#writingfiction

Broken Down Stuff

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Vermont Public Radio is filled with cheery news. Worst Super Bowl. Lousiest State of the Union Address.

More locally, the Honda buried at the neighbors has fully emerged. Where the headlights should be are two gaping holes, the lights themselves on top of the car.

My 20-year-old sets her gas cap on top of her car and drives off in a rush. When she discovers this, I send her to the auto parts store, where she suspects the guys behind the counter are laughing at her. Why not? I ask. I laughed at you. Give me a little mirth, girl. She laughs, too, delighted the cap is nine dollars. What a deal I got, she says.

I resist pointing out that a better deal would have been not losing it. I’ve gotten a nine-dollar laugh out of this one.

It’s February. This is the time of year when things get worse in Vermont, but also better. I’ve lived here a long time, and generally I like living in Vermont. I actually like it very much, despite the things in Vermont that aren’t cool but are hardly endemic to Vermont—isolation and intergenerational poverty and the increasing bent in American life to see the world in narrowed vision.

This is the time of year when  cabin fever begins to creep in with a kind of communal silliness. We are all together in this. Even folks who foray out to Florida or California, winter is long, and then longer, and then even longer.

February marks the time of both weeping and giggling. The light floods back, more every day, crazy-making. Spring may be far off, but the scent is in the air.

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Ah, Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Every winter, I shovel a path from the woodshed to the back entry, and another from the kitchen door to the compost pile, a hand-cut maze around my house. The snow in northern Vermont falls so amply my daughters, when toddlers, were sometimes completely concealed in these paths. I could hear a little girl laughing, running with baby steps in snow boots, invisible to my eye.

Yesterday, the 11-year-old and her friend, still wearing pajamas, opened the door and oooohhhhed at the snow. They shoveled a steep slide off the kitchen roof, and then made another from the sugarhouse roof.

In the afternoon, sun emerged and light snow drifted down outside the public library windows. The library filled with just the right amount of people, the children busy with crafts, the adults companionable, drinking coffee and working. At five, I walked outside into what must be the best of Vermont winter: drifting bits of perfect snowflake shot through with sunlight, mixed with the blueness of twilight.

But 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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Tools of the Trade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I stumble spelling the same handful of words, stupidly over and over. Fuchsia. Schedule. Traveling.  As good, serviceable words, I use them repeatedly, and yet I always catch myself just for an instant. How do those consonants line up in schedule, anyway?

I imagine a surgeon has terminology, methodologies, sterilized silver, to utilize in her trade. Writers weld words with the subtlest shades of meaning: fuchsia in a hanging plant, profusely blossomed; or fuchsia I wrote about this morning, the color of a woman’s silk blouse and hazily diffuse through an unwashed convenience store window, filtered through a storm of twisting snowflakes.

Roseate. Coral. Magenta. Cerise. Bloodshot. Ruby.

Red is the color of blood, and I will seek it:
I have sought it in the grass.
It is the color of steep sun seen through eyelids….

– Conrad Aiken

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Hardwick, Vermont