writing

History, Yellow Wallpaper, Gas Station.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On my way home, I stop to fuel my Subaru. A light snow falls, icy around the edges, barely sharp enough to tease my cheeks as I stand looking up. It’s after dark, and the people are coming and going in the convenience store with cups of coffee and bottles of wine and white paper cartons of fried food. The river curves behind the store and the attached garage, silently bending through town, water running beneath the frozen surface.

The evening before, my daughter asked me about The Yellow Wallpaper, the novella she’s reading for class. I remembered the free copy I picked up in high school, dirty and water-stained — a copy I probably snagged from my high school floor. This is the season of freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw, the long slow slog towards spring. In the late afternoons, skiing, the sunlight pushes through the forest. Some days, cold. Some days, warm. So it goes.

Life is a verb, not a noun.

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Laughter. Moonbeams.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
Ice Fishing, Caspian Lake

A profound cold stills our world for a few days, narrows our lives. All night on Friday, the wind screams and howls. By Saturday afternoon, the wind drops. I ski out to the river. The air is broken glass, so sharp breathing hurts.

To celebrate my oldest daughter’s birthday, we eat at a little restaurant/bar in Plainfield where I haven’t been in fifteen years. We’re at a back table so cold that the other three keep on their jackets and I note the usefulness of my handknit sweater. This observation impresses no one except myself. My daughter orders a drink with a lemon peel. The food is scrumptious, rich with garlic.

In their zipped-up jackets, side by side, my daughters talk and laugh with their ongoing story that includes frozen pipes, getting lost, a red prom dress, what happens when a car is started at 27 below zero, and the IRS. Outside, a round moon is ringed with yellow luminescence, so brilliant the sky around the moon is blue, surrounded by night’s black. Our boots crunch over ice as we list the moon’s might: tides and weather, childbirth and madness, the beauty of moonbeams.

In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. 

— Tobias Wolff

Bobcat. Saw-Whet Owl.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I arrive a few minutes early to meet my friend for coffee and look for a window table to open my notebook. A writer I know just a little is eating a ham and cheese sandwich and asks me to sit down. He’s old enough to be my father if he began fatherhood at a young age, which I know he didn’t. He immediately tells me two things: he’s waiting for his back road to be sanded and he saw a bobcat in a tree behind his house that morning. He describes the cat’s reddish fur, and I ask detailed questions about the wild creature’s size and location and poise. My friend arrives and they keep talking about San Francisco, and then he tells us about studying with Joan Baez at The Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.

The bakery is at a busy intersection in Montpelier. Through the window, I see people in colored winter coats. Until the pandemic, I often brought my laptop to work at this bakery and the one across the street that closed a year or two ago. Two blocks up is the public library where I wrote long sections of my last book. None of these places I’ve returned to work. Like everyone else, my life has changed, my habits recreated.

The bakery is closing. The day moves along. My friend and I walk through Bear Pond Books. She buys me a novel, hugs me goodbye, and heads on her way. I walk the long way back to my car. That night, I dream about the saw-whet owl my daughter and I glimpsed in the woods behind our house. A toddler, she pointed at the hemlock branch where the tiny bird was nestled in the greenery, its eyes wide-open. We stood there for the longest time, wordless, our breath frosty clouds in the winter air.

“… nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists, and must be hunted for and found.”

— Joan Baez

Making Things…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Mid-January, the earth is covered with ice and a crunchy snow a few inches deep. The meditative qualities of walking are swallowed up by fear of slipping or the grinding of hard snow beneath boots. People complain. Complaining is a normal winter’s activity, so are ice and snow, and yet — I’ll reiterate for what seems like the hundredth time again — we’ve slipped out of the cog of normalcy.

What I do:

I finish painting the bathroom (one Sunshine wall, the others Vanilla Ice Cream).

I’m diligent at my work.

My daughter and I go out for coffee, struggle through the CSS profile on financial forms, talk and talk and circle around.

I rise early every morning and rewrite my novel, snip, stitch, elaborate, with my imagination and my hands. In the night, I wake and lay more wood on the fire, pieces of my life arising in words: loons and dahlias and betrayal and desire.

On a Jane Alison bender (Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative), I inter-library-loan Alison’s memoir of how her parents switched partners with another couple, The Sisters Antipodes. Alison writes, “Making things helps make you.”

Sunlight on Sunday, a stiff breeze that jangles the wind chimes.

Winter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

This is: winter, not-winter, definitely-winter. Scattered, my thoughts fragmented, I wander down to the lake where the ice has set in now. The world is utterly still there save for a scattering of snowfall. The birds are silenced, and even the breeze has vanished. The profoundness of deep midwinter dwarfs the human world. I lean into it, letting the cold eat up my fury. On my way back, a squirrel runs across the road, calling back to me…

Sylvia Plath writes:

Winter is for women —

The woman still at her knitting,

At the cradle of Spanish walnut,

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dull to think…

Composite.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

After the death of Ray McNeill, I scavenged a phone number for a woman who roomed in my freshman college dorm and phoned her. We hadn’t seen each other in years. She called me, years ago, after a mutual friend died unexpectedly from heart failure. Our conversation has no real point, no precise question I want answered. We agree we didn’t like each other, years ago, but can’t remember why. What was the contention and why did it matter so much?

Four degrees this morning. I’ve experienced forty below zero, but, good lord, four degrees is not compatible with prolonged human exposure. I carry the stove ashes out and stand for a moment, a few snowflakes drifting down from the darkness, illuminated in my kitchen window’s electric light. Below me in the valley, the scattered lights of the village glow: power still on here. All night, wind threw handfuls of icy snow at our windows. I lay awake listening and reading, my cat curled on my bed, wary of my visiting brother’s dog.

My youngest and I, as the initial rain set in, discovered a rainbow over the village. A fortuitous sign? All depends on how you read that, which way luck will run.