Earthworks

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Venturing into unfamiliar territory today, the girls and I unexpectedly found ourselves on Horn of the Moon Road, and then crossed the dam at Wrightsville Reservoir. One of the beauties of living in Vermont is there’s often no one else around, so we simply stopped, abandoned the car, and walked along the narrow road, each side sloping steeply, covered with rocks.

My older daughter and I reminisced about when the reservoir had been nearly drained empty, and, conversely, when the water level had risen so high that trash lingered in the treetops for months.

On this giant earthwork, we were amazed at the work man’s hands have done, so much sod and rock moving, the immense depths of concrete and steel. What a different view of water today. All summer, my daughters and I have swam and canoed in clear lakes and remote ponds, and then today: the rugged vision of men enacted on the land. Tonight, reading van Gogh’s inimitable letters, I remembered how much van Gogh taught me as a writer: to look, and look, and not to be afraid to take in everything. More pieces of the evolving puzzle.

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

— Vincent van Gogh

Montpelier, Vermont

Tool, Weapon, Daily Bread

November 22, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

How lucky I was to have a houseful of girls tonight, laughing and eating, with just so much chat-chat-chatting. They have questions and their own contrived theories – could this be true? This? Would life be different with a houseful of sons? Somehow, I think so.

Driving to the movies, in this dark November night, I listened to their talk braiding around each other, and I realized these girls know each other through language. Too often, I’ve thought of my own use of language as either tool or weapon. A few years back, I wrote an essay about industrial wind in VTDigger, intentionally using language as weapon. Now, in the bits of journalism I do for paid work, it’s a serviceable tool. But these girls remind me, again, of simple loveliness of speaking, and that the deepest profundity is often what’s right at hand.

…If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back

— Adrienne Rich

Woodbury, Vermont

Unfolding Fern

November 20, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m reading tonight at the Hartland Pubic Library, in Hartland, Vermont. Here’s a paragraph from my essay about writing this novel:

From the opening sentence, the book arcs as a metaphorical unfolding of a fiddlehead, from youth’s smallness to the generous flourish of a mature woman. Fenollosa writes, “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature…. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things….” (10) In Hidden View’s opening lines, late winter sunlight glints harshly over icy snow, and cowshit tracked by boots erodes the pure white. A mixture of shit and beauty winds all through this book; opposites, as the yinyang symbol reminds us, do not exist as discrete entities in nature. The conundrum of how our fairest aspects are equally suffused with our foulest elements rises to the forefront as the novel climaxes. I imagined my characters as ascending, grappling birds. As they fought with each other – husband and wife – brother and brother – their interior natures battled, too: would decency and kindness prevail, or fear and its loathsome clutches? How would it settle out for Fern? For her husband? How would her love affair with her husband’s brother resolve?….

Photo by Molly S.

Fear of the Dark

November 10, 2015November 10, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I wrote my novel Hidden View in bits and pieces, in notebooks, on a computer, in endless rewrites on the back of printed pages. I began this book during my daughter’s nap time, those golden hours when I could sit down and breathe creativity in the solitude writing demands. I wrote for no one but the novel itself: to write as well and truly as I could.

This book has joined the world. It’s out there, for the taking and reading. When I think about what made this book, I took what I had at hand: a ball of yarn, imaginary rabbits, Vermont’s exquisite and desolate winter, a house both a solace and a menace. But equally driving the book are three forces. One of these is mothering. Like the ceaseless gritty wind in a canyon, my children have formed and hewn me, in a multitude of ways I never could have imagined. My children are my anchor, the physical weight that has pinned me to this soil and forced me to know the world in an expanse I never could have imagined.

When my older daughter was a baby, my husband left the state for work, and the baby and I remained. On a 100 acres, our house is surrounded by woods. At that time, I was afraid of the dark. When the baby slept at night, I had to walk down to the unlit sugarhouse in the dark, by only the thin light of a flashlight and the stars overhead. Those months were late fall then, around this time of year, and the nights were cold. The rural dark in Vermont is so profound I have held my hand inches before my face and yet been blind to my own flesh. I forced myself to go out in the dark, because I knew every journey would lessen my fear. And I knew I could not mother this baby, in this house, in this agricultural life, if I feared the dark.

Of the dark, at least, I am no longer afraid.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn’t want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

–– Rachel Cusk

Milkweed Seed/Morrisville, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Ten-Year-Old Point of View

November 4, 2015November 4, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Both my children were very much planned and desired babies. I desperately – more than anything – wanted to become a mother. But what I didn’t anticipate was how much fun the kids would be. Now years past the baby and toddler stage, I returned from another long school meeting to my children reading beside the wood stove. The younger daughter, when she looked up at me, immediately launched into the rather long and complicated plot of the novel she’s reading.

She rubbed her fingertips over the pages and said, I love this book.

I love that she loves this book. Of course I do – I’m a writer and a reader myself – and, for better or worse, I know parents often desire their children to be at least somewhat like themselves. Beyond myself, though, this child at 10 is opening up into her own person, too excited at night to sleep because she’s excited for school the next day. She’s curious and questioning and articulate about her world, living more deeply into what a writer calls POV: point of view. Her POV is her lens of the world, dynamic and shifting and, generally, infinitely interesting to me.

What’s most intriguing is that this child is decidedly not me, that she’s her own unfolding person. By the roadside this morning, on the way to school, she released a mouse from the trap. Look, mama, she insisted. The mouse is cute, really.

I crouched down beside my child and joined her point of view for a moment. The mouse, I saw, was perhaps not that vile, after all….

Take point of view. Editors will breezily comment that POV is child’s play, that naturally one is on top of simple stuff like that. But one is not. POV is far more subtle, complicated, and permanent….

–– Thomas McCormack

West Woodbury, Vermont, November

Windstorm

October 30, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These autumn days hold the dim shortness I remember from this time of year as a child in New England, but the air this afternoon lay almost balmy, redolent with wet earth, like spring. Driving to meet my children at school, a sudden wind blew up violently, throwing dry leaves in the air, bits of twig, the abrupt rain nearly sideways against the windshield. The clouds spun darkly.

Looking up through the glass at crows tossing in the unsteady air currents, suddenly I realized the heart of the book I’m writing is about light and shadow. I pulled over at an ugly patch of Hardwick – a mini-storage – and ran to the center of the parking lot. The rain bit at my eyes, and the wind spun in a gyre with shreds of trees and plastic debris. I closed my eyes and thought of those Salinger stories I had been reading last night; I imagined each of those stories in their own entity – with Teddy and Esme and the Laughing Man – circling around.

Just as abruptly, the wind ceased. I stood for just a moment more, thinking of those stories, as full as any story could possibly be, with layers of shadow and light, story beneath story.

Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

–– Salinger, “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”

Woodbury Elementary School, Vermont, late October

Stony Soil Vermont

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