See other posts in the series: P2 P3 P4 P5
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A satisfying read is dependent upon two critical components: what is read and when. Up the book comes, then down the book goes if the timing isn’t right.
Released in 2011, it’s taken two years for Theresa Kishkan’s memoir, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, to find its way to me. Writer and reader Kerry Clare acted as connector via her engaging website picklemethis.com (and its big sister, 49th Shelf). Author discovered, I linked into Theresa’s site and ordered two books, Mnemonic and The Age of Water Lilies, a novel. We began an email correspondence.
While there is a glut of knowledge in the world, there is a dearth of wisdom. I read Mnemonic voraciously. I pondered, chewed, deconstructed, and reconstituted each piece, slowing down to a crawl to savour the words. You see, I am shifting gears and am filled to overflowing with heavyweight existential questions that demand a certain level of engagement and tenacity. I need answers.
The Mnemonic essays are both fearlessly personal and universally approachable, shaped by the conceit of the tree species she has known and loved. They are stories set locally and abroad, which emanate a profound appreciation of the influence of place and home. They balance the intellectual with the physical, book-learning with adventuring, producing the action-oriented storytelling that I favour.
Turning the pages was a bit like visiting with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Our geographies correspond so closely: Duncan and Chemainus; Powell River and Texada Island; the Fraser Valley and the Fraser Canyon; Wallachin and Kamloops. These are the places of my childhood. The arbutus that grow freely near her home are my personal totems. I felt the heart-pangs as her three children grew up and moved away, as I watch my four change daily. Like a reflection in a mirror, I am helped to see: to understand what’s coming, to name what’s happened, and to examine – and absorb – who I am in this moment.
This book couldn’t have come at a better time.
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The Kishkan Oracle.
I would offer five questions by email, one at a time, and Theresa would respond as she saw fit. And she did: beautifully, expressively, generously. Here is our discussion of Mnemonic, and a life thoughtfully lived, over five days and five posts.
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QUESTION #1: To date you have written 11 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Mnemonic, published in 2011, is an intensely personal telling of key parts of your life story. Why this book at this moment/juncture in your life?”
TK: This is an interesting question but I don’t have a straight-forward answer. I’ll begin by confessing I’ve always loved the essay form. I love knowing that it comes from the French infinitive essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”, and I think it’s true that Montaigne’s beautiful examples of this form grew out of his practice of keeping a commonplace book. I began writing essays in 1990. I can date this precisely because we were living for a winter term in Utah where my husband was a visiting poet at Brigham Young University and I felt compelled to make notes about the landscape and my experiences there, notes I hoped would find their way into poems. But the writing kept growing, spreading out, and I needed a form for it which was flexible and capacious. Finally I just decided to call what I was writing “essays” – lyrical narratives, personal essays, works of creative non-fiction – and that was a very liberating thing. I missed the immediate (or relatively so) gratification of writing short poems but on the other hand, it was such a pleasure to write in sentences, long lines, to think of their cadences and so forth as “other” than the metrical or stanzaic restrictions of verse. An essay is built differently than a poem and I was happy to try to learn this new architecture.
[pullquote]My older son once said that I was something of a magpie in my working methods and I think he’s right. One shiny object leads to another and their relationship, one to another, might seem cursory or tangential but in a way, if the light is right and the mood generous, they form a mosaic, a patchwork which is not as random as it might initially appear.[/pullquote]
The essays that I wrote then, and for the next ten years, were discrete, self-contained. As I was writing the pieces which became Phantom Limb (published in 2007), I noticed how often I used a plant as a touch-stone from which to explore a whole complex of personal, historical, and cultural notions and ideas. Phantom Limb has a “Scouring Rush” for example; it has a “Coltsfoot”. It has a long essay called “month of wild berries picking” in which I meditate on a Native teaching story – it occurs in many First Nations cultures, from the Arctic to the Southwest and all across North America and Siberia, and it has echoes in European folk tales, too – and I loved writing in a reflective and I guess refractive way, using my own experiences with bears here in our coastal landscape to think about the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Seasonal cycles, the kind of memory mapping bears (apparently) engage in, the potential allure of risk . . . Although I was also writing fiction during these years, I truly felt that I’d found my form in the informal or personal essay.
So I had in mind plants and I had in mind the essay as a capacious basket for the things I wanted to explore and I also had in mind John Evelyn’s Sylva in which he prepared an inventory of Britain’s trees. I was at a point in my life – children gone off to university and their own lives, parents (and parents-in-law) elderly and ailing – where I spent a lot of time remembering. The way I recalled the important things seemed always to be through my senses – the smoke of our morning’s fire (we heat our house in part with wood) with its incense of cedar kindling reminded me of childhood camping trips, of riding my bike to Beacon Hill Park to watch an old man carve a totem pole (not realizing until much later that he was the great Kwakwaka’wakw carver; that driving through Victoria’s new suburbs made me long for the Garry oak meadows of my girlhood where I rode my horse through dry grass; that drizzling a little Greek olive oil on summer salads or cutting rosemary to flavour lamb reminded me of a youthful romance on Crete in the mid-1970s. It seemed that everything I’d done in my life had been in the company of trees. I wanted to record these things and the more I wrote, the more I discovered there was waiting for me to discover or remember. I wasn’t thinking of it as material I would necessarily publish and so I was free not to second-guess myself or my intentions. I wanted simply to explore the grove of trees that shaped and shaded and nurtured my own life. I was eager to describe and interpret what took place in that grove.
The more I wrote, the more I discovered I wanted to write. I wanted to make a record of house-building, particularly as that grand adventure, undertaken by two poets without a clear idea of how to do it (and without much a tool-box either: a hammer, a circular saw, a level, a plumb-bob), led to the adventure of having children and raising them in a place they still drift back to. I wanted to record the unexpected gift of learning how to sing in my early fifties, of revisiting a profound relationship I had with a painter in my early twenties.
I also discovered that this was one possible way to write a memoir in which I could get everything in. Not just the personal details but the things that drew me to investigate, to research, to pair with my own sense of the world. Bits of song, notes about botany, musings about family history, moments of divinity. I have a curious mind but it isn’t orderly or scholarly.