Author: theresakishkan

This morning, the first thing I saw when I got out of bed was this little linocut, sitting on my dresser, waiting for me to decide where to put it. I bought it in Oaxaca last week. We’d been ambling back from the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca and found ourselves in a square with displays by printmakers (mostly). We went from booth to booth, talking to young artists, choosing a few pieces to bring home as gifts. The ones I loved best were too big for me to carry in my suitcase (a vivid etching of whales, another of women swimming underwater) but no matter because there were lots of small prints. I bought this one for myself, a contemplation I can relate to. The young man spoke a little English and he was insistent that I know his name. Vale Uk. Will you write it in my notebook, I asked, and he did. It means Valley Dog, he said, smiling. Is that the name your mother gave you, I wondered, and yes, he smiled. My name. So my Valley Dog: where will I hang it? It’s 5 inches wide by nearly 6 inches long, printed on nice paper, a little lopsided. Which suits me fine. If you’ve seen my quilts or received a Christmas card from us, one of my linocuts printed on our Chandler & Price platen press, you will know that everything I do is slightly off centre.

I’ve been in a contemplative mood this week, which is perhaps why I am thinking about a place to hang Vale Uk’s sharp-toothed dog singing to the stars. Yesterday I had an appointment with the ophthalmologist to determine the current condition of my retinas. I fell on ice in 2018; the impact of the fall set in motion the process of retinal detachment and ever since, I’ve had many procedures to repair the damage, some of them in Sechelt but the last 4 or 5 at the eye care centre at Vancouver General Hospital. Yesterday, after images were taken of my eyes, the ophthalmologist examined them on his computer screen, and then examined my eyes. I was so relieved to hear that there were no new issues. I could see the images on the screen, the repairs like tiny buttons along the edges of the retinas, and a few bigger ones too. (I was told by the specialist in Vancouver that my retinas were threadbare.) So there’s that to think about.

And yesterday, before the eye appointment, I had a meeting with my new publisher, associate publisher, and editor assigned to my book. They were so enthusiastic about it and had some ideas that made me feel so grateful, not only for their praise but for their belief that this is work that deserves to be published, to find a readership. We will be working with quite a tight timeline in order for the book to be published early in 2026 but I’m ready to do what I need to do. In the night I was awake thinking. I began writing this, little by little, in the fall of 2022. By spring I had a draft, which grew and changed over the next 6 months. I didn’t know if the work was something I should even think about publishing. It’s personal, intimate, and in a way it’s my #MeToo story, complicated, troubling, and not entirely negative. It look me more than 40 years, nearly 50, to remember and record the events and what they meant. Mean. When I’d talk to John about it and confess that maybe I shouldn’t consider it as something to publish, he’d tell me all the reasons he thought it should be. He has known me almost as the long as I’ve carried the story, he knew the person at the heart of the book, and in the house we share, there are the images I write about, most of them paintings of me. And not me, which is what I explore.

So there’s lots to contemplate this week, and in the future. I want Vale Uk’s coyote (or dog; maybe both?) in a place where I can see it under its veil of stars. It reminds me in a way of the passage from Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” that gives my book its title:

Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words.

1. Listening: right now, Kate Wolf on low, “Across the Great Divide”, her clear voice sweet as the rain falls.
   
   

I’ve been siftin’ through the layers
Of dusty books and faded papers
They tell a story I used to know
And it was one that happened so long ago

 

It’s gone away in yesterday
Now I find myself on the mountainside
Where the rivers change direction
Across the Great Divide

The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It’s when the darkness rolls away

Now, I heard the owl a-callin’
Softly as the night was fallin’
With a question and I replied
But he’s gone across the borderline

I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes
–Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

1.

Each time you put your blue and white striped towel on the chair by the pool and enter the water for the laps you love to swim, the white-winged dove you have called Carmen (for its sultry vibrato) comes to perch on the pine pole nearby. Sing, Carmen, sing your aria, while a swimmer windmills and turns.

Love is a rebellious bird
That none can tame,
And it is quite in vain that one calls it,
If it suits it to refuse.

2.

What were they saying? Morning, morning, morning. Wake up! Today is the day you will drive out to Teotitlán del Valle to watch the weaver card fleece, spin it to yarn, dye it with indigo, calendula, cochineal, pomegranate, pecan shell, rock lichen, mint. We have been on this land for 5 generations, he tells you, and you buy a carpet rich with lightning, rain, corn, the geometric spiral of life. Coming back that evening, a storm comes in over the mountains. You almost see lightning, the carpet rolled tight in its carrier bag.

3.

They begin at 5:30, calling, calling. The trees in the courtyard tremble with the sound. The tulip trees in the courtyard tremble with goldfinches. By the time you sit at the little table with espresso from the cafe on the street, the sun is hot.

4.

What kind of hummingbirds alight on the columns of Pachycereus cactus along the edge of the pool, alight, pushing their long beaks into the green flesh? Were they the Berylline, the Beautiful, the Blue-Throated, the Bumblebee? They paused so briefly that you couldn’t really tell.

5.

You are blue and silver throated yourself when you wrap the beautiful shawl the weaver made around your shoulders for a night out at the red restaurant where you celebrate 46 years of knowing the man you married.

6.

On the last morning, you were awake before the doves, awake in the shuttered room, hearing only a car or two on the C. Porfirio Díaz, your suitcase packed, the length of fabric you bought to make a cushion tucked into the very back compartment. It remembers rain, the cycle of life, a few bars of lightning on the road from Hierve el Agua to Oaxaca. You had hoped to find an acorn from the holm oaks growing near the mineral pool but no, no, though a black vulture soared over the valley and something, not a dove, sang in the guaje on the long trail back.

7.

Removed from its carrier bag, unrolled on the pine trunk where you store your sweaters, the carpet waits now for a place of its own. Already you miss Carmen on the post by the pool.

Note: the carpet and shawl were created in the Zapotec Spirit studio of Oscar Perez in Teotitlán del Valle.

If I turn to the right as I’m swimming my morning laps, this is what I see. Sometimes pigeons are perched on the dome and sometimes they are lined up in the edge of the pool, drinking. Yesterday a white dove joined them. The white-winged dove we call Carmen sits on a pole over the little area where we sit to dry off. Every morning begins this way.

Around the block is the Museo de Arte Prehispanico de Mexico, showcasing the collection of Rufino Tamayo. Each gallery is beautiful, the work displayed in cases painted deep pink or violet or ultramarine or saffron or clear green. So many astonishing creations, from 1260 BC to 200 AD, and then later, until 1521. I loved the polychrome vessels, the dogs, the women. Look at this philosopher!

It’s our last day in Oaxaca, a day for last things: swims; ambling through the Zocalo where children race around and vendors tap an elbow to show you painted animals or wooden spoons; a meal at Cafe Boulenc; a conversation with Carmen about her future in opera.

Tomorrow we fly home.

1.

i am saturated in colour, the rosy or yellow or sky blue buildings, the cup I bring back from the market, filled with pineapple and mango, dusted with chile, the houses tumbling down the hills above Oaxaca, red, pink, emerald green.

2.

I swim first thing, accompanied only by my new friend, Carmen, a white-winged dove who perches on the pergola and practises her scales. I swim later, too, with John, and yesterday someone had left all their empty bottles by the pool, drinks brought up by one of the young men who work here: several kinds of cerveza, Pouilly-Fuisse (which retails here for $90 Canadian–I checked), ice buckets still filled with precious ice, glasses on their sides, and a tip of 20 pesos, about $1.30 Canadian…

3.

A new exhibit at the textiles museum (I’ve been 3 times!): Laura Mellado, with 3 installations inspired by her early years near the sea. Knots, jetsam, tangles of rope. I loved pushing aside a dark curtain to stand among these beautiful creations, with their quiet nods to fishing nets, samplers, tablecloths embellished with lace. In her notes on the pieces, Virginie Kastel Ornielli writes, “With Laura, the answers are to be found where memory has placed its affection.”

After breakfast, I swam 16 laps and talked to a white-winged dove about her gorgeous vibrato. I told her she’d make a wonderful Carmen. (She’s here right now, practising arpeggios.) There’s saxophone player in the courtyard and the day is warm. We’ll wander over to the Textiles Museum a bit later.

Last night after dinner we sat in the zocalo and watched people dance to wild Mexican rock music. On the other side of the plaza, an army band. People everywhere, dressed up for a night on the zocalo. We were too. I wore some of my turquoise, perfect in this light.

I’ve been trying to add to my News and Events page but for some reason I can’t edit it. In case you missed my post the other day about the prospect of a new book, I am delighted to share the news that Thornapple Press will publish my memoir-ish essay (or essay-ish memoir), Let A Body Venture At Last Out of its Shelter, next year. I read the contract on the plane to Mexico City last week and then I signed, me in Oaxaca and the publisher, Eve Rickert, in the Galapagos Islands. (Ah, technology.) I am excited to work on this manuscript to make it as good as I can.

The saxophone player is taking a little break and my dove named Carmen is in full voice. Pinch me, it’s Sunday morning in Oaxaca, warm sunlight, flowers, quiet voices of the cleaning women, in Spanish and Zapotec, a body ready to venture at last out, out, out in this beautiful world.

waiting for coffee on the terrace outside our room, a few clouds passing, the white-winged doves hidden in the trees

This morning began with a swim, followed by a walk to the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, a truly wonderful place. We started out with the intention to see everything, oh foolish dream. The first gallery was devoted to Dolores Porras, an extraordinary potter from this area. She began making pots at the age of 14 and worked for the next 5 decades. Her vessels are huge, decorated with fish, iguanas, mermaids, flowers, sinewy curves and geometrics. A woman who understood the power of the earth, and fire. In one note about her practice, specifically the firing of the finished pot:

The potters pray for everything to go well because they will finally see their piece “being born” as it gets transformed by fire.

I also loved the room devoted to Tomb 7 on Monte Alban, a place of great riches: the harbinger of the discovery being a large seashell, one end cut off so it could be played as a trumpet. The face of the Lord of the underworld, a skull with inlaid mosaic of turquoise. I couldn’t stop looking. And 30+ inscribed animal bones forming a codex.

There were rooms filled with pre-Columbian statues and I was reminded of Evan Connell’s beautiful novel about obsession, The Connoisseur.

And then we needed coffee.

i keep seeing the water trucks with their hoses reaching high on buildings to fill cisterns and I remember how the faucets in our hotel ran dry yesterday morning. As we left, we saw the water truck pull up to replenish, a reminder that we are in a high desert and the reason why so many of the city plantings are succulents and cactus. At the taco wagons on the streets, vendors rinse their wiping cloths in a precious half-bucket of water.

Today our cousins left to return to Baja and we changed hotels. (We didn’t need a 2 bedroom suite any longer though we immediately regretted leaving Jorge who brought our breakfasts, cooked by Maria, to the table on the rooftop deck where the little pool was.) This hotel is lovely, the rooms centred around an inner courtyard green with trees, cactus, and bougainvillea. Its pool is long enough to allow for true laps while doves wait for you to pass before they drink from the edge. After we checked in and had a swim, we headed out to the photographic museum. Yesterday, at the museum of contemporary Art, a woman stopped to ask if I was Canadian. She was from Toronto. We quickly established that we had similar interests (she was wearing a dress dyed with indigo) and she recommended the exhibit of Gary Goldberg’s photographs: Encontrando El Universo En Oaxaca. John and I were completely taken by the images of landscapes, weather events, and geographical representations found in the textures of flaking ancient walls. I walked through each room, and then I walked through again. And because we are only a block and a half away, I intend to return over the next week. Several of the images were interpreted by textiles artists using needled felt. I felt the old excitement rise inside me, a good sign.

What will I make of this time? The colours, the dappled shade on hot afternoons in the Zocalo, the swims under intense blue skies, the February heat? I don’t know. But I feel full of possibilities after a long sad year. I want to dye with cochineal, sew lines of bright saffron thread over deep blue cloth. I want to make stars out of whatever comes to hand. Coming back from dinner tonight in a deep yellow room, I saw our rosy hotel with the church dome across the road and thought, Can you remember this moment?

Can I?

ps I took both photographs on Porfirio Diaz this evening.

I love the sound of churchbells in Oaxaca. This morning–was it prophetic?–they sounded as I signed the contract for my memoir-ish long essay, Let A Body Venture At Last Out of its Shelter. In November I read this interview in BC Bookworld and was inspired to send Eve my ms. And now it will come out next year!

The essay began as a conversation with my younger self, the one I see each morning as I come down the stairs from my bedroom.

It’s a conversation I waited nearly 50 years to engage in and it was painful, sometimes joyous, sometimes sad. And how wonderful to think of the months ahead, editing, talking, and generally bringing this book to life. This morning the churchbells sound celebratory, hopeful.