writing

Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost

Little and Great Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

September 1, and the sudden gush of changing seasons, which is never simply a matter of weather and light, but habit and soul. After a summer of book tour and work, of road trips and hikes, swimming, of reconciliation and division, too, seed sowing and blackberry gathering, of the sweet satisfaction of a family marriage, now early autumn nibbles in these early mornings. All summer, I struggled writing, but the vision forward for this manuscript abruptly opens. I lean hungrily into the work.

On a recent evening, we visit an open studio evening, a dirt road site of a long-ago hill farm with a queenly view of the valley, a righteous post-and-beam structure with a stunningly opulent garden. The art ranges from sculpture to two charcoal drawings commissioned by Bob Dylan where I linger; the studio and gardens comprise a whole. Slowly, the rooms fill with people I’ve known for years and strangers, too, all curious. How much my mother, long passed from the earth, would have loved this evening. How implicitly she would have understood the present of art, its underpinning in the past. She would have noticed the old millstone now relegated beneath a young apple tree.

We drive home around the lake, then down the hills into Hardwick village, the sunset crimson and gold along the darkening horizon. Always, we’re plunging forward, into the night and sleep, into the morning. The next day’s noon, I walk with my daughter along a causeway far into Lake Champlain, balmy wind on our faces, small spits of rain in our hair. The good luck omen of white egrets.

All these are great and little things. The profound pleasure of pouring boiling water into a French press in my rosy dawn kitchen. Soon enough, the monotone of snow and ash and road sand, the immense might of winter, will settle here. For now, the bittersweet profusion of late summer—sunflowers and goldenrod, basil and tomatoes.

As it’s September 1, here’s W. H. Auden…

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Wedding Bells: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Van Morrison’s Enlightenment begins with a riff on the Buddha’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Didn’t I first stumble into that koan in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, that little white paperback my sister and I checked out of the public library and handed back and forth between us? Those were the adolescent years when I devoured literature — Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath — so hungry, those years of amazement, at how literature could sing. So hungry I was in those years that merged into that Vermont mountainside college where I often stayed up most of the night, talking, drinking, often sleeping under the dazzling constellations. In the mornings, we trekked to seminars in the former cow barn and debated Plato and Kant.

Those years, I believed I could wrap my mind around life, that understanding was possible in more than ragged snippets. All my adult life I’ve leaned into a daily version of chop wood, carry water, that three-legged stool of raising children, writing books, earning a livelihood to keep shelter and home whole for my tiny family. An insanely complex equation.

With great merriment, my oldest daughter marries, we host a party, folks arrive, cake is eaten. The night before, we stay up late, the girls decorating the cake, my brother on a kitchen stool, shaking out the stories of our memories together. Such happiness to have a full house of youth and laughter. Monday morning, awake long before dawn, I labor at my version of carrying wood, those Van Morrison lines humming through my mind. Illusion? Nonattachment? Perhaps all my life I’ve thought about this koan in the wrong Western way, an either/or. Cold dew washes my bare feet.

As for the cake…. I’m still handing around leftovers, sweet luck.

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
― Lucille Clifton

Courage Crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I began my Call It Madness book tour on a steamy June evening, traveled all summer around the state and into New Hampshire, and ended in Greensboro, a ten-minute drive north of where I live, on a late afternoon, the August day promising coolness as the day ended, a room full of people I know and some I don’t know. I was graced with affection and curiosity.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family make this trek with me, take time from their lives — and sometimes I traveled alone — that well of solitude that both sustains and sometimes frightens me.

At this last reading, in the town where I walked around the lake, beginning to write Call It Madness in my mind, think through this story of a farm lost four generations ago and a young, rough-edged woman seeking her own salvation, the audience asked thoughtful questions. At one point, I heard myself say, when I had cancer, and of course that is not true. The pronunciation of cure, if I am so fortunate, is far yet in the future. But looking around the room, I knew pieces of so many people’s lives — losses of their own dear ones, of addiction and financial duress, of the persistence of juggling a creative life and earning a living.

This morning, reading David Biro‘s One Hundred Days, I chance upon his words (as a physician and patient of a rare blood disorder) that medicine is art and science. I benefitted from both: decades and decades of painstaking research provided me treatment and the complex art of my oncologist ushered me through the nightmare of that treatment. In the deepest nadir, he appeared at my bedside at a time when numbers meant nothing to me: before dawn or late evening, or maybe noon. I told him I didn’t think I could continue, and he simply studied me, silently, while I scraped down into that threadbare pocket of my courage and pulled out another crumb. He waited for my resolve to thicken.

Likewise — and yet utterly different — writing. Late August, the crickets singing down the end of summer, I’ve lucky to have a house of family and friends this weekend, and then perhaps some lying in the sun, reading my way through the stack of books I’ve acquired on my bookstore tour. I’d imagined my fifties as a decade of some calm after kid-rearing, divorce and the scramble to set my girls and myself steadily in a beloved house, on a financial footing where I was not always chewing a thumbnail. Instead: a life like a bouquet of sunflowers, staggeringly beautiful, the leaves’ edges fading.

After reading, I stood in the parking lot with a friend, our conversation continuing in the way of friends who have known each other for years. For this moment, I relished how I felt held in this Vermont village, one blossom in a handful of so much.

“At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others…” David Biro

A few known things: sand, evening…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

These August days are yet long, lingering exquisitely. Days of heat and sweat. Noon, we drag a picnic table beneath a maple tree, spread out our lunches, eat and talk with the sunlight dappling through the leaves, a small breeze kicking up. The nearby road is busy with pickups laden with ladders and mowers, suntanned arms crooked out unrolled windows, and the vacationers at their leisure. This August day hums magnificently, with that dappled sunlight and cicadas.

I receive an email about my novel Call It Madness from a woman in the middle of the country, not far from where my mother grew up, so many decades ago. We email back and forth a bit about class and working and how those two forces of writing and living can sharpen your eyes, if you lean into it.

Surviving cancer taught me countless things, too, made me both more tender and more ruthless, two things seemingly at odds but not. The world is a variated unfolding story of cause and effect. In my novel, a man mangles his hand in a sawmill accident. Decades later, his great-granddaughter struggles with the family fall-out of that accident: a farm lost, a penalty of impoverishment. I glean what I can of my own story — the murky details of my past (my mother’s changed name, a story my father shares of remembering his father burning his army uniform in a backyard fire) — and appraise how I fit into the terrain of the world around me. Swimming at twilight, the lake both golden and black, those elegant 1 Corinthians words return to me: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I’ve been swimming at this sandy stretch for nearly thirty years, once upon a time with children and sand buckets. The water is yet magnificent. Sand clings to my wet bare feet. The day has cooled, refreshing as quaffing water when you are thirsty. The sand scatters on my kitchen floor. Something, I think, I’ll need to sweep. This morning, the sand remains.

“The world is a complex fatigue.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

August appears, and I’m at work Saturday morning, trudging around a lake in a thickety forest with some of my favorite people in town, talking work and books and the edginess of this fleeting life, the puzzling conundrums of what people do.

Below, the Hayden Carruth poem I’ve posted before around August 1, during the years I’ve written in this space. Every year, when I read this poem again, different lines pop out. Here, “The world is a complex fatigue.” If I began a list of things I learned in my year (now, year and some) of surviving cancer and cancer treatments, gracious, I would keep writing and writing. The cats would not be fed this morning. The blueberries would not be picked.

But to return to August…. June, July, August, in my way of reckoning, these are Vermont’s high holy months, the long days of sweet roses and waving rudbeckia, the welcomeness of ice on your tongue, walking in twilight, the loveliness of sunlight chips and loons on pond water. Those worn clichés — savor every day, know your luck — are true of course, in the way that truth is multitudinous — in the way that Mac Barnett notes that Be Kind might be a given starting place, but not a plot. And human life, of course, is plot, plot, plot. Often, not of our own making.

Story, of course, is where I’m headed. These midsummer days, the glossiest greens already fading. As I’ve done for years, I hold to the strands that keep me sane in this world illusory and fragile and heartstoppingly thrumming with might far beyond any one or two or few of us… the chords of this mortal life. The gritty and sometimes joyous labor of writing, of walking in the world, the domesticity of family and friends. Brew coffee, weed the garden, ponder the sky.

AUGUST FIRST
by Hayden Carruth

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done. A large moth, probably
Catocala, batters the screen,
but lazily, its strength spent,
its wings tattered. It perches
trembling on the sill. The sky
is hot dark summer, neither
moon nor stars, air unstirring,
darkness complete; and the brook
sounds low, a discourse fumbling
among obstinate stones. I
remember a poem I wrote
years ago when my wife and
I had been married twenty-
two days, an exuberant
poem of love, death, the white
snow, personal purity. now
I look without seeing at
a geranium on the sill;
and, still full of day and evening,
of what to do for money,
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue. The moth tries
once more, wavering desperately
up the screen, beating, insane,
behind the geranium. It is an
immense geranium,
the biggest I’ve ever seen,
with a stem like a small tree
branching, so that the two thick arms
rise against the blackness of
this summer sky, and hold up
ten blossom clusters, bright bursts
of color. What is it — coral,
mallow? Isn’t there a color
called “geranium”? No matter.
They are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.
The moth rests again, clinging.
The brook talks. The night listens.