Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

River Ice

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Late, yesterday, bringing in firewood, I walked up into the woods just before snow descended with all its might and majesty. Dark was coming in, and I hiked to where I could see the blue ridge of Elmore Mountain in the distance across the valley. Standing perfectly still, I heard nothing, not a single sound, until merely the wisp of my own breath pried open that silence.

The river today is filled with flowing chunks of ice, green like water residing deep in a quarry’s bottom. We woke this morning to icy grapple against the bedroom windows, the wind skulking around the house, like a wild animal, eager to enter. All the wildness of winter returns, the icy realm returned in all its mighty fury – and unspeakable, very earthly beauty.

DUST OF SNOW, by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

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Traveling

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These past few days I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, traveling through the rain in California, on an old bus named Sweetheart, with the desperate-hearted, the lovely and the profane, the young and the dying. The novel is classic Steinbeck, with an eye for the landscape, and characters so real you could pull up a chair and have a conversation. Near the end, when I began to think this wasn’t my favorite Steinbeck novel, I read a half page of dialogue that made the whole book rise and spin. Then I went with those two characters back to the bus, dug it out of a mud hole, and drove to San Juan.

 

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

– Steinbeck, East of Eden

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Photo by Molly S.

Living Sonnet for this Holiday

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In my daughter’s geometry homework, she’s struggling to take a flat diagram and turn it into a three-dimensional object – harder than might be imagined, even for an art-minded kid. In this holiday break, with a teenager and a savvy ten-year-old, we talked with my brother about who we know and how their lives shape out, and the choices people make in their lives. That clarity of hindsight notion…

Sometimes it appears as though our lives unfold into myriad geometrical shapes, complex beyond any imaging. Walking in the garden this afternoon, around the beds banked over with raked leaves, we saw two fluttering moths, blooming johnny jump-ups, and purple ground ivy flowers in the hoop house. Those petals are a dimension not so long ago I would never have imagined in the month of December. What way will this story bend? All around us appears this mighty world, seemingly all-powerful, greater than any of us: and yet, here we are, a handful of people – my family – walking in our kitchen garden. Who is the folder of this shape?

 

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

– Madeline L’Engle

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Christmas Eve, December 2015, Woodbury, Vermont

Revision: Re-Envisioning

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This Wednesday morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest ones – the kindergarteners and first graders – shared some of their work. Their teacher had encouraged the kids to work on revision, with a method I found so familiar I might have written it myself: be specific, persevere, don’t be mean. The children showed their school – fifty students and a handful of teachers and parents – a science experiment, snowflakes they made, a girl’s story she had written four times. Excited about the holidays, the little girls wore sparkly dresses.

I didn’t encounter the revision word until high school. Revision was a hated word, a punishment, a sign of slacking or incompetence. Not until I hit the second half of college did revision become deeply engrained in me.

In graduate school,  I had a professor who told me, Revision is our life. Widen your lens: re-envision. Perhaps that’s why I found this morning so particularly interesting: at such a young age to begin looking at your doings, not in a spirit of despair or judgement, but in creativeness openness. That may be a long stretch for a five-or-six-year-old kid, but good habits took me an embarrassingly long period to learn.

For what it’s worth, Shelagh Shapiro (author of a fine Vermont novel The Shape of the Sky) interviewed me for her Write The Book Radio program (listen here). Listening to the podcast driving home last night, I thought, Slow learner. Which, perhaps, was why I enjoyed the little kids this morning. And the young authoress today did her own illustrations, as well.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

– Bernard Malamud

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Montpelier, Vermont

 

 

On the Straw in the Manger….

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My father had a saying in my childhood: Adversity builds character. That tenet doesn’t rear its head in many contemporary parenting manuals, but when I was pregnant for the first time, someone asked me what I wanted for my child. Health and happiness, of course, but I also wanted to nourish a rich inner life for her.  I couldn’t say exactly what that might mean, and my daughter has since said – more than once – “I’m sick of hearing about that inner life thing.” But when the time came (unexpectedly, as it perhaps always might) to draw on my own inner resources, I found those waters far sweeter and infinitely more plentiful than I ever could have imagined.

To my father’s advice, I might add Malcolm Gladwell’s exhortation to have blink, to keep your eyes savvy and parse up the scenario. These two come together, it seems to me, in this holiday season – which is, after all, in part the story of parenting. Despite our culture’s commodification, Christmas is the sacred innocent babe in the manger full of straw, his young parents turned away from the inn in their painful hour of need: literally, at the birth of their child. Born under an auspicious star, with a destiny to suffer enormous adversity, the story of this child of the wandering poor might impel us to reexamine the abandoned and dusty outbuildings of our lives, searching for what we least expect – perhaps even what we may not want –  and search the starry heavens, looking for counsel.

 

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise…

– Maya Angelou
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Elmore Mountain, Vermont

 

December Solstice

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Having kids means, in part, passing through childhood again, but with an entirely different lens, a perspective deeply entrenched in childhood, yet wholly beyond childhood. One slight thing I’ve learned over these decades is that our world, as still and stagnant as it sometimes appears, is always moving, always in flux, our bodies shedding skin while simultaneously producing new cells.

On the edge of this December solstice, with the threads of worldwide violence thickening and spreading and our own good, green planet poisoned and ill, it’s worth remembering the universe we inhabit always, in perpetuity, rotates back toward the light.

What does the solstice mean? my daughter asked. How to answer this primal question? Cusp, I answer. The place to open your heart and eyes and lungs, and breathe in.

In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms.

– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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West Woodbury, Vermont