Some Novels I Might Have Sadly Missed

January 13, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In a box of books my sister shipped to me years ago, I found a copy of Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up. In those pre-internet days, I didn’t realize this little gritty novel had garnered its own classic cult following. When I recommended the book to someone else who was reading Crime and Punishment, he laughed and said that would have been a good title for Dostoyevsky’s book, too.

From the fifty-cent bin in a library book sale, I pick up Joshua Mohr’s Some Things That Meant The World To Me. My 19-year-old lifts the book from the kitchen tale and mentions the cover is from “Wheel of Fortune,” which makes me ask how she’s so intimate with that game show.

My daughter reminds me she works in a nursing home.

She asks about the ink splatters on the cover below the “Wheel of Fortune” lettering — the half of the cover that made sense to me. Rorschach test I tell her, and offer a brief explanation.

I’d probably fail that test, she says, not perturbed in the least.

She bundles up, heading out for a ski. 11 below zero.

We’re all writing about the same things, we’re all trying to evoke emotion. How are you going to find a new image, a new way to say it that your audience hasn’t experienced before? If a character comes in and just blurts out, “I’m sad,” it’s a pretty bad way for a story to start. But, if I describe a woman in Dolores Park at three-o-clock in the morning, drinking tequila out of the bottle while sitting there hunched up, and suddenly the sprinklers come on. She doesn’t even move. She just continues to drink tequila. The reader comes out of that scene understanding she’s sad by putting the pieces together.

—Joshua Mohr

Photo by Molly S.

Got Wool?

January 12, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

When I was 19, my mother gave me a heavy wool, intricately cabled sweater she had spent years knitting and I was certain I would never wear. I was living with my then-boyfriend in the coldest place I ever lived — and anyone who knows me knows that means something. The beautiful old farmhouse was at the end of dirt road in southern Vermont. In one half of the house lived a single mother and her young daughter (I cringe now to think of what abysmal neighbors we were to her), and my friends and I housesat the other half.

The house was heated by a wood furnace. It was December, and the wood supply we had been left was nearly depleted. I certainly knew nothing about heating with wood. I was greener than the wood we burned.

I wore that sweater for the entire month I stayed there. I slept in it. I wore the sweater so hard and for so many years that only pieces of it remained when I moved from my last house.

What taught me to love scratchy wool? Cold Vermont.

5 below zero this morning….. Could be much colder. ‘Tis the knitting season.

Use It Up. Wear It Out. Make It Do. Or Do Without.

— Calvin Coolidge

Wet Wool Memory

January 10, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I buy my daughter a pomegranate, because she loves the fruit, because of the red it brings to our snowy Vermont landscape, and because Saroyan wrote about pomegranates. My parents did not buy pomegranates. As a kid growing up in New Hampshire, I wondered about that mysterious fruit — much like I wondered about Turkish Delight, the Narina sweet my father found in Ann Arbor and bought for us with great joy.

On a snowy day, the girls discover a coolant leak in my car. The mechanic who fixes the leak explains to my teenage daughter what the level of coolant should be in a car, when to add coolant, and when to worry. Standing between the two of them, I study his unzipped Carhartt jacket, stained with motor oil. Like Proust’s madeleine, so much of my past was redolent with wet and snowy clothes, work and words twined together.

Like that, then, the past’s gone. The girls and I stand outside the garage in a snowstorm again. I tell my older daughter as I always do, drive carefully. Laughing, they’re off again.

From one of my mentors, poet Ruth Stone:

Yes, we are everything, every experience we’ve ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don’t even began to touch upon it. There’s an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.

Studded Snows

January 8, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

What’s the one thing that makes Vermont winters survivable? Friends? Laughter? Knitting? A chicken roasting in the oven? Nope: snow tires.

Driving to Burlington on a snowy Sunday morning to interview a young poet, I kept thinking, At least I bought new snow tires. When my daughter disappears in the darkness to work, I think, I’m so glad I shelled out for those tires.

On my way home through the Calais back roads, I pull over at the town hall, a beautiful and somewhat mysterious building to me — why is it here? what’s the history that’s now disappeared around this building? I’ve been listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and laughing so hard I’m actually crying.

Outside my little Toyota, I’m immediately reminded of winter’s enchanting beauty, the bit of wind on my cheeks and the snowflakes in my eyelashes. Sunday afternoon, and no one’s out and about, save for one grownup far down the road, walking a dog. Leaving my car at the roadside, I walk down to the meeting house and stand there, staring up at the steeple in the gauzy snow, listening. Then I put those snow tires to use again.

Winter seclusion —
Listening, that evening,
To the rain in the mountain.

— Issa

Simple Saturday

December 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I make an error knitting a hat — I skip the beginning half of a cable round. Compensate for the error and hope it’s not apparent? Or unravel (again) and start over?

Thus, the allure of craft — the potential to make something beautiful by getting it exactly right.

Not so, parenting.

On a post-Christmas slushy and raw day, the 13-year-old girls find me holed up in a corner of Montpelier’s Capital Grounds. It’s a day unfit for for their skiing plans, impossible to sled or ice skate. I close my laptop and suggest we walk. Even the sidewalks are sketchy with ice.

Too icy in Hubbard Park’s woods, we walk through the steep-streeted neighborhoods behind the capital, stop to admire six grazing deer, and muse about the houses we pass. What would it be like to live here? the girls wonder, contemplating their adult lives. Where will we go?

On the drive home through the dusk and a blowing snow that surrounds my little car in Calais, the girls both sit in the backseat as they did when they were little, eating cold dumplings and playing songs they think will shock me. Instead, I’m mesmerized.

At a gas station in Hardwick, I fill the tank in my shirt sleeves. In the backseat, the girls unroll the window and tease me, telling me to put on a coat, and suddenly I start dancing, lifting my arms over my head in a silly, made-up song about December and joy. A bitter wind blows along the highway. I leap a little higher, in our few moments of merriment, before I reach for my coat, too.

The winter wind
flings pebbles
at the temple bell

— Buson

Bloody Nose

December 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My daughter’s nose has been bleeding for days — a trickle, a stream, and suddenly she bleeds steadily from both nostrils.

7:30 on an utterly dark evening just after Christmas: we’re at a gas station at the edge of town on what feels like the coldest evening of the year. Save for a teenage boy in the convenience store, playing on his phone, no one’s around.

While my older daughter hands paper towels to her sister in the car, I stand under the florescent lights and call the ER. What’s the threshold for a bloody nose? I ask. I get fever, but when I should I worry about a bloody nose? Utterly unconcerned, the nurse tells me I’ll know.

On a post beside me, I read a dirty sign — Fresh Sandwiches To Go — and wonder how many years ago that sign was someone’s bright idea.

I’ll know?

Through the car window, I see my daughter’s eyes, frightened.

Over the holidays, my brother told her all minerals were formed in supernovas and made their far way to earth through meteorites. How cool is that? he said. Our bodies are created from ancient stars.

A single pickup truck passes along the two-lane highway.

The night is utterly still, the darkness beating around us — alive — the pulse of the universe, miraculous with ancient remnants of stars, my open eyes at the edge of the infinite unknown.

Then we head home, where the cats sprawl, sleeping.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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