November 2015 – Page 2 – …Theresa Kishkan

Fairfield

November 6, 2015November 6, 2015 theresakishkanLeave a comment

In Victoria for a few days. A wonderful event at Russell Books last night where Sarah de Leeuw and my husband John Pass gave gorgeous readings from their new books and where I distinguished myself by whacking my head on a low beam as I opened the event with my own reading. But a warm and generous crowd, old friends among them.

I was a child, then a young woman, in this city. Returning is always a little fraught, an object lesson in the twinned powers of memory and nostalgia. I think it’s true that nostos, the root of nostalgia, carries in it not only the notion of return (in epic poetry, from war or extensive journeys on the part of the hero) but also the sense of the restoration of one’s central identity. A longing for home and who you were there.

So here, in Fairfield, where my daughter and her boyfriend live, I can almost see the annex of Sir James Douglas Elementary School where I attended for two years — grades one and two — and where I learned to take such joy in books. Yesterday we walked downtown and I saw the old library on the corner of Yates and Blanchard where I received my first library card the summer before grade one. My older brothers taught me to write my name (I could already read) and most Saturdays my family visited the library for our week’s quota of books.

Walking back to this apartment yesterday, I recocgnized the tiled road signs set in the sidewalk and remembered my delight in them as a child. I could sound out their letters and know where I was.

I’m still doing that.

“…the book will return…”

November 2, 2015November 2, 2015 theresakishkan2 Comments

I woke up this morning with all kinds of ideas about form, how it finds us rather than the opposite, how for some of us, our life’s work is all of a piece, an ongoing composition that allows for — even encourages — continous engagement. I’d read a review of Jorie Graham’s From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, by Ange Mlinko and I think I was dreaming of Graham’s poetry, heard its music and wild intelligence all through my sleep. She is a poet who mines the deep seams of Western culture from a personal perspective, always questioning and questing. And the way she positions her lines on a page, challenging the space and accomodating them to its imperfections — no one else does that in the same way. Mlinko has her reservations about some of Graham’s later work but says, “Her long-lined long poems expand into time like a lyric version of manifest destiny.”(http://www.thenation.com/article/modernist-poetry-in-a-crowdsourcing-age/) She is an unabashed Modernist and I suppose that one of the reasons I find her work so persistently exciting and congenial is because those are my values too. I go to the great Modernist writers of the 20th century as often as I look for something new. And reading, say, Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield, Basil Bunting or James Joyce, I find the world made new again and again. And then again. In The Second Common Reader, Woolf proposes the ideal way to read, which is an ideal guide to her own work of course as well as those books we return to over and over again:

The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgement upon those multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. (from “How Should One Read A Book?”)

I wrote down those early thoughts this morning and then promptly lost the post into some Internet fog. And the day happened, with some housework, a long walk in search of mushrooms (only two chanterelles worth keeping and several pines too sodden to bring home), the rescue of a tiny rough-skinned newt from the road where it had crept out and then lost too much body heat to move any further, and listening to, then seeing, a kingfisher above the marsh between Hallowell Road and Sakinaw Lake, where Ruby Creek swirls in its autumn fullness, and where I hoped to see cutthroat but instead only found long streaks of white guano where eagles had feasted on their bodies. The day happened and the sun has set, though there was such a glow of late sun in the cascara just beyond my window. Everything full of everything else, shape-shifting.

What is the light
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
that air that carries it. What is it
for the space of time
where it is useless, merely
beautiful?

(from “Salmon” by Jorie Graham)

by hand

November 1, 2015November 1, 2015 theresakishkan2 Comments

Yesterday we participated in the Alcuin Society’s Wayzgoose, held every two years in the Alice McKay Room of the Vancouver Public Library. It’s a fair, really, featuring the work of letterpress printers, book artists, papermakers, marblers, and others involved in one or another (or many) aspects of the book arts. We have a couple of old platen presses — a Chandler and Price and a smaller Adana — and we print poetry broadsides as well as ephemera. Our production has slowed down in recent years as we concentrate on our own writing (and somehow there just isn’t as much time, it seems, though where it goes is an ongoing mystery to me). We’ve printed wedding invitations (two weddings, both our sons, in 2012) and one little birth announcement (a poem John wrote for Kelly); I know there’s musing about a second birth announcement, for grandson Arthur, born 3 1/2 weeks ago. So although we’re not printing as much as we did in previous years, we go to the Wayzgoose to see what others are doing and to offer interested parties a chance to look at and even buy our backlist. We still have sets of our Companion Series, for example: we asked twelve Canadian poets to respond to a poem of their choice and we printed the two poems side by side. Here’s the prospectus (and if you are unable to zoom in on it and you’re interested in learning more about the series, just send me a note):

(The email address on this prospectus is an old one. If you are interested in learning more about the Companions broadsides, you can email me at the address provided on the Contacts link on the menu on the right-hand side of my home-page.)

It’s always so inspiring to see what others are doing. Phyllis Greenwood spent the day demonstrating the art of marbling paper. In the past I’ve bought sheets of her marbled paper and I keep thinking they’ll be perfect for a project — end papers for novellas, maybe? Or that essay series I hoped to publish under our High Ground imprint — chapbooks of single essays, printed digitally, but with letterpress covers. And marbled end-papers? Hmmm. (Again, where does the time go? Why haven’t I done this? Another of those dreams I wake in the night from and wonder why I don’t simply get to it.)

There are grand projects on display at the Wayzgoose, and smaller ones; and this time it was the smaller ones that spoke to me so clearly. Frances Hunter of Red Tower Bookworks had the most beautiful notebooks, all handbound, and many of them with covers of handmade or marbled papers. I bought several of the latter, though it was the former that intrigued me. She is making paper using invasive species — Daphne laureola, or spurge-laurel, gathered in the woods surrounding her home at Prospect Lake, near Victoria; and yellow flag iris (Iris pseudacorus). The Prospect Lake area is one I know well, having spent my teen years at nearby Royal Oak, and having ridden my horse many Sunday mornings out to Prospect Lake where old farms and the general store held stories of the colonial settlement of the Saanich peninsula. Frances is working on projects involving moths and their association with plants of the Garry oak meadows of the peninsula; readers of my book Mnemonic: A Book of Trees will know how dear those meadows are to my heart.

This morning I put two of the notebooks on my maple cutting board (that’s a strip of spalted maple you can see running down the heart of the board) and took their photographs. Somehow the notebooks speak to me of possibilities, their blank pages ready and willing.