poverty

A Whole Person.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Everyone has their own familiar paths and places. This empty stretch of interstate in the Netherlands between Vermont and New Hampshire my daughters and I have traveled countless times now, in all varieties of weather and moods. Now, so many years into this, one daughter is grown, the other on the cusp. My daughters look at my brother and me with a mixture of so many things — what, precisely, neither he nor I need to speculate. Laughing, he suggest to them that he and I equal a full person, our meager strengths and copious broken places complementary. I suggest, Maybe even a little more than one person….

I’m grateful to be invited to read and speak at the Cabot Public Library Tuesday, April 11, 7 p.m. in a real-life deal. Come if you can.

And — definitely worth a read — Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America.

Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.

Visitor, An Ask

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

On a sleety day in rural Woodbury, the bright spot in my afternoon is the woman who walks to the library — a mile or so on slushy backroads because she and her partner have no vehicle. The truck died.

She checks out books, we talk about men and raising kids, the cost of living in Vermont. I’ve been working in rural libraries and schools long enough now that I quickly know who’s hard up versus who’s driving that old Subaru because an old Subaru might make them look a little less affluent. In the sogginess of March, my library visitor is sharp and funny, with an amusing eye for details. Sitting there, in the warm library, after a few hours of relative quiet to catch up on work, I winch, thinking of how carless-ness, unemployment, and rural Vermont can crowd up against a person.

When I leave, I drive her down the road to Hardwick, the two of us, talking, talking. It’s after 5, and while dusk isn’t far off, the day still holds light. She’s pragmatic about her chances for a ride back up the road. I never know. Then, just before she gets out, she asks for two dollars, for him, the boyfriend.

… understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world’s bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.

― James Agee

IMG_1309

This.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

There’s a place in Maughm’s Of Human Bondage where the main character, Philip Carey, sits down and eats dinner with a family in a London tenement. Although I haven’t read this section in years, it stuck with me, because Carey eats happily with the family, no longer squeamish about accepting food cooked in less than pristine conditions. Not so many years ago, I might have written what Carey learned was “humility.” Perhaps. But maybe he had been hungry often enough in his life to appreciate company and shared food, and had no fear about poverty’s uncleanliness.

I first read this novel when I was 22. I was living in a downtown Brattleboro apartment where a running box fan fell out of our second-floor window to the sidewalk below, and, by fate’s luck, missed pedestrians on that busy Friday sidewalk. Paired up with Walden, these two dissimilar books have become the books of my adult life.

Sitting in the Washington County Courthouse, where I have become a known woman, I thought of clubfooted Philip Carey, knocking around poor and rainy London, homeless at times, desperate to become a doctor. It was fitting to think of him, in that enormous and ugly building, filled with an apparently ceaseless flow of human misery. What would be the point of all this, really, if you didn’t pass through, and, on the other side, cherish pulling up a chair and eating with others, no matter what the circumstance?

He was always seeking for a meaning in life… He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.

– W. Somerset Maugham

FullSizeRender.jpg