#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Snow Child

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

It’s an Ezra Jack Keats kind of snowy day (or days) in Vermont. If you’re not out foolishly driving around (and not many are), the snow is spiraling down exquisitely. After hours of tedious work inside, while the snow swirled against the windows, I walked along our unplowed road. Pausing on my way to meet my neighbor, I remembered those winters when my firstborn was a toddler, and winters really were one months-long housebound snowstorm.

Every day, I pulled my chattery child along the road on a runner sled. Always, at the same place she would beg me to lumber through the deep snow into the woods and pluck a few miniature hemlock pinecones from a low hanging branch.

Years later, unboxing this red snowsuit for her younger sister, I discovered tiny pinecones in every pocket.

It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

FullSizeRender

Chipped Lives

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

It’s so darn cold here I woke up in the dark this morning with the cold scraping my cheeks. Leftover pork bubbles on the wood stove with red chili and beans: we need heat and bright color.

Despite the cold, the March light is sparklingly beautiful. My young neighbor and I slid around the ice surrounding the sugarhouse, covered with a few inches of sugary snow. I offer him salvaged doors and windows, piles of wood; he’s happy.

Less here; more down the road. This morning, while my wood stove slowly warmed our house, I remembered a Hemingway line about the surprise at the end of Ulysses. Finishing Finkel’s new book this morning, I discovered an incredible surprise in his ending. The line I snipped below is perhaps one of the few pieces of advice I could truly offer my 18-year-old daughter, this young woman who has already met the hole in her heart with burning rage.

The neighbor loads his Subaru. I’m relieved to have these potential pieces of home travel down the road. Build a greenhouse. Plant more seeds. Thrive.

I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives, and I wondered then if Knight’s (the hermit) journey was to seek it. But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts.

– Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: the Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

FullSizeRender

My Familiar

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The past two mornings, a large fisher cat has slunk through my snow-covered garden, scoped out the compost, and wandered back into the woods, with that odd, weasel-esque serpentine back motion. The creature is dark as a rain-sodden forest floor.

My house is for sale now, and strangers have been wandering in and out. Do they admire the blue I’ve painted the windows? Are they as annoyed with the unfinished trim and stair treads as I am, or are they starry-eyed, as I would have been, years ago?

I’ve told none of them of this wild creature wandering in and out, my own particular secret, the wildness I’ll carry with me, no matter where we go.

The truth felt stranger than the myth.

Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: the Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

FullSizeRender

fitting reading, these days

Mother

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One rainy Saturday when I was a kid, my dad drove me and my siblings to the movie Watership Down in Manchester, New Hampshire, in an old green Commando Jeep he drove most of my childhood. On the way there, approaching an intersection, the brakes failed, and he slid through an intersection blaring his horn and flashing his lights. Under a benevolent star that day, we cruised through the red light unharmed, and my dad pulled over, doubtlessly nearly breathless with relief.

For a child, that memory remained as a flashy bit of drama. As a parent at the wheel with three kids, terrible misfortune averted. When I told my 18-year-old daughter to drive safety the other day, heading to high school or work or out with her friends to the movies, she rolled her eyes. I reiterated that I will always be your mother, so bear up, my beloved.

Today is my mother’s 80th birthday, two days after my father’s 80th birthday, both children of the Depression, with their own long lives which have touched so many people.

I think of parenting like the proverb from an old Tom Selleck movie: The ox is slow, but the earth is patient, plodding along with heavy-hooves, but overhead spreads the changing, infinite sky, the eternal constant comfort of the earth beneath our feet.

Best wishes on your birthday, mother.

…Let me congratulate you on
the birthday of your son…
You didn’t make him prosperous or famous,
and fearlessness is his only talent.
Open up his windows,
let in the twittering in the leafy branches…
Give him his notebook and his ink bottle,
give him a drink of milk and watch him go.

– Yevgeny Yevtushenko, from “Birthday”

FullSizeRender

Free Stuff

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Freezing rain last night. An acquaintance from years past walks up the icy driveway this morning to inquire about an old claw foot bathtub. We talk for precisely three minutes about one of the most difficult problems I’m facing now. Three minutes, tops. And yet, somehow, that’s all I need. In a better frame of mind, I’ll return the favor to someone else.

It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!

Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water

FullSizeRender

A Handful of Words

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Recently, on a freezing afternoon, I was late to a workshop for writing a grant, in an attempt to keep funding my second novel endeavor. Either because I live where parking is usually not a problem, or because I don’t think ahead, I arrived with about a heartbeat to spare, but then couldn’t find parking, and ended up running in my clunky boots and parka a few blocks.

The workshop was held in a dance studio that was hardly heated, and all of crowded around tables in our sweaters and coats and hand-knitted hats. Mainly painters, the other attendees ranged from a young man who seemed to have just rolled out of the sack to elderly folks who asked a lot of good questions. Although I didn’t linger, I knew these were my tenor of people – not all that well-coiffed, intense enough about their passion to seek out sitting for a few cold hours in a shabby end of Burlington.

To get through the first cut, I’ll need to write four paragraphs. I sat there, in my sweater with the unraveling cuffs, and thought, That’s it? Four paragraphs? While the painters asked questions about matting, I started scribbling my answer. Be specific. Be profound. Articulate why literature matters. And, for God’s sake, don’t be afraid of four paragraphs.

Check back in May and see if I’m weeping….

Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place.

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

fullsizerender

Hazen Union, Hardwick, Vermont