Late Night Reading

September 24, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

As summer blended into autumn, the days were warm enough to swim, but we simply didn’t.

Instead, I lie awake at night, listening to the tree frogs thrip, thrip, thrip, singing as though this season will linger on and on, and then it’s me and the cat lying on the couch in the middle of the night, reading about economics and slavery, and when that’s too much for those tiny wee hours — while the stars pass over our roof — the cat suggests Alan Watts, which has somehow been shoved down the back of the couch. The book is an old paperback that I either swiped from my dad’s shelves when I was in college, or he passed along to me. Which of us can remember any longer?

Finally, the rain pours down in an enormous wash.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

~ Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

Photo by Molly B.

Book From the Past

July 26, 2019July 26, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Stopping by the new coffee shop in Hardwick last weekend — Front Seat Coffee — I discovered this gold-covered book which I am darn sure was The Book of my childhood. My dad actually bought this book for our house; he didn’t check it out of the library or stand in a bookstore reading it — his two main ways of gleaning information when I was a kid. He bought it and used it.

Need heating vents upstairs? Consult the book. Toilet broken? Get out the book, kids. Hot water heater on the fritz, again? Book. Move the washing machine, install a kitchen sink, put in a window or an outside door? Book, book, and book.

Inside are the classic ‘exploded view’ diagrams where my siblings and I honed our reading skills. Everything’s there, except how to smartly deal with the IRS…. a whole other lesson.

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!

— Faulkner

Female Talk

July 14, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A friend and I both read Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. We compare notes: where are you? Reading, I wonder what my friend will think of this section, or that; I wonder what we’ll say. Irritatingly, Taddeo divides these women’s three stories into mixed up pieces, so last night, I skipped through the book and simply read a story straight through.

My daughters return in the night and a rainstorm, bubbling with stories of kayaking and a friend. We talk and talk. Underneath, I sense how much more they’ve shared together, these three females, ages 14 to 20. I can’t help but wonder what I was talking about at that age. Not enough, I’m sure.

Three Women is about sex — sexual power and the inverse of that, sexual vulnerability. Good lord, I think, reading: finally.

Why Read?

February 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

February — surely the freaking longest month of the year in Vermont.

Unable to endure the unremittingness of winter, I’ve taken over the couch with my laptop and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. Unableto tell my friends and library patrons about this book — as then I might be forced to hurry, hurry and read, read, to pass this novel along — I’m sunk down deep in this story. What to love? The book is the American road trip (and I’m a sucker for road trip stories, a veteran of innumerable mishaps along my own blue highway adventures), told by a mother who understands the importance of buying coffee for grownups and cookies for the kids, of unrequited lust, of a marriage bending, of the thrust of creative work, of how all those pieces fit and don’t fit together.

I slept on this couch for over a year after my husband left, unable to sleep in our former bed, the room we built with the balcony and double glass doors, the windows on three sides, the moon rising over my prolific garden. The couch, I discovered, was enormously comfortable, and the (former) marriage bed a possible remnant from the Middle Ages.

I purchased this book with library funds, with actual property tax dollars from the taxpayers in Woodbury, many of whom I know. When I’m finished with the novel, I’ll pass it along, happy to hand it over to my reading friends. But in the meantime, I spy many February days on the calendar remaining. I’m in no particular rush to finish. The brighter and warmer days of spring are most likely an illusion — and I’m hoping for a breathtaking ending to this novel…..

But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden…

― William Carlos Williams

Trout Fishing Reminescences

January 4, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m listening to a recent This American Life podcast, when a section of Brautigan’s The Abortion is read aloud, I lay down the scissors I’m holding. I’m sixteen again, hidden in the public library stacks, unable to believe what I’m reading. What is this? Who is Brautigan?

An instant fan of Brautigan and simultaneously unable to exactly figure out why, when I listen to his words read aloud, I suddenly see his writing is all reverence, all poetry, all a hymn to living — in the most utterly mundane way — an acknowledgement of love and love gone awry, of abortion and bliss — funny and sorrowful and joyous.

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.

― Richard Brautigan

160588

Reading

January 2, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

By lucky chance, I start reading Joshua Mohr’s Sirens — memoir of writing, drug use, broken spiritual and physical hearts — and I can’t stop. The slender book reminds me of when I was twenty, reading Death on the Installment Plan in bed in a second-floor Brattleboro apartment, savory from the downstairs Korean restaurant. Like Celine, Mohr’s writing is full of life as that Brattleboro Main Street, or as desolate as a snowy midnight.

Check out Two Dollar Radio’s Santa Fucked Up sale.

Our lives are always in flux, so many contradictions comprising our identities…. We are never one thing. I was never only the heart defect, only the author or junkie or husband or father or professor or drunk. I wear all these like layers of skin. Like stars creating a constellation.

— Joshua Mohr, Sirens

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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