#books

Real v. Unreal, Doorway in Seasons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Evening, I visit with a friend on her porch. I’ve forced myself from the couch, leaving behind a Carl Hoffman book. My friend talk about little things—knitting mittens, a curry recipe—and the submerged currents that drive our lives—poetry and sex and a vision to transform my side yard into perennials. The daylight dwindles. Today, foliage colors hum at their radiant best, and I say goodbye, gather my hat, and head out on a walk into the twilight. That afternoon, I’d stopped along the Rail Trail to run. A man had parked a long RV in the otherwise empty lot, watercolors and an easel propped on the granite block wall. When I returned, gasping and sweaty, we talked for a bit. I just want to be here, he says, outside. Which mirrors my own sentiment.

There’s no one else out this night, but two boys on bicycles, racing and shouting, crossing the nearly empty road.

Twice, today, I’ve had that otherworldly sense of déjà-vu. While listening to this stranger with his watercoloring and my friend with her library book in her lap, I’m also in a consultation room and the oncologist tells me the lymphoma has returned. I understand the seriousness in his voice; we’ve laughed about many other things, but there’s no laughing now. In this strange state, I leap up and stand in the doorway, one foot in the room, one in the halfway. Real, or not?

For years, I’ve endeavored to hone my discipline, to keep writing, keep working, read, walk, pay attention, listen to the story around you, for goodness sake, but the physical pain of cancer forced me to be here now, in ways I didn’t want. Nonetheless. And that’s one enormous nonetheless.

I loop around the village and return up my short steep road in the darkness. I’ve been on that threshold for years, half in, half out, always running for the woods and the trails along the river, the mountain path, gathering little scraps of conversations and friendships into my pockets, never trusting their radiance, like this foliage, won’t fade. Cancer, of course, as disease will, rendered running impossible. Across that lawn where I intend to sow a wider garden, a fox streaks, shadowy in the night. For a few moments, I stand in the surprisingly warm end-of-September night, breathing in the fragrance of fallen apples, juice sweetening the earth.

And that Hoffman book about the Asmat? The shifting realm of what’s real and what’s not? Unlearn the questions.

“But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment…”
― Carl Hoffman

Illumination of Constellations.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On the way home from a conference in Montpelier, I stop at #10 Pond. Late afternoon, there’s no one around, and I open my laptop and work, perched on a rock. For a good long while, it’s just me and two curious loons swimming by, the September sunlight dropping over the hillside full of hovering gravity-defying dust and damselflies.

A stellar autumn day.

I hadn’t intended to swim, but the afternoon turns sweaty. The water’s temperature hovers at perfection, the morning’s chill vanished this late in the day. Afterwards, I stand on the shore’s mud, drying off. A stranger appears and wades in. The sunlight moves between us, a great creature.

We talk about the clear water and the leaves turning gold, and waking in the post-midnight wee hours. The nights are cold, and we agree that we close our windows, now, to keep some warmth in our houses for the morning. A young mother and two small children scramble down the bank. The youngest child runs into the pond, splashing, hands outstretched.

19 years ago to this day, my youngest and I were at the ER, when my husband had a chainsaw accident. All’s well could be the pronunciation, nearly two decades later, but is that so? Another of these questions that only I seem to ponder—how much of our difficulties were caused by us, how much by fate? An impossible question with no answer. A human, not a loon, koan.

Mid-September, a day balmy-sweet. I drop my damp towel and wade out. I fear I may not swim again this year, maybe never, but as I stroke out further than I have this summer, far beyond shore, I let those fears sink down to the pond’s hidden bottom.

Much later, the day’s heat lingering, I lie on my splintering picnic table beneath the Milky Way and let the words wash out of my mind, sink down through the grass and sandy soil, the realm of worms and grubs and groundhog burrows. The constellations illuminate the darkness.

Metaphor.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a whirl of what I call doubt, I hole up, sequester myself from the clanging world and the roaring news that AI has escaped the sandbox and my own gnawing worries about how, anyway, am I spending my allotment of mortal days/weeks/hopefully years?

I wake hours before that that glowing rim of dawn rises over the cemetery, my fine silent neighbors, and begin the work of joining word to word, noun to verb. Writing, I return again to that morning nearly two years ago, when I stood at my bedroom window staring down at a mock orange bush. The upper branches had been broken when the house painter’s ladder fell on the bush’s crown. I had learned the evening before that I had metastatic cancer, later revealed as stage four lymphoma. I stared at the jagged branches and realized I might die that winter.

It was the morning of the 2024 Presidential election, which had and has disastrous consequences for so many people, but that morning, consequences were heading in a markedly different direction for me and my family.

Now, two years later, the place I live on the globe—northern Vermont—again bends towards the shorter, darker days. It won’t be all that long before snow settles in around us. The mock orange yet needs trimming. But the work before me is to write hard into metaphor: to parse the layers of mortality, of human good and ill will, the brokenness and beauty of the world through this human tool.

As for the photo above…. the Old West Church in Calais, September home to Words Out Loud, one of my favorite annual literary events.

We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”
― John Green

Practicing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Twice a month, I gather a Writer’s Circle at the Civic on Hardwick’s Main Street, about a six-minute walk from my back door. A simple notion—I offer a poem, we write, read, talk. A consistency in a fragmented world. Housed in the former Buffalo Mountain Co-op building, the Civic has three floors. A carpenter, my ex spent countless hours in this building. In those days, I had a key, too, and often used the top floor as a writing studio, slinking in with my laptop and writing in the dim space that stored baskets and yarn. I finished drafting my first book in an unswept corner.

Now, like the curiosity of a large family house, the space is pushed and used in different ways. In the cool September late afternoons, we claim the tables on the first floor, watching Hardwick’s foot and vehicle Main Street traffic. Dump trucks with firewood, trash haulers, pickups and SUVs, kids on bikes. My friends walk to a restaurant for dinner, then amble back, boxed leftover in hands.

We write on. Months in, we’re learning to know each other. Yet the writing is often a surprise. What will emerge?

I live in this town, work in the adjacent town, these complex organisms unique in their own ways, built upon layers of history and families. Endlessly riveting, sometimes maddening. Which, I suppose, is the human way.

And a little Kurt Vonnegut: “If you want to really hurt your parents… the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake… Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

“…living according to the rhythms of others…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My ex and I were remarkably unsuited for each other in many ways; in particular was his ability to live without plans. I—in what’s surely irritating, too—lean into rhythms and patterns. This long holiday weekend, I wake hours before dawn, busily tearing apart a manuscript draft and rearranging, stitching, adding, cutting, cutting, cutting…

These early autumn days are sunny, with real heat yet. Afternoons, I park at the rail trail, stretch, and run. In the parking lot, there’s always that SUV with a youngster who’s on a different economic path, and an assortment of Subarus and Volvos with bike racks. These runs are short, a few miles perhaps. Sometimes, I make the four-mile loop. Ending, I often leave the path for the pasture along the river, the Joe Pye weed and purple asters and goldenrod dense. The pollinators eat hungrily.

An orderly life depends on a tenor of privilege, a gift I didn’t have in those years of in-the-thick mothering. Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle wrote about “living according to the rhythms of others”—a line I’ve considered for years. Nearly all my life I’ve lived in the sway of family, gleaning writing time where I could. Now, just a few years into the children-are-adults phase of my life, my companions are sweet fat housecats but also the unremitting remains of cancer and treatment: the mighty beast of fatigue. I lean into it and push; the fatigue pushes back. As in any family, you make your agreements. You learn to get on.

Late afternoon, we build a fire and linger. Long past dark, we huddle around the flames, the cold nipping in. I tilt my head back. Overhead, stars appear between patches of clouds. From the trees, apples have already fallen into the long grass, sweetly rotting from the day’s heat. I’ve left the kitchen light glowing over the table spread with pages and my scrawled notes. Tomorrow’s labor.

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

— Galway Kinnell

Courage Crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I began my Call It Madness book tour on a steamy June evening, traveled all summer around the state and into New Hampshire, and ended in Greensboro, a ten-minute drive north of where I live, on a late afternoon, the August day promising coolness as the day ended, a room full of people I know and some I don’t know. I was graced with affection and curiosity.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family make this trek with me, take time from their lives — and sometimes I traveled alone — that well of solitude that both sustains and sometimes frightens me.

At this last reading, in the town where I walked around the lake, beginning to write Call It Madness in my mind, think through this story of a farm lost four generations ago and a young, rough-edged woman seeking her own salvation, the audience asked thoughtful questions. At one point, I heard myself say, when I had cancer, and of course that is not true. The pronunciation of cure, if I am so fortunate, is far yet in the future. But looking around the room, I knew pieces of so many people’s lives — losses of their own dear ones, of addiction and financial duress, of the persistence of juggling a creative life and earning a living.

This morning, reading David Biro‘s One Hundred Days, I chance upon his words (as a physician and patient of a rare blood disorder) that medicine is art and science. I benefitted from both: decades and decades of painstaking research provided me treatment and the complex art of my oncologist ushered me through the nightmare of that treatment. In the deepest nadir, he appeared at my bedside at a time when numbers meant nothing to me: before dawn or late evening, or maybe noon. I told him I didn’t think I could continue, and he simply studied me, silently, while I scraped down into that threadbare pocket of my courage and pulled out another crumb. He waited for my resolve to thicken.

Likewise — and yet utterly different — writing. Late August, the crickets singing down the end of summer, I’ve lucky to have a house of family and friends this weekend, and then perhaps some lying in the sun, reading my way through the stack of books I’ve acquired on my bookstore tour. I’d imagined my fifties as a decade of some calm after kid-rearing, divorce and the scramble to set my girls and myself steadily in a beloved house, on a financial footing where I was not always chewing a thumbnail. Instead: a life like a bouquet of sunflowers, staggeringly beautiful, the leaves’ edges fading.

After reading, I stood in the parking lot with a friend, our conversation continuing in the way of friends who have known each other for years. For this moment, I relished how I felt held in this Vermont village, one blossom in a handful of so much.

“At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others…” David Biro