art

‘Eat all the plums from all the iceboxes. Apologize to no one.’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Not a spoiler alert — an eclipse is headed our planet’s way — and we live in the path of totality. Over the past few years, it feels like the state has prepared for so many things: snowstorms and windstorms, floods. Now, a river of people streaming in for The Awesome.

Meanwhile, lives churn on. I spend a pleasant and snowy afternoon writing a spreadsheet, followed by a ranting email which I (wisely) delete before I send. I write and write. A short excerpt of my novel is picked up for publication in May. I’m given a green folder and a white folder of old letters and documents and site map for an article I’m writing. The housecats twitch at the juncos in the feeder.

Ryan Champan’s advice on writing a novel:

56. If you’re struggling with revision, print out the draft. Cut each sentence into individual strips and papier mâché them into a sculpture of your head, scaled 2x. Once it’s dried, place the sculpture over your head—create eye holes at your discretion—and just sit like that.

And another:

15. Llosa again, on writing one’s first novel: “Those writers who shun their own demons and set themselves themes because they believe their own aren’t original or appealing enough are making an enormous mistake. In and of itself, no literary theme is good or bad. Any themes can be either, and the verdict depends not on the theme itself but rather on what it becomes when the application of form—narrative style and structure—makes it a novel.”

Read the whole 1oo here. Surely a few gems for anyone…

January: wonder & diligence.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Twenty-five years ago, on a frigid January night, I went to a birthday party and ate chocolate cake. I would have my first baby in a week, and I had gone at that pregnancy with wonder and diligence, heavy on kale and broccoli, scant on refined sugar. The cake was marvelous.

In this warm January, a friend lingers with me over coffee. Melting snow drips from the porch roof as we talk about travel, making art and making a living, parenting. I’m reminded of a line from Raymond Carver that the mightiest force in his life was his two children, Carver who wrote brilliantly about laundromat hours. Wonder and diligence. Our conversation winds around to The List, the eternal draft of chores and visions, the crossing off and adding on, the drafting and revising, the diligence that strings our days together, a crude framework of parenting.

End of January: the weather is slushy and icy, sunbeams a rarity, hardly the season of wonder. My firewood holds the month’s damp, as if resistant, too, to the lousy weather. I lay chunks of wood beneath my stove, drying them a little before I chuck them in, burn the wood to ash.

My little cat flicks his tail. A cardinal nestles in the mock orange’s bare branches, crimson feathers in the muted world. I lay my hand on my cat’s silky back, murmuring, “Well, what do you know….”

And a Raymond Carver poem:

“Happiness”

So early it’s still almost dark out.

I’m near the window with coffee,

and the usual early morning stuff

that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend

walking up the road

to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,

and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

They are so happy

they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take

each other’s arm.

It’s early in the morning,

and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.

Onset of Pre-Cabin Fever.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I shake stunningly beautiful snow from my mittens onto my cats. Mid-January. Winter’s loveliness has just arrived. My house is again the three of us, two fluent in Cat and one marginally fluent in Human. The one who speaks Human gets the deciding vote, so we get up very early. The Cat speakers are wholly in favor of this, as the wood fire is fed and the cat kibble rationed into bowls. Eventually, the dawn finds us, and the rest of the world creeps in.

If this keeps us, the prognosis is mad-as-a-hatter by Honest Abe’s birthday. No fear of that. Any hermiting is constrained around here. Two small excerpts from my novel are accepted by journals. The cats and I nestle into our narrative. I let them lick butter from my fingers. Snow silently fluffs around us, concealing the stars, the sunflower stalks, the ash bucket I left by the step.

A little chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I call the mechanic back about my car who says it’s all good news, a replaced muffler, and the car looks fine.

Finally. Something repaired in the chain of a dying range, a done-in washing machine, my own washed-out and piss-poor attitude.

In one of the few sunny days I’ve seen recently, I’m standing on my back porch, listening to water dripping. We talk a little about the shitstorm of this decade so far, the election roaring up in nearby New Hampshire. He mentions he doesn’t know my political leanings, and I laugh. I’ve been writing him checks for years now, and I’m certain it’s no surprise who I didn’t vote for. But he bends our conversation a little further, kicking the standard gloom-and-doom away and remarks that we might as salvage some happiness in this life.

On this rainy midwinter day, I convince my youngest to drive north to a library in search of a Claire Dederer book. Here’s a few lines from the last chapter of Monsters.

Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason….

Monsters. Childcare.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I stand outside the town office building, eating leftover beet-carrot-garlic salad for lunch, watching the sky alternately break apart in sun or drop rain. If there’s a rainbow, it eludes me. A retired couple who lives up the street walks by, returning from their daily post office walk. We kick around the news: a petition to close the town’s elementary school and how last night’s snow turned to rain.

Slushy, slushy.

The wind kicks up a hint-of-late-February warmth, the way that month can smell of thawing earth, of the gradual thaw-and-freeze-and-thaw that morphs into spring. Midwinter here, the weather out of whack. The afternoon opens into sunlight. The sun’s rare January appearance carries me through the afternoon and into a cheerily ebullient Selectboard meeting, and home again along an icy road, the stars glittering over hayfields, to play cards with my daughter while the cats savor their feline leisure, sprawled before the wood stove.

I lay awake late reading Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Dederer writes:

… the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.

In Very Vermont Fashion….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

… I stopped by an art opening in a former brick stagecoach inn. In the Vermont way, the art was eclectic and superlative, the cheese local, the diminutive cupcakes homebaked, and the company excellent. My friend is the easy kind of person who doesn’t mind stepping forward with a plate of olives in her hand and introducing herself to a former library volunteer of mine whose name I can’t quite place….

Across the dirt road is an old barn where a stone labyrinth was placed a few years back. While my friend and I were talking, we watched two strangers do an excuse me, no, excuse me, sorting out who was going to enter the labyrinth first.

Small pleasures, friends, against the inevitable chaos of life.