writing

Night

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When we were girls, my sister and I shared innumerable books. In elementary school we began with library books (Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself), and by high school we were onto James Joyce and Tom Wolfe – most recently Anthony Doerr. It’s a habit that’s spanned throughout our entire lives.

One slender book has always remained in my consciousness. Even now, I remember reading this book for the first time with my sister, the two of us horrified, by happenstance of geography and time blessedly never stepping even near the peripheral edges of the profoundest human suffering. The book is Night. 

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

– Elie Wiesel

September 30, 1928-July 2, 2016

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Santa Fe, New Mexico

 

Thirst

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Out of my Vermont landscape, traveling, I’m surprised to see, again, how profoundly landscape – like the desert’s grit-filled wind – shapes perception. I gauge my world through water’s motion: Have the spring beauties spread their tiny petals? Whose garden has been dealt a killing frost? Is travel impractical because of muddy roads? When will the overcast skies break?

The New Mexican desert revolves around the exquisite geometry of light, shadow, wind, the near-absence of water: the same life-driving axis of knowledge, turning in an opposite direction.

This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth’s interior all the way into the sky and back.

Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet

 

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Santa Fe, New Mexico

Summer Song

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On this first day of summer, my daughters and I swam in Caspian Lake, the cold and beautifully clear water where we’ve swum for years. The earliest, this far north in Vermont, that I’ve swam there has been April, a month where the ice sometimes still knocks up against the shore. The latest was a sunny first of October, and that evening I knew I was pregnant with my second child.

Everyone must have their sacred spaces on this earth. Here’s one of mine, singing eternally the melody of the changing sky, water or ice, some measure of wind, and the children – happy, happy, happy, to be there. Yeah.

Juana sang softly an ancient song that had only three notes and yet endless variety of interval. And this was part of the family song too. It was all part. Sometimes it rose to an aching chord that caught the throat, saying this is safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole.

– John Steinbeck, The Pearl

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photo by Molly S./Greensboro, Vermont

Writing Dialogue

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

There’s this odd word gnomon in James Joyce’s story “The Sisters” which is used in the mathematical manner: it’s a way of knowing a physical void by what is visible. That returns to that notion of understanding ourselves as creatures of change: not full and certainly not complete.

A writer once pointed out to me the gnomon is a way of writing dialogue, too. Truest dialogue always reflects the sub-story of what we’re not saying. We live in worlds of stories we create: the spoken story we share, and then all those winding sub-stories beneath.

Isn’t that partly what makes us so infuriating to each other at times, and, conversely, also so intoxicatingly fascinating? Behold, then, the strawberries, the nasturtiums, sun rising through a scrim of fog, the Milky Way arching through the black of a moonless night – this exquisite world we inhabit – and us, with our endless stories…. essence of our humanity.

 If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

–Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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first berries from our garden

Imagine Me Gone

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s one reason to read: very late last night, I read through a twistingly wry scene between a sister and a brother. Then, at the very end of the chapter, a few lines tilted the scene into an entirely different perspective. All day, I’ve been thinking over this novel, how those lines are like ones in my own life, rare and yet terribly real. Our everyday realm is bona fide, too, but imagine literature – or life, for that matter – without the raw pulse of emotion, a literal opening of the heart in a world suddenly listening?

He had ceased his fidgeting… The house had gone quiet around us.

“I love you,” he said. “For whatever it’s worth.”

– Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

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Elmore, Vermont

Gravy, Today

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early this morning before dawn, I woke and heard rain falling. Not much, but enough to satisfy the seedlings I’d planted yesterday. My garden has been dry, almost dusty. For those moments, I lay still, listening, letting the world around me do its work.

Gratitude’s a funny thing. Like empathy, I think it’s taken me decades to know its miraculous depths. Also early this morning, I received an email with a review of my novel in The Emerald City Book Review. I’ve never met the reviewer, yet she read my book in the way I had hoped the novel would be read, even quoting lines from where I consider the book’s heart, something I have never told a soul.

Like most writers, I toil at the bottom of a narrow, stone-lined well. But today: gratitude for someone who took the time to read and write so well about my book, gratitude to this earthly life that I could chisel out this book, and gratitude for this morning’s moments of rest, lying and listening to the sweet spring rain, falling on my garden.

Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving…

Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.

Raymond Carver, “Gravy”

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