Knock down a wall, survive for a bit

March 14, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The advance copies of my novel that will be published at the end of June, Call It Madness, sprinkle out into the world. I print postcards and mail those, too. Email me your mailing address (brettstanciu@gmail.com), and I’ll drop a postcard. The novel will be published June 30, and summer events slowly add up. I imagine sultry July, steamy August, spaghetti strip sundress, tumblers of ice water.

The novel is divided into sections of place: an apartment, a pantry where the protagonist Avah hides, the roadside Blue Lion Motel where Avah tracks down her mother, and Echo Lake—a great gossamer spill, a fat layer of ice…

Places define us. Unbelievably, I am now nearly a year out from chemo. All that long last winter I huddled on my couch, too sick to feed my own woodstove, I kept thinking, I think the kitchen wall removed. I want the small rooms of this old house opened. Now, a year later, holding what will be forever-fatigue in one hand and my strengthening return to health and merriment in the other, I hire a carpenter to remove a wall of early 20th century two by fours and lathe. I return to my dusty and torn-up house in the late afternoon, step in, and think, This is how the house is meant to be.

With the mind of a novelist, I wonder at the calculus of human decision-making: the mixture of numbers, of cost and house value, a stacked rationality. Take that arithmetic, and add to it my fierce desire to re-imagine my future where my garden bounty of jalapeños and garlic meets kitchen cleaver, where I revise another book at my kitchen table, where illness is swept from my house by the spring wind rushing through the open windows, smudging my rooms with the fecund scent of mud, the castanet jingles of mating frogs.

Vermont spring: thaw, fresh snow this morning, stove ashes sprinkled on the icy paths, robins. All the things.

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” — Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Vermont Town Meeting Day, Mud.

March 5, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I live in a village with a single blinking yellow light at its intersection. In all those multiple trips to Dartmouth for consultation, treatment, medication, we drove out of town, over the hills, along the Connecticut River, all the way to the Hanover, New Hampshire exit. There, a traffic light greeted us.

For a few months, the village will be rerouted through temporary lights while a crew rebuilds walls to keep the town out of the river and replace a footbridge over the river. For drivers, something to complain about. For walkers, a point of interest.

On town meeting day, in the historic town house, a day of voting, hot emotions, decisions of material import. A school budget voted down.

March is the season of fluctuation between mud and ice. One afternoon, the blowing snow drives bitterly into my eyes; I huddle in my coat. The next afternoon, I tie my coat around my waist, let the breeze push through my hair.

The sun beams with real heat. The earth reveals her immense size. Meanwhile, the humans, with all our passion and fury. I seek both the companionship of people around me — how dearly I treasure this, more and more — and seek solace in solitude, in the chitter of chickadees, the clouds rushing over the sky, the full moon hung over a forested ridgeline, gleaming.

“What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”
― Gary Snyder

The truth is erasure.

March 1, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Saturday morning, I chip at my day’s list, persistent: my thousand creative words, email that shouldn’t linger, the house chores of wood and compost. On the nearby trails, I ski and later drink coffee with my beloveds, and we ponder construction that will tie up this town, Hardwick, until the sundress-wearing season. At home again, I finish the 2025 taxes, stow things in boxes, preparing for a carpenter who will remove a kitchen wall and put a window in my kitchen. This plan I hatched while I was marooned in my house for months, struggling through chemo. Now, this winter, I wondered, Am I mad? Will I still proceed? But opening the heart of my house to the view of the village seems a hopeful act, a kind of creative resistance against dismal five-year survival statistics, an act of beauty in contrast to the darkening world.

I abruptly need the sky and the muddy earth beneath my boots. I consider phoning this friend or that friend to walk with me, but I doubt anyone will jump at the sudden request. On this ridgeline road, I see a friend who quickens my blood. We walk and talk for bit about the things that nourish my winter-worn soul: about the unexpected in our lives, about writing and doubt, an April event of poetry and art and food. About what Bashō called “the journey itself is home.”

She heads home, and I keep on along the maples. All winter I’ve walked here. One frigid January, I’d gone too far and considered flagging a stranger in a car for a ride, but I didn’t. I kept on, as we all do. An eagle spreads its wings over a hayfield then disappears over a treeline. Blackbirds sing. A skunk waddles along the road. The snowbanks are above my head. The creature and I consider each other. Then, on our respective sides of the road, we each ease along. When I look back, the skunk is hurrying along, too.

Another spring. So many years I’ve lived through a New England winter, so many springs, and yet each March arrives as a surprise, a fresh reckoning. The wind smells of the opening earth. Twilight will soon be nestling in, and I’ll be home again, feeding my cats and the woodstove, eating a blood orange. A friend plans to visit, and we’ll keep each other company. Better to think of the days without names or numbers. Wiser to place these with a friend’s name, with skunk, puddle, blood moon.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

… 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 Glück

Strange gift.

February 25, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A year ago, I couldn’t manage the three steps onto my back porch without holding a daughter’s hand. A reversal of those early parenting years when I held my toddlers’ teeny fingers as my children learned to walk and then, quickly, to run. A year later, my oldest and her partner load up our skis, and we head out for a seven-mile trek. I once thought idly of skiing, a mere pastime, nothing more. Now, it feels nothing less than miraculous.

A year ago, my daughters and the partner propped me together through the darkest months of my life. In those months while I endured chemo, little bits of lights and happiness trickled towards me, as if falling down an ancient stone-walled well. Sunlight in my living room, in the hospital halls, (never in the subterranean ER), flash of cardinals, the boxes of books and gifts of miso and cards and checks that kept me alive.

Post-ski, I feed my mewling cats and eat blood oranges, then lie on the couch and read Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat. I’m relaxed as if I’ve swum with a friend in a Vermont pond, and then we linger on the shore, talking about nothing and everything. But it’s February yet and snowfall is circling again. We’d skied from hayfields down into the forest and circled around and around. At one moment, I’d hit fatigue, where I wondered if I would emerge from these deeply snowy woods. It’s a place I’m now beginning to know intimately, where I know the life I clutch so fiercely can so easily slip away. I was reminded recently of Robert Frost’s lines that “the best way out is through,” a minute guide for human life. On this day, all the human things.

Shift in POV.

February 22, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughter sends word and photos of walking on Lake Champlain, frozen hard. I send word back, Be mindful! For those of us who love to swim and lounge on lakes and ponds, walking on the ice in the dead of winter is exhilarating, a flip in view in these cold months.

11 degrees this morning when I rise in the dark and shovel ashes from the woodstove while the cats mewl a protest for breakfast. I’m still thinking of those photos, and how it feels to have the cold air descend on your cheeks and walk that border between hypothermic water and all that sky. In a troubled winter I worked in a nearby town, I’d walk on the lake’s ice at noon and lie down and stare up at the sky. There were a few ice fishing shanties, never a sign of anyone, just me and the crows, all ice and the limitless sky and whatever the heavens had to offer. Sometimes spitting snow, sometimes endless blue, sunlight without warmth.

Heart of February. The skiing is excellent. A friend who I’ve known forever picks me up, and we walk along an ice-and-sand-strewn road. Below, the valley where the Black River and Route 14 is hidden in the folds of mountains. We look across and muse at the snow we can see on the mountains’ forest floor, how the bare trees reach up towards the sky.

Full moon:
my ramshackle hut
is what it is. — Issa

Plunging through….

February 19, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I drive a friend home, and we linger in my car, talking. She asks me what makes an individual an individual. Early evening, darkness wraps around us, my headlights off, the day’s dripping icicles frozen again. The juncos and cardinals and finches that nip at my feeders have settled silently for the night. I am at the place of near-wordlessness again. I’ll be home again soon, too tired to brew tea, longing to lie down and let sleep wash over me for the night.

Nonetheless, we talk about memories and habits, the nature babies carry into this world, the inescapability of genetics. I lean forward and rest my forehead on the steering wheel.

Cancer, that relentless instructor, reshaped my appreciate for the common noun and verb—for the tangible—drove me inescapably into my body, far from ideology into the ineffable appreciation of swallowing water, the comfort of visiting friends, sunlight on my face.

In northern Vermont, we are again in the prolonged season of start-and-stop-and-start again, the loosening from ice on back roads, the freeze again, the steadily warming and lengthening light. On this road, I meet an acquaintance and his sweet little dog. We walk together for a bit, speculating about schools and consolidation and possibilities that perhaps will never transpire. Meanwhile, the dog sets her small muddy paws on my knee. I crouch down and rub her velvety ears. The cold breathes from the dirt road, the turning earth’s exhalation.