Eating Roses.

June 28, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I’ve just finished stacking a fallen-down section of woodpile when a friend texts and asks if I’m interested in a twilight walk. Heck, yes. With my thumb and fingernail, I snip a rose and carry the fragrant pink beauty cupped in my hand as I walk towards my friend’s house, trailing tender petals.

We meet at a halfway point between our house. To my surprise and delight, she eats the rose.

In the lingering light — June’s gold and green beauty — we walk along the rail trail and pause at the bridge over the river. Leaning on the railing, we talk about all the things — family and money and loneliness — while the river runs over and around the boulders and bends around the forest, heading through the village.

Darkness drifts down when I finally head home through the scent of clipped lawns, the roses along the Catholic parsonage, the seduction of garlic from the downtown restaurant, its door propped open, a woman rubbing a cloth over the bar.

Vermont June. Mighty, magical month.

And…. book launch for Call It Madness, this Tuesday, 7 p.m., hosted by the Galaxy Bookshop at the Jeudevine Memorial Library’s amazing addition. If you’re around, come!

Looking into the Longevity of Our Stories.

June 25, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Writer Tom McKone called me last week for a CALL IT MADNESS interview. We spoke for longer than either of us had expected, as I leaned over my back porch railings. His review ran in yesterday’s The Bridge. McKone is my ideal reader: curious, thoughtful, precise. Writing a book requires years—years of labor that has zero relevance to a time clock; labor that demands writing through doubt and kismet; labor that gleans from ebullience, nihilism, and that broad plain of gray uncertainty. There’s a splash when a book is released, a flurry, but the goal? The real desire? Have a reader sink into a hammock or lean against a swaying subway wall and read.

An excerpt follows.

“Our memories, where and when we’re born, and our family, social environment, and economic situation can shape who we are,” Stanciu said. Mentioning the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, she said it is very hard to “step out of that repetition of the past,” especially when that past is burdened with poverty and alcohol.

“One of the things I hope people get out of this book is the ability to ask questions (and) to be curious,” she said. “Why do people act the way they do? What do I not understand about them — both when they behave well and when they behave in infuriating ways? I think it’s always been a relevant question, but it’s super relevant right now — not to see each other in two-dimensional ways, but to really look into the longevity of our stories.”

June’s Snow.

June 22, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

We eat on the back deck of a little restaurant in Plainfield, Vermont, home of the former Goddard College, its campus now morphing towards its next phase. In Plainfield, there’s hand-lettered LOVE signs everywhere, a sense that people are doing interesting things like writing novels in verse in treehouses, and folks say hi when we pass on the sidewalks, as if they know us. And maybe they do. Tiny Vermont.

Rain sprinkles around the table’s umbrella. Overhead, leaning back, I spy a puzzle piece of blue sky, a horn of the half moon.

Solstice, the longest day of the year, fragrant with roses, a serenade of toad songs. Afterwards, we walk along the river, then uphill, where the floods in the past few years cut the hillside, rammed silt and rock into houses that remain, people-less, doubtlessly waiting for FEMA money that may or may not arrive, an excavator, another breaking. We turn and wander through higher ground, where gardens flourish green and pink. Hammocks are strung for summer reading in porches.

June’s ineffable loveliness.

In the long twilight I drive home, my tires splashing through puddles where rain has fallen hard and missed us. Around Woodbury Lake, the mist layers among the emerald hills, the sky’s deepening blue, sunset gold. Beloved Vermont, relishing her own beauty. I don’t pause, the radio off, only me and my own stray thoughts. I drive north on this road where I’ve traveled for so many years, in so many kinds of weather, passing the place of the terrible recent accident, the unspeakable tragedy, and then I’m in little Woodbury village again. Wetlands and church and school and post office. Fog trails around me.

I’m not at all a churchgoing woman, but the phrase yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death clangs through me, resonates in my soul and body like a bell’s clapper. The dearness of this life, so easily torn.

At home, in the thin wisps of light, I wander through my garden, the campion white, the mock orange blossoms June’s snow. Through my neighbors’ windows, laughter spills.

“Peonies at Dusk,” Jane Kenyon

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

On the Road…

June 20, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My twenties were years of road tripping, Vermont to Washington state, lots of New Mexico, sleeping in the back of our black diesel VW Rabbit, 55 mpg, our Rand McNally shedding pages. Thirties were babies and learning to garden, raising high the roof beams, forties the scrambling decade of parenting alone and keeping kids shod and fed. Fifties, kids are paddling their own lives, and yet we’re tight, tight; cancer survivorship schooled us rapidly in what’s dear and what’s so easily lost.

Among these decades, my own unbroken thread of writing. Road trip with a self-made atlas.

A beloved friend hops into my car. We lived on the same dirt road for years. I would phone and say, It’s sleeting. Come walk with me. She was always game. This late afternoon, I drive south, that too familiar journey of Route 15 and I-91, heading towards Dartmouth-Hitchcock, but I park in pretty Hanover, NH, where I’ve been invited to read from Call It Madness — a title that reflects my own life — madness, madness, everywhere — both the crazy-making of divorce and cancer but also my own fierceness for my dear ones, for literature and the roses blooming around my house and the precipice I tread between ebullience and the frigid teeth of despair.

The loveliest of evenings at Still North Books. My reading companion, Shasta Grant, is true and gifted, the bookstore staff warm, the audience curious and kind. My friend and I are the last to leave, save for the cheery folks folding the chairs and emptying our water cups. I drive north into the night. The sun dwindles into gold and pink. We talk about cars and money, kids of course, drinking and books and death.

She gives me her apple. I eat and drive. Thirty years into our friendship, as the darkness folds around us, I think, What a long way we have come. In my driveway, we linger, the car’s engine clicking as it cools, the fireflies flickering. How happy I am to begin my own hand-crafted book tour for Call It Madness. In my youth, those decades when I leaned so hard into my life I hardly brushed my hair, I believed my life would flatten, temper into quietness. Oh friends, the world’s depths are revealed as bottomless crevasses and immense peaks, largely unknowable. What’s knowable is the stickiness of that apple’s juice on my fingers, the darting fireflies, the answer I gave to a stranger’s question at the end of the Still North Books reading: “My real flaw was cowardice.” I’ve long ago abandoned the flimsiness of that forgiveness concept, for myself or others. Life propels onward, word by word, sunset to sunrise, companionship in all weather.

A few things…. I’ll be on Bon Mot on Central Vermont Radio, Sunday, June 21, 5 p.m. Call It Madness book launch Tuesday, June 30, 7 p.m., at the Jeudevine Memorial Library in Hardwick, Vermont, sponsored of course by the hometown and most stellar Galaxy Bookshop.

Survive, professor! That’s all you really have to do. Keep the grass from creeping into eh carrots, deal with the woodchuck stealing the apples, patch up the pipes! — Makenna Goodman

Multitudes.

June 17, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A friend comes for cheese sandwiches and raspberries, and we walk through the hydrangeas and across the cemetery and downtown to the Galaxy Bookshop where Garret Keizer launches his new book. The evening is illuminated with sunlight. Keizer reads well, and at the end, my hands folded over my knitting in my lap, I feel how this room of friends and strangers leans together, yoked by the intensity and compassion of his words. He thanks the audience and says drive home carefully.

Over those sweet raspberries, we’d talked about the curious threads that knot through communities, the connections between people known in segments. Likewise, we comprehend this universe in all its radiance and brutality through a smudged lens. This week, in a nearby town, an unimaginable car crash.

Lingering at the bookstore’s door, two old friends and I muse about these strange political days. One friend ventures that collective celebrations, like the recent Knicks’ win, keep us buoyant. As a writer, I’ve always leaned into words, the shelter of creation, the force of imagination. Yet, there are realms where language no longer suffices. Nine years ago, we moved into this house. I opened the living room windows, and the perfume of roses washed through the rooms. Nine years? a friend asks. What does that feel like?

It feels like multitudes.

… Last, grateful for this nice write-up of Call It Madness in the Times Argus.

Always, the question, which way?

June 14, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

For readers who haven’t lived in northern Vermont, here’s a keyhole view of June: heat and humidity move in, and the earth thrusts out into leaf and bloom. Overnight, the loosestrife blooms yellow, the chard gains an inch in leaf. The lilacs fade. The Siberian irises spread purple.

In the heat, listening to terrible news of the American Empire’s spread, I finish stacking next winter’s firewood. Sweaty and dirty, the cats and I admire my work, contemplating the frosty fall evenings. The cats, perhaps, are merely curious about my labor, or the next meal’s arrival, or perhaps a cat calculus I don’t imagine.

June, the songbirds serenade exquisitely. I mow the grass around the woodpile, the pink roses beginning to bloom, the brushy compass flowers that are now knee-high. Will the ancient mock orange leaf and bloom? Will the woodchuck devour the sunflower seedlings? Will I unclench my knotted heart and let myself fall in love, tumble into the next phase of whatever I may have in this lifetime?

Rain falls and the heat breaks as I finish mowing. I wander around, drinking a glass of water, the rain running through salt and chaff on my cheeks and biceps. 21 years ago, a friend labored to bring her baby into the world. I sat in her kitchen while our six-year-olds played under her front yard maples. Her mother-in-law made chicken soup that I ate while I nursed my own wee infant.

The world isn’t filled with ten thousand things. In the June afternoon’s rain, a rainbow elusive, math welds no teeth. A hopping robin in search of sustenance, unfolding hydrangea leaves, the bounce of a child’s basketball, the scent of sap bleeding from winter’s firewood.

For local folks…. I’ll be reading at Still North Books in Hanover, NH, Wednesday, June 17, 7 p.m. Yes — a lovely bookstore — and yes, a non-cancer visit to this lovely village.