travel

July, in stillness and fury.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Restless, these July days long and, I kid you not, fragrant with fat pink roses in my yard, I’m at a nearby pond not long before twilight, craving company and coolness. I crouch along the shoreline. Save for one sole swimmer, the water lies flat. From the one house along this wooded stretch, laughter spills.

As a child, my sibs and I had a picture book by Leo Leonni about a mouse named Frederick, an artistic rodent soul who saved up the colors of the summer to share in storytelling, hunkered down in the mouse nest, to get his tribe through the dark winter. Likewise, July. In a patch of mucky reeds, forget-me-nots stretch up, teeny blue blossoms. Surely these flowers fit into the biological world for some specific and clever reason. This evening, they’re simply delightful.

Far down the pond, the loons call, exquisite tremolo. This evening, I’m yet humming from Ocean Vuong’s recent reading in Greensboro, how he did that rare thing: in a theater of hundreds of souls, he read simply to me, as I let my knitting fall into my lap and I leaned forward against the balcony’s railings, listening and marveling, his words a river of shoveling snow and absent fathers, of napalm in the jungle and American factories, and how history and bloodshed and the resilience of poetry bind us as a species—each of us a unique drop in that river of flowing time.

The pond’s chill gnaws my flesh. On the sandy mud, we eat cherries. Talking, we will solve exactly none of the world’s conundrums tonight. The loons appear, two parents, two fledglings, on an evening swim and fish hunt. I’ve been here before, stark winter, silent ice, the crunch of snow beneath my boots. Now, the biting insects cluster along my bare legs, claiming bite-sized sips of my blood.

Last, a few readings for Call It Madness coming up. Please come, if you’re around my edge of Vermont, in sweet July.

Meadow Meeting House, in Corinth, VT, Sunday, July 12, 3 pm, with the remarkable Sasha Hom.

Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT, Tuesday, July 14, 7 pm.

A novelist, however, sees the idea of ‘a leisurely life’ as practically synonymous with ‘the waning of one’s creativity.’ For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die. — Haruki Murakami

On the Road…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My twenties were years of road tripping, Vermont to Washington state, lots of New Mexico, sleeping in the back of our black diesel VW Rabbit, 55 mpg, our Rand McNally shedding pages. Thirties were babies and learning to garden, raising high the roof beams, forties the scrambling decade of parenting alone and keeping kids shod and fed. Fifties, kids are paddling their own lives, and yet we’re tight, tight; cancer survivorship schooled us rapidly in what’s dear and what’s so easily lost.

Among these decades, my own unbroken thread of writing. Road trip with a self-made atlas.

A beloved friend hops into my car. We lived on the same dirt road for years. I would phone and say, It’s sleeting. Come walk with me. She was always game. This late afternoon, I drive south, that too familiar journey of Route 15 and I-91, heading towards Dartmouth-Hitchcock, but I park in pretty Hanover, NH, where I’ve been invited to read from Call It Madness — a title that reflects my own life — madness, madness, everywhere — both the crazy-making of divorce and cancer but also my own fierceness for my dear ones, for literature and the roses blooming around my house and the precipice I tread between ebullience and the frigid teeth of despair.

The loveliest of evenings at Still North Books. My reading companion, Shasta Grant, is true and gifted, the bookstore staff warm, the audience curious and kind. My friend and I are the last to leave, save for the cheery folks folding the chairs and emptying our water cups. I drive north into the night. The sun dwindles into gold and pink. We talk about cars and money, kids of course, drinking and books and death.

She gives me her apple. I eat and drive. Thirty years into our friendship, as the darkness folds around us, I think, What a long way we have come. In my driveway, we linger, the car’s engine clicking as it cools, the fireflies flickering. How happy I am to begin my own hand-crafted book tour for Call It Madness. In my youth, those decades when I leaned so hard into my life I hardly brushed my hair, I believed my life would flatten, temper into quietness. Oh friends, the world’s depths are revealed as bottomless crevasses and immense peaks, largely unknowable. What’s knowable is the stickiness of that apple’s juice on my fingers, the darting fireflies, the answer I gave to a stranger’s question at the end of the Still North Books reading: “My real flaw was cowardice.” I’ve long ago abandoned the flimsiness of that forgiveness concept, for myself or others. Life propels onward, word by word, sunset to sunrise, companionship in all weather.

A few things…. I’ll be on Bon Mot on Central Vermont Radio, Sunday, June 21, 5 p.m. Call It Madness book launch Tuesday, June 30, 7 p.m., at the Jeudevine Memorial Library in Hardwick, Vermont, sponsored of course by the hometown and most stellar Galaxy Bookshop.

Survive, professor! That’s all you really have to do. Keep the grass from creeping into eh carrots, deal with the woodchuck stealing the apples, patch up the pipes! — Makenna Goodman

June Love.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

First copies of Call It Madness in the Galaxy Bookshop.

After my long trip to northern New Mexico — sand and yucca, family in all its myriadness, green chili, and the sweet juniper breath of the desert night — I lean into Vermont’s lush early summer. Mostly, I keep to myself, planting my garden before this morning’s warm rain, stacking wood piece by piece, savoring the forget-me-nots that have appeared this year beneath the dwarf apple tree that is no longer any small thing. These days are a living Impressionist painting, lilac-scented pastels. In the night, my bones worn satisfyingly with hours of labor in the sun, I lie on my weather-splintered picnic table, the frogs singing, the Milky Way a celestial arc. I am not a piece in this puzzle, but a strand in the tapestry.

“Go down through the garden, dig up the radishes! Root up everything! Eat grass! Look for corn! Look for oats! Run all over! Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place.” E. B. White

Secret revealed.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Freakishly, by chance, I discover my mother’s given first name is different from the name she used. I’d never heard a whisper of this secret. As a writer, the discovery is material manna. As a daughter… well, strange news, indeed.

In the inexplicable alignment of fate, I’m a month away from publication of my third book, Call It Madness, a novel about young woman Avah who unexpectedly realizes her mother lied two decades ago when she claimed Avah’s great-grandfather died, his beloved house sold. Now, I unearth this secret my mother kept so well. I carry my mother’s name that was at once her name and not her name.

Where is the dusky line between fiction and life? Impossible, this seems, impossible, that I’ve written about my life in reverse. Kierkegaard wrote, “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely…”

How meagerly we know this world, the littleness of the stuff that structures our own stories. Stacking firewood on Sunday afternoon, I listen to a NYT story written by a sighted man about traveling with the unsighted. The upshot? How we understand the world in pieces. The whole is an impossibility for any one of us.

And yet, fiction aims to manifest a perfect miniature world, a shimmering sphere, a handful of secrets and mysteries revealed one-by-one, like a matryoshka doll. At its center, is there a grain of rice or a chip of coal? A folded fortune like a slip of paper in a sweet cookie, a koan to clench in a fist and ponder. A way to reflect the whole of life, this impossible life.

Bear, darker than midnight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

I’m walking up a fourth-class road when I spy a black shape moving along the upper end of the nearby hayfield. Vermont divides its roads into categories, from the interstates to dirt roads to the little-used former farm or forest roads that are snowed-cover in winter, mud-rutted in spring. I stand beside a wild apple tree, the blue view of the Worcester Mountains over my shoulder, and admire this bear, darker than midnight against the field’s glossy emerald. When green kindles in Vermont spring, it flourishes.

This place I’ve never walked, although I’ve seen maps and heard stories. The road treks uphill through the forest and dips down where Caspian Lake gleams, realm of summer visitors, but for the time, still the territory of the locals.

I find what I’m seeking and also what I’m not: the labor-dense stone walls whose once-upon-a-time fields are gone to forest, moss-covered cellar holes, twisted rusty remains of farm equipment. Peepers chorus. An old farmhouse with an enormous veranda on a hill must have once had a royal view of the lake, and endured bitter winter winds. Someone has tried to cut the wild reclamation from the house and mostly failed.

In the sunlight, I linger, wondering who lived here, their stories silent. The two-story house has large dormers and many windows; it’s not a fly-by-night, tossed-up structure. On my way home, I pause where I saw the bear, searching, but of course the bear has moved on. Three ducks fly low over my head. The earth exhales its sweetness of thawing mud, the turning-over of last autumn’s leaves, this summer’s great promise.

“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” — Jack London

Journey of many layers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

One of the best journeys of my life was when I was 19 and had long hair I rarely brushed. My then-boyfriend and I were hitchhiking (don’t hitchhike any more, folks) at the Greenfield, MA, I-91 exit, heading north, home to Brattleboro. A man driving an old convertible Cadillac, a great white Moby Dick beast, picked us up. In my memory, he’s smoking a cigar and grinning. While he and the BF sat in the front, shooting the shit, I sprawled in a backseat so enormous it could host a family. I surely wore no seatbelt. My god, on that July evening, I felt like I was flying.

This week, a grad school friend of mine invited me to spend a morning as a visiting writer with his students. All the layers of this trip—the journey south, the first solo I’ve taken since the cancer (my girls urging me to drive carefully, have fun), the stop in Brattleboro where I’d lived in my twenties and was happy, the visit with my dear friend and his wife who I immediately feel is a kindred soul, in their inviting house with a backyard vernal pool and singing peepers, a night of rainstorms, the morning’s magnolia blossoms gleaming pearly—all these layers folded into these writing students who arrived with questions and notebooks, hungry. In this breaking world, what a joy to swim for a bit with others in the passionate stream of loving literature, in all its myriad forms.

On my way home, I stop at a café near Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. By then, early afternoon, I’m worn down. The café was a favorite of my daughters, in all those months I was treated. Last June, when I was finally well enough to join them, no longer sequestered in a hospital room, they bought me a plain croissant, and I ate a few bites of its inner softness. This afternoon, on the sunny patio, I devour pickled vegetables, soaked in vinegar—something I could not eat last year. Delicious.

April, mud season, it’s just me and a young woman with an infant cradled on her chest. I read for a bit, and then as I’m gathering my things, a car pulls up with two young women. They run to the woman and the baby, laughing and shouting, gleeful.

Midafternoon, I have a ways to drive yet, along the wide river and over the mountains. I take a small walk first through the pine forest behind the café. Warm sunlight filters through the canopy. No ephemerals emerge yet, but soon, soon, as the trout lily leaves spread over the earth. My mother would have noticed the young mother, her sleeping babe, the joyous friends meeting this new life. Such satisfaction she would have taken. One more element folded into this journey. Then I head north.

…. And for folks around me, Helen Whybrow will read from her fantastic The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding from her translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars at Greensboro’s Highland Center for the Arts, Saturday, followed an artists’ reception for a stunning group exhibition celebrating Vermont’s pastoral life. I was lucky to write about this for Seven Days.

I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. ~ Helen Whybrow