Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Bookselling & Stories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

December is the best month to be a bookseller, because it’s the month when people give stories to one another. All day, folks stamp in from the cold and ask for a book for their ancient aunt who enjoys knitting and local history, or a baby not yet born who has a whole world yet to love. My favorite today was the young uncle who bought Roald Dahl for overseas nephews, but went home to reread James and the Giant Peach before mailing the novel.

Today, with the ground finally covered in our familiar snow, the light returned in the solstice kind of way we New Englanders know and love. This evening, a half moon glows on our piece of the earth, the clouds scudding back and forth over its pristine illumination.

Like this light, stories came in all day at the bookstore, not simply flowing out in wrapping paper and bags. We heard stories of the babies on their way, of the old who were babies themselves in this town; one, two, three stories that made me want to weep, the story of a woman buying an auto repair business in the Northeast Kingdom, and many more simply funny and joyous. Taken together, this was a bouquet of stories, all across the human realm. Fitting in a place for literature.

You can speak as though your life is a thread, a narrative unspooling in time, and a story is a thread, but each of us is an island from which countless threads extend out into the world.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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Photo by Molly S.

Stories

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Driving the kids home from basketball practice tonight, I listened to their discussion about the beginning of humankind. Did people come from monkeys or from God? My daughter eventually brought up the Big Bang. That must have been the beginning, but how did the Big Bang fit into God and the monkeys?

Eventually, I suggested maybe all these ideas might be true. The kids’ answer was to ask for more snacks.

I kept thinking about that idea of how we tell stories of ourselves. And where does one story begin and another end? I’d just been with a group of teachers asking, Tell me the story of what is it you do. I listened for the hard bones, the unseen, that jointed their stories together.

Long ago, I believed stories remained in books, interesting but tepid things. Now I know story is the absolute heart of who we are, at times suffused with finesse and grace, at others – as in Baltimore – swollen with the tangles of history and present outrage.

There’s a phrase we use in our house: an ax can be both tool and weapon. Story, too, can be utilized as either, but further, I’d say, as tool, weapon, and journey.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Tightrope and Travels

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Over the internet today, we heard news a local Vermont high school was evacuated because of a bomb threat. Immediately, my coworker and I thought of our children, although none of us had kids in that school. That experience – fearing for your children’s safety while they’re in school – I’m quite certain my parents never had.

This past year, due to a confluence of events, I’ve had to consider physical welfare and safety in ways I never considered. I’ve come to think of fear as the abyss around a tightrope, a void filled with invisible air currents, unexpected temperature changes, the swells of uncertainty.

If there is one thing that is certain, though, it’s that my own children and their generation will need to have their eyes open in all kinds of ways that never encroached on my New Hampshire childhood: rising waters, erupting violence; I will not continue the list.

Then today, randomly, at the bottom of a work-realted email, I read these lines from Desmond Tutu. There, I thought, is the tightrope to ferry my children across the abyss.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

— Desmond Tutu

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Where I Told the Children I Went Today….

Autumn Dusk

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With no snow, our late autumn Vermont appears like coals burned out, none of our summer’s radiance, our snowy luminosity. This afternoon, not yet four, with the light already leaking away, I lay down in my daughter’s forest lair, dead logs propped up against an enormous white pine. While she wandered away, busily scavenging planks for a footbridge over a culvert with a running stream, I lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes.

The afternoon was extraordinarily still, with not even a stir of wind, a chatter of chipmunk. I smelled mud, that thick, humusy scent of forest floor opened up. Still waiting, I opened my eyes and, through a part in the branches overhead, saw three crows traveling across the gray, cloudy sky, their wings steadily flapping, quite possibly not at all disturbed by the night falling down and the dearth of glow. And that, perhaps, might be the flight of autumn across our sliver of the world.

A lone crow
sits on a dead branch
this autumn eve

— Basho

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Ready

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A year ago, I finally wrote the query email that sold my book. With no internet access at home, I wrote the email in a corner of a public hallway in Montpelier, my back up against the literal as well as proverbial wall. I began, I’m going to go out on a limb here…

Later that afternoon, in a cold December rain, the day before Christmas break at my daughter’s school, I stood on the asphalt talking with her teacher, who, in his kind way, asked about our vacation plans while I willed myself not to begin crying. My entire world, interior and exterior, was suffused with dreary rainfall. I had no idea what would happen that afternoon, let alone in the next two weeks.

That was almost exactly a year ago. Did it take all of my life to write those words? To edge so far out on that limb there was no conceivable way I might crawl back?

The press published Leland Kinsey, a Vermont poet of phenomenal strength and beauty, a poet whose vision of the world cuts sharply, bloody at the bone, with rare grace. So much has happened in this year of my life, and yet, every time I sit down to write, I remind myself again that’s what I’m aiming for: push.

TO OUR VERMONT FATHER ON HIS EARLY WINTER BIRTHDAY

Our father who is in hospital,
hallowed be your name
though you are hollowed.
Your kingdom gone,
your will undone
on this earth, and there is no heaven.
You gave us, until this day, our daily bread.
and you forgave us our debts,
though you could not forgive your other debtors.
A fierce Scot, you were not led into temptation.
and tried to deliver us from evil.
You worked your life in the Northeast Kingdom
with power,
and no glory,
ever.

— Leland Kinsey

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Lake Elmore, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Singing in the Dark

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This time of year, the darkness knits around us. Waking early, I’m awake for hours working into the light. Very early evening, I returned with the children in the full dark, the stars overhead distantly radiant in the pitch firmament. The shortest day of the year is now so near, I can feel the arc of our universe nearly rounding the bend, gradually slingshotting us back toward light.

This is my one life. Say you know.
Say this means many things, say snowy owl,
say three feet of snow, say kestrel. My one
life is here at the table, next to me. Say you know,
say fine night for soup, glad to have you,
how was your drive….  Say here,
One Life, settle in with us. Here is the fire.
Say here is a warm stone. Say sing.

Say Sing, Kerrin McCadden

 

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