writing

Courage Crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

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.

July, Sweet and Sour.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

I read in the New York Times that Catcher in the Rye turns 75, a novel my mother first shared with me. My parents owned little fiction; our house was mostly filled with philosophy books, David Hume (who I never read) and Plato and Aristotle. In those shelves was jammed a copy of Huckleberry Finn and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Ten Stories, drug-store paperbacks held together with rubber bands. Books I love — and maybe you do, too.

In this lushly lingering month of July — filled with sun and swimming, with work and chores — I’m lucky to have scheduled a dozen readings for Call It Madness, this novel about Vermont and family and how the sodden past shapes our lives. Of all the books that reflects my life, Long Day’s Journey into Night surely ranks at the top. A reader pointed out to me recently that Call It Madness moves forward linearly, but is packed with the past, events that happened decades ago that remain as vibrant as this morning’s news.

I write in the world of cause and effect — our actions always propel consequences — but the past with its radiant joy and unquenchable sadness propels us mightily. Nonetheless, the pear trees previous owners planted in my front yard bear reddening fruit. The bees suck globe thistle. Sunday evening, I walk far along the river, the running water sunk low among exposed rocks. The sunlight lingers — so much light in these days sugary with freshly-mown hay. I’d like to pocket a handful of July and return in January: humans, we can launch ourselves to the moon but July-in-January is impossible. Nothing to do but quaff the present while it exists.

hydrangeas
pale blue in the rain
blue in the moonlight

By Masaoka Shiki | Translation by Lucien Stryk

The WHAT IS.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My brother and I break off the rail trail and hike up a spur trail. I haven’t been here before, but I once lived on the side of the moutanin where we now head. July, neither hot nor cold, we’re in shorts and t-shirts, walking and talking, laughing about things only siblings seem to hold. It’s just us and the hermit thrush and mosquitoes. We’ve left phones and work behind; maybe it’s 1978 again.

A few hours later, we descend steeply into the other end of town, where Cooper Brook runs by the liquor store, Dollar General, a snack shack. Through goldenrod, we walk along the sandy former railroad bed. A dense forest shelters around and turns the trail to muddy ruts, stones washed slick with recent rain. Frogs leap from puddles. I step around a wide toad.

My brother’s visited many times, most with me, some alone in my house while I was in the hospital. In the evening, we pick up the tour again, walking through the brushy path to the cemetery that seems to delight only me. Ticks! Blackberry brambles! It’s just a short stretch, and I strangely revel in this tangled passage, as if a portal from home to village, sweetened with black raspberries. We stop and visit a new neighbor, then trek again downtown, to the river where workers have been re-armouring the granite walls all summer, pouring footings for a suspension bridge.

I point out the shop where friends feed feral cats—one sleek creature sitting in the driveway, watching—and the house that burned and a woman died. My map of the town unspools: the apartments with the overdoses, the former inn where, in a garret room, I once met a therapist in a rainstorm whose dogs lay on the floor and I begged her to salvage my life from a chaotically breaking marriage. As I stared out the window at the rain crashing on the porch roof below, I realized whatever salvaging was going to be done had to be done by myself. Downstairs was a now closed-up bakery where I bought donuts with my youngest daughter. The superintendent’s office where I attended a hundred school board meetings. The river’s edge, where I gathered white pebbles with my daughters and created a rock garden.

Countless treks around this little town. Mid-July, neither hot nor cold, the wind still, the river low. I’ve seen the town flood, brutal cold descend. Atlas I’m creating of manifold layers.

…. and a thank you to David Goodman of VTDigger for this podcast with the writer Catherine Tudish.

“Prayer” by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

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