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Sacred Spot

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

At library class yesterday, I’m in one of my places — like canoeing on Calais’s Number 10 Pond or Bandelier National Park in New Mexico — I’m (at least temporarily) where I’m supposed to be. Housed in the original Barre, Vermont, Spaulding High School, the building was constructed as schools once were — as places of community pride and beauty — with tin ceilings, ornate woodwork, and a view of the city below.

I love Vermont’s Department of Libraries because the staff is articulate and funny and clever — because they champion intellectual freedom in a time of increasing censorship and groupthink, because they’re adamant about the rights of children to have their own thoughts, and because they’re committed to librarians working together.

When they say We have your back, I trust that — and I’m not someone who easily trusts. No hard sell, no payment plan, no exchange of cash. Simply: this is the good mission we’re committed to, and we’re doing it.

Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in.

— Susan Orlean, The Library Book

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Barre, Vermont

Some Novels I Might Have Sadly Missed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In a box of books my sister shipped to me years ago, I found a copy of Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up. In those pre-internet days, I didn’t realize this little gritty novel had garnered its own classic cult following. When I recommended the book to someone else who was reading Crime and Punishment, he laughed and said that would have been a good title for Dostoyevsky’s book, too.

From the fifty-cent bin in a library book sale, I pick up Joshua Mohr’s Some Things That Meant The World To Me. My 19-year-old lifts the book from the kitchen tale and mentions the cover is from “Wheel of Fortune,” which makes me ask how she’s so intimate with that game show.

My daughter reminds me she works in a nursing home.

She asks about the ink splatters on the cover below the “Wheel of Fortune” lettering — the half of the cover that made sense to me. Rorschach test I tell her, and offer a brief explanation.

I’d probably fail that test, she says, not perturbed in the least.

She bundles up, heading out for a ski. 11 below zero.

We’re all writing about the same things, we’re all trying to evoke emotion. How are you going to find a new image, a new way to say it that your audience hasn’t experienced before? If a character comes in and just blurts out, “I’m sad,” it’s a pretty bad way for a story to start. But, if I describe a woman in Dolores Park at three-o-clock in the morning, drinking tequila out of the bottle while sitting there hunched up, and suddenly the sprinklers come on. She doesn’t even move. She just continues to drink tequila. The reader comes out of that scene understanding she’s sad by putting the pieces together.

—Joshua Mohr

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Photo by Molly S.

Reprieve

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At the hardware store in town, the woman ringing up my chicken feed asks if I’m going out partying for New Year’s Eve.

Are you kidding me? I blurt out. Then I apologize and ask about her plans. I like these hardware store folks, with their humor, their can-do willingness to solve my piddling problems — a clogged bathtub drain, a stuck lamp switch.

The cold’s broken for December’s last day. Before dusk, I follow the raccoon tracks from my compost down the snow-crusty hillside, wondering where this creature lives.

Another of my daughter’s homemade calendars folded up and put away, the day-to-day record of our lives — work schedules and friends and dentist appointments — the stuff of our lives.

For this year? Stay solvent. Paint the kitchen gold, my bedroom turquoise. Swim in the Atlantic with my kids. Follow wild tracks and fill the creative well.

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.

— Hayden Carruth

 

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Breakfast with a Stranger

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On this Thanksgiving morning, a dream of our house burning wakes me. In the haze of my dream, I’m first insistent my daughters leave, their two cats found and taken to the neighbors. My laptop. Then there’s an odd pause, where I’m alone in the house, as if what next? what else?

A former sugarmaker who burned countless cords of wood on a 14′ long arch — wood stove user — and firewoman to seven enormous burn piles when I left our old house — I’m intimately familiar with the curl and lick of fire, of its wicked smartness.

I wake, happy to be in our warm house, one cat hungrily biting my bare toes, the other nuzzling my cheek, my daughters sleeping. Downstairs, a pecan pie waits, uncut, on the kitchen table.

Yesterday, I met an incredibly accomplished writer in the Hardwick diner, and here’s a snippet from our conversation over coffee and tea and the diner’s savory shredded hashbrowns.

Despite all the irritating experiences around Thanksgiving that happens when families get together, there’s also moments when we’re all sitting together and eating together and someone is telling a story, and you think how great it is that we’re all together hearing these stories together, and then living stories together….

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