write

Dumpster Raiding, Poetry, Independence Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Ocean Vuong reads at a nearby arts center that is built in a farm field with a stage modeled on the Globe Theater. My friend and I cruise in, nearly late, and the parking lot is full. Hundreds of people have arrived. On this holiday weekend, I’ve swam and eaten ice cream, stepped inadvertently from friend to friend, like the twilight walk that ended in darkness on a trail, two small women talking, talking, fireworks booming in the blackness around us.

Vuong reads mesmerizingly, like a dream. He begins with remarking that humanity began in poetry and war, and how this will shake out after the Anthropocene is yet of course to be determined. By the reading’s end, I wipe tears from eyes. Immensely talented, utterly humble, Vuong offered homage to craft of storytelling—its essential role in all human life—and to the women who raised him. Four Vietnamese women in hardscrabble Massachusetts wrested free from their bad men and raised seven sons. None of these women were writers, but they were all oral storytellers who told their stories to salvage their dignity from the harms of the men. The repair was for their sons—and themselves.

And the poetry and war where Vuong began? By the hour’s end, his words stream through me, like that Buddhist retreat I attended last summer, my body still bitten by cancer to more bones than flesh. In those days, for fleeting moments I could envision my own near death, that this body I’ve used so hard will go down into soil and stone, that tendrils of roots and melting snow will erase me from this world of language and teeming desire, and yet I will have never gone anywhere at all.

Likewise, listening, I realize the poet carried all of us, not one more than another, along his mellifluous words, that the human history of this country, America, is inextricably bound in the polarity of war and poetry, a profound rushing flood of passing time and undefinable generations.

Later, my dear friend headed home to her dog and her life, I wandered along the back end of the village where a dumpster lies overturned. From the rubble, I extricated a glossy Dorothea Lange photo, the famous portrait of a mother and children. I rolled it up and tucked it beneath my arm. For you, I write for you, because you are me.

NOTHING

We are shoveling snow, this man and I, our backs coming closer
along the drive. It’s so quiet I can hear every flake on my coat. I
used to cry in a genre no one read. What a joke, they said, on fire.
There’s no money in it, son, they shouted, smoke leaking from
their mouths. But ghosts say funny things when they’re family.
This man and I, we take the weight of what will vanish anyway
and move it aside, making room. There is so much room in a
person there should be more of us in here. I wave to you, traveler,
inches away but never visible from where I am. Are you warm
where you are? Are you you where you are? Something will come
of this. In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a
loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more
of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call
it Progress. We’re in our thirties now and I rolled the dough just an
hour ago, pushing my glasses up my nose with my flour-dusted
palm as I read, reread, the hand-scrawled recipe given me by the
man’s grandmother, the one who, fleeing Stalin, bought a ticket
from Vilnius to Dresden without thinking it would stop, it so
happened, in Auschwitz (it was a town after all), where she and
her brother were asked to get off by soldiers who whispered, keep
moving, keep moving like sons leading their mothers through
wheat fields in the night. How she passed through huddled coats,
how some were herded down barb-wired lanes. The smoke from
our mouths rising as the man and I bend and lift, in silence, the
morning clear as one inside a snow globe. For how can we know,
with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that
survives? The man pours a bag of salt over the pavement. But
from where I’m standing it looks like light is spilling out of him,
like the ray of dusty sun that found his grandmother’s hands as
she got back on the train, her brother at her side, smoke from the
engine blown across the faces outside blurring into pine forests,
warped pastures, empty houses with full rooms. The man
clutches his stomach as if shot, and the light floods out of him, I
mean you—because something must come of this. Poetry makes
nothing happen, someone who is dead now said after a friend’s
death. When the guard asked your grandmother if she was
Jewish, she shook her head, half-lying, then took from her bag a
roll, baked the night before, tucked it in the guard’s chest pocket.
She didn’t look back as the train carried her, newly seventeen,
toward where I now stand, on a Sunday in Florence,
Massachusetts, squinting at her faded words: sift flour, then beat
eggs until “happy-yellow.” The train will reach Dresden days before
the sky is filled with firebombers. More smoke. A bullet in her
brother under rubble, his name everywhere outside her like the
snow falling on your face forty years later, on December 2, 1984,
while your mother carries you, alive only three hours, the few
steps to the mini-van where your grandmother, nearly sixty now,
crowns your head with her brother’s name. Peter! she says, Peter!
Peter! as if the dead could be called back from rubble into new,
stunned bones. The snow has started up again, whitening the
path as though nothing happened. Oh, to live like a bullet, to
touch people with such purpose. To be born going one way,
toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked
for but then choose the room where your hunger ends—which
part of war do we owe such knowledge? It’s warm in this house
where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then.
Let it be big enough for everyone, even the ghosts rising now
from this bread we tear open to see what we’ve made of each
other. I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but
half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not save us. I
know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice
from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing you say,
laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe
you. I shouldn’t, but I do.

~ Ocean Vuong

Multitudes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A friend comes for cheese sandwiches and raspberries, and we walk through the hydrangeas and across the cemetery and downtown to the Galaxy Bookshop where Garret Keizer launches his new book. The evening is illuminated with sunlight. Keizer reads well, and at the end, my hands folded over my knitting in my lap, I feel how this room of friends and strangers leans together, yoked by the intensity and compassion of his words. He thanks the audience and says drive home carefully.

Over those sweet raspberries, we’d talked about the curious threads that knot through communities, the connections between people known in segments. Likewise, we comprehend this universe in all its radiance and brutality through a smudged lens. This week, in a nearby town, an unimaginable car crash.

Lingering at the bookstore’s door, two old friends and I muse about these strange political days. One friend ventures that collective celebrations, like the recent Knicks’ win, keep us buoyant. As a writer, I’ve always leaned into words, the shelter of creation, the force of imagination. Yet, there are realms where language no longer suffices. Nine years ago, we moved into this house. I opened the living room windows, and the perfume of roses washed through the rooms. Nine years? a friend asks. What does that feel like?

It feels like multitudes.

… Last, grateful for this nice write-up of Call It Madness in the Times Argus.

Shift in POV.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
(photo G Stanciu)

My daughter sends word and photos of walking on Lake Champlain, frozen hard. I send word back, Be mindful! For those of us who love to swim and lounge on lakes and ponds, walking on the ice in the dead of winter is exhilarating, a flip in view in these cold months.

11 degrees this morning when I rise in the dark and shovel ashes from the woodstove while the cats mewl a protest for breakfast. I’m still thinking of those photos, and how it feels to have the cold air descend on your cheeks and walk that border between hypothermic water and all that sky. In a troubled winter I worked in a nearby town, I’d walk on the lake’s ice at noon and lie down and stare up at the sky. There were a few ice fishing shanties, never a sign of anyone, just me and the crows, all ice and the limitless sky and whatever the heavens had to offer. Sometimes spitting snow, sometimes endless blue, sunlight without warmth.

Heart of February. The skiing is excellent. A friend who I’ve known forever picks me up, and we walk along an ice-and-sand-strewn road. Below, the valley where the Black River and Route 14 is hidden in the folds of mountains. We look across and muse at the snow we can see on the mountains’ forest floor, how the bare trees reach up towards the sky.

Full moon:
my ramshackle hut
        is what it is. — Issa

Nurses.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 26 Comments

If you don’t know nurses, you will, or someone you love will. In my past year of cancer-and-chemo appointments, of those dozen hospital stays, in variations of days to weeks, the nurses were my very best friends. Nurses cajoled me to eat chicken soup and drink water (even a sip, just try); they were kind to me and looked out for my daughters. They taught us the ropes of the hospital ship: the habits of doctors and surgeons, how to adjust a bed and order food, find the light switches, turn up the room’s heat, find warm blankets. They offered orange juice and sandwiches to my daughters and hotel vouchers. The nurses told me I would live.

Nurses taught me about IVs, how not to bend my arm, what downstream occlusion meant, and when I must absolutely ring immediately for a nurse. They helped me to shower when I couldn’t stand, and never laughed when I said I forgot I had no hair. But they did tell funny stories and made me laugh. When I had a terrifying reaction to a chemo drug that was absolutely necessary for me to endure, a nurse sat with me for hours.

There was that terrible ED visit when I couldn’t stop throwing up from pain, and I was too weak to talk, and the nurse stayed long after his shift ended, holding my hand while I cried. There was yet another awful stay in the ED, those three nights in the room with the beige metal walls and the heat that wouldn’t turn off, and the nurse and the MD together figured out a pain med plan that brought me back to my body, that made the cancer bearable again.

Another nurse helped me get discharged on a spring day when I pleaded to go outside and see the apple blossoms, to have sunlight and wind on my face; she arranged for my daughter to sit with me on a bench and sip hibiscus tea, and she arranged for the hotel room where I slept all afternoon and then traveled in the morning across the road again, back to the cancer center for more chemo. She did this to help me heal. The chemo nurses tend the frail and the hopeful, the recovering and the dying. I had no port, so my arms were bruised and scabbed from months of sticking, and these fine nurses turned my forearms over and over and never failed me. Who in your life never fails you? They took such care.

I could write on and on. The nurse that first visit to the ED, who knew from a scan that I had metastatic cancer before I did. He walked in my room and looked at my daughters with such compassion. We did not know, but he did. He knew the hardship that lay ahead of my dear daughters.

The nurses, unfailingly, cared me as one of their own. I have notes in my journals, names and stories of strangers who cared so tenderly for me and my daughters, but really what I have is gratitude, admiration, and such sorrow for the unnecessary murder of one of our tribe.

The Goddamn Gray, the Brilliance of Language.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A year ago, my daughter was driving me to the local ER, yet again, under the frigid winter sky. Wordless, I leaned my head against the side window of her Subaru, staring at the faraway pricks of stars vanishing and reappearing among the clouds. In the darkness, I fixated on one thought—the white hospital bed, the clear liquid drugs that would make the pain cease—and held to that, my lifeline. Cancer-and-chemo, in its infinite complexity, is a monotone landscape. In all those months, my existence was the blackness of pain, the temporary light of relief-from-pain, the crimson drug injected into my veins. Occasionally, a cardinal at a feeder, blood oranges, and then I couldn’t eat those, either, and I remained alive on Saltines and water.

I keep thinking of those below zero nights as I drive this night to the opposite end of town. There, with a friend in a place where I’ve never been, we eat drunken noodles and green curry, and then drive again through the darkness and the drifting snow that’s no threat, simply prettiness. At the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, we settle into the dining hall with the residents. We’re greeted warmly, and the room is scented with the lingering remains of a savory dinner, of coffee and wine and the fragrance of flowers likely from the tables freshly scrubbed. This is a dear place, where I’ve been lucky to stay and work hard, meet friends and share stories about creativity, its hardness and joy.

Rigoberto González reads magnificently, his words, reminding me of when I was a teenager reading James Joyce for the first time, thinking yes, yes, this is what writing can do, push us into a place where we glimpse the world for a moment in all its shimmering and confounding complexity, its immense sorrow, utter fun, or the way a hand plucks a pebble from a river and holds it dripping and glistening to the sunlight.

At home, I stand in the darkness that is sodden with cold, a forerunner of the mighty freeze rushing this way. The crescent moon pushes against the clouds. In those underworld months, the goddamn gray occasionally scattershot with goldfinches exploding from bare branches, my fate might easily have veered another path. A storm and brutal cold loom over this nation submerged beneath political nefariousness.

This terrible disease, this exacting instructor, taught me brutal lessons. Among these, savor these draughts of warmth, recognize heart. Know this value. Do not disparage.

“Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
― Anne Boyer

Call It Madness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 26 Comments

My newest novel’s advance copies arrived in a great big box at the post office that I hefted on my shoulder. The postmistress said, “You wrote another book? How cool is that.” Indeed. Then she wondered if I could carry out this box that she described as nearly large as myself. I laid the box on the passenger seat and then walked across the street to the co-op where I bought an orange and peeled it and ate the sweet sticky fruit in a drippy wet snow.

Call It Madness? A novel about a young woman who realizes her mother had spun lies all her life—a grandfather who hadn’t died, a beloved house that hadn’t sold, only tumbled apart with rot and rodents. How does she get out of the madness-making of family and salvage some shreds of happiness?

June 30 the book will be released from Regal House Publishing. You can find it at my beloved local bookstore, the Galaxy Bookshop, or from the big A here.

Here’s the opening page….

White Quartz

2016

I didn’t know what made my parents drive from Bellingham to faraway Vermont the summer I turned four. I had never met my great-grand-father Opa until that afternoon my mother rolled our station wagon down Breadseed Lane. Earlier that day, a stranger had helped my parents change a flat tire on the New York turnpike, but the spare was a misfit. For hours, our car had been thumping while I stared through the backseat windows at the trees and fields passing by, pondering the puzzle of that strange word breadseed. Could seeds blossom into loaves?

We hadn’t stopped for lunch, and I was hungry. Was this Opa character cooking us dinner? Turned out, he was not.

In a rain that was just beginning to let up, the old man stooped in his yard beneath an enormous pine tree, fists curled behind his suspender buckles. I was not quite yet four, remember, and I knew suspenders only from picture books. In a strange coincidence, I had asked my mother for a pair the last Christmas. She had laughed and said suspenders only existed in fairy tales about grandfathers who were woodcutters and chased away starving wolves.

I loved that trip so much that the next summer I begged to return to Opa and his house that smelled of sugary rotting apples. I whined, Please, Mama, please. Which apartment we lived in then I’ve long forgot-ten, but in my memory, I’m sitting on the floor. At the end of the galley kitchen, a glass door streams in cloudy light. I’m watching the hem of my mother’s skirt graze her bare knees. The polyester skirt is one she wore for years, zigzag black lines over white. The hem has opened and hangs down, its frayed edge unraveling into threads. She’s smoking, the cigarette held impatiently in her teeth, and ashes drift down in the murky light. That morning, my mother tells me that Opa died soon after we left. The house was sold.