The Story Runs
Alongside Life

For a writer, the story runs alongside life, sometimes faltering, sometimes out of reach, yet always somewhere there, waiting to be found.

But writing does take time, and when I read somebody’s remark about prayer, that you need several hours of silence and meditation in order to pray for a couple of minutes, then the same has to be said for writing.

Writers are just ordinary people who spend a lot of time writing or thinking about writing.

Writing is rewriting; writing is revising; writing is also knowing what questions you want to ask, and even try to answer.

So, if you can’t write the story you want to write, start writing about the problem, make it central.

So no – hardly lonely, rather the reverse; but I can’t emphasize enough the delight of aloneness when you have an idea to pursue, a story to net and develop, a poem to write, a new idea to put on the page or screen.

In the end, what we find we desire most is simply to get back to work.

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.

Words matter, truth matters, imagination matters.

This turns out not to be much about the writing life, except that the writing life has to be about the rest of life, or it has no roots.

When I arrived here I had no idea that so many writers were my neighbors on this island and would become my friends.

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.

The sky is blue, the mango blossom is out, the beaches are full of student spring-breakers and the ocean is at the end of every street.

Slowly, the light changed and the whole landscape did not go dark – we were not in a place to see the totality - but it was as if light, life and memory were being drained from the land and sea.

The written word seizes and fixes a time in a way that memory alone does not.

The great thing about memoir-writing, I discovered, is that you already have the story.

I remember school desks with rusty ink in their inkwells, and bottles of blue-black Quink, and blotting paper – remember blotting paper?

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.

Sadness is only half the story; you let go, and happiness of a different sort may come, another point of view, another place, another opportunity.

I spent weeks alone in Dorset, walking, thinking, writing a bit, swimming, at home in a way that I am really not anywhere else; it’s the place of my childhood.

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.

Walking, my mind moves into gear, thoughts begin to form, poems to emerge, ideas to take shape.

The only problem was that they had to go back, and I wanted to keep The Yearling forever, that story set in a state called Florida on the far side of an ocean I never thought I would cross.

After a life involved with others – lovers, friends, children, husbands, colleagues, readers, students – there’s a quiet excitement in finding out who we are, when alone.

I confide to a friend of my own age that these days I love being alone, and she agrees.

Lovely to see you, sad to see you go – but, as I walk back to the emptied cottage, a sense of the freshness that comes from being once again alone.

I pause and look around me and in this dry hot season, recognize that I’ve come to the end of several long projects, and there is nothing that I have to do with any urgency.

And then, a miracle, light grew back and we looked at each other in relief.

It’s a transformative experience, walking into that unfolding landscape, moving somehow in tune with the universe – even with blisters and a tired back, coming ever closer to the very edge of Europe.

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.

So, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela has been in my life, on and off, for some time.

One of the traditional starting-points for the pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was Arles, in southern France.

Seeing, listening, tasting, smelling, letting in atmosphere, weather, all that has informed us as an evolving species over millennia; connecting with each other in significant ways.

Finding, tasting, looking, listening, digesting, changing ourselves just a bit along the way; hoping that what we find informs not just our own continuing lives, but those we touch as we pass.

We won’t be doing much of the other-worldly – rather looking closely, listening closely, tasting carefully, paying attention to the actual world, the world of Arles, France, and its surroundings in May 2026, and the world of our own sensations.

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.

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.

Sometimes to read a page is enough, and I return to my own, restored and set alight again.

In the small hours of the night, we can switch our minds to our characters’ problems rather than our own.

A question comes to mind and you spend time, energy and all your spare thoughts, trying to answer it.

I realized that after a few weeks or even months of feeling totally at sea, all my habits and assumptions challenged and the world of writing seemingly as remote as everything else, it did not need to change much at all.

You don’t get to create paintings like these in less than a lifetime of dedicated attention.

But I do want to commit favorite poems to memory, more systematically than I have, simply because I want them close, in my head not just on the page or screen.

We need our communities; nobody flourishes alone, whatever the myths may tell us.

Her paintings are quintessential Key West – changing skies, calm and then stormy seas.

Key West light informs these paintings, I think, the way the light of the South of France informed those of Cézanne and Van Gogh.

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.

A bonus was that the avocados crashed down from our neighbors’ tree like hand grenades, and we went out afterwards to pick them out of soaked grass.

The past is still with us in memory and in writing. Our lost friends speak to us still.

These days, I find him in me as I walk, swim, or simply stand on the beach feeling sun and wind on me, after a swim.

It’s a memory I have from hurricane Georges, in 1998: avocados rolling in the gutters, lobsters thrown up on the beach. A feast amid chaos.

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.

Light matters to painters; it mattered especially to the Impressionists and those who painted out of doors, en plein air, like Cézanne and Van Gogh.

Swallows swoop before my window. The light changes, blue deepens, shadows darken. Elder and broom are flowering. It’s morning on this one particular day in June.