Notes on a Writing Life / 60

Notes on a Writing Life / 60  
April 14 2024

Dear All,

Springtime in Key West is always lovely, but this year after an unusually rainy winter, it is especially green and bursting with buds and flowers, young mangos ripening, mockingbirds beginning their flirtations, roosters pursuing hens everywhere.  There’s already a slight sense of winding down after the season, which has been frenetic.  We residents breathe two sighs - of relief that the town will be less crowded, but also of sadness to see friends depart for the north.

This will be a short newsletter, as I’m beginning to prepare my departure too – I’m flying to Paris in early May.  Our plans for the Writing Retreat in Spain are in place, and eight brave souls have so far committed to crossing the Atlantic to be with me and Kim at the Flores Retreat Center.  There are still a few places left, if anyone has a last-minute urge to be in a beautiful place, writing!

Here is the link again, just in case.

  I am planning to do at least some of the walk on to Santiago de Compostela and hope to find a companion to do it with me.  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.

Meanwhile my recently published books are available online.  It’s been a busy winter, bringing out three books one after the other, and I’m ready for a break!  Who knows what will come next?

Affectionately, Ros

Morning in May

Grass grows in the night
and early the mockingbirds begin
their fleet courtships over puddles,
upon wires, in the new green
of the Spanish limes.

Their white striped wings flash
as they flirt and dive.
Wind in the chimes pulls music
from the air, the sky’s cleared
of its vast complications.

In the pause before summer,
the wild sprouting of absolutely
everything: hair, nails, the mango’s
pale rose pennants, tongues of birds
singing daylong.

Words, even, and sudden embraces,
surprising dreams and things I’d never
imagined, in all these years of living,
one more astonished awakening.

from "Bonnard's Dog" published by Hanging Loose Press in 2015

Notes on a Writing Life / 59

March 14, 2024

Dear all,

I’ve been thinking about my father this week: he died on March 11 1991, just a few weeks after his last game of tennis.  He was all about keeping moving – both physically and intellectually.  As children we followed him on long marches across the countryside, trying to keep up with his stride.  As sulky teenagers, we protested, pulled from our loud music and cigarettes in darkened rooms, to walk with him, play tennis or swim.  He was the lover of wild swimming – any patch of water, river or sea or stream, would do; and of rock-climbing, and other dangerous pursuits. An avatar – sometimes overdoing it - of testing oneself and emerging triumphant, ignoring scratched knees and children’s complaints.

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.  When I see one of my three brothers even at a distance, walking, I see that distinctive swinging stride of his.  We have it in our genes.

And, at nearly the age now that he was when he died, I appreciate his example as I probably didn’t when young.

This year, I’m planning to walk at least some of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, a walk I have done with two of my brothers at different times.  I have a view of a winding path between trees pinned on my studio wall, and I long to follow it again.  Walking, my mind moves into gear, thoughts begin to form, poems to emerge, ideas to take shape.  First, I empty my mind; then I begin to move.

The Writing Retreat at Flores, in northern Spain, will be the precursor to the walk – a pause, a step aside from the world and time, a moment for what my mother, quoting the Bible, used to call ‘amendment of life.’ And writing.  Who knows what we may write?  Then, we’ll walk – those of us who love to do so, who long to follow the winding road and let our feet take us where our dreams evolve.

Here is one of the posters for the Writing Retreat that I’m putting up around town in Key West in the hopes that people here may answer the call.  But if you read this, wherever you are, and are tempted, just go to the QR code on the poster, and you will be taken direct to the Flores website.  However experienced a walker or writer you are, or if you simply want to do something in your life that you’ve never done before, do come and join us.  We’ll be walking in the footsteps of thousands of pilgrims on a sacred road towards the very edge of Europe. And I’ll be walking with my dad.  Buen camino!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 58

February 14  2024

Dear All,

The date above happens to be the publishing date for my novel “Bone Whispers”, as mentioned in my last newsletter.  You can now order it from any good book store, or online – and I’d be grateful if you might think of posting a review online.

Time to celebrate!  And it’s Valentine’s Day too…

Meanwhile, Kim Narenkivicius and I continue planning the June writing retreat at Flores Retreat Centre, in Spain.  The theme of the retreat will be writing as pilgrimage, tracing the inner and the outer journey, as it takes place on the ‘French way’ part of the pilgrimage route towards Santiago de Compostela.  I’ve planned a series of days writing around the spirit of place, the details and atmosphere of place, ourselves in the world (the immediate world around us) and the ways we map experience of place and time.

My own journeys on the Camino – and earlier, in the Atlas mountains of Morocco - have taught me that you don’t know a place really until you walk it – or walk into it.  After a few days walking from Astorga in 2010, I began to feel the countryside moving towards me as I moved into it, as if it came forward to hold me.  This is something you have to experience, not describe. So for two weeks after the writing retreat, there’s the extra possibility of walking to Santiago de Compostela, for those who choose to do it.  Personally, I find writing begins inside my head when I’m either walking or swimming.  Movement in space, the body’s effort, the winding road or open sea all play their part.  In June, we will visit local churches and petroglyphs to get a feeling for the place, then write, then walk.  For people who can’t envisage walking a hundred or more kilometers, there are taxis!  Everyone who wants to write something in particular, who wants simply to start writing, or who is an experienced writer already, is welcome.  You don’t know what you can do, until you take the first step.

Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way” has informed my own life and the almost-yearly classes I’ve led in Key West;  some of her themes and ideas, like writing morning pages, will be incorporated.  Mainly, I’ve lived and taught from the idea she threw to me in the 1990’s, that process is the point, and if you do something – write, paint, play music – regularly, not only will you improve at it but all sorts of unforeseen options and offers may come your way.  My own new process is learning modern dance from an inspired teacher; yes, I could have started that 30 years ago, but the point is, I’ve started it now.

So, I hope to see some of you at the retreat in June!  Attached is the website with details and prices.

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 57

14 January 2024

Dear All,

A happy 2024 to you!  May it turn out to be peaceful and creative…

My chickens are coming home to roost. I’m delighted to say that “Seas Outside the Reef” and “Light Over Islands,” two books set in Key West, are now both available on Amazon, as I mentioned last month, and are about to be produced in e-book form.  I’ll be signing copies at Soul House, the beautiful store on the corner of Southard and Frances in Key West, run by Oakleigh Waits and Susan Beale.  Come by 3:30 – 5:30 on January 25 – Virginia Woolf’s and Robert Burns’ birthdays!

In this newsletter I want to tell you more about my novel, “Bone Whispers”, out on February 14 – Valentine’s Day – on which day I’m inviting my little writers’ group out for a festive lunch.

The novel is set in Dorset, in England, and it’s a story I’ve had in mind for a long time, though I’m not sure quite why.  It includes childhood memories of the post-war era in England, as well as 21st-century sections set in my country of origin.  The contemporary part is set in 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, on a scorching summer in which climate change is making itself felt and a drought went on for months.  It invokes Thomas Hardy and his novel “The Return of the Native” as my protagonist returns to the place where she spent summers in her childhood and youth.

I left England in the early 1980’s, to move to Scotland, where I lived for 12 years, before moving to the US in 1993, and I have only visited my native country yearly since then.  What is it about getting older that makes you want to go back to your roots?  I remember saying somewhat glibly years ago that trees need roots, not people – and now, I’m feeling rather differently about this.  Not that I want to move back, physically, but that it mattered to me in writing “Bone Whispers” to explore what it means to be English, as I think one really only can when looking back from another country and another society.  So, the native returns, and the book, published in the US, bridges a divide for me, connects my native story with my American experience, and I hope gives my readers a bit of both.

Images courtesy of Flores del Camino Retreat Centre.

One of the more delightful projects of 2024 promises to be the writing retreat that Kim Narenkivicius and I are leading in June, from 1st to 12th, at the Flores del Camino retreat centre along the pilgrimage trail in northern Spain.  With excursions to visit local churches and petroglyphs, exploring sacred geometry, working with earth pigments and close access to the Camino de Santiago (as well as, of course, time to write in comfort and with good food laid on!) this will be a wonderful way to treat ourselves to an oasis of calm and connection with history. All levels are welcomed. Also, Kim is crafting the “Part II” onward walking pilgrimage to Santiago directly after the writing portion of the retreat from the 12th to the 24th of June. So, if this intrigues you and is exactly what you need to do this year, stay tuned. We will be sending out the final details shortly. You can also contact me via the link below to be placed on the email list.

I’m off this weekend to the Literary Seminar in Key West that takes place this weekend: “Florida: The State We’re In.” (Pun of course intentional.)  I’m looking forward to hearing what writers from our state have to say, on this place that enchants and baffles us all, and is under threat from rising seas, book censorship, educational mayhem, political chicanery and all the rest. We’ll be under water here in a while, long or short – but for now, we meet down near the ocean’s edge, come rain or shine, in a place where the beauty of the natural world is still eviden and the sun goes down in a blaze of original glory every night.

Stay well!

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 56

14 December 2023

Dear All,

A friend, Eric Anfinson the painter who owns Mockingbird Studios, says that when a mocking-bird comes into your back yard it is time to get your work out into the world.  Well, the mocking-bird visited us last week with a flick of his/her white tail feathers…so:

  Two books of mine are about to appear from Open Boat publications: the first, a republished version of “Seas Outside The Reef,” a novel about Key West in the 1990’s, the second a collection of short stories, “Light Over Islands”, also set in Key West, written over the last 30 years. The Key West/New York artist Susan Sugar has generously offered her paintings for the two book covers.

My new novel, “Bone Whispers” will be published by Epicenter Press on February 8 – more on that next month.

Celebrating the Key West we have lived in and loved for so long, Margit Bisztray and Lena Perkins had a launch of their beautiful new book “A Sense of Place” at the Marquesa hotel last week; the old gang was all there, and we pored over photographs of houses, street signs, trees and empty beaches that are no longer what they were. But the theme is not just nostalgia – it’s about change, and cherishing memories while creating new things of beauty.

Cricket and Allen

With this in mind, and the realization that in this current moment, in which so many people are suffering, it’s hard to focus on one’s art or even set time and attention aside for it, I’m starting a new 12-week class on “The Artist’s Way” at the Studios of Key West on January 9 at 5.30.  For anybody who is in town, and who may have been asking themselves the question – what use is my art in a world like this?  Or – how can I be selfish enough to take time to do it? – do come and join in.  The class asks for a commitment to our art, whatever it may be, and to give it priority for 12 weeks in the company of other like-minded people.  Whether you are beginning on something new, trying to finish an old project or simply wondering what on earth to do next, it’s for you. We’ll also be incorporating some ideas from Julia Cameron’s later book, “Walking in this World.”

I do have hopes for 2024 – as Rebecca Solnit says, “Hope is an attitude, not a feeling.”  And, to leave you with a few words that have meant a lot to me over the years:  there’s a Civil War (1640’s)  grave in the east of England of a man who “did the best of things in the worst of times and hoped them in the most calamitous.”  How’s that for an epitaph?

Affectionately, Ros

Notes on a Writing Life / 55

November 14 2023

Dear All,

This month, back in Key West, I’m deep in the novels of a writer who published in the 1920’s and 30’s and then disappeared from view – Jean Rhys.  Beginning with Miranda Seymour’s biography of a talented and hard-working writer and an obviously infuriating if much-loved woman, I then moved on to “Quartet” and “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie” her earliest novels, and am working my way through her oeuvre.  Why Jean Rhys, why now?  She’s a sharp anti-dote to the sanctimoniousness of our time.  It’s also comforting to me to think that a novel can strike such a chord nearly 100 years after it was written. I think of her, forgotten, poor and old, living in a mobile home in Devon in the 1950’s, not knowing that in a future century someone will be loving her work. And, she is so at odds with the mores of 2023: her heroines drink and take drugs and fall for impossible men and have sex with them, sometimes paid, and there’s no sign of redemption – only the honest yet ironic accounts of women’s lives, the refusal of hypocrisy or blame; the author’s own dry wit. I think she’s far more psychologically acute than Hemingway, who was writing at the same time in the same city – Paris – though she read and admired him.  And there’s the added pleasure of her sense of place and atmosphere, the 5th and 6th arrondissements, so anyone who knows this part of Paris can follow her down those same streets.  Her world is of seedy hotels, cheap restaurants, bars, prisons and railway stations. Her constant theme – poverty and its humiliations.  Happily, her last novel “Wide Sargasso Sea”, a prequel to “Jane Eyre,” published in her old age, brought her renewed fame and money and she lived to be nearly 90.

Her books show me that there are pendulum swings in fame and fortune: greeted as avant-garde in the 1930’s, her books fell out of favor after World War 2, as people wanted reassurance and upbeat stories. In the 1960’s they were re-published, in the UK and the US, as remarkable works of their time.  These days, we are back with censorship, ‘niceness’ and heroines we can approve of.  Go figure, as people say…

My own new novel “Bone Whispers” is due out from Epicenter Press in mid-February 2024. A new collection of Key West short stories, “Light Over Islands,” as well as a re-edition of “Seas Outside the Reef” will also be available shortly. For an advance read of the “Light Over Islands” stories and a weekly series, illustrated by my daughter, Miranda Brackenbury, “A Game of Snakes and Ladders” about 50+ years of being published and not-published, go to rosalindbrackenbury.substack.com.

Here is one of Miranda’s beautiful illustrations.

Affectionately, Ros

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.

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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