“… the now of us…

August 9, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The incomparable Mary Elder Jacobsen reads her poetry at Elmore State Park. A sultry August morning, I come alone, friends off doing one summer thing or another. Mary reads in the beach house with the doors and windows open, a breeze carrying in the lake’s lapping and children’s laughter.

Afterwards, because I’m there, I hike the mountain. My family and I have hiked this mountain many times, but I haven’t been here in a few years. Last summer, I was walking—short stretches at first, then longer—gaining strength from the trifecta of cancer and chemo and surgery, gaining strength week by week. This summer, I’ve pulled out my hiking boots, pushing. How far will my strength return?

The rocky outcropping is familiar, a bit more brushy, but the cement footings of a vanished cabin are as I remember, with purple asters and wild roses. A sweltering, sweaty day that recalls my New Hampshire childhood, the countless hikes with my dad. A couple arrives, and we talk about the lake below, the view of the forest and hayfield landscape. We share apples, handfuls of crackers, stories.

The story I don’t share is the January evening I parked at the lake’s edge and walked out on the ice beneath the piercing stars. I was on my way from a late meeting to pick up my daughter at a friend’s house, and I’d allotted myself exactly ten minutes. The cold came at me like arrows. Across the lake, the ice cracked like a shot in the fierce temperature. And the constellations? Ancient and present and promising a future…. Now, years later, in moist August scented with those roses…. This day bears no thinking of time. August, in her tumbling abundance.

That January night, my daughter was waiting for me, wanting home. We’d been gone for hours and hours, since early morning, and the wood stove had gone cold, our house inhospitable. Rushing — I was always rushing in those days — I kindled the fire, boiled boxed macaroni and cheese, carried in more wood. We ate in front of the crackling wood stove, sharing our days. All the seasons of a life. Now, this August afternoon, damselflies flicker.

Hours later, I swim in my favorite pond. A friend and I swap stories and books, crackers, tomatoes, cheese. A stranger swims, too, and the stories widen. In a pouring rainstorm, I drive home, then stand under my covered porch and lean against my dear house, drenched from swimming and rain. The earth drinks deeply.

Because, whatever Science says about some equal future moon,
I know the rare particulars of this vast and intimate brilliance—
the now of us—won’t ever, in our lifetime, come my way again. ~ Mary Elder Jacobsen

A few known things: sand, evening…

August 6, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

These August days are yet long, lingering exquisitely. Days of heat and sweat. Noon, we drag a picnic table beneath a maple tree, spread out our lunches, eat and talk with the sunlight dappling through the leaves, a small breeze kicking up. The nearby road is busy with pickups laden with ladders and mowers, suntanned arms crooked out unrolled windows, and the vacationers at their leisure. This August day hums magnificently, with that dappled sunlight and cicadas.

I receive an email about my novel Call It Madness from a woman in the middle of the country, not far from where my mother grew up, so many decades ago. We email back and forth a bit about class and working and how those two forces of writing and living can sharpen your eyes, if you lean into it.

Surviving cancer taught me countless things, too, made me both more tender and more ruthless, two things seemingly at odds but not. The world is a variated unfolding story of cause and effect. In my novel, a man mangles his hand in a sawmill accident. Decades later, his great-granddaughter struggles with the family fall-out of that accident: a farm lost, a penalty of impoverishment. I glean what I can of my own story — the murky details of my past (my mother’s changed name, a story my father shares of remembering his father burning his army uniform in a backyard fire) — and appraise how I fit into the terrain of the world around me. Swimming at twilight, the lake both golden and black, those elegant 1 Corinthians words return to me: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I’ve been swimming at this sandy stretch for nearly thirty years, once upon a time with children and sand buckets. The water is yet magnificent. Sand clings to my wet bare feet. The day has cooled, refreshing as quaffing water when you are thirsty. The sand scatters on my kitchen floor. Something, I think, I’ll need to sweep. This morning, the sand remains.

Gold and Green: August

August 4, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I’m yet on my homemade, hand-crafted Call It Madness Mad Book tour…. reading at 6 p.m. tonight at the exquisite St. Johnsbury Athanaeum. Book discussion Friday, at the Craftsbury Public Library, 5 p.m.

In between readings and work, family and chores…. summer spins on. An evening downpour yesterday drenches my swimming plans. Instead, I walk downtown and drop postcards in the mailbox, then keep on walking. The rain lessens. With my hood off, the drizzle curls these new-found ringlets, unexpected gift courtesy of chemo. The evening shines emerald.

At the river, I scramble down the bank, kick off my sandals, and wander among the water-smoothed stones and boulders. Not far from me, traffic rumbles along route 15. The river talks, too, this ancient place, waters carrying their chorus to the sea….

Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering — Issa

“The world is a complex fatigue.”

August 2, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

August appears, and I’m at work Saturday morning, trudging around a lake in a thickety forest with some of my favorite people in town, talking work and books and the edginess of this fleeting life, the puzzling conundrums of what people do.

Below, the Hayden Carruth poem I’ve posted before around August 1, during the years I’ve written in this space. Every year, when I read this poem again, different lines pop out. Here, “The world is a complex fatigue.” If I began a list of things I learned in my year (now, year and some) of surviving cancer and cancer treatments, gracious, I would keep writing and writing. The cats would not be fed this morning. The blueberries would not be picked.

But to return to August…. June, July, August, in my way of reckoning, these are Vermont’s high holy months, the long days of sweet roses and waving rudbeckia, the welcomeness of ice on your tongue, walking in twilight, the loveliness of sunlight chips and loons on pond water. Those worn clichés — savor every day, know your luck — are true of course, in the way that truth is multitudinous — in the way that Mac Barnett notes that Be Kind might be a given starting place, but not a plot. And human life, of course, is plot, plot, plot. Often, not of our own making.

Story, of course, is where I’m headed. These midsummer days, the glossiest greens already fading. As I’ve done for years, I hold to the strands that keep me sane in this world illusory and fragile and heartstoppingly thrumming with might far beyond any one or two or few of us… the chords of this mortal life. The gritty and sometimes joyous labor of writing, of walking in the world, the domesticity of family and friends. Brew coffee, weed the garden, ponder the sky.

AUGUST FIRST
by Hayden Carruth

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done. A large moth, probably
Catocala, batters the screen,
but lazily, its strength spent,
its wings tattered. It perches
trembling on the sill. The sky
is hot dark summer, neither
moon nor stars, air unstirring,
darkness complete; and the brook
sounds low, a discourse fumbling
among obstinate stones. I
remember a poem I wrote
years ago when my wife and
I had been married twenty-
two days, an exuberant
poem of love, death, the white
snow, personal purity. now
I look without seeing at
a geranium on the sill;
and, still full of day and evening,
of what to do for money,
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue. The moth tries
once more, wavering desperately
up the screen, beating, insane,
behind the geranium. It is an
immense geranium,
the biggest I’ve ever seen,
with a stem like a small tree
branching, so that the two thick arms
rise against the blackness of
this summer sky, and hold up
ten blossom clusters, bright bursts
of color. What is it — coral,
mallow? Isn’t there a color
called “geranium”? No matter.
They are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.
The moth rests again, clinging.
The brook talks. The night listens.

Wild and Human Worlds, Intersection.

July 30, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

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.

July 27, 2026 / 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.