#amwriting

Tools of the Trade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I stumble spelling the same handful of words, stupidly over and over. Fuchsia. Schedule. Traveling.  As good, serviceable words, I use them repeatedly, and yet I always catch myself just for an instant. How do those consonants line up in schedule, anyway?

I imagine a surgeon has terminology, methodologies, sterilized silver, to utilize in her trade. Writers weld words with the subtlest shades of meaning: fuchsia in a hanging plant, profusely blossomed; or fuchsia I wrote about this morning, the color of a woman’s silk blouse and hazily diffuse through an unwashed convenience store window, filtered through a storm of twisting snowflakes.

Roseate. Coral. Magenta. Cerise. Bloodshot. Ruby.

Red is the color of blood, and I will seek it:
I have sought it in the grass.
It is the color of steep sun seen through eyelids….

– Conrad Aiken

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Hardwick, Vermont

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

Tuesday: a Few Miles Travelled

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Eleven years ago, I drove away from Copley Hospital in Morrisville, sitting in the backseat of a car – a place I never sit. My six-year-old daughter was in the backseat, too, her infant sister between us, just days old. Although it had rained every single day in May – either a drizzle or deluge – the beginning days of June were sunny and hot. Leaving the hospital, we passed enormous corn fields where emerald shoots of corn had emerged from the dark soil in those few days I had been cloistered.

Sick through almost the entire pregnancy, by the end I was less alive, submerged in that pregnancy’s difficulty. But all that passed immediately with the birth of my second daughter. Within minutes of her birth, I felt myself returning to life.

In all the marvelous experiences of my life, those minutes driving by those June corn fields rank very near the apex: the two children I was meant to have, beside me birthed and healthy, the gloomy raininess of a long hard season dispersed, and all around us, radiant in sunlight, those fertile fields rich with life pushing upward, in those long sweeping rows of gems.

blessing the boats
(at saint mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

— Lucille Clifton

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The Garden’s Geometry

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As a new mother, I was surprised by the weight of children; even babies, carried all day long, are heavy, and nursing in the nighttime, my arms often drooped with exhaustion. While my daughters are long since beyond the babes-in-arms stage, all afternoon yesterday I carried buckets of mulch and compost, bent with my hoe and scythe, and tugged my garden back from wilderness into domesticity: for a brief bit of time.

Step away, and the raspberry canes will run their way back. Creeping buttercup – or creeping crowfoot – proliferates knottily.

May is the season of optimism. I’ve planted melons for my watermelon-loving daughter, and promised to water well. The vertical territory of my beds lies low yet; visit in a few months and – like growing children – the vines will be lushly magnificent, the peppers spread out and holding hands, the bachelor buttons in bloom. May, like mothering, is the season of patience, too.

I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none.

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

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Auditory Postcard from Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last night, hot from bike riding with my daughter and watering transplants in the garden, I madly put the screens in the upstairs windows. We slept with the glass opened all night, and this early morning is cool and lovely, a symphony of songbirds serenading my children in their dreams.

When I was a teenager, my cousin from New York City visited us in the summer and remarked every morning that the birds woke him with their singing. Turbo birds, he called them. These mornings, I sometimes remember the three enormous sugar maples that graced my childhood lawn, prime songbird habitat. As a child, I thought it amusing that someone would comment on songbirds. Really? You might as well comment on drinking water.

Like anywhere, Vermont has drawbacks: I’ve seen mercury at 42 below zero fahrenheight, the public libraries are too tiny, rural living can be darn lonely, and my ears are swollen with bug bites. But here’s just one ineffable joy: birdsong.

“A Minor Bird”

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

Robert Frost

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West Woodbury, May evening

 

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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