writing

Metaphor.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a whirl of what I call doubt, I hole up, sequester myself from the clanging world and the roaring news that AI has escaped the sandbox and my own gnawing worries about how, anyway, am I spending my allotment of mortal days/weeks/hopefully years?

I wake hours before that that glowing rim of dawn rises over the cemetery, my fine silent neighbors, and begin the work of joining word to word, noun to verb. Writing, I return again to that morning nearly two years ago, when I stood at my bedroom window staring down at a mock orange bush. The upper branches had been broken when the house painter’s ladder fell on the bush’s crown. I had learned the evening before that I had metastatic cancer, later revealed as stage four lymphoma. I stared at the jagged branches and realized I might die that winter.

It was the morning of the 2024 Presidential election, which had and has disastrous consequences for so many people, but that morning, consequences were heading in a markedly different direction for me and my family.

Now, two years later, the place I live on the globe—northern Vermont—again bends towards the shorter, darker days. It won’t be all that long before snow settles in around us. The mock orange yet needs trimming. But the work before me is to write hard into metaphor: to parse the layers of mortality, of human good and ill will, the brokenness and beauty of the world through this human tool.

As for the photo above…. the Old West Church in Calais, September home to Words Out Loud, one of my favorite annual literary events.

We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”
― John Green

Practicing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Twice a month, I gather a Writer’s Circle at the Civic on Hardwick’s Main Street, about a six-minute walk from my back door. A simple notion—I offer a poem, we write, read, talk. A consistency in a fragmented world. Housed in the former Buffalo Mountain Co-op building, the Civic has three floors. A carpenter, my ex spent countless hours in this building. In those days, I had a key, too, and often used the top floor as a writing studio, slinking in with my laptop and writing in the dim space that stored baskets and yarn. I finished drafting my first book in an unswept corner.

Now, like the curiosity of a large family house, the space is pushed and used in different ways. In the cool September late afternoons, we claim the tables on the first floor, watching Hardwick’s foot and vehicle Main Street traffic. Dump trucks with firewood, trash haulers, pickups and SUVs, kids on bikes. My friends walk to a restaurant for dinner, then amble back, boxed leftover in hands.

We write on. Months in, we’re learning to know each other. Yet the writing is often a surprise. What will emerge?

I live in this town, work in the adjacent town, these complex organisms unique in their own ways, built upon layers of history and families. Endlessly riveting, sometimes maddening. Which, I suppose, is the human way.

And a little Kurt Vonnegut: “If you want to really hurt your parents… the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake… Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost

“…living according to the rhythms of others…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My ex and I were remarkably unsuited for each other in many ways; in particular was his ability to live without plans. I—in what’s surely irritating, too—lean into rhythms and patterns. This long holiday weekend, I wake hours before dawn, busily tearing apart a manuscript draft and rearranging, stitching, adding, cutting, cutting, cutting…

These early autumn days are sunny, with real heat yet. Afternoons, I park at the rail trail, stretch, and run. In the parking lot, there’s always that SUV with a youngster who’s on a different economic path, and an assortment of Subarus and Volvos with bike racks. These runs are short, a few miles perhaps. Sometimes, I make the four-mile loop. Ending, I often leave the path for the pasture along the river, the Joe Pye weed and purple asters and goldenrod dense. The pollinators eat hungrily.

An orderly life depends on a tenor of privilege, a gift I didn’t have in those years of in-the-thick mothering. Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle wrote about “living according to the rhythms of others”—a line I’ve considered for years. Nearly all my life I’ve lived in the sway of family, gleaning writing time where I could. Now, just a few years into the children-are-adults phase of my life, my companions are sweet fat housecats but also the unremitting remains of cancer and treatment: the mighty beast of fatigue. I lean into it and push; the fatigue pushes back. As in any family, you make your agreements. You learn to get on.

Late afternoon, we build a fire and linger. Long past dark, we huddle around the flames, the cold nipping in. I tilt my head back. Overhead, stars appear between patches of clouds. From the trees, apples have already fallen into the long grass, sweetly rotting from the day’s heat. I’ve left the kitchen light glowing over the table spread with pages and my scrawled notes. Tomorrow’s labor.

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

— Galway Kinnell

Good Soil.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I read Wendell Berry for the first time the 20th century summer I lived in a tipi we set up in a wild blueberry field. The land was owned by the widow of the well-known ecologist Robert MacArthur. Nights, when it rained, I stowed the library books in the VW Rabbit we drove all over the country, often sleeping in the back, from Montana to Arkansas. Recently, from an upstairs closet, I pulled out a photo of myself, circa the 20th century summer before grad school, when I painted houses and drank Genny beer. My best friend had taken up with a schizophrenic who collected rocks, so many he eventually buried his mustard-yellow Toyota Corolla beneath a pile of rocks from fist-to-large-dog-sized. I’ve long ago lost track of these people. They went their way, and I was swimming along in the current of my life, so young I didn’t realize the rising waters. I was headed out on my own long journey across the country, returning years later to the sweet and cold soil of Vermont to sink my roots deep.

Wendell Berry, Gloria Steinem, Dolly Parton… in their own unique way, each exuded pragmatism and optimism, perhaps the best of American qualities. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America? Still ringing true….

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

Wedding Bells: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Van Morrison’s Enlightenment begins with a riff on the Buddha’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Didn’t I first stumble into that koan in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, that little white paperback my sister and I checked out of the public library and handed back and forth between us? Those were the adolescent years when I devoured literature — Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath — so hungry, those years of amazement, at how literature could sing. So hungry I was in those years that merged into that Vermont mountainside college where I often stayed up most of the night, talking, drinking, often sleeping under the dazzling constellations. In the mornings, we trekked to seminars in the former cow barn and debated Plato and Kant.

Those years, I believed I could wrap my mind around life, that understanding was possible in more than ragged snippets. All my adult life I’ve leaned into a daily version of chop wood, carry water, that three-legged stool of raising children, writing books, earning a livelihood to keep shelter and home whole for my tiny family. An insanely complex equation.

With great merriment, my oldest daughter marries, we host a party, folks arrive, cake is eaten. The night before, we stay up late, the girls decorating the cake, my brother on a kitchen stool, shaking out the stories of our memories together. Such happiness to have a full house of youth and laughter. Monday morning, awake long before dawn, I labor at my version of carrying wood, those Van Morrison lines humming through my mind. Illusion? Nonattachment? Perhaps all my life I’ve thought about this koan in the wrong Western way, an either/or. Cold dew washes my bare feet.

As for the cake…. I’m still handing around leftovers, sweet luck.

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
― Lucille Clifton