Shirley Jackson

Storywalk.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I often read other blogs filled with all kinds of interesting things and wonder. Where on the planet are you writing? So often, I begin a post with “The weather turns foul or cheers up, the leaves unfurl or fall off and die….” Weather is ever-present around here. And yes, we’re still swimming, but the days are already dimming.

I found this lovely page from a children’s storybook along a path. The local children’s librarian put these on posts on a short path from the library to the lake. On my way into work this morning, I stopped at the lake and opened my lap. I worked intently for an hour, just me and three loons, and some woman who appeared with her two golden retrievers. The water lay flat and smooth, about as perfect as anything gets in this world.

Recently, I read over a few of Shirley Jackson’s terrific essays about writing. She writes, “The essence of the story is motion.” So, too, I wish we better understood this about life. That endless monologue running through my head… well, the walk through the woods is the essence of me.

Family Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

One of the more revealing titles of my recent reading is Akhil Sharma’s Family Life,  a novel hardly of the slick parenting magazine fare I leaf through in that dentist office I so frequently visit these days. A slim, fierce, terrific book.

This morning, reading another book about family life – Margot Livesey’s Mercury  – this line jumps out at me: “The human brain often juxtaposes the sublime and the trivial.”

The line encapsulates the book, true, but also domestic life.

Parenting often seems an endless routine of gathering twisted toddler socks from beneath the kitchen table. When my girls were teeny-tiny, I often muttered to myself during unbroken days a line from Shirley Jackson: “All day long, I go around picking up things.” The tooth-brushing trivial.

And yet, embedded like gems in the midst of sandbox squabbling, there’s marvelous moments: braiding my daughter’s hair, inhaling the familiar, salty scent of her scalp, listening to her stories.

The blue vase on the sideboard was from the Song dynasty, eleventh or early twelfth century. How had it survived nearly eight hundred years when I could barely survive forty? I was in that state between waking and sleeping, neither fully inhabiting my body nor entirely absent, when I heard footsteps. The mattress dipped.

– Margot Livesey, Mercuryfullsizerender