Wild and Human Worlds, Intersection.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In New Hampshire for a book reading, visiting bro — all the New Hampshire things: granite boulders and thickety woods, the clear Saco River where we alternate post-hike lying in the pebbly river and warming on the water-polished rocks, so much talk and laughter, all the things.

A fellow hiker stops us on the trail and points at two black bear cubs in a tree, the great mama below, brown-nosed like a creature in a child’s picture book, but of course not at all like a child’s tale. Wordlessly, we admire the animals, one cub climbing a branch, round in limb, enchanting. Then slowly we make our way off the trail and through the forest, a great half-circle, to leave these creatures to their own wild way.

In my own corner of Vermont, I’ve spied so many bears this summer. Always, this flash of awe, this sense of luck to know this sliver of wild, immediately followed by caution: keep our human realm away from these creatures in their own bear domesticity.

It is a mystery to me where each word begins and ends, let alone each phrase. ~ Jean Said Makdisi

July, Sweet and Sour.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

I read in the New York Times that Catcher in the Rye turns 75, a novel my mother first shared with me. My parents owned little fiction; our house was mostly filled with philosophy books, David Hume (who I never read) and Plato and Aristotle. In those shelves was jammed a copy of Huckleberry Finn and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Ten Stories, drug-store paperbacks held together with rubber bands. Books I love — and maybe you do, too.

In this lushly lingering month of July — filled with sun and swimming, with work and chores — I’m lucky to have scheduled a dozen readings for Call It Madness, this novel about Vermont and family and how the sodden past shapes our lives. Of all the books that reflects my life, Long Day’s Journey into Night surely ranks at the top. A reader pointed out to me recently that Call It Madness moves forward linearly, but is packed with the past, events that happened decades ago that remain as vibrant as this morning’s news.

I write in the world of cause and effect — our actions always propel consequences — but the past with its radiant joy and unquenchable sadness propels us mightily. Nonetheless, the pear trees previous owners planted in my front yard bear reddening fruit. The bees suck globe thistle. Sunday evening, I walk far along the river, the running water sunk low among exposed rocks. The sunlight lingers — so much light in these days sugary with freshly-mown hay. I’d like to pocket a handful of July and return in January: humans, we can launch ourselves to the moon but July-in-January is impossible. Nothing to do but quaff the present while it exists.

hydrangeas
pale blue in the rain
blue in the moonlight

By Masaoka Shiki | Translation by Lucien Stryk

Singing a Love Song, Swimming.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

It’s nearly 8 in the evening by the time I step into #10 Pond, the sun slipped down around this narrow pond surrounded by mountains, my only company two teenage girls who stand on the shore talking about a mother’s car—these girls and a loon calling.

I part the still waters and swim out. Despite raging heat elsewhere on the globe, Vermont’s summer holds a chill, and by the time I swim back, I’m cold. On the shore, the girls have disappeared, and under the twilight sky it’s just shivering me toweling off water, pulling on a sweatshirt. All afternoon, I’ve thought of this water, of the sky turning from blue to black, of the mud beneath my bare feet, the loon chorus. It’s been a day of work and laughter, nothing rotten that I’d like to leave at the bottom of the pond; nonetheless, July moves along, the relentlessness of time. I crave these moments of water and sky, of reading beneath the apple tree’s shade, dinner near the garden, as much sun and wind and, yes, cold water as I can bear. Sustenance.

“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins

The WHAT IS.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My brother and I break off the rail trail and hike up a spur trail. I haven’t been here before, but I once lived on the side of the moutanin where we now head. July, neither hot nor cold, we’re in shorts and t-shirts, walking and talking, laughing about things only siblings seem to hold. It’s just us and the hermit thrush and mosquitoes. We’ve left phones and work behind; maybe it’s 1978 again.

A few hours later, we descend steeply into the other end of town, where Cooper Brook runs by the liquor store, Dollar General, a snack shack. Through goldenrod, we walk along the sandy former railroad bed. A dense forest shelters around and turns the trail to muddy ruts, stones washed slick with recent rain. Frogs leap from puddles. I step around a wide toad.

My brother’s visited many times, most with me, some alone in my house while I was in the hospital. In the evening, we pick up the tour again, walking through the brushy path to the cemetery that seems to delight only me. Ticks! Blackberry brambles! It’s just a short stretch, and I strangely revel in this tangled passage, as if a portal from home to village, sweetened with black raspberries. We stop and visit a new neighbor, then trek again downtown, to the river where workers have been re-armouring the granite walls all summer, pouring footings for a suspension bridge.

I point out the shop where friends feed feral cats—one sleek creature sitting in the driveway, watching—and the house that burned and a woman died. My map of the town unspools: the apartments with the overdoses, the former inn where, in a garret room, I once met a therapist in a rainstorm whose dogs lay on the floor and I begged her to salvage my life from a chaotically breaking marriage. As I stared out the window at the rain crashing on the porch roof below, I realized whatever salvaging was going to be done had to be done by myself. Downstairs was a now closed-up bakery where I bought donuts with my youngest daughter. The superintendent’s office where I attended a hundred school board meetings. The river’s edge, where I gathered white pebbles with my daughters and created a rock garden.

Countless treks around this little town. Mid-July, neither hot nor cold, the wind still, the river low. I’ve seen the town flood, brutal cold descend. Atlas I’m creating of manifold layers.

…. and a thank you to David Goodman of VTDigger for this podcast with the writer Catherine Tudish.

“Prayer” by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

“The present pushes back the life of regret.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Lucky, lucky to reading in such charming backroads Vermont places. Lucky to be driving with a companion who gets me there via google maps and keeps me company on the drive. I’ll read at The Norwich Bookstore tonight, that familiar trek down I-91, but this time turning at Exit 13, not east towards Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center but east towards the literary world. With deep satisfaction. (Book signing Saturday, July 18, at Phoenix Books in Burlington, 1-3pm)

A friend stops by and cautions me that thunderstorms and hail, maybe fire and brimstone are expected tonight. I laugh because, well, why not. There’s those cliches about life’s a journey and so on, reductive things for a bumper sticker or card, with of course a soul of truth. Early evening, I read under the butternut tree, sparrows chittering, a woodchuck grazing beneath the lilac hedge. I’ve been here before: such a gorgeous wild sprawling summer, and already the days are dampening at each end, just the merest. The neighbors drive up, cheery and sweaty from baseball, and agree yes, more sun, more summer. The woodchuck looks up, untroubled, and munches on. I think, I could get a dog. Or not.

A mosquito bites my big toe. Swifts dart above my head.

The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn’t matter
to the makers if their pots cracked. — Galway Kinnell

July, in stillness and fury.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Restless, these July days long and, I kid you not, fragrant with fat pink roses in my yard, I’m at a nearby pond not long before twilight, craving company and coolness. I crouch along the shoreline. Save for one sole swimmer, the water lies flat. From the one house along this wooded stretch, laughter spills.

As a child, my sibs and I had a picture book by Leo Leonni about a mouse named Frederick, an artistic rodent soul who saved up the colors of the summer to share in storytelling, hunkered down in the mouse nest, to get his tribe through the dark winter. Likewise, July. In a patch of mucky reeds, forget-me-nots stretch up, teeny blue blossoms. Surely these flowers fit into the biological world for some specific and clever reason. This evening, they’re simply delightful.

Far down the pond, the loons call, exquisite tremolo. This evening, I’m yet humming from Ocean Vuong’s recent reading in Greensboro, how he did that rare thing: in a theater of hundreds of souls, he read simply to me, as I let my knitting fall into my lap and I leaned forward against the balcony’s railings, listening and marveling, his words a river of shoveling snow and absent fathers, of napalm in the jungle and American factories, and how history and bloodshed and the resilience of poetry bind us as a species—each of us a unique drop in that river of flowing time.

The pond’s chill gnaws my flesh. On the sandy mud, we eat cherries. Talking, we will solve exactly none of the world’s conundrums tonight. The loons appear, two parents, two fledglings, on an evening swim and fish hunt. I’ve been here before, stark winter, silent ice, the crunch of snow beneath my boots. Now, the biting insects cluster along my bare legs, claiming bite-sized sips of my blood.

Last, a few readings for Call It Madness coming up. Please come, if you’re around my edge of Vermont, in sweet July.

Meadow Meeting House, in Corinth, VT, Sunday, July 12, 3 pm, with the remarkable Sasha Hom.

Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT, Tuesday, July 14, 7 pm.

A novelist, however, sees the idea of ‘a leisurely life’ as practically synonymous with ‘the waning of one’s creativity.’ For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die. — Haruki Murakami