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Singing in the Dark

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This time of year, the darkness knits around us. Waking early, I’m awake for hours working into the light. Very early evening, I returned with the children in the full dark, the stars overhead distantly radiant in the pitch firmament. The shortest day of the year is now so near, I can feel the arc of our universe nearly rounding the bend, gradually slingshotting us back toward light.

This is my one life. Say you know.
Say this means many things, say snowy owl,
say three feet of snow, say kestrel. My one
life is here at the table, next to me. Say you know,
say fine night for soup, glad to have you,
how was your drive….  Say here,
One Life, settle in with us. Here is the fire.
Say here is a warm stone. Say sing.

Say Sing, Kerrin McCadden

 

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Plot, or Opening Doors

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My ten-year-old daughter told me she was in the school’s elevator the other afternoon and couldn’t remember whether she was supposed to press L for Lobby or 1 for the first floor. While the elementary school is micro-small, the schoolhouse was built over a 100 years ago, with the gymnasium and kitchen on the second floor. A number of years ago, the town opted to put in an elevator for public access, and, hence, my child with her buckets of compost in the elevator. The door opened… and she found herself looking at the first-and-second grade class.

She said, Ooops! and explained her predicament, before swinging the door shut and continuing on her school chore way. The teacher told her, Well, it’s nice to see you.

What a lovely surprise my daughter must have been behind those doors, a bashful smiling girl. Working out the plot of this second novel is like opening doors in my characters’ lives: what now? Too many times in our lives, the opened door isn’t necessarily a smiling girl with a bucket of lunch compost. I’ve often thought, What fresh new hell is meeting me now? But in fiction (as, I suppose, in life), opening a door means the unspooling of a new thread of story, and I try to remind myself, Greet that opened door with some moxie of optimism.

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

–– Rebecca Solnit

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Hardwick, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Unraveling and Knitting

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This cold, dank and inimitably dark season is also the yarn season. Unlike living, any knitting project can be unraveled and reknit. Late last night, knitting while reading my bell hooks library book propped open with my bare toes, I realized the needles and yarn I had mated didn’t fit. Still reading, I  unwound the hat and rolled up the yarn. This evening, I chose a smaller needle size, and this hat I’m knitting for a friend’s Christmas present is aptly on its way.

Not so, our lives.

I’m sometimes asked, But is your fiction real? Of course it’s real, but it’s also fiction. Isn’t the craft of writing rewriting ad infinitum? Take out a character, emphasize a plot point, weave through an image of a great blue heron? Our lives are bulkier and baggier things.

I was reminded of this, stopping along a roadside today, admiring how the trees knit into the sky. One of my childhood’s keenest memories is standing at the edge of a giant cornfield in Illinois, where our family was camping on one of our numerous cross country treks. I was likely ten, the age of my younger daughter now, and I stood with my father, excited as I have ever been about anything in my life. Good lord, all that corn and the sky! The world was limitless.

The true artist is never so lost in his imaginary world that he forgets the real world, where teenagers have a chemical propensity toward anguish, people between their thirties and forties have a tendency to get divorced, and people in their seventies have a tendency toward loneliness, poverty, self-pity, and sometimes anger. The true artist choses never to be a bad physician. He gets his sense of worth and honor from the conviction that art is powerful – even bad art.

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

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Rust

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

 

With so little snow and a great deal of sun, we spent some time walking through the neighbors’ fields today. When they bought the property, they dragged out all the abandoned farm machinery, the wheels and gears, and lumped it together on an old cement slab. The collection had been in the weeds for God knows how long, and doubtless it’ll remain clustered together, gradually rusting, accumulating leaves and the odd fallen stick, for a stretch of unknown eternity, too.

Unlike Robert Frost’s birch fences that rotted in three foggy mornings and one rainy day, machinery, having changed the landscape in such profound ways, slowly returns to the earth fleck by fallen fleck. This machinery has done all the hard moving it’s going to do.

I can’t but think there’s some odd comfort in even the mightiness of steel and internal combustion going the way of all things: that all the driving power of industrialism will yield to entropy, that the earth in her slow and patient way will fold back around the fortresses of men, and eventually have her way.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

— Alan Watts

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Spinning Planet

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Almost immediately after a children’s play at the Craftsbury Library tonight, my daughters ran outside. Was it the weirdly warm December weather? The joy of seeing a long-time friend? I sat on the back porch slouched in a rocking chair, watching the sun sink behind the Lowell ridge, listening to ten-year-old hysterical laughter.

My teenager appeared, and we were all crazed, wandering around the church, the gazebo, the war memorial. As the dusk steadily pressed down, the children raced across the Common. At the far end, I saw the white-painted fence, and nothing of the children but a smear of a red coat.

Spring fever? In December? In a world rapidly turning upside down? With my teenager, our conversation often seems one long meandering line of history, of the bloody business spanning centuries. But the world turned upside down is inescapable in this mud-season December, with my laundry hung out to dry on the clothesline.

The girls lay on the grass, and I teased them, Make snow angels. Christmas is coming! I pressed the toes of my boots against one of the girls’ feet. This same girl bequeathed me these boots a few years ago, when she had outgrown them. Having walked through some serious living in these boots, the sole under my right foot has split, a crack where water from the thawing earth bled up through my sock, soaking my skin.

In the twilight, she was laughing. How’s that for a composition? This glossy-eyed girl, giggling in the shifting bits of remaining light, ruddy-cheeked with gorgeous health, hair unraveling in a braid, her back and shoulders pressed into Vermont sod while overhead the constellations merge into view, and our planet spins steadily, on and on….

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul…

— Invictus

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Woodbury, Vermont

Broken Hearts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Via my lousy cell phone connection, I had a conversation with a person I’ve never met who’s writing a review of my novel. Almost immediately, he told me, You broke my heart. What was I to make of this? I never intended to break anyone’s heart, least of all through my writing.

But is the book broken-hearted? Of course. It’s adult fiction, about a woman and a family. Broken hearts are the way of the human world.

As I write this, my own two daughters are drawing at the kitchen table, the teenager unfolding practically before my eyes into her own young womanhood, the ten-year-old wearing her skis at the table, longing for the excitement of snow, ready to try her mettle. When they were little toddlers, I kept anticipating I’d figure out this mothering thing, that our life would settle down into some kind of pattern, maybe even get a little boring. But my children kept changing that. Oddly enough, the kids kept growing. It wasn’t enough to crawl; they had to walk, then definitely run. At one point, my older daughter surrounded herself with board books, kicking back on our scuffed pine floor with stuffed animals. Now, she read a fat C.S. Lewis grownup book this autumn, hard and philosophical.

All good writing (and I hope my book fits somewhere on that scale) is about loss, as loss is braided into our lives. Of course, I want my daughters to love, and love well, whom and what they love. And yet… I can’t help but wish, admiring these girls surreptitiously, learn from little pieces of loss, my darlings, know them truly and well, and be blessed with long and sweet life.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable.  But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.

— Madeline L’Engle, Walking On Water

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Hardwick, Vermont