I’m sitting in our B&B on Rockland Avenue, listening to cars sliding by in the rain. Last night John and I read at the library in Nanaimo to a small but lovely audience. That library reminded me of a ship, huge windows looking out over the harbour, early Christmas lights spangling the water and wet streets. We read alternately, having chosen work which used the same material — fire, building our house, pine-bark beetle damage in the Interior of B.C. — so that the audience got the sense of how two very different writers respond to similar themes. John had his show-and-tell — a large poster of one of Ernie Kroeger’s rubbings of pine-bark beetle tunnels (Ernie invited Canadian writers to “transcribe” these “texts” and John’s example, “Anthem”, is in his book, crawlspace). And I had my show-and-tell — a small basket woven of Ponderosa pine needles from favourite locations in the Interior, a process described in “Pinus ponderosa: A Serious Waltz” in Mnemonic: A Book of Trees. I passed the basket to the audience so they could see how it was made and each one of them sniffed it!
Before our reading in Nanaimo, we went for a walk at Pipers Lagoon. There were Garry oaks on the rocky point, a sign of home…(I was born on this Island and the oaks are one of my earliest memories of trees.)
Tonight we’re reading at the Vancouver Island Regional Library in Sidney at 7 p.m. Join us if you can!
...Theresa Kishkan 