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Weeping and Hovenweep, one year later

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Just about a year ago, my daughters and I spent a long afternoon in Hovenweep National Monument, in Utah. Even now, the sound of that name – Hovenweep – makes me want to press my fingers over my face. We sat under a slatted aluminum covering over a picnic table, unable to stir out into the heat, unwilling even to walk a short distance to what I imagined was the edge of a canyon. By this point in the summer, we had traveled thousands of miles, slept in many different places, and trod the gamut of human emotion. Hovenweep become our literal edge of the world, the place where, when you get there, you can no longer admire the abyss of the canyon.

All afternoon, under a broiling sun, my daughters and I sat beneath that crude cheap covering, playing Hearts, playing Yahtzee, the girls eating Nutella so hot it dripped from a spoon. We were waiting for a particular person to either appear, or not. As we waited, I watched a storm cloud in the distance, so far away in that eternal Utah horizon. Would it mass over us and rain?

The drama of our little family unspun that afternoon in an immense landscape of dust and small pebble and a few sprigs of sage, a land of no rain. I believed I could walk all day long in that desert, and, at the end of the day, I could still look back and see where I had begun. Hovenweep is a territory of stunning high desert beauty, and yet inescapably saturated with the crumbling, inexplicable ruins of the past. All that afternoon, filled with trepidation, anger, grief, I sensed the vast watchfulness of that place; how many, many women must have lived in that dry land, with joy surely, and surely also with terror for themselves and their children, as their demise reared up, with neither cheap shade nor nutella.

How much I would have liked to have seen one of my sisters from long ago that afternoon, a woman who might have known how things break apart. Who might have understood how I look at my daughters with mine, mine in my eyes. Who might have offered me her hand, as I would have toward her.

This is what human beings have felt from the beginning of time. If you want to be a full, complete human being, if you want to be genuine and not pretend that everything is either one way or the other way you can hold the fullness of life in your heart….

–– Pema Chödrön, Fail Fail Again Fail Better
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Failure and Writing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One of the real assets to working in a bookstore is the Advance Reader Copies–those paperbacks that appear in a white box shortly before everyone else gets their hands on them. Early this morning I read a little book of Pema Chödrön’s, Fail Fail Again Fail Better but, heads up, the interview at the end is the better part of the book. An eighty-year-old nun now, Chodron is refreshingly honest about her mistakes as a young woman, her two failed marriages, her struggles with parenting.

In this book, she writes about how to live a life in the present–with mindfulness–and yet acknowledge the wrongs we’ve all committed in our lives. In other words, how to reconcile what we’ve screwed up–and we all screw up, badly, one way or another–with a creative and loving and productive life. Isn’t that a fine place to aim for? To hold the past, acknowledge it, hold it before you like the foulest and ugliest of your fears, and yet move on.

Canoeing with my daughters today is a wholly present moment–sunlight and dragonflies, the water almost too warm at the surface, then cooler the deeper down I dove–and yet I carried with me, secreted, as if beneath a middle rib, thoughts of the book I’m rewriting–taking apart and taking apart–and will begin to put back together, better. Finer. Smarter.

“Fail better” means you being to have the ability to hold… “the raw of vulnerability” in your heart, and see it as your connection with other human beings and as a part of your humanness. Failing better means when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source of forward… If it’s something like writing, just start–don’t not write the book.

–– Pema Chödrön

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Photo by Molly S. Number 10 Pond, Calais, Vermont

Writing Your Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

By this time of year in Vermont, much of what will come to fruition has been sowed and thrives. You’ve either had a crop of blueberries or not. The strawberries have long since gone by, only the verdant green remaining. Carrots, kale, squash, all should be well on their way.

What’s gone is gone. My chard, devoured by the woodchuck, will not grace my kitchen table this year. This digs at the question of poetry. I could turn my gaze and blind myself to how my garden lies at this time, weedy and gnawed in places, the peppers sweet and savory, the green ripening on the ear, the cucumbers proliferate. A metaphor for raising a child, acknowledging where wiser tending could have happened – or not. The elements of rain and cold and disease will thrust in.

But writing, perhaps, is a different endeavor than life. You get a rough draft; with diligence, you can rewrite and rework, burnishing your words. Easier, less risky, less dear.

Isn’t this all a matter of hunger, of desire in one raw form or another, a great maw of longing for satiation? The woodchuck to fill his belly. The carrots to thicken. A writer’s desire to reflect and hold the world’s mysterious complexity and beauty. A child’s yearning for growth and expansion.

A mountain can be a great teacher–not only because it manifests that cosmology of sincerity and restless hunger with such immediacy and drama, but also because it stands apart, at once elusive and magisterial…. (Walking up Hunger Mountain) reminds me yet again that things in and of themselves remain beyond us, even after… the most concise and penetrating poem.

–– David Hinton, HUNGER MOUNTAIN

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Wild cucumbers.

Place in Writing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Abbreviated intro to the reading I did tonight at the Greensboro Writers’ Forum, which leads, more importantly perhaps, to Lorca.

The most important thing I can say about place and writing is that we are place. Landscape is not merely green fields dotted with cows. My thinking around place has been significantly influenced by Lorca’s essay on duende: on what he calls this “mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained which is… the spirit of the earth.” The power of literature arises from our soulful connection to the earth–with all the light and also all the darkness that encompasses.  My book, set on a rural Vermont farm, unwinds as the characters evolve from a youthful idealism to the day-to-day reality of struggling to earn a livelihood from agriculture. All farms confront failure in one way or another; whether in small doses or wholesale catastrophe–much as we do in our own lives. In the end, perhaps, that’s the rub in this world–that mixed, gray place between intense joy and utter sorrow–where our own human stories unfold, and that’s where literature thrives.

So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

–– Lorca

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Photo by Molly S.

Long Pond Cape Cod

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Ten-year-old Gabriela Stanciu is a guest blogger today. She loves to eat watermelon and read Harry Potter.

I was on a vacation at Cape Cod a few days ago and we had just gone swimming in the ocean so we thought we should wash the salt water off by swimming in a fresh water pond. We went to Long Pond. It is a Pond in Wellfleet Cape Cod. so we showed up and parked. Me, my Grandparents, and my dad got out of the car. When we got in it was really warm compared to the ocean. It was a beautiful lake. The water was crystal clear all the way through. And it was really shallow. When I got like a third of the way out into the lake it was only like five feet deep. The sand at the bottom was really soft and there wasn’t any rocks. Like 15 minutes later my sister and aunt showed up. My sister didn’t want to go swimming but my aunt did. When my aunt got in she got in over my head so I hopped on my dad’s back since I can’t swim very well. We swam for a little more and then got out.

Next we went to this store that we call the floatie place even tho we have never been there. Well, it has a ton of giant floaties all over the building. They probably have any floatie you can think of in that place but we did not go there to get a floatie we went there to get a life jacket so I could float around in the sea. My favorite floaty was the giant flip flop but it probably wouldn’t fit in our car. But what we did get did fit in our car.

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My Woodchuck Companion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The air was cool this morning when I reached over and turned on the light. It was a little after four, and with the windows and screen door wide open the room had cooled overnight from the day’s heat. I woke thinking of the woodchuck I’d seen in my garden the day before, a long flashing swatch of him running alongside my onion bed. Earlier that day, from the balcony, I’d seen the woodchuck on the huge rock pile across the small field. The animal lay on his variation of a rock balcony–my neighbor across the buckwheat–preening itself. I could see the lushness of its pelt, brown and russet and red, before it turned, amazingly quick despite its size, and disappeared down the rock pile.

The creature’s been in my hoop house, eating tomatoes, these luscious beauties on my forty or so plants finally ripening after a late planting and a summer of rain. As I lay there, I imagined this impressively large animal gnawing away at my fruit, strewing the paths with partially chewed golden and red tomatoes, its head swiveling around, a little jumpy for the sound of my footfalls, its dark eyes shining in the early light.

While I lay there, the Dutch novel I’d been reading, The Twin, got mixed up in my thinking of the woodchuck, so I was riding along the dykes and looking through a window on a Dutch dairy farm. In and out of this spell loomed the wild creature with its glistening white teeth and shaggy pelt–the fur that, on some fearful level, I longed to touch. In the end, I picked up my book and read for a while before getting up to work.

My tomatoes? Or the woodchuck’s tomatoes? A year ago, the fierce gardener in me would have risen up in rake-welding fury. Now, I’m thinking to pick what I can, and perhaps not so bitterly begrudge this rampaging feast. Likely, the woodchuck wishes I would pull up stakes and head out for new territory. As I wish for him.

There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they’d all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

–– Maxine Kumin “Woodchucks”

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