writing

Travels Around the Globe & Through the Centuries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Late into last night and early this morning – two periods of darkness – I read Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty, the travels of Captain William Bligh and his misfortunes. She writes of the exquisite natural beauty of Tahiti, and about the chaos of Western men sailing on their rampage for vengeance, men sailing the seven seas, the seven deadly sins rioting through this story.

This evening, walking with my daughter in the early spring evening, the robins singing, I imagined how divine that virgin land must have been, with its contrasts of color and elevation, its welcoming inhabitants, the plethora of food. As a writer, I can’t help but admire the endless metaphorical possibilities….

Reading about the great strife and literal journeys of others deepens the geography of my own domestic Vermont life, reflecting my black sandy beaches. Greater misery of others doesn’t diminish the suffering of those in my world, but widens the landscape, per se, of what it means to be human.

… under cloudless skies and mild breezes…. the lush, dramatic peaks of Tahiti. Closer in, and the mountain cascades, the graceful palms, and the sparkling volcanic black beaches could be seen beyond thundering breakers and surf. The few ships that had anchored here had all attempted to describe the vision like beauty of the first sight of this island rising into view from the blue Pacific. Bligh had called Tahiti “the Paradise of the World.”

– Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: the True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

 

 

Maize v. Corn

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When I was ten, my family and I camped one summer all the way from New Hampshire to Wyoming to Mexico. One of the places we visited was Mesa Verde, in Colorado. In the visitors’ center, we saw an ancient urn found in a cave (as I remember), filled with corn seed. The archeologists planted some of the precious seed; the kernels germinated. The seedlings grew and thrived.

A few summers ago, I returned to Mesa Verde as a grown woman with my family, and that urn was still there, in that same visitors’ center. For a few days, we stayed with friends, who took us to one of the many once-upon-a-time villages, which had been excavated and filled back in, and now seemed traversed mainly by wildlife. We walked among the remains of walls and abode houses, theorizing where these families might have planted crops, how they harbored water, what kind of lives they might have lived.

Water and maize: clearly the narrative of life for these people: material and undoubtedly spiritual, too. As I begin planting seeds again this season, I can’t help but think of that ancient clay vessel, so reverently crafted and painted, its dear contents preserved. And, 21st woman that I am, I can’t help but remark what a far distance those precious seeds have travelled to the industrial giant of King Corn.

This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth’s interior all the way into the sky and back.

–– Craig Childs

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Koyaanisqatsi: Unbalanced Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not long ago, one of my daughter’s friends remarked that everyone desires the warm feeling of home. And yet, why is it so darned hard to keep the home in balance? The stuff of literature is family, never wholly at ease, always shifting and turning, brimming with hunger and unmet desire…. the stuff of life: this material I write about; this very matter I live.

This winter, even a mouse came to die beneath my wood stove, spreading out its little furry body, relinquishing fear of us in its desire to expire on the hearth. The snow is all gone but the hard ugly leavings of dirtied lumps. Vermont in March should be heavy winter, sun bright over fresh snow, and we should be skiing in t-shirts, sunburning. The wind has been blowing every night, bringing neither spring nor storm. It’s off, all of it, this winter that never was.

Long after dinner tonight, the girls and I sat at the table, talking, myself knitting, pulling together through language. They tell me, this happened today, and we did that, while I’m thinking of those sunny faces of coltsfoot, the deep yellow blossoms that push up through the rockiest and poorest of soils. When will they return? I rely on language and story, yes, to bind us together, and my other old stand-by – resilience – thinking…

Surely some revelation is at hand…

– Yeats

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March, Vermont

Private v. Public

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

This morning, after driving through a surprisingly thick snowstorm, I found myself in a tiny room in the radio studio of WDEV in Waterbury. Hester Fuller, the host, had kindly read my book and interviewed me for a bit, then Gary Miller (author of the fine collection Museum of the Americas) came in, too, with Joe Citro on the phone line.

We were literally knee-to-knee in a tiny room, talking about the intimacy of writing. Writing is that curious mixture of intense privacy – literally, the stuff of our own experiences – spun into shared stories. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden wound into my life when I was fifteen, lodging deeply in my blood cells, its influence surfacing in my own writing. Over and over, I have hammered myself against Steinbeck’s anvil that insists on seizing human choice despite the chaotic happenstance of human life. How will I understand my life? The lives of those I dearly love?

Driving home in the dark tonight, I realized my character, Fern, understood her life like this: finding an abandoned sweater in a library’s free box, she washed and then unravelled the yarn, discarding what was ruined beyond repair, saving what she could. Then she knitted, by trial and error, a sweater patterned with trees and mountains and Lady Moon, creating a work of beauty – and practicality.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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Burlington, Vermont, March 2016

Before Dawn, Children Sleeping

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura’s beloved rag doll, Charlotte, is given to a spoiled neighbor’s baby. Charlotte had been a Christmas gift Laura’s mother had made her, and the girl sorely misses her doll. Later, she discovers her beloved doll, discarded and frozen in an iced-over puddle, and fiercely reclaims her. This all takes place in the chapter “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn,” when Laura, her sisters, and mother are without Pa, and in need.

This morning, in my own pre-dawn house, while everyone was yet sleeping, I thought of Charlotte again, and how I’ve returned to that image all through the varied years of my life, looking for treasures to mend in frozen puddles. Sometimes I wonder where my own daughters will be, years from now, all grown up, enmeshed in families of their own. What have I made or given them that they would rescue from sleeting rain and mud? Something dear, I hope. Something beloved.

Darling Charlotte lay in her box under the eaves, smiling with her red yarn mouth and her shoe-button eyes. Laura lifted her carefully and smoothed her wavy black-yarn hair and her skirts. Charlotte had no feet, and her hands were only stitched on the flat ends of her arms, because she was a rag doll. But Laura loved her dearly.

–– Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek

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Day of Hearts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In When Breath Becomes Air, recently posthumously published, Paul Kalanithi acknowledges the irony of his devastating cancer in his thirties; Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon unbelievably gifted in a multitude of ways, had striven to understand mortality before his diagnosis, to parse what dying meant.

Is it true that our lives circle back? As Joseph Campbell wrote, the greatest challenges we face are those we would never willingly encounter.

Kalanithi must have been an extraordinary man in many ways, but particularly in the exquisitely graceful way he never diminished or belittled individual suffering while also acknowledging that suffering is an integral and unavoidable aspect of living a human life. The book is suffused with a pursuit to understand our world and yet marvel at its infinite mysteries.

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

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Mid-February, Vermont, 2016