creativity

Heart Runneth Over…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The Gihon River runs through the Vermont Studio Center campus, turning as a river does just out my studio window. All day long, the mallards do their duck thing, swimming up and downstream. In the wild honeysuckle’s tiny bits of green leaves, cardinals perch.

In this week I’ve spent at the Vermont Studio Center, I’ve leaned with a ferocity and joy into writing. A week to write, unfettered by the everydayness of commerce and cooking, of checking the car oil, adhering to those endless lists of can the house insurance get a lower premium, and am I ever going to paint the back side of my house? A thousand things comprise a life — some stupidly trivial like repairing a kitchen cabinet knob, some sacredly profound, like mourning a parent’s passing. 

Does writing, does sculpture, printmaking, poetry, make the world a finer place? The jury’s out perhaps, but art certainly unites the finer parts of who we are as humans, and makes this life more bearable.

Thank you again for reading.

Where I Am.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

For a week, I’m lucky to be staying at the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, tucked in Johnson, Vermont, with writers and visual artists. A word, first: like anyone in this culture driven to create art, I’ve been swimming upstream (clumsily) for what seems like most of my life. But this magical place offers notsomuch an antidote but an alternative possibility.

In one way, I feel like I’m a college student at tiny rural Marlboro College again, eating communal meals with the same cohort, attending presentations, talking and so much talking. How’s your book going? What are you doing with copper? So many interesting people writing and sculpting and painting. But, like everyone else here, I’m far beyond college age, using my studio hours fiercely.

In my studio building, a former resident wrote in a communal notebook about arriving worn down from the grind of capitalism, and how rejuvenated she left after her stay here. I’ve long realized that our capitalist model often draws out the mean and petty strands of us, like a competitive gardening streak that weirdly surfaced in a long-ago baby group I attended. Which serves, of course, exactly no one at all. For this bit of time and space, I’m savoring this dear space, where my back is watched, and I can do my work.

… Last, thank you all for your notes and emails since my mother’s death. My father recently uploaded his memoir, 87 years of his indisputably distinct life.

Sweeping Out Inner Clutter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments
Spring window, upstairs study.

Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”

Dazzling light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Here’s the weird thing about this March: cabin fever is not a thing. March has always marked the time of year when snow and cold has piled unrelentingly on us for veritable months. Not so, this warm year. But climate change does squat for the dearth of light, and certainly nothing for the dissatisfaction that’s creeping into our social consciousness. I am a woman who craves the planetary might of blooming crocuses, the radiant headiness of a forest strewn with spring beauties, the serene hover of a bee tucked into a downy apple blossom. Patience, patience.

Walking home from the library, a sudden snowfall drenches my eyelashes.

On this early morning, poetry:

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end

of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now

I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives

two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck,

out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.

Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running

for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water,

but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.

The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot,

strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls

of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog,

fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything

broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse

of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way

or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

— Barbara Crocker

Layers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

A week of sun ends in scattered raindrops and my hands dirtied with creosote from cleaning out my wood stove. The cats hunker against the wall, glaring at my labors, annoyed at the chill descending into their cat realm. My daughter, fluent in Cat Language, feeds the creatures small pieces of roast chicken. I brew more coffee.

Mid-March, the sudden season of reckoning: what is it I’m doing? This is the week of self-doubt and the week of the kindness of strangers, too. March has long meant the season of sweet maple and cold hands, of leaning hard into work, the season of faith that spring’s crocuses and snowdrops and ephemerals will return—that they always return—to remind myself that the wider world holds us inevitably, for good or ill and sometimes for both.

Cutting into with the ax,

I was surprised at the scent.

The winter trees.

— Buson

Teenagers Recite Poems

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Reluctantly, my daughter drags herself to a required high school poetry recitation.

While I chat with parents I haven’t seen in ages, I see her laughing with a boy she’s known since third grade.

Adolescents and poetry — how fun! One boy gives a comedic performance of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” beginning by asking the prompter, Where am I stopping now?

Another boy’s fingers tremble as he reads a particularly beautiful poem. A shy girl comes alive.

Afterwards, talking in the dark on the short drive home from the theater, my daughter tells me about each student, how they chose their two poems, and what their voice was like. My daughter’s second poem was Frost’s Two roads diverged in a narrow road, so familiar, such a beloved poem. Nervous for her first poem, Emily Dickinson, she gained her voice with the second, her eyes on the upper balcony, her voice clear, melodious, utterly her.

Tonight the bear
comes to the orchard and, balancing
on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees,
hanging onto their boughs,
dragging their branches down to earth.
From ‘The Bear” by Susan Mitchell
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