Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Private v. Public

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This morning, after driving through a surprisingly thick snowstorm, I found myself in a tiny room in the radio studio of WDEV in Waterbury. Hester Fuller, the host, had kindly read my book and interviewed me for a bit, then Gary Miller (author of the fine collection Museum of the Americas) came in, too, with Joe Citro on the phone line.

We were literally knee-to-knee in a tiny room, talking about the intimacy of writing. Writing is that curious mixture of intense privacy – literally, the stuff of our own experiences – spun into shared stories. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden wound into my life when I was fifteen, lodging deeply in my blood cells, its influence surfacing in my own writing. Over and over, I have hammered myself against Steinbeck’s anvil that insists on seizing human choice despite the chaotic happenstance of human life. How will I understand my life? The lives of those I dearly love?

Driving home in the dark tonight, I realized my character, Fern, understood her life like this: finding an abandoned sweater in a library’s free box, she washed and then unravelled the yarn, discarding what was ruined beyond repair, saving what she could. Then she knitted, by trial and error, a sweater patterned with trees and mountains and Lady Moon, creating a work of beauty – and practicality.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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Burlington, Vermont, March 2016

The Vermont Season of Pre-Spring

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A number of years ago, I conceived an idea that our family’s financial salvation lay in wedding favors. With our maple syrup, colored card stock, a paper cutter, and raffia, I filled tiny bottles with syrup and bow-tied on little cards printed with hopeful things like Julie and Josh, July 8, 2001, Eat, Drink & Be Merry. Or: A sweet beginning. In the long run, my fortune didn’t lie there, but I met interesting people at profoundly pivotal junctures in their lives.

One April, in an intense mud season, a couple unexpectedly drove out to our house. We were deep in the midst of sugaring with a three-year-old. On our back road and driveway – and all around the house where the snowbanks were fiercely melting – lay mud that sucked at our knee-high boots with an audible glop. The winter had been its usual terror, and immense snowbanks mounded all around the house, interspersed by our trodden paths. My gorgeous little girl, with unbrushed hair, walked around shirtless in overalls and mud boots, a yellow plastic sand toy shovel in one hand.

The couple had heard about our wedding favors and had arrived to order in person. He and my husband talked about Ford pickups while I chatted with the woman. She kept looking around, distressed. It’s just so muddy, she kept saying. How do you stand it? Where she cringed from dirt and inconvenience,  I saw sunlight so intensely bright it lay like shining gold coins on the shallow dips of water that spread out all around our house, as though we were a ship on a rippling sea. I knew mud as the world’s thrust from winter to spring, the give from one season to another. My heart lightened with joy at the end of a bitter cold season and the imminence of wildflower season. I knew coltsfoot would shortly bloom.

…Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and
violets.
Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again.

– Louise Gluck, from “March”

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Sunlight and Sweetness

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When my daughter was two, I picked up a copy of Jeffrey Lent’s novel In the Fall in Montpelier’s Bear Pond Books and began reading. My child was on my back, and I stood so long she nudged me with her feet, a way she had of prodding me along when the scenery dulled for her. I bought the book and walked down Main Street, the pages open in my hands.

Reading that novel was like nothing else I encountered. I was scraping and painting the kitchen windows that summer, and I abandoned that work, sitting on the porch steps, reading, reading, while my child ate watermelon, strewing gnawed rinds over the grass. Halfway through the novel, the language became incantatory in my mind, rising and singing. When I finished the book, I studied the paperback cover, pondering the beauty and mysteries of this book, the sheer grace of its enormous hard work. The novel’s ending remains one of my most beloved.

Why I write all this is not just to rave about this novelist (if you haven’t read him, how lucky you are – you can read his books for the first time), but for this:

With vivid and richly textured prose, Brett Ann Stanciu offers unsparing portraits of northern New England life well beyond sight of the ski lodges and postcard views. The work the land demands, the blood ties of family to the land and to each other, the profound solitude that such hard-bitten lives thrusts upon the people, are here in true measure. A moving and evocative tale that will stay with you, Hidden View also provides one of the most compelling and honest rural woman’s viewpoint to come along in years. A novel of singular accomplishment.

–– Jeffrey Lent

Very often a writer’s life is plagued with burrowing doubt and uncertainty, laboring in a society that values tax bracket far above art. And then, sometimes, you feel you might just have hit the mark. Infinite gratitude.

 

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March woodpile, Woodbury, Vermont

Town Meeting Day

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Vermont Town Meeting Day, upstairs in the elementary school gymnasium, with the kids running riot downstairs in the darkest reaches of the basement, daring themselves to enter the unlit corner around the boiler.

By discussion and voice vote, the town’s yearly business was transacted today. Here’s what we discussed: fire truck lease payments, the school budget, derelict buildings, whether to pave the upper part of the Cabot Road. At times tedious, riveting, and funny, town meeting has an odd quality of mimicking life and is one of the perks of living in a Vermont town. Where else can you stand up and make an impassioned to plea to keep your small school and have neighbors clap? Where else can you also hear about cement culverts and drainage and which garbage bins in the cemetery need emptying? The people are generally civil, the coffee and homemade lunch unlimited, and you can bring your knitting. 

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

– F.D. Roosevelt

 

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Trees, Rugged Earth

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My brother has a stash of panoramic vista hikes in his terrain. This visit, we hiked up Jockey Cap in nearby Maine, an enormous round igneous rock practically in the town of Fryeburg.

At the top, we saw extensive Lovewell Pond, the substantial White Mountains to the west, and the flats of Maine where the land begins to stretch to the sea. The sole snowy peak, in this end of February, was Mt. Washington. From that height, in this too-warm winter, the earth appeared dull brown, even the blues of the mountains washed out under the brilliantly clear sky. Down below, we saw a conical pile of road maintenance sand, a Dollar General, a series of strip malls, traffic inching along the highways: not the earth in her shining majesty and glory, but hard-worn, patient, enduring.

At the crest, a pine tree no taller than myself grew stubbornly from the rock. My daughter and I knelt near its roots, our bare fingers over the hard curled wood searching for traces of soil. None. And yet this tree ruggedly remains, flourishing, seemingly against all odds.

SEEKING REST

Late night, dark night,
the house hums around me.
… High wind
swirls the stars around me.

Closed and still,
I hear and say the names
that do not stay in place
when night has found me.

Everything is shifting.

– Ellen McCulloch-Lovell

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Fryeburg, Maine

Travel Into Places Familiar and Unfamiliar

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Yesterday, the girls and I left Vermont – currently a giant slew of ice and running water –and drove over the Connecticut River into New Hampshire’s White Mountains, an ancient granite range. At the crest of the Notch, I stepped out in the blowing snow and snapped a photo, the temperature not much above zero. In the backseat, the little girl pressed against her teddy bear. I drove down the steep switchbacks, listening to music, the girls quiet, while the temperature soared and the snow that shrouded the pass lifting and disappearing.

For years, I’ve impressed on my daughters to make a mental map of their world as they go. Memorize road signs; note the position of the sun, rivers, cairns; remember your turns. And yet, more than our perceptions of places falter. A few years ago, with our daughters, my husband and I returned to the mountainside  where we had married. We hiked up this once-familiar area and could not find the field of our wedding. The mountainside, a former ski area, had not been mowed for years, and the field had been reclaimed by scrubby thickets. In the end, we found what we were seeking, completely altered but for the shape of the earth: a flat knoll and a once-upon-a-time drop off now concealed by emerging birch.

These ancient mountains are all of this: familiar to me through swimming and river rock collecting and backpacking into the peaks, and so infinitely mysterious, ever-changing, miraculously beautiful. And, this morning, sunny.

….to see beyond boundaries to the subtle heart of things, dispense with names, with concepts, with expectations and ambitions and differences. Tao and its many manifestations arise from the same source: subtle wonder within mysterious darkness. This is the beginning of all understanding.

Lao Tzu (c.604 – 531 B.C.)

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Franconia Notch, New Hampshire