxiety about politics and other mundane things. Observing the heavens – like being aware of the tides - gives you a fine sense of perspective, whether you are an astronomer, astrologer, or just a person who wants to understand the universe. A writer, for example. An artist. Someone for whom the bigger picture always counts, who tries to see beyond the obsessive details of life into the grand design.

So, look up when anxiety strikes, as it did in the US this week, as it does in many parts of the world. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…” as Shakespeare’s Cassius says in “Julius Caesar.” But a helpful shift of viewpoint can also come from observing the stars, and the vastness they tell of.

Affectionately, Ros

Book news:  My novel “The Third Swimmer” is now available on Kindle Direct at Amazon as well as in print, as my novella “Elena, Leo, Rose” will be very shortly.  I’ve also just heard that an old friend, Claudie Hunzinger, has won the Prix Femina in France for her novel, “Un chien a ma table” (A dog at my table).  After Annie Ernaux winning the Nobel for Literature – bravo to both!

Notes on a Writing Life / 42

Photo by Cricket Desmarais

Notes on a Writing life 42
October 14 2022

Dear all,

Years ago, at the end of the last century, I began teaching yearly classes based on Julia Cameron’s very successful and well-loved book, The Artist’s Way.  Many of Key West’s artists and writers got to know each other better through these classes, which became ongoing support groups in many cases, and lasting friendships were formed.  A small island town lends itself to such groups, as we meet each other easily, but these ideas can – and have – spread throughout many other places and led to ongoing groups, as Julia Cameron generously suggested at the end of her book.

Now, twenty years or more later, I have the idea of updating the theory and practice outlined in the book for the 21st century.  So much has changed in our world, and the times we live in are uncertain, the planet we live on is threatened, and the ideal of the artist’s life can seem outmoded, irrelevant, even selfish.  People who felt isolated during Covid and its aftermath have a need to get together, talk about their lives and how they create, and get sustenance from others. We do need each other in order to keep going. The myth of the solitary struggling artist has long been out of date.   

So, I’m starting our meetings at the Studios of Key West on December 5 in the early evenings and they will continue for twelve weeks. If you are in Key West during that time – join us at the Studios of Key West!  If not, I will be posting a weekly summary on Substack.com of what we discussed, what came out of it, what insights and connections were made.

Thinking of support for artists and writers, my friend and genius website creator, Kimberly Narenkivicius, is offering the opportunity for 3-week winter writing retreats for single or pairs of writers/ artists in her cottage in Rabanal, Spain. It’s on the Camino, the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela.  Contact her at The Stone Boat if you are interested.

It’s time for artists and writers to come out of our hiding-places and get together to create our new worlds….

Thanks for reading,

Affectionately, Ros

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My novella “Elena, Leo, Rose” is still being sold at its introductory price of $3.99 on Amazon,

I would love for anyone who enjoys it to post a review…

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Notes on a Writing Life / 41

Notes on a Writing Life 41
September 14 2022

Dear All,

I wonder how many other writers have experienced this: characters who just refuse to go away. The book is finished, the conclusion drawn – and yes, that really was the ending you wanted. But if for some reason, the characters go on, talking to you in the night, presenting new aspects of themselves, insisting on their right to live?

‘The lie, the look, the grief are without permanence.
The watch continues to tick where the story stops.’

Mavis Gallant, one of my favorite authors, wrote that. The watch continues to tick. As it does in life, as long as you are on this earth.  But what to do about it? Let them have another book?  Write a series?  Go on listening to these people you thought you had said goodbye to?  When I was young I read a book called ‘What Katy Did’ followed by another ‘What Katy Did Next.’  Admirable titles – they tell you just what the book is going to be about.

Paris Journal, by Mavis Gallant.

As a very young beginning writer, spurred on by the Katy books and Anne of Green Gables among many others, I had a hard time getting my characters to do anything. They stood there, described in detail, like those paper dolls waiting to be dressed, refusing to move. We’re here, they seemed to say: now what?

Now, I have people who won’t stop moving and talking, who invade my mind when I’m doing something else. Who won’t shut up and go away. They seem to want their continuing stories to be told.  Fanciful, I know. Maybe even a bit crazy. But there they are.

I don’t know what I’ll let them do – the jury’s still out. In my last novel ‘Without Her’, their friend died, choosing her own death.  What happened to them after that? What do you do after you’ve seen your friend die? When life in all its contradictory ways still goes on? As yours does, as mine does, until it doesn’t anymore.

Meanwhile, happily, I’ve just signed the contract for my newest novel ‘Bone Whispers’ with Epicenter Press in Washington State. It’s a mystery of sorts, set partly in the years after World War 2, and will be out sometime in 2024.  I’m delighted that it’s going to have a life – that those people, other familiars I lived with for so long, will be telling their stories in the light of day.

Thanks for reading,

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 40

Notes on a Writing Life 40
August 14 2022

Dear All,

Whenever another artist asks if they can use a line of writing of mine in a work of theirs, I feel a thrill that the words themselves will be re-used, re-invented, translated into another field.  It’s like that with translation, too.  Here is my work alive in another language, made ready for another society and readers!

Poetry can easily be hidden inside another work of art.  My friend Madeleine Strobel has taken a line of a poem I wrote years ago and included it in the piece shown here.  I hardly remember writing the poem, but am moved to think it speaks to her today.  Another friend, Claudie Hunzinger, an artist and writer who lives in the Vosges mountains in eastern France, once created an exhibition of ‘burned’ poems: the words themselves written on paper she made from mountain flowers, then tied into little bundles, and their edges singed as if someone had tried to destroy them, or they had been rescued from a burning house.  We make art out of fragments, remains, the left-over, the partially destroyed – and this somehow seems appropriate again now, as so much in our world is being threatened or destroyed.  I have always liked the hidden and the mysterious.  Words hidden in matter are like code, or magic spells.  This goes back to childhood, when I believed in that sort of magic, and tried (in vain) to practice it. It’s partly play, partly investigation of what is. And poetry, made up of words, can be dissected, its essences recaptured, created anew by other hands, other imaginations.

I’m home in Key West after a summer of travel – England, Italy, France. Nothing about travel is straightforward – especially in the UK these days.  But I do love European trains, and on a long day in late June, traveling by train through northern Italy, the Alps and southern France to Paris, facing backwards all the way and simply looking out of the window as train tracks, mountains, rivers and houses receded into eventual darkness.  It was like looking back on a lifetime; and it was a time to dream, muse, think – whatever we call it when our minds slip into another gear – and wonder what comes next, and what forms it will take.

Meanwhile, “Leo, Elena, Rose” is available still at a bargain price at Amazon, and from Open Boat Press.  I plan to do a reading from it later this year, in Key West.

Thanks for reading!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 39

Notes on a Writing Life 39
July 14 2022

     Dear All,

Do the books we choose to take with us on our journeys and vacations set the mood for us? And, why do we choose what we choose?

     I’ve been thinking about endings. Last books, unfinished books, books that don’t see the light of day, and here I am in Hardy country (Dorset, England) where I usually feel I must re-read the old curmudgeon, often coming back to the ironies of “The Return Of The Native.” This year I have a new novel called “The Chosen” by Elizabeth Lowry, about the death of Hardy’s first wife, Emma, and the decision he made to stop writing fiction after the terrible, mean-spirited reviews he had for “Jude The Obscure” (sex, always too much of it, also infanticide – “done because we are too menny.”)   In the novel I’m reading, Hardy is blocked, guilt-ridden, sleepless, and takes to eating jam with a spoon for his lunch while his wife haunts him from the attic. Only after her death can he write the love poems to her that made his name as a poet. “The Chosen” is thoughtful and beautifully written, but does post a warning to writers obsessed by their work.

     My other choice was Geoff Dyer’s “The Last Days of Roger Federer” which turns out to be more about Geoff Dyer than Roger Federer (who got up and played some more stunning sets after the book came out) but also about Lawrence and Nietzsche and Bob Dylan and many other people whose last days, or last works, are under scrutiny.

     I also found a book a few weeks ago in a used bookstore in Venice, “The Tide Is Right” by Hugo Charteris and was intrigued as it had apparently been suppressed before its initial publication in 1957 by an aristocratic English family threatening the publisher. The writer went off to Africa, the book was suppressed and was only published later by Dalkey Archive in the US.  It interested me mostly because of its suppression – what could they have objected to? Not sex or child murder, but simply the embarrassing behavior of a certain upper-class bunch of people who thought they should be immune…

Wimbledon and Westminster have also claimed a lot of my attention during the first half of July – last days on the courts of Rafael Nadal, perhaps, and certainly last days – prolonged in a Trumpish way - of Boris Johnson, who doesn’t want to move house.

    We are having perfect summer days – in England, a heat wave.  Why do English summer days somehow feel elegiac?  Is it because we know they can’t last? Because the summer holidays always came to an end and we were sent back to school?  Because everything feels elegiac when you start thinking of Last Things?

     Next, I’m going to read a thriller…

Affectionately, Ros

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