#books

Re-teaching loveliness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Photo above is evidence of my loose approach to living with cats, an approach my visitors either embrace or wonder, what’s up with the cats on the counters? Brush stroke by rag wipe, I proceed with my kitchen project. I am a woman who craves order. Keeping my kitchen in cardboard boxes is not my SPARK JOY go-to; nonetheless, I persevere.

With added windows, I am relearning the light in my kitchen. Sure as anything, the metaphor of this project does not elude me. A year ago, a friend visited me in my Dartmouth room, bringing knitting and butterscotch pudding. Before she left, she walked me around the hall, 150′. We walked that loop twice? Through the window, the green and rain filled the day.

A year later, novel writing and paintbrush washing, property taxes and weeding, the Monday morning plan for a week’s work. The metaphor of this has not escaped me. In the co-op, reaching for broccoli, a long-ago acquaintance startles when he sees me.

I’d heard you were dead, he says.

Not yet, I laugh. Squeaked through, for now.

A year ago, I’d envisioned a kind of ease for myself; surviving lymphoma had made me invincible to misery in certain ways—a disinterest in petty bullshit, a newfound ability to let the little bickering struggles that seem to plague our time, or maybe simply our human nature, fall with the dust and debris on the kitchen floor. But what rose, instead, with sharpened teeth, were those existential questions: how does meaning structure my life? Who’s with me? Where to tap happiness, that old true word?

Walking home, I cough and touch the lymph nodes in my neck. Has that mighty disease returned? I’m at the kids’ ballfield, where the turkey vulture roost in the surrounding woods. Evening, the thrush sing. Holding these two things — the thrush’s melody, the circling vultures — I head home. Where the cats wait for me on the kitchen counter.

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness… ~ Galway Kinnell

Risking Delight with the Lion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Precisely a year ago, to the day, Isele Magazine published my essay “Red Devil, Survivor Herself.” I had written all through the godawful cancer treatments, AKA chemotherapy, and publishing this essay marked my tenacious determination to remain among the living—and to remain a fierce writer, too.

Over the summer and autumn, “Red Devil” morphed into a manuscript-in-process. Recently, three more chapters were picked up. The kind folks at Isele Magazine published “Risking Delight with the Lion.” The following two will be published in different journals later this spring.

Here’s the opening of “Risking Delight.”

In my winter of chemotherapy, I woke at night, quivering. Where was I? What was happening? Gasping, I reminded myself that I was in bed, I was okay, that whatever demons had sought me in sleep had been banished by my waking. I didn’t blink my eyes open into peace. My breathing never eased into contentment.

Cancer-and-chemotherapy is a path of suffering, an involuntary hairshirt. The first morning I met my oncologist Dr. Valera in that Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital room, I was surfacing, bleary and exhausted after an emergency admission and an exploratory surgery that verged on plunging me into a sedated coma. My daughters had been summoned through a snowstorm. What remained of my vitality was vanishing. Me or the lymphoma would triumph. There was no middle ground. Yet, that first morning, Valera assured me, “I can cure you.” Not cocky, not boastful, merely stripped down to facts: the lay of my body and disease, his skill and treatment course.

I clutched his words desperately, but I never repeated aloud, “This physician makes a claim that I will live.”

What was the levy I would pay for remission?…

Last… with the 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future project, I’ll be reading at the Tenney Memorial Library in Newbury, Vermont, this Saturday, 4 p.m. Come!

Hell-bent robins.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

I arrive home from the local arts center, get out of my car, and a robin nearly flies into my head. Winged creatures are swooping from the apple trees to the hedge of lilacs that is just beginning to bud. My god, what a lovely day.

In my bag, I have an empty pint jar of water I’ve been drinking, and a ball of purple linen I’m knitting into a summer shift, and the books of the two authors whose reading I just attended — Helen Whybrow of The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding’s translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars. I have a new book, too, a collection of stories by a Turkish author I’ve never read. Sitting with my book world friend, her publisher friend hands me a book, too. The afternoon and evening has gone this joyous way, like that hell-bent robin — strangers and friends and people I haven’t seen in ages — exuberant about literature and art and the unstoppable profusion of spring.

I like this art center so much I imagine curling up on a cushiony bench and sleeping beside the wide windows, the starlight on my face. An acquaintance I met at a Vermont Studio Center residency works here, too, and we plot some amusing possibilities. We’re beside the table heaped in lush mounds of delicacies, and I graze on stuffed mushrooms and empanadas and fresh tomatoes. I wrap lemon squares in napkins and hold these in my hands away from my books and knitting.

Outside on the stone patio, the wind is lifting over the meadow, the sun sinking and the cold creeping in. All around me looms that chilly darkness, the nearness of sunset, the hole in the night where dawn seems impossible. So much of my life I’ve teased and poked at this, and, conversely, pushed the vast cold away — through distraction and once-upon-a-time through drinking and work. Now, as the twilight drains away and night stakes in for its duration, I wander among the yet leafless apple trees, the garden with its green garlic nubs, drinking tea and listening to the birds settle down to sleep. My god, the myriad lessons of cancer. Note this, too: clench joy and fear in the same fist. See what happens.

Kitchen renovation paint considerations….

The die is cast?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Writing notes for a reading for Call It Madness, I scrawl in my notebook that this novel is jammed with secrets. Avah Lavoie, protagonist, stashes secrets of theft of longing, and she’s surrounded by secret-keepers, too. Early in the novel, I offer readers two clues. These questions underpin my life, too. No surprise.

The first that’s slipped into the narrative is the story of beavers in New England, how these creatures and their laborious dams once flooded New England, rendering that birch bark canoe a viable form of transportation. When the craze for beaver hats set in, the beavers were trapped nearly to extinction, drying up the land. The story of the past shapes the terrain where we live and how we see the world.

The second is Caesar’s line Alea iacta est — the die is cast. The machination of fate. It’s a question that’s arced through my life since I was a teenager, immersed in Russian novels. Now, from my Vermont house, in the tender dawn, pearly crescent moon hanging low in the horizon, the stars snuffing out as light grows, the robins striking up their day’s singing, this line returns to me. Is fate sealed for this country where, by circumstance, I live, a madman as a leader, intent to wreck destruction and pain, war crimes? Around me, the questions reverberates through everyone: how to live?

Sunday morning, the earth after this fierce winter softening, the daffodils pushing up through black earth, the delicate snowdrops pearly, persistent, the strength of these slender stalks a strain of secret, too.

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” — Leo Tolstoy

Natural resurrection.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air . . . It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Friday begins raw and shivery. I’ve shed my long underwear and regret it. By mid-afternoon, the sun’s emerged. I park along a muddy road and hike up through a soggy pasture to the stone cellar holes. A hundred years ago, a farm must have been rooted on this hillside, bracing against winter’s snowy wind, full of summer sun. A view of mountains and the Lamoille River Valley. Sugar maples dominate what remains.

As I approach, robins flutter, fly, resettle, their singing unbroken. I tie my coat around my waist, cram my hat in my pocket. At home, green nubs of lilies and crocuses emerge, just beginning their greening. Among the lilacs, I look for those daffodils.

Mighty spring, season of healing. The winter’s debris of compost and spent woodpile and last fall’s unclipped perennials emerge. Every year, spring rushes in with a surprise. A certain reminder of mortality, but so lovely, so marvelously endearing…

Knock it down, revise your life.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

March, northern Vermont, the long dragged-out amorphousness where winter drags its slushy sulkiness into sodden spring. I long for a few hours of blistering sun. This season was the weather my mother despised most, all those New Hampshire years of my childhood. One afternoon, she pulled over on a back road and instructed my siblings and me to run through a farmer’s soaked pasture, patchily emerged from a winter of snow, and head for the woods at the far end. We did not know who owned the field and argued. Go, she insisted, go. You kids need to run. So we ran.

My novel, Call It Madness, which will be out in at the end of June, in a month when I intend to swim, is about the unvarnished craziness of family, of fiercely knotted threads of desire and thwarted passion, how the stories that shape and mold our lives are buried generationally. The novel is not about my mother, but it’s for my mother, the woman now dead nearly two years. She was mercurial, passionate about love and destruction. In the long-beyond-time stretch of recent cancer treatments, those endless months on the couch, I often thought of her; she was the only family member who had endured the triple violence of cancer-and-chemotherapy-and-surgery, sheer survival tenuous as a snowdrop. My mother surprised me until the very end of her life, the whole range of the unexpected, from sorrow to contentment. As her youngest daughter, how little I knew her, and yet I carry her with me, in my own might and fallibility.

In these months of remission, I’ve learned from yoga that inquiry is a force, a variation of that impossible Socratic dictum, know thyself. Healing, I plot a venture into transforming my kitchen, my home’s heart, and hire a carpenter to take down a wall, open an exterior wall with windows. Am I crazy, I wonder. At the edges at least of madness, recklessly heady with survival, with the raw knowledge of mortality clenched in one fist.

When the vinyl flooring is ripped up, the carpenter and I ponder the hardwood boards, stained and blackened and scraped. The lives of previous occupants rises like mist, mesmerizing, unknowable. What remains are their scars. My cat and I sit on the dusty floor and share a bowl of arugula. Wet snow slides from the roof in the flowerbeds. I planted the gold compass flowers. Who planted the pink roses I’ll never know.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house…

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. — Robert Frost, “Directive”