photography

Texting as Mosaic

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A lot of my humanly effort goes into writing, or at least trying to improve: can I write more clearly? More eloquently? Can I push deeper, and then even deeper, beneath what I’ve already written and glean yet more?

And then, I meet texting. I have a teenager. I witness this girl text. With considerable patience, she’s shown me the texting ropes. She even texted me when she forgot her lunch, and I most helpfully texted back that no, I wasn’t delivering her lunch in the next ten minutes, and she should mooch off someone else. But I don’t think I texted mooch. It might have appeared as lop or something. Lop off someone else?

Then, last night, I had my first texting “conversation” with my brother. (He would describe my effort as half-assed, sister, I’m quite sure.) In the midst of this electronic bubble back and forth, the house quiet at night with the children sleeping, the wood stove burning and my solitary light burning, we went on and on, although I had spoken on the phone with him the night before, and my late-night work was unfinished. This conversation was like deep sea fishing, pulling up one thing after another from the past. Do you remember this teacher? What was happening in 1987? In these little bits of phrases, I began to see woman in blue and what’s grammar and don’t hate Vermont surface and swim. That day, I had been writing about Chinese poetry and my novel and the seamless stream of language, and before me words appeared, hilarious and poignant and loving, too. Like a broken glass readied for a mosaic. And now I’ll be the mosaic-maker.

… this self-congratulatory belief in my ability to chart my own destiny was patently ridiculous. Worldly things are worldly things; two bad seconds on the highway can take them all away, and sooner or later something’s going to come along that does just that.

Once you have it, this information is unignorable, and it seems to me that you can do one of two things with it. You can decide that life doesn’t make sense, or you can decide that it does.

–– Justin Cronin, “My Daughter and God,” in Best American Essays 2015

IMG_0067

Woodbury Elementary School/Woodbury, Vermont

Listening and Writing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With my children gone for a few days, I vacuumed the considerable debris from the living room floor and then took my ream of a manuscript and laid it on the wood floor, in piles of chapters and scenes. I walked around, bent down, lifted a page, then sat on the floor and read. I was immersed in the territory of a novel-in-draft-writing. I wasn’t looking for a good sentence, a decent paragraph, a chapter with potential. Instead, I aimed to listen, to look down deep, and figure out what may lie at the dead-center of this book.

My laptop was shut; the clock turned to the wall. I determined not to answer the phone unless my girls called. I had a good three-inch stack of a draft, much likely to be discarded along the way, mere steps to get to the end.  To listen and read so hard, to come at this work without prejudice or prejudgement is difficult at best. At last, I began to scribble, notes for characters, a possible plot-line arc, and then, at the end, I wrote one true word: hunger. The book is about hunger.

That was most of Sunday. I painted a few kitchen windows and weeded the garden.

In the early evening, my girls called. I left my basket half-filled with tomatoes, and leaned against the garden post, listening for the heart of their stories.

We are afraid of writing, even those of us who love it. And there are parts of it we hate. The necessary mess, the loss of control, its ability to betray us… how to feel at ease with all this? How just to let one’s work be?… The answers you want can come only from the work itself. It drives the spooks away.

–– Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark

DSCF0007 1

Summer in All Her Radiant Glow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Whatever is your life fills up with – be it classes, farming, the bond market, heroin – tends to become the idols you worship. At one point in my life, my attention was often occupied by Sleepy Bunny, a small once-white and once-fuzzy stuffed animal my daughter dearly loved. We didn’t go anywhere without ‘the bunny.’ That bunny remains with us, although my days of preoccupation with stuffed toys and diapers and perpetual snacks have altered considerably.

Raising children often seems to me stepping from one rock to another, and I have to remind myself that the journey itself is the point, stupid, and not some distant end. Watering in the hoop house this late evening, I snipped a handful of basil flowers, pressing the spicy, sweet blossoms to my face, and brought this fragrance into my kitchen. The crickets are chirping now, this final day of July, and the mud is cooling beneath my feet.

OTHERWISE

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love…

But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

– Jane Kenyon

Elmore, Vermont. Evening and girls.

Elmore, Vermont.
Evening and girls.