novel

Little and Great Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

September 1, and the sudden gush of changing seasons, which is never simply a matter of weather and light, but habit and soul. After a summer of book tour and work, of road trips and hikes, swimming, of reconciliation and division, too, seed sowing and blackberry gathering, of the sweet satisfaction of a family marriage, now early autumn nibbles in these early mornings. All summer, I struggled writing, but the vision forward for this manuscript abruptly opens. I lean hungrily into the work.

On a recent evening, we visit an open studio evening, a dirt road site of a long-ago hill farm with a queenly view of the valley, a righteous post-and-beam structure with a stunningly opulent garden. The art ranges from sculpture to two charcoal drawings commissioned by Bob Dylan where I linger; the studio and gardens comprise a whole. Slowly, the rooms fill with people I’ve known for years and strangers, too, all curious. How much my mother, long passed from the earth, would have loved this evening. How implicitly she would have understood the present of art, its underpinning in the past. She would have noticed the old millstone now relegated beneath a young apple tree.

We drive home around the lake, then down the hills into Hardwick village, the sunset crimson and gold along the darkening horizon. Always, we’re plunging forward, into the night and sleep, into the morning. The next day’s noon, I walk with my daughter along a causeway far into Lake Champlain, balmy wind on our faces, small spits of rain in our hair. The good luck omen of white egrets.

All these are great and little things. The profound pleasure of pouring boiling water into a French press in my rosy dawn kitchen. Soon enough, the monotone of snow and ash and road sand, the immense might of winter, will settle here. For now, the bittersweet profusion of late summer—sunflowers and goldenrod, basil and tomatoes.

As it’s September 1, here’s W. H. Auden…

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Tangled Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A little rain falls when I’m done with work for the day, nearly seven in an evening filled with August’s sultriness. There’s no one in the electric department parking lot where I swap jeans for running shorts, and then head on the stony trail through the woods and down to the river.

August, the growing of weed and tended garden finished for this season. The apples are reddening. The blackberries that remain on the vine burst with juice, sweetness on the verge of rot.

I cross the river. Raindrops pebble its slow surface. I loop behind the old yellow barn that houses a warehouse of local cheese, then circle around the osprey nests where the Black River pools behind an old dam. My t-shirt is damp with sprinkles of rain and my sweat. Grateful I am to a friend who appeared with a glass cup of echinacea this week. In the spring, I’d mused that, a year out from cancer treatment, that was as far back as I would come. “Really?” she mused quietly. “You might question that.” Now here I am, running around the edges of this village, along this rain-kissed goldenrod.

Anne Sexton wrote about “the awful rowing towards God,” a poet I read in grad school, a woman crazed by not one simple cause. For so many years, I clenched my wooden oars, my rowboat with my children circling in eddies, plunged through rapids, in a journey breathcatching sometimes from fear and uncertainty, sometimes through the sheer awesomeness of the vaulting night sky, the companions of swimming dolphins.

Much as I chafe against a linear view of time, I see myself running around the brackish reservoir, then along the gentle slope back to my car and the mason jar of water I’ve left there to quench my thirst. I run with my whole story a whirlwind in my body and mind, known and unknown. Surely, as we rush headlong forwards, we’re always going backwards, too. And yet we row on, the work of this mortal life.

Oh, Anne Sexton, with her unhappy demise. Two years ago, I often ran along this path and discovered wild grapes down an embankment. The rain paused, I scramble through weeds. The grapes are there again this late summer. I gather these sweetly tart beauties in the hem of my t-shirt. Eating, I walk along the path, studying the soot-stained clouds. My friend with a new baby in a stroller appears around a bend. I offer this young mother a handful of grapes, and she spits seeds into the trailside milkweed. Sweaty from August and running, I bend down to admire the babe. Scuttling clouds are reflected in the child’s luminescent eyes, her smile quicksilver as a rainbow trout in a rushing mountain stream.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet…
This story ends with me still rowing. — Anne Sexton

Singing a Love Song, Swimming.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

It’s nearly 8 in the evening by the time I step into #10 Pond, the sun slipped down around this narrow pond surrounded by mountains, my only company two teenage girls who stand on the shore talking about a mother’s car—these girls and a loon calling.

I part the still waters and swim out. Despite raging heat elsewhere on the globe, Vermont’s summer holds a chill, and by the time I swim back, I’m cold. On the shore, the girls have disappeared, and under the twilight sky it’s just shivering me toweling off water, pulling on a sweatshirt. All afternoon, I’ve thought of this water, of the sky turning from blue to black, of the mud beneath my bare feet, the loon chorus. It’s been a day of work and laughter, nothing rotten that I’d like to leave at the bottom of the pond; nonetheless, July moves along, the relentlessness of time. I crave these moments of water and sky, of reading beneath the apple tree’s shade, dinner near the garden, as much sun and wind and, yes, cold water as I can bear. Sustenance.

“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins

Looking into the Longevity of Our Stories.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Writer Tom McKone called me last week for a CALL IT MADNESS interview. We spoke for longer than either of us had expected, as I leaned over my back porch railings. His review ran in yesterday’s The Bridge. McKone is my ideal reader: curious, thoughtful, precise. Writing a book requires years—years of labor that has zero relevance to a time clock; labor that demands writing through doubt and kismet; labor that gleans from ebullience, nihilism, and that broad plain of gray uncertainty. There’s a splash when a book is released, a flurry, but the goal? The real desire? Have a reader sink into a hammock or lean against a swaying subway wall and read.

An excerpt follows.

“Our memories, where and when we’re born, and our family, social environment, and economic situation can shape who we are,” Stanciu said. Mentioning the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, she said it is very hard to “step out of that repetition of the past,” especially when that past is burdened with poverty and alcohol.

“One of the things I hope people get out of this book is the ability to ask questions (and) to be curious,” she said. “Why do people act the way they do? What do I not understand about them — both when they behave well and when they behave in infuriating ways? I think it’s always been a relevant question, but it’s super relevant right now — not to see each other in two-dimensional ways, but to really look into the longevity of our stories.”