novelist

Sips of May.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

As the spring dusk settles down, I’m wandering around the edges of my garden. The lilacs have just begun opening, a tiny four-petaled blossom here, another there, the remainder of that lavender flower still knotted, not yet relaxed into the wide open spring season.

I’m in my ragged jeans, dirt under my nails, when my neighbor pulls into her driveway and gets out of her Prius. She’s wearing what she calls her rag-bag dress, and the two of us make a kind of pair. I’ve known her since our oldest kids were babes in arms, not yet eating smashed carrots.

It’s been a year for each of us — and I mean that: a year. We both have college-aged kids in and out of our houses. Under the fragrance of pear blossoms, we immediately head into that long-running conversation we have about her work and my work, about writing and art, about aging parents. The half moon rises over my apple tree.

May, in all her radiant beauty. Here I am, with a hundred chores in one day — a hot water heater repair, more writing, plant arugula and Brussel sprouts, my constant fiddling with the wood pile, the daughter chat. How this Vermont world loves to green. Yes, and again, more, yes, yes.

Where I Am.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 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.