writing

Book in the Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A cardboard box of advance reader copies of my book–my first book–appeared in the mail. Returning home from work and school, my daughters and I had gone in through the kitchen door, and it wasn’t until I was at the kitchen counter slicing tomatoes for dinner that through the window I saw the box on the stone step at the back door.

It was the most curious feeling to pull out crumpled paper and find my bound  books, so beautifully designed, crafted with such care and attention–this novel I have spun from nothing but my own experience and language, through all those hours scavenged, often late at night, early in the morning, during child naptimes. Like nothing else, this book in my hand is a bridge between the mysterious well of my working imagination and the world, a tangible here I am.

Whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page. […] Writing or making anything — a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake — has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.

–– Sharon Olds

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Chimney Sweeps

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Until recently, I never really thought all that much about cleaning. A chore, an activity, play some music and make some headway. I’ve been in filthy houses, spick ‘n span abodes, the whole gray gamut of in-between. I once participated in an extremely late night board meeting in a school my children never attended, and towards the end of the evening I looked around the room, noted the chaotic clutter, and wondered how anyone worked in that classroom.

Today, as the cold weather begins digging in, I swept the ashes from my wood stove and readied my beloved stove for the months ahead when I will never allow the fire to burn out. The chimney, too–from basement to roof over three stories tall–needs cleaning. I pulled out the stovepipe and thrust my arm into its chimney’s cold center. I found thick layers of creosote, crumbly and pitch-sticky, two strange opposite and simultaneous qualities.

In the sooty, dirty basement I’ve knelt before the opened clean-out door and shoveled bucket after bucket of creosote scabs, then held a mirror flat in my hand and showed my little child the daytime stars in the heavens, visible only through that extended canal of darkness.

I’ve never cleaned this chimney before, but I feel certain my teenage daughter and I, with our strong backs and gritty muscles, could force that sharp-edged wire brush down that channel, scrape free the debris of last year’s long winter’s cold, and shove that brush, pole length by pole length, down to the chimney’s very root. This chimney is the lungs of our house, the passage of air and smoke that allows our hearth to burn, hot and truly. My teenage daughter is determined to begin this heating season with a scrubbed right chimney, and no fears of our house engulfed in nighttime flames.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.

–– Louise Gluck

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Woodbury, Vermont

Pieces of Writing, Things of Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Twice this summer, as I’ve driven along the Vermont interstate, a blue pickup has swung out in front of me at the same exit, a man at the wheel, but what caught my attention both times was the Greek omega symbol on its side, leering up at me like some distant memory of high school science. As a writer, I can’t help but think, That needs to wind into my book.

One keen advantage of writing is that, while I’m often half-blind, at times I’m tuned in razor-sharp, wondering in what way the universe is patterning around me, with this truck and this omega so near I could stretch out my arm and grasp its curve. Perhaps the deeper advantage of this is that writing forces you to look, and look hard at times, for meaning and relevance in the world.

Writing a scene the other morning, I realized a female character, in a dim kitchen, held an ear of corn from her garden and was abstractedly picking the ear apart, peeling loose the husk and each strand of silk, bit by bit. Inside, she discovered those gleaming, uneven rows of kernels, new as milk teeth. Would she eat the corn raw? Steam it? Offer it to her stepdaughter? Heave it in the compost? Chuck it out to the chickens?

The things of the world we live in matter. It’s different to wear acrylic or hemp, to eat fast food hamburgers or brandywines from the garden, whether your house has walls of glass or hardly any windows at all. Neither, perhaps, good nor ill, but the things that return into your life might not be wholly arbitrary. What’s near to your hand might be there for a reason.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.
Content with an ordinary life,
you can show all the people the way
back to their own true nature.

–– Tao Te Ching

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Photo by Molly S.

Parenting a Teen and Writing a Novel

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My long-time friend and I went canoeing and swimming with our kids today. The ten-year-old girls immediately ran for the beach, swam the entire time, and never put one toe in the canoe. The two teenagers, a him and her, swung the heavy canoe off the car and confidently carried it to the lake. How the heck did this happen? These two kids I once held on my lap while they shared goldfish crackers? After a dutiful swim, they preferred to sit on the beach–forget romping in the water–and talk.

There’s a fiction phrase–a willing suspension of disbelief–which, the further along in parenting, the more that seems a truism for life. I expect to be in the teen years for a good long while yet, and I could say it’s interesting, but, in fact, it’s darn mesmerizing… among a few other adjectives, too. But when these teens were ten-years-old themselves, I could never have believed they would become so full as people, so funny, so wry, and with legs sprawled everywhere. Here I am, I thought, in that perpetual rough draft of my life, garnering more material.

What you are aiming for (in writing a novel) is willing suspension of disbelief, and the first person who must suspend disbelief is yourself. Some beginning novelists have more disbelief than others, but even if your burden of disbelief is heavy, the only way to suspend it is to keep adding sentences to the ones you have already written.

–– Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
…. Or, I take this to mean, in other words, keep on trekking:  parenting and writing.

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Look for the Humble

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Recently, my younger daughter told me the word humble saved Wilbur’s life. Shouldn’t I know the ins and outs of Charlotte’s Web by now? While I’m no kiddie lit devotee, this is one of my most favorite books, ever. But this single word, humble, saving a pig’s life? What a neat way to envision the book. Sure, Wilbur was humble, and, true, Charlotte knew this, but she used what she had at hand, a scrap of paper and an adjective with potential. What a writer!

Someone once advised me to use what’s at hand. That’s keen advice, for living and writing. Take what’s at hand: a sparrow in a current bush on a broken branch, or a hole worn in the elbow of a favorite sweater. What’s the potential? A woman with a hole in her broken heart, revealed as her fingertips fray that unraveling yarn and tear at a callous on her skin.

Humble might have saved Wilbur’s life, but the word was spun into his world by the writer.

By the end of the eleventh century… the previous silver standard, founded on men’s violent and sporadic activities as Vikings, had been replaced by the homespun standard, based on women’s peaceful and steady work as weavers.

–– Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

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Young Woman at Work/Photo by Molly S.

Revision and Freedom

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I write, but I’m also a knitter, and one of the beauties of knitting is that you can rip the whole darn thing out and begin again. It’s just yarn, as I tell myself. Re-knitting might be tedious, but it’s achievable. Or even, god forbid, toss the yarn out and begin again. Isn’t reworking and rewriting nestled at the heart of craft? Why would we ever think something like craft or art might be easy? How lucky writing is: revision is possible, even demanded, whereas, in life, revision is a little more tricky. And that might be one of my greatest understatements.

… writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment…

–– William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl

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Photo by Molly S.