V Hansmann

But Build a House

Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house.
—Donald Hall

This yearning began in college. I took a survey course on Architectural History because it was reputed to be an easy B. The professor took pleasure in the fact that all the jocks took his course. He flirted with the hockey players and they flirted right back, which made me really uncomfortable. I had issues. I aced it because I loved the way buildings looked, the way the styles, materials, and vernaculars shifted over time, and the way buildings had an inside and an outside. The next semester I took a poetry-writing course for the same reason. I started writing – sonnets; rhymed couplet epics; jokey things; elliptical, sexual fantasy exploits. The professor was only a couple years older than me and already a published poet and noted translator. I had a crush on him. He gave me a B. 

Architecture and poetry slipped away. I drank myself out of college. I got married and almost started a literary magazine. I took a job on Wall Street and began to make money. Though I managed to stop drinking along the way, I wandered for decades through a middle-class wilderness; sober, responsible, closeted, unhappy. I came out miraculously. Soon, I was single. My freak flag, long furled, began to flutter again. At last, after thirty years, the office I worked for closed. 

In a moment of clarity, I applied to graduate school: no BA and off to get a master’s degree in creative writing. Suddenly, I was in the company of smart people who were fascinated by the same thing – making sentences. My hero was/is Donald Hall, the Poet Laureate, who wrote poetry and prose, both extraordinarily well. His personal life included misbehavior and fortitude. I hold this quote of his in my heart: The friendship of writers is the history of literature. 

So, I would build me a house, a house for my friends, those writers. I had some money. I found a derelict nursing home on an acre adjacent to the college where I got my MFA. It had a proud, careworn Italianate Victorian on the front, a hodgepodge of hallways, spooky rooms, and plumbing off the rear, and a motel-style, single-story excrescence hanging from one side. I bought it, moved to Vermont, and tore most of it down. 

The building is beautiful and full of light. I call it Prospect Street Writers House. It’s at the top of Prospect Street and has twelve bedrooms and a yellow front door. I intend to be a poet who runs a business that gives writers time and space to do what they do. How did I get here? Inklings, misdirection, balls dropped, balls picked up, assholes, aid, impediments, surprises, carelessness, chance. I’ve never started a business before. I must embrace uncertainty. I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m seventy-two: each day is gravy. 

Prospect Street Gallery

V Hansmann: I graduated with a concentration in nonfiction from a low-res MFA in June of 2011. Those two years changed my life. After thirty years in business, I had become the English major I always intended to be. I cherished the ten-day residencies in January and June, because for once I was in the company of smart, accomplished people who loved books and were interested in the same thing I was – learning to be a better writer.

Website: prospectstreet.org
Facebook: facebook.com/ProspectStreetWritersHouse