#amreading good books

Stitch by Stitch

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my younger daughter was two, my friend Jessica taught me to knit, which revolutionized my world. A life with little ones underfoot is improved by creativity which may be picked up or put down at any time. Unlike time (say, 2016), yarn can easily be unraveled, and the work improved.

Since my first knit, purl stitches, I’ve knit in numerous houses and meetings, across country on a train, in the ER, the endodontist’s office, at concerts, under trees, in the sugarhouse, in my bed.

With innumerable strangers, I’ve handed my knitting and their knitting back and forth, admiring and discussing. In despair, occasionally, I’ve thrown out knitting gone badly awry. My best knitting was a pair of mittens I knit my daughter for her 15th birthday, blue and white, compass pattern. Now I’m on a pattern a little too difficult, with yarn overs that are trouble to drop, with a pattern I am, stitch by stitch, accomplishing; it’s beautiful.

When my girls and I were talking about wishes for the new year, I thought work hard, but perhaps what I really meant was love well.

The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams – it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind’s history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.

Elizabeth Zimmerman (who else?), The Knitter’s Almanac

 

 

Snowed In…. and more

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My brother borrowed my daughter’s car and returned it with the back door dinged in, which made us laugh. That’s all? 2016 has thrown a lot more at us. But here’s the thing: at the very beginning of my novel’s draft, I have that classic line from Dante: In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

In my forties, the straight way is concealed, undoubtedly. But what I’d missed in that line until today is the coming to yourself gem buried within that sentence. Earlier this fall, I had a conversation with someone who described this phase of life as not solved by geography; this is an interior journey of the heart.

So, for a moment here, what better way to end a long year than with laughter? Big and little kids went sliding on the ice today – no sleds required; our kitchen is well-stocked; the snow falls – lovely as I remember from childhood; and my first novel hit the Galaxy Bookshop‘s 2016 bestseller list. Satisfaction.

Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

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My garden in winter.

My Brother’s Handgun

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 11-year-old daughter wants to be an FBI agent when she grows up. I wish I could say I have no idea where that desire derives from, but a rawer truth is that choice illuminates a great deal about her young life – and equally about mine.

When I was a young mother, I focussed so much on what I could give my children – homegrown organic squash, stacks of library books, sand castle building – that I pretty much entirely discounted all the influences that would equally affect my daughters, unintended or not: in short, the great wide world we live in.

A first-time mother, I just took everything so personally, as if feeding my kid a potato chip would amount to heresy. I had this very naive idea that if I pushed the image of the Earth Mama hard enough, I could hold off from my children the equally real awfulness of this world.

Over and over, one strand emerges in my writing: that our choices and actions determine who we are; that while our heads may be filled with the finest of intentions and profoundest of ideas, only action and how those actions affect others determines, ultimately, the mark of who we are. Which perhaps is why I’ve ragged on that Hallmark card notion of love. In my experience, love is the nursing mother’s arms around her baby, but also the ragged fierceness to step forward when the seas go swirly and the sharks surface to feed.

Whether I like it or not, children grow up, one little bit at a time, not simply with a birthday, or turning eighteen, and, having seen plenty of ignorance (my own and others’), I’d far rather my daughters make their decisions knowingly.

So…. when my brother taught my younger daughter to shoot his Glock, his hands over hers, I let them be.

Here’s a New Yorker parenting article, on resilience.

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Woodbury Library

Clutter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

With a gift of fudge, my teenager and I stopped by the new neighbors’ house yesterday. The boys and their father had disappeared outside, while the mother was reading a slender book on feminism she had given her husband for a Christmas present. She had determined the book was required reading for her high school student, while the 10-year-old was given a temporary pass.

Owned by a large Connecticut family, the house has been vacant for years. One night this fall, another friend was sorely in need of acorns for a photo shoot (these are the kinds of friends I have), and the girls and I drove down in the dark and searched under that property’s oak trees with flashlights for what my children once called “oak nuts.”

Now, the house is literally spewing belongings: mismatched ski boots, a basketball stand on its side in the snow, Christmas lights on a hedge so haphazard my older daughter laughingly said the lights appeared to have been tossed out a bedroom window. Family life in all its raging clutter. Coincidentally reading Shirley Jackson’s phenomenally useful and entertaining essays on writing fiction and craft, I realize how interested I am in their half-opened door, the painting already hung in the entry hall, and I wonder how our own messy family appears.

 It seems to me that in our present great drive—fiction-wise—toward the spare, clean, direct kind of story, we are somehow leaving behind the most useful tools of the writer, the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of the imagination from the everyday account.

Shirley Jackson, “Garlic In Fiction”

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Gifts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My teenager has been on a fudge-making bender this week, sizing up recipes, sourcing out inexpensive tins, buying ribbon to neaten up her gifts. Last evening, while I was lying gracelessly on the floor in my end-of-long-day stupor, she busily cut peppermint-stick and walnut-studded chocolate fudge and carefully packed the pieces with tissue paper into her bright tins.

She offered up her extras as gifts for me to give away. To the new neighbors, for instance.

Mom, she said, I’m making you look good.

I closed the Shirley Jackson bio I’m reading and looked at her. It’s been a long – perhaps too long a time – since I cared all that much about looking good. Somehow, in the years’ jumble of babies and breastfeeding, sugaring and bills, basketball games and sleepovers, I shifted to “not looking all that bad” as satisfactory enough.

Truth is, the girls do make me look good. Years ago, I would have considered this ancillary boon a trivial notion, hardly worth anything at all. How the world does change. I’m going to walk down the icy road to the neighbors, knock on the door, and offer up that gaily-wrapped fudge in full disclosure of its creator – with great joy.

Here’s a few lines from my library book….

Shirley Jackson saw herself, it seems clear, as a version of a writer…. (whose role) was to draw back the curtain on the darkness within the human psyche…. thousands of unsuspecting readers who opened The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, were confronted by a story (“The Lottery”) unlike anything they had ever read before. They admired it, they raged at it, they were puzzled by it; but no matter their reaction, it illuminated their world.

– Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life

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Photo by Molly S.

A Whale’s Heartbeat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these subzero nights, I’ve abandoned my room of windows on the top floor and started sleeping in my daughter’s lower bunk bed, in her room cozily located over the wood stove. Upstairs, my older daughter’s room is just across the hall from mine, and we generally talk before sleeping. My younger daughter is pleased with her turn at companionship. Plus, she doesn’t complain when I read late at night with the lights on.

Last night, before falling asleep, she told me a whale’s heart beats about 10 times per minute, while the tiny shrew’s heart can pulse away at a 1,000 jumps per minute.

I reached up and snapped off the light. In darkness, we imagined how voluminous might be a whale’s heart, hot blood churning through its chambers. She told me about a trip she’d taken a few years before with her father, to Provincetown, where she and her sister walked through the ribs of whale skeleton. In the warm dark room, we lay imagining what it would be like to live in the belly of a whale, and late in the night when I woke to feed the fire, I was still dreaming of that dark, living interior.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing–more’s the pity.

– Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

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