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The Four-Year-Old as Imminent Novelist

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was fifteen (back in the last century), my dad bought me a copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, a brand-new hardcover copy – a very big deal. I read the book hungrily, a book both technical and visionary, and carried it with me through all those moves of my twenties. Here’s a sampling:

The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader. For that one needs no schooling. But it’s by training – by studying great books and by writing – that one learns to present one’s fictions, giving them their due.

Which pretty much means: get down to work. I love fiction so much I find it almost incomprehensible that anyone would want to do anything else – like, say, teach kindergarten or litigate. My own teenage daughter’s natural inclinations bend towards art and photography, although she would never define or see herself as an artist. I remembered Gardner’s lines above when I saw this photo: her own way of taking things apart – a drinking glass, the kitchen table, sunlight – wondering how does this work? how does this look? what can I do?

cups

Photo by Molly S.

Rowing in the Lake and Sky

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We rowed to the middle of Caspian Lake today, myself sprawled over the keel of the small wooden boat, the little child kneeling beside me. The older daughter welding the oars demanded, What are we doing?

I said, We’re hanging between the water and the sky today.

In the lake’s center, waves lapped against the boat, the oars clunked in their metal locks, a gull flapped by without a feather-whoosh of sound. I dove in, the water so clear I saw my kicking feet brushing all that water below, then raised my arms into the sky, an infinity of luminous blue broken with troubled storm clouds. Cool and sweet, the lake was fragrant as fields of growing hay.

Glory be to God for dappled things…
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
             – Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
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Greensboro, Vermont

Vermont Landscape of Imaginary Birds

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other day, my younger daughter asked me what I would choose if I could I pick two talents. Talents? I thought, wondering at the unusual use of the word. She told me, What I would choose is to make clouds and to fly. I want to be a bird, she said.

I love this in my child: she didn’t stop where I would have – imagining a bird’s flight. In the book I’m writing, turkey vultures come and go, and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time metaphorically transporting myself into that wide wingspanned flight. But never have I imagined making the clouds, creating the literal landscape of sky around those creatures. In so many ways, I see my child’s life as fuller than mine, not diminished by the pieces I’ve outlined: chores and work and writing and pleasure. For this child, her life is still all one unfolding tapestry of landscape, and her longing to fly is just one woven element of the mystery’s enchantment.

… we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement…
At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etude”

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Landscape Not-Vermont….

The Medieval Knight and the Apple Tree

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I picked up neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s Do No More, so there’s been some conversation around the kitchen table about what is an aneurysm and how can a surgeon become so skilled? I’d like to say right up front this is not a feel-good book by any means, and Marsh’s success is tempered by grief. Nonetheless, brain surgery is a vocation he’s called to.

Upon sitting in the surgeon’s chair, Marsh writes:

This moment still fills me with awe. I have not yet lost the naive enthusiasm with which I watched that first aneurysm operation thirty years ago. I feel like a medieval knight mounting his horse and setting off in pursuit of a mythical beast…. and although my assistant is beside me… and despite all the posters in the hospital corridors about something called clinical governance proclaiming the importance of team-working and communication, for me this is still single combat.

Likewise, the apple tree in my front yard grows with passion and singular intent, not at all concerned about the children in the swing or the croquet wickets, the possibility of late frost or early frost, and certainly not affected by any warnings or exhortations. Over the years I’ve lived here, this tree has grown steadily and profusely. Every day, my hair catches in the low-hanging branches I stubbornly refuse to cut. This tree doesn’t intend to pursue any mythical beast, but it’s spreading elegantly into its own destiny.DSC01072

Reading with Daughters

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I first started to read, I was given a series of  books at school with stories about traveling through magical lands, unlocking doorways with magical keys, and appearing abruptly in green fields with Mt. Fuji-like mountains in the distance. I was tiny, so the books seemed large to me, like the size of the Vermont Gazetteer, which they couldn’t possibly have been, and the illustrations were koda-chrome beautiful. I have no idea what those books were; I’ve never seen them again (no doubt they’re out of print), but I keenly remember the joy I found, proficient at reading and slipping into that world.

Isn’t that one of the great joys of reading? Not leaving this world, but unlocking doors with unexpected keys and going down deeper into our own unpredictable world?

We’ve hit a new reading phase at our house. The other night at dinner my older daughter read The New York Times review of Harper Lee’s book aloud, with much discussion, and the next day she checked out Go Set a Watchman from the library. What a pleasure to read with her last night, as she periodically lifted her eyes and said, “You won’t believe this, mom,” while the younger daughter ate grapes, deep in her own fairy book series.

I’m reading Shape of the Sky, so keenly well-written I’ve put in a few late nights. Here’s Shelagh Connor Shapiro’s line about a teenage boy:  Within the song is both the pleasure and anger of being fifteen or sixteen or seventeen – the untapped potential of those years, and the yearning to be more than he is, to be in another place and time. And yet, to love where you are.

Ripening raspberry on the vine by Molly S.

Ripening raspberry on the vine by Molly S.

Stopping by the Edge Garden

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, while on my way from here to there, I stopped by a garden. With just a few minutes, I ran down the hill through the crown vetch and looked briefly to see what was growing. Cinquefoil, creamy yellow.

This garden, like so many Vermont gardens, is an edge garden, between a place of domestically cultivated flowerbeds, carefully tended, in the height of bloom, and just beyond this vegetable garden is a wetland with a lilypad-rich pond, where I’ve seen blue heron, deer, an eagle. Between one place and another, the edge is fertility, creation, growth, a joining of one place to another:  bank to water, field to forest, sickness to health, fruit to decay. So, bending over, in two moments of quiet before I hurried back up the hillside to my daughters, I thought to pull a few weeds away from a cucumber plant, and found instead wild cinquefoil thrust over the seedling, so amazingly alive in this unpeopled place I withdrew my hand.

Instead, as I walked back, I snipped a few stalks of wildflowers. The edge is multi-layered, endlessly changing, the brilliant sunlight soon dimmed to night, harborer of sweet wild raspberries, leeches, box turtles and snapping turtles, toads the size of my thumbnail. Today, surrounded by those wildflowers tall as my elbows, I thought, Well enough. Let it be.

My daughter, at eleven
(almost twelve), is like a garden….

Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat…..

– Anne Sexton

Wildflowers by Molly S.

Wildflowers by Molly S.