Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 150

Snowed In…. and more

My brother borrowed my daughter’s car and returned it with the back door dinged in, which made us laugh. That’s all? 2016 has thrown a lot more at us. But here’s the thing: at the very beginning of my novel’s draft, I have that classic line from Dante: In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

In my forties, the straight way is concealed, undoubtedly. But what I’d missed in that line until today is the coming to yourself gem buried within that sentence. Earlier this fall, I had a conversation with someone who described this phase of life as not solved by geography; this is an interior journey of the heart.

So, for a moment here, what better way to end a long year than with laughter? Big and little kids went sliding on the ice today – no sleds required; our kitchen is well-stocked; the snow falls – lovely as I remember from childhood; and my first novel hit the Galaxy Bookshop‘s 2016 bestseller list. Satisfaction.

Do not be afraid; our fate

Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

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My garden in winter.

My Brother’s Handgun

My 11-year-old daughter wants to be an FBI agent when she grows up. I wish I could say I have no idea where that desire derives from, but a rawer truth is that choice illuminates a great deal about her young life – and equally about mine.

When I was a young mother, I focussed so much on what I could give my children – homegrown organic squash, stacks of library books, sand castle building – that I pretty much entirely discounted all the influences that would equally affect my daughters, unintended or not: in short, the great wide world we live in.

A first-time mother, I just took everything so personally, as if feeding my kid a potato chip would amount to heresy. I had this very naive idea that if I pushed the image of the Earth Mama hard enough, I could hold off from my children the equally real awfulness of this world.

Over and over, one strand emerges in my writing: that our choices and actions determine who we are; that while our heads may be filled with the finest of intentions and profoundest of ideas, only action and how those actions affect others determines, ultimately, the mark of who we are. Which perhaps is why I’ve ragged on that Hallmark card notion of love. In my experience, love is the nursing mother’s arms around her baby, but also the ragged fierceness to step forward when the seas go swirly and the sharks surface to feed.

Whether I like it or not, children grow up, one little bit at a time, not simply with a birthday, or turning eighteen, and, having seen plenty of ignorance (my own and others’), I’d far rather my daughters make their decisions knowingly.

So…. when my brother taught my younger daughter to shoot his Glock, his hands over hers, I let them be.

Here’s a New Yorker parenting article, on resilience.

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Woodbury Library

Clutter

With a gift of fudge, my teenager and I stopped by the new neighbors’ house yesterday. The boys and their father had disappeared outside, while the mother was reading a slender book on feminism she had given her husband for a Christmas present. She had determined the book was required reading for her high school student, while the 10-year-old was given a temporary pass.

Owned by a large Connecticut family, the house has been vacant for years. One night this fall, another friend was sorely in need of acorns for a photo shoot (these are the kinds of friends I have), and the girls and I drove down in the dark and searched under that property’s oak trees with flashlights for what my children once called “oak nuts.”

Now, the house is literally spewing belongings: mismatched ski boots, a basketball stand on its side in the snow, Christmas lights on a hedge so haphazard my older daughter laughingly said the lights appeared to have been tossed out a bedroom window. Family life in all its raging clutter. Coincidentally reading Shirley Jackson’s phenomenally useful and entertaining essays on writing fiction and craft, I realize how interested I am in their half-opened door, the painting already hung in the entry hall, and I wonder how our own messy family appears.

 It seems to me that in our present great drive—fiction-wise—toward the spare, clean, direct kind of story, we are somehow leaving behind the most useful tools of the writer, the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of the imagination from the everyday account.

Shirley Jackson, “Garlic In Fiction”

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These Few Days

Christmas is an apt holiday for this northern time of year, a solstice pause when the light will begin turning around, slowly, before it returns by my daughter’s early February birthday in racingly long days. More than anything, I think of this time of year as intense juxtaposition – utter dark, crystalline snow – of giving and receiving – of domestic warmth and external cold.

As a young child, maybe six or seven, I remember listening to a Christmas story on the radio. My sister and I were confused about this place called Bethlehem, and why were Mary and Joseph wandering around on a donkey just before she had a child? How did this mysterious star appear? The most mesmerizing part of the story were the angels who appeared to the shepherds, camped out with their woolly flocks in night. The angels linked those two worlds – sandal-wearing staff-bearing shepherds, sitting around their nightly fire – with the profoundly unknown heavens, embodying juxtaposition: enchanting beauty and stark fear.

So it seems to me, this year perhaps in particular, that Christmas is a holiday for the pleasures of childhood – of play and eating and a ferocious appetite for life. The immense star that joined a newborn and his wandering parents to anonymous shepherds and wealthy kings alike shines yet over our polluted and ailing, and infinitely precious and beautiful planet; the story is yet alive.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Luke 2, King James Version

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Elmore, Vermont/Driving home

Gifts

My teenager has been on a fudge-making bender this week, sizing up recipes, sourcing out inexpensive tins, buying ribbon to neaten up her gifts. Last evening, while I was lying gracelessly on the floor in my end-of-long-day stupor, she busily cut peppermint-stick and walnut-studded chocolate fudge and carefully packed the pieces with tissue paper into her bright tins.

She offered up her extras as gifts for me to give away. To the new neighbors, for instance.

Mom, she said, I’m making you look good.

I closed the Shirley Jackson bio I’m reading and looked at her. It’s been a long – perhaps too long a time – since I cared all that much about looking good. Somehow, in the years’ jumble of babies and breastfeeding, sugaring and bills, basketball games and sleepovers, I shifted to “not looking all that bad” as satisfactory enough.

Truth is, the girls do make me look good. Years ago, I would have considered this ancillary boon a trivial notion, hardly worth anything at all. How the world does change. I’m going to walk down the icy road to the neighbors, knock on the door, and offer up that gaily-wrapped fudge in full disclosure of its creator – with great joy.

Here’s a few lines from my library book….

Shirley Jackson saw herself, it seems clear, as a version of a writer…. (whose role) was to draw back the curtain on the darkness within the human psyche…. thousands of unsuspecting readers who opened The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, were confronted by a story (“The Lottery”) unlike anything they had ever read before. They admired it, they raged at it, they were puzzled by it; but no matter their reaction, it illuminated their world.

– Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life

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Photo by Molly S.

A Whale’s Heartbeat

In these subzero nights, I’ve abandoned my room of windows on the top floor and started sleeping in my daughter’s lower bunk bed, in her room cozily located over the wood stove. Upstairs, my older daughter’s room is just across the hall from mine, and we generally talk before sleeping. My younger daughter is pleased with her turn at companionship. Plus, she doesn’t complain when I read late at night with the lights on.

Last night, before falling asleep, she told me a whale’s heart beats about 10 times per minute, while the tiny shrew’s heart can pulse away at a 1,000 jumps per minute.

I reached up and snapped off the light. In darkness, we imagined how voluminous might be a whale’s heart, hot blood churning through its chambers. She told me about a trip she’d taken a few years before with her father, to Provincetown, where she and her sister walked through the ribs of whale skeleton. In the warm dark room, we lay imagining what it would be like to live in the belly of a whale, and late in the night when I woke to feed the fire, I was still dreaming of that dark, living interior.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing–more’s the pity.

– Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

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Magical Realm

As the kids and I drove into Barre, Vermont, this afternoon, the little boy in the back seat said,  I really don’t like Barre.

I’m with the kid, I’m reluctant to say, for reasons no doubt wholly different than the boy’s. We were headed to The Nutcracker, in the gracious Barre Opera House. On the way there, I drove behind the county courthouse, repository of windowless hallways and claustrophobic rooms, countless tears of human misery.

But I trusted ballet could rewrite my experience of that city, and the magical dance did not let me down. At the performance’s very end, high up in the balcony, I realized  – in what should be a, well, duh, moment – that ballet was all about the transformative might of imagination.

All the way home – and here’s yet another driving story, yet another journey – we drove on icy roads through the smokey blue-black twilight, and then arrived in our own home town with full darkness ringed all around, velvety and deep, and the village lights twinkling white. The town itself might have been the opera house stage, lit-up and beautifully arrayed for the holidays.

When I was twenty, I worked nights for a summer. I loved driving at night as a young woman; the darkness around my two Volkswagen beetle headlights felt ripe with possibility, and I believed myself invincible with youth. In an odd juxtaposition, nearly thirty years later, possibilities stretch out even more infinitely before me. Although I now know the illusion of invincibility, I think I’ve traded that for something deeper and far more valuable in those sparkling lights.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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Snow!

In our  free range child-rearing realm of West Woodbury, Vermont, sliding off the roof season has officially commenced. Last night, I heard my 11-year-old muttering to herself as she sized up her snow roof-raking endeavor. One more good snowfall should do it. She’s been accumulating a pile of snow to slid into from the low-ish roof.

This morning, we woke up to steadily falling flakes, and by this afternoon she and the neighbor boy were crafting a slide on the sugarhouse roof. While I did chores in the blue haze of winter twilight, I listened to the two kids shouting and laughing, and well beyond dark they were busy with winter’s bounty, bright-cheeked, merry, happy. Rain in the forecast – enjoy, children!

… Around the glistening wonder (of a snowstorm) bent

The blue walls of the firmament,

No cloud above, no earth below, –

A universe of sky and snow!

– John Greenleaf Whittier, from “Snow-Bound”

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Writing & Money

The other day, my Facebook-loving teenager casually mentioned to me that, on average, writers make $149K per year. “You’re doing something wrong, mom.”

These lines are full disclosure that, in fact, I am not earning $149K per year. The children and I are, however, still afloat. While I know all kinds of writers, many of whom are terrific writers as well as decent people, no one I know has ever undertaken the vocation of writing for money. Writers may be many things, but we’re generally not stupid.

When I taught a one day class at Johnson State College a year ago with Dede Cummings, my most useful piece of advice for aspiring writers was two-pronged: write and keep your expenses low. I really wasn’t kidding on either count.

Money is merely practical. Writing is art. Both are necessary – in my life (and my daughters’ lives, at least). So it was with real pleasure that the day I received a royalty check from my novel, I also met a woman I hadn’t seen for a few years. She had read my book (– and loved it; I write this with real pleasure), because another woman gave her the novel and told her to read it. That woman didn’t know me and didn’t know I had any connection to her friend. She is my ideal reader: someone who loved my book and passed it to another reader, as I do with so many books I love.

What a piece of luck was this chance encounter in the co-op’s coffee aisle, on a subzero and sunny day.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

– E. L. Doctorow

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Living Room Windows, Mid-December

Where You Find Yourself

The first job I ever had, when I was fifteen, was a library page in the village library where I read darn near every book in the children’s section. I was so desperate to read, I even read the sic-fi and books about dinosaurs, neither of which were my favorites. One day, I discovered the classics were hidden in a back room off the children’s section. Dickens! Tolstoy! Steinbeck!

This fall, I became the librarian at Woodbury’s even tinier library. While I had to be talked into this position, I should have taken it right away; the library is one of my natural places. Likewise, a welder I sometimes use has a group of guys in his shop, hanging out in lawn chairs, with a hot wood stove crackling in the winter. That’s the place for those guys.

I see love of places in both my children, too. My teenager runs every day along our dirt road, breathing deeply of the woods. The younger girl has a place in her circle of friends where she’s at home. Which brings me to the present I’m knitting for someone’s Christmas gift. Knitting (and creativity) is a portable place, a true winter activity.

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.

– Elizabeth Zimmermann

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