Tag: Blue Portugal & Other Essays

redux: “I have walked behind the sky.” (Derek Jarman)

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Note: 5 years ago this week, I finished a collection of essays that I called Blue Portugal. It was published by the University of Alberta Press in the spring of 2022. I loved writing the essays and was interested to find this post while looking for something else. So much of my life is cycles! Indigo dye (the first photo certainly has echoes of last week’s post), quilts, even the essays themselves. (I have another collection, Kingfisher, making the publishing rounds.) I didn’t end up using the Robert Penn Warren lines as an epigraph, I used a passage from the Odyssey instead, but I still love the lines. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

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clothesline

So. Yesterday I finished writing the final essay for Blue Portugal. Or at least I finished a full draft, with some parts a little rougher than others. There are ten essays in this collection, ranging from meditations on colour, investigations into ampelography, entoptic phenomenon, Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor as a soundtrack for navigating grief, the relationship between the venous system and rivers, and using Dante’s Inferno as a means to recover from fractures. I know. It doesn’t sound like a manuscript that will be easy to place with a publisher, does it? In truth, I don’t think the essays themselves are difficult or chilly. But they’re not issue-based. They’re not life-style pieces. I read those and enjoy many of them but they’re not what I write. Or at least they’re not what I need to write right now.

There’s a lot of blue in this collection. The title piece for example begins with wine, Modry Portugal, a beautiful light red wine we drank in the Czech Republic. Modry means blue in Czech (and other Slavic languages) and I wondered about the Portugal. Where did the grape come from, and how, and why. I also wanted to look more deeply at family origin stories. There’s another essay, “The Blue Etymologies”, that I wrote to puzzle through what I experienced when I fell last November and damaged my retinas.  I have walked behind the sky, wrote Derek Jarman in Chroma, and yes, that was exactly where I went. “blueprints” revisits housebuilding and various kinds of fabric resist printing and the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins. Several of the essays use maps and land surveys in an attempt to locate the past and a couple of them might be too personal to interest anyone but members of my family. Who can say.

What I want to say is how much I’ve loved writing these essays. They are messy, imperfect, badly constructed in parts, and the craft is often careless; if you’ve read previous posts and seen images of the quilts I make, then you will recognize the parallel. But in an odd way they’ve kept me alive. Or they’ve kept my mind alive as I’ve navigated some health issues, have lain awake in the night thinking of my children and their children and how we’ve ended up living so far apart, have learned to do particular techniques with textiles, and have tried to keep what’s beautiful close to hand in the face of climate change, dangerous political systems, and an aging body.

hooped

The epigraph for this collection is a passage from a poem by the American poet Robert Penn Warren.

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

–Robert Penn Warren

Deep delight, in a moment of mania. That was me, in the night, writing by starlight, telling the story over and over again.

a publishing history, with asides (third instalment)

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21st century, second decade

Sandcut Beach

My parents died at the beginning of the second decade of the new century, a year apart to the day. Several close friends died. My sons married their sweethearts. (My daughter married hers a few weeks ago!) Every day held sorrow and joy. And also a sense of possibilities for my long-held interest in my family’s history. After my father’s death, I took home the small hoard of papers and photographs he’d kept to himself. I don’t know exactly why he was reluctant to share the materials, or to pursue answers to questions–the ones I had and surely ones he had too? And a year later, after my mother’s death, I felt the uneasy sense that I was now the family matriarch, the one responsible for keeping the lines of kinship clear. They were not clear. There were half-stories, careless genealogies. In retrospect, I see that much of the research and writing I did during this decade was in service to these histories.

I’ve always loved the literary novella. Without ever really intending to, I’ve built up a nice collection and have read many more, via library or generous friends. Inishbream was a sort of accidental novella, beginning as it did as a linked group of prose poems, eventually drawn out and given a structure. I loved the possibilities of the form, how it could hold so much in such a hermetic shape. A year or two after The Age of Water Lilies was published, I was invited to a book club to talk with members who’d just read it. I always enjoy these occasions. During our time together, one woman asked what happened to Grace after the novel ended. Good question. Grace was born to a single mother in the spring of 1915. She is sort of tangential to the narrative. But the more I thought about her, the more I wondered too. I began to write Winter Wren to find out. I think I knew from the beginning that the book would be a novella. I put Grace in a cabin I’d always thought I’d like to live in, a cabin I first saw as a teenager, on a beach west of Sooke, B.C. (It’s the one above the waterfall in the photograph at the beginning of this post.) She was in her late 50s, an artist trying to paint the view at dusk. I wanted to write about the 1970s—the novella takes place in 1974, an interesting time for ceramics in B.C. (Grace’s love interest is a potter in the tradition of those who studied with Bernard Leach in Cornwall and then returned to Canada), for museums where the salvage paradigm was part of the ethos, and perhaps the last possible time for Grace to meet one of the late 19th c-early 20th c artifact collectors.

winter wren

But you know already what I’m going to say: I sent Winter Wren to dozens of publishers and all of them rejected it. To make a long story short, my dear friend Anik See was visiting enroute from Dawson City to the Netherlands and we shared similar stories about novellas we’d written. We decided to begin a micropress to showcase the form and we decided to begin with mine. Our rationale was this: if our endeavour didn’t work, then I would be disappointed, sure, but at least it would only be me and not someone else. I could shake it off, poof, and move on. (Ha!) Anik designed the book, I photographed a pottery dish with a length of scouring rush (it figures in the book), and we found a really good printer in Victoria. And you know, we sold our first print run of 250 copies within weeks and we reprinted. I still get orders for it. We went on to publish 4 more novellas and we are very proud of Fish Gotta Swim Editions. Our latest is Anik’s Cabin Fever.

I’ve been to the small Vancouver Island beach near Jordan River where Theresa Kishkan’s novella Winter Wren (Fish Gotta Swim Editions) is set; I’ve seen the waterfall that tumbles over sandstone onto the shingle just below, and the solitary cabin facing south and west, surrounded by salal. Winter Wren tells one possible story from the many that cabin could tell. (Michael Hayward, Geist)

After I finished writing Winter Wren, I wrote another novella, Patrin, and it was published (beautifully) by Mona Fertig’s Mother Tongue Publishing in 2015 and then in French by Marchand de Feuilles in 2018. I also wrote a long essay, “Euclid’s Orchard”, about quilting, mathematics, coyote music, apple trees, and love; and when Mona showed interest in publishing a collection of my essays, I gathered together a group. Eulid’s Orchard & Other Essays was published in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Award.

Each image is a perfect crystallization of a detail, gesturing toward a truth much larger than the tiny pinpoint of its composition. Near Victoria, she recounts an exquisite memory of “an abandoned house completely knitted into place by honeysuckle and roses” (p. 101). Near Drumheller, she sings the prairie: “turn, turn, bend the song to the roadside plants … free verse composed of craneflies, dragonflies, bluebottles, broad-bodies leaf beetles, greasewood and cocklebur” (p. 61). And near her home, she concludes with the cries of coyotes: “lilting joyous youngsters unaware that a life is anything other than the moment in the moonlight, fresh meat in their stomachs, the old trees with a few apples and pears too small and green for any living things to be interested in this early in the season” (p. 155). (Catriona Sandilands, The British Columbia Review)

An aside: Mona Fertig and her Mother Tongue Publishing enterprise deserve gratitude from writers everywhere for the beauty of the books and the huge effort Mona put into designing them, editing them, bringing them into the world with sparkling wine and flowers, arranging public events for the writers, and being the kind of publisher writers dream of. I’d have published with her forever and was sad when she announced her retirement but also glad for her because she’s been able to return to her own writing projects. She did everything that bigger publishers did and she did it with joy. (She’s the one on the left, with the big smile.)

at-the-book-prizes

Novellas, novellas. I wrote The Weight of the Heart as a way to lament the gaps in my own education in the 1970s when the instructor of my Canadian literature course told me not to bother writing about Sheila Watson and Ethel Wilson, saying they were minor, and the former was barely coherent. I wanted to celebrate these two literary cartographers of our province and to highlight the importance of their work. I also wanted to spend time, real time and imaginatively, in the Thompson Canyon and the dry Interior of B.C. Palimpsest Press published The Weight of the Heart in the spring of 2020, just as most publishers and some writers were required to pivot to a virtual presence because of the pandemic. I wish I’d been better at this, though we still had such a slow internet connection—we live in a rural area– that even if I had been able to Zoom more effectively, our bandwidth wouldn’t have allowed me to participate much. (We were able to upgrade a bit later.)

The Weight of the Heart also finds in Wilson’s and Watson’s writing an experimental style and a mode of consolation. Like Wilson’s independent protagonists, the narrator discovers her autonomy and grit in the landscape she travels. Watson’s spectral figures and interest in sacred rituals resound in the symbolic scenes of almost drowning in which the narrator is saved by her brother’s mysterious presence and in Kishkan’s invocation of Egyptian burial rites as a refrain throughout. Most obviously, the double hook of Watson’s title recurs in the dualities throughout the novel—in the two rivers, in twin foals (the colt unfortunately lost in birth) by a mare named Angel, and most clearly in the two siblings who are bound together in a landscape where life and death regularly meet. So, Kishkan and her narrator know where to look in Canadian fiction for a view of the British Columbian landscape that reveals these striking oppositions and their consoling unions. A unique and compelling creation in its own right, Kishkan’s poetic exploration of grief lives up to its literary precursors. (Kait Pinder, the Malahat Review)

I wrote another novella in this decade, begun perhaps in the middle, put aside, but finished in 2020, during the long lonely weeks of the pandemic when I was missing my family and wondering if we would ever get together again for our summer meals, swims, and talks late into the night by a campfire. I used Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as a template, following the main character through a day of preparations for a party. There are shadows and owl voices in the woods and an unexpected guest coming up the driveway at dusk, carrying a knife. I tried to find ways to present the material innovatively, with sections of call and response, lists, and the music of an oud. I called it The Occasions. I don’t know if it will ever be published.

Another aside: I am lucky in life and love if not in publishing. And I wonder how many writers have a husband who is also a letterpress printer and who offers to make keepsakes to celebrate new books? For the past ten years or so, John has printed beautiful objects, some of them embellished by me, to give away at book launches and to provide local book stores with so they can tuck a keepsake into the books of mine that they sell. I have a few remaining of some of these and if you want to order a book from me, I can include one for you.

keepsakes remaining

At the beginning of this instalment, I wrote that I was trying to untangle the knots of family history and genealogy. Some of this work resulted in essays in Euclid’s Orchard but I wasn’t finished and kept on writing. I’d also had a health issue in 2016 that resulted in many tests, half-diagnoses, fearful assessments (though it all worked out well), and I also wrote about those things against the backdrop of all I loved: my family, the rivers of this province, textile work (which is always a way of meditating for me, sewing myself in and out of mysteries, riddles), the countries my grandparents left for new lives in Canada, and more. These became Blue Portugal & Other Essays, published with care and generosity by the University of Alberta Press in 2022. It received SUCH good reviews.

In Blue Portugal the essays’ themes are allowed to slip their boundaries; a topic addressed in one essay recurs in later essays, a recognition, perhaps, that thoughts and interests develop over time, shifting slightly as they are put in the company of other thoughts, are seen from different perspectives. The essays in Blue Portugal seem to talk to each other; they interlace in interesting and thought-provoking ways. The book is a fine example of the personal essay at its best. (Michael Hayward, The British Columbia Review)

It was a book that others noticed, gifted to friends, and reading it now, I am sort of surprised that I was led into some of the essays so mysteriously. A voice in the night, murmuring, The river door. Whose voice? I only know I took it to heart.

To those of us who’ve been following Theresa Kishkan on her blog for many years, the preoccupations of her latest book, the collection Blue Portugal & Other Essays, will be familiar, the quilts, the homesteads, the memories, the blue. But it’s the stunning craftsmanship of the book, the fascinating threads that weave the pieces together and also recur throughout the text, that make this book such a pleasure to discover. How quilting squares are analogous to the rectangles from which, one by one, Kishkan and her husband literally constructed their home on BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, and the blueprints, and the blues of dye, and of veins, and of rivers, and of how one thing turns into another—how? How does a body get old? How do children grow? How does a family tree sprout so many new branches? And from where did it all begin, Kishkan going back to seek her parents’ nebulous roots in the Czech Republic and Ukraine, in a 1917 map of lots in Drumheller, AB, in everything that was lost in the Spanish Flu, and how we’re connected to everything our ancestors lived through. (Kerry Clare, picklemethis.com)

And now? Now? 4 years into the 3rd decade of the century, I’ve completed another collection of essays. The centrepiece is a long postmortem and reassessment of a relationship I had with a painter when I was 23 years old. My walls are hung with some of his paintings, portraits of me among them, and I attempt to reclaim the gaze by entering into a daily conversation with one particular portrait hung in a stairwell; she is one of the first things I see each morning as I come down to the kitchen. There are other essays in the collection that meditate on war, climate change, injury and recovery, swimming and Herakleitos, and the nature of love. I’ve begun the long process of trying to find a publisher (my last publisher wasn’t interested, feeling perhaps that the collection is too personal and potentially risky in terms of sexual politics). As I write, it’s been rejected by 4 publishers and is currently awaiting decisions by 6 more. I’m also about halfway through writing a novel set in a small fishing village called Easthope and in the city of Lviv, in western Ukraine. I began the novel 4 years ago, just home from a trip to Ukraine, and set it aside to complete editorial work on Blue Portugal. And then the Russians invaded Ukraine and I couldn’t imagine ever writing about Lviv. But I decided that I’d stay with my original intention and setting— 2015—and write to set down what I love about both places.

And now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov,
after all it exists, quiet and pure as
as a peach. It is everywhere.

–Adam Zagajewski, trans. Renata Gorezynski. The poet used a variant for his native city which has known many administrations since it was first established in the 5th century and is currently known as Lviv

It may seem that I am a bit cranky about publishing in the 21st century but I have to say that it’s always the end point in writing for me. I began to write with the sense that the process was complete when the piece found a place in the larger world. I don’t begin a work with any idea of what might happen when I’ve finished, though. Not yet. I live in the language, the world of the writing, and when I come up for air, it’s then that I realize that I have no idea if the work will ever find a readership. I am too many things that are not what the current world wants or needs. Who wants to read about a fishing village or a party under fairy lights in a garden on the edge of the world or eye injury or indigo dye or the musings of an aging grandmother? A woman married for 45 years. I know some people do but maybe not enough of them. Enough of you, I mean. But I have some years left and those will find me at my desk, finding a way to map out the terrain I dream about, yearn for, to find ways to knit together strands of music, roots of family trees, and real trees too, embellished with salmon bones, the beautiful holdfasts of bull kelp and bladderwrack (the tired images scorned by A.F. Moritz all those years ago). There’s a little quote from the writing of the early naturalist and advocate for wilderness, John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” I keep this in my mind and heart as a mantra. I don’t know how this might be worked into a synopsis or query letter or proposal but it keeps me anchored, heldfast, to what I want to do in my life. Everything else is a bonus.

holdfast

redux: “We can almost smell the Cheremosh River.”

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Note: this was July, 2020. I was still in the spell of a trip the previous autumn to Ukraine where I found my grandfather’s home village and met some distant relatives. One of them, a cousin several times removed, invited me to return any time and I replied, Will you teach me your way of making varenyky? It felt like an important skill to learn. It still does. This post concludes with a passage from “Museum of the Multitude Village”, an essay I wrote in part before I went to Ukraine and in part when I returned. It was unpublished in 2020 and it went on to become part of my Blue Portugal & Other Essays (University of Alberta Press, 2022). Oh, and I’m cutting sweet peas every morning, though I didn’t plant Cupani, which is what the ones in the photograph are.

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cupani

The kitchen was fragrant with dill and scallions. We were making varenyky, based on recipes from Olia Hercules’s wonderful Mamushka, but adapted to what we had available to us. We had dry curd cheese and cream cheese, potatoes, thick-cut bacon, and frozen sweet dark cherries. We had savoy cabbage to braise for a side dish, and beets with their tops. Manon and I stuffed the dough and pinched the triangles closed, 8 cookie sheets of them, and those rested for a few hours on top of the freezer while the beets were roasted for salad, and the cabbage cut into thin slivers with apples and shallots. John set the table outside, under the grapes and wisteria, and there were bottles of Bricker cider, Prosecco chilled in the cooler, and a gooseberry galette for dessert.

I grew up with aunts and a grandmother who made delicious pedaha–what we called pierogi. My grandmother made fresh cheese to stuff them with and she also used sweet golden plums for a dessert version. We ate this food when we visited Edmonton in summer. I remember lying in grass and hearing the women make the pedaha together in the kitchen, windows open for any breeze that might find its way into the hot room. In my kitchen with Manon, with the sound of the little boys making a mural of our patio with sidewalk chalk, I knew what the women must have felt in those days: a sense of familial history. They were doing what they’d been taught to do, anticipating appetites and the prospect of long meals on summer evenings with far-flung family returned for a visit.

In Ukraine last September, I kept seeing versions of families that might have been my own. I even met some members of the family that stayed in Ivankivtsi. And I knew that those who were eating under vines as we passed their farm on our way to our hotel above Kosiv were remembered by others living elsewhere.  We could be them. We are sometimes the couple with the apple basket, sometimes the children asking to return. Sometimes we are all together at a table and the food we eat is the food I dreamed about as a child, dreamed of its creation. Driving from B.C. to Edmonton, I could already smell the dill and the sharp onions being sliced in the capable hands of the women.

At each farm, someone is picking apples, by ladder, by filling a bucket with windfalls. A man, a woman with a child, a couple, with a basket between them. Stooks stand in the fields. Horses graze, dogs sleep as though dead in the dry grass. There are pumpkins still in the gardens, heaps of watermelons, horseradish leaves lush by the houses. At the farm where we turn to climb the road to Sokilske, an old table is balanced under a pear tree and a family is seated around it. The man raises his glass. A horse lifts its head as our wheels spin briefly, gaining traction for the steep rise. We can almost smell the Cheremosh River. And listen—there are chickadees in the sunflowers. Chickens scatter at the side of the road.

–from “Museum of the Multitude Village”, an essay from an unpublished collection.

a year of Blue Portugal

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book and fish

A year ago this week, the courier left a box of Blue Portugal & Other Essays down by the gate that leads to our neighbours. It was raining that day and when our neighbour Ted drove up our long driveway and said he had something for us, I suspected it was books but I also hoped they hadn’t been sitting in the rain for too long because our neighbours are back and forth to another home on the mainland. Would the books be ruined? By process of deduction we figured out they’d only been there for a hour or two and the courier had put the box in a big plastic bag.

Blue Portugal is my 16th book. Or maybe 17th. (Each time I count I get a different number.) But the actual moment of opening a box and seeing something I’ve worked hard on, first the writing, then the editing, then copyediting, proof-reading, some of this entirely on my own (the writing), and some with excellent people such as the whole team at the University of Alberta Press, anyway, that moment is extraordinary. In the box, nestled in white packing paper, were the blue books filled with my meditations of this life of mine. A life that is shaped and shadowed by a wide network of family members in the present and in the past. My parents are in the book. My father’s parents, and what I know of the long line of Kishkans and Klusovas stretched along the spine of the Carpathian Mountains as they extend west to the Beskydy Mountains in the Czech Republic. As they travelled by boat from Europe to North America. As they made rough homes and planted gardens and grew potatoes. (My mother’s parents are mostly unknown to me, though I tried to trace them in an earlier book, Euclid’s Orchard.) My children are in the book, and theirs. There are rivers, brushes with serious illness, memories of fractures and sorrow, a fall on ice resulting in damaged retinas, an overnight train ride from Kyiv to Chernivtsi before Covid, before the Russian invasion. And there’s a lot of blue: the cyan of Steller’s jays; the indigo I dye cotton and linen with to make quilts inscribed with eelgrass, clouds, snow-angels, migrating salmon; the namesake wine of the title, Modry Portugal, that I first drank in my grandmother’s country; the hallucinatory blue of entoptic phenonema.

In the past year, Blue Portugal has made friends. In the British Columbia Review, Michael Hayward said this:

The essays in Blue Portugal seem to talk to each other; they interlace in interesting and thought-provoking ways. The book is a fine example of the personal essay at its best.

Michael Greenstein, in the Miramichi Reader, concludes his review with this:

Her elegiac rhapsody in blue recurs in “Blueprint” where we follow the construction of her house in British Columbia. Her web of essays are palimpsests covering and uncovering hidden roots and rhizomes. From Dante to duende, and the melancholic saudade of fado, Blue Portugal cultivates grapes and vintages. Follow Kishkan closely along many paths of anatomy and destiny.

On her literary blog, Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare is generous:

But it’s the stunning craftsmanship of the book, the fascinating threads that weave the pieces together and also recur throughout the text, that make this book such a pleasure to discover

Friends and readers I’ve never met took the time to write beautiful letters. A few sent little gifts. And in return, we made some small gifts. My husband John is a letterpress printer and he printed keepsakes on our 19th century Chandler & Price platen press which I embellished with fragments of indigo-dyed cotton, shell buttons, and red silk thread: a number of bookmarks were given out when the book was first published (local bookstores tucked the keepsakes into copies of Blue Portugal they sold and I mailed bookmarks to people who told me they’d bought the book); and a second keepsake was given to well-wishers at a book launch at the Arts Centre in Sechelt last September.

finishing

There were some readings, online and in person, some interviews (including this wonderful conversation with Joe Planta: https://thecommentary.ca/ontheline/2044-theresa-kishkan/ ), some talks given to interested groups via Zoom, and there are more events in the future, including a brief reading and two workshops on the personal essay at Word on the Lake Writers Festival in Salmon Arm later this month, and an event at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts in August. (Talewind Books always sells books at this Festival and John will print a 3rd keepsake to be given away with copies of Blue Portugal sold at this time.)

A year ago this week, the courier left a book of books at the neighbour’s gate. I remember sitting by the fire with a copy, reading my words on Alan Brownoff’s elegantly designed pages, actual pages after the many hours of working on a screen with Kimmy Beach and others, and thinking that maybe the pieces in this book get closer to what I hope to do when I begin to write an essay. I’m learning all the time. This is what I wrote in the Preface:

Some essay collections are unified thematically or chronologically around a writer’s life so that a reader understands the book to be a form of memoir. Blue Portugal does not aspire to memoir exactly. There are connections between the individual essays, yes, there are times when they talk among themselves, refer the reader to others in the group, but my intention was not to create a unified set of texts, with a logical flow. What the essays share is a sensibility—mine, of course, but also I know that I am interested in ideas and terrain which often share something in common. The rivers of my home province echo the venous system of my body. The indigo powder I turn into dye in turn shares a palette with entoptic phenomena. The title essay remembers a wine I first drank in my grandmother’s homeland. These are personal essays after all, not rhetorical or expository ones, so I’m at the heart of each one. Mine is the voice that invites the reader in, welcomes you at the door. My heart is on the sleeve of each essay. I’m the woman on the raft in the Thompson River and in the restaurant in Prague, in the PET tunnel in the B.C. Cancer Centre, portioning out her parents’ ashes on a beach on Vancouver Island, in a kitchen on the Sechelt Peninsula sewing a quilt from indigo linen she’s dyed on a cedar bench by her garden while pileated woodpeckers teach their young to fly nearby. Her (my) own children have flown but she remembers them on the trail down to the school bus, shadowed by the dog whose pelvic bone sits on her desk, a reminder of injury, recovery, and the precarious nature of our lives.

Here I am at the launch, showing the quilt that accompanies “A Dark Path”, the path that leads back, way back, to the year I was 14 and was injured in a riding accident and found myself on a path through bitter privet at the Gorge Road Rehabilitation Centre, learning to walk again, walking into a future I could never have dreamed. Blue Portugal & Other Essays is a book I’ve been writing all my life, through all the years that have led to this one, stitched from scraps of beauty and difficulty and love.

a dark path at Blue Portugal launch

PS–two things. For some reason, not all the links are working. I keep adding them and they disappear. Sorry! And the second thing is that I should explain that couriers in their wisdom seldom follow instructions on how to find our house for deliveries. Once they left a car-seat, arriving for a visiting grandchild, down a neighbour’s driveway (the neighbours keep their gate locked when they’re not here so there was a small window of opportunity and the courier took it boldly) and it was only when the company sent a screenshot to prove they’d “delivered” the item that we recognized a particular element about half a mile away and went to collect our parcel from under someone else’s sign. Books by the gate are a common issue and they won’t listen when I tell them, If you reach the gate, you’ve gone too far. The only company that ever gets it right is the one that delivers cases of wine from to time. Thank goodness.

redux: “At each farm, someone is picking apples”

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at bukovets

Note: I wrote this a week or so before the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year. So much has changed. But my joy at spending time in that country and finding relations in the village my grandfather left in 1907 is still at the heart of one of the essays in the book I was proof-reading when I wrote this.

_________________________________________

As I proofread the galleys of my Blue Portugal, I am remembering the trip we took to Ukraine in September, 2019. In so many ways I am grateful we went then. I was ready to meet the relatives who drove for 2.5 hours to spend time with us up in the Carpathian Mountains, I was ready to try to imprint each tree, each river bank, every stone of every church, every stitch of the beautiful rushnyk we saw everywhere, draping icons in the churches, wrapped around the loaves offered as we arrived at events, even ready to drink horilka at every hour of the day because who knew when I would taste it again. And if we hadn’t gone that fall, well, it would have been impossible, wouldn’t it, to plan to go now. A few months after we returned, I wrote an essay, “Museum of the Multitude Village”, now part of Blue Portugal, though when I wrote it, I wondered if I might just keep writing about Ukraine until it turned into a book of its own. In a way it did. Just before the pandemic was declared, I made the essay into a chapbook to celebrate my 65th birthday, helped by my printer husband John (who printed cover labels on our old C&P letterpress) and my friend Anik (who put the document I sent her into a design file so that it could be sent to the local copy shop).

As I proofread the galleys, working back to front (“Museum of the Multitude Village” is the last essay in the collection and I am trying bpNichol’s proofreading technique — he was once John’s editor — which was to start at the end and work to the beginning in order to read the text freshly), I am swimming in the pool at the hotel up in the mountains on a late September morning, old folk songs in my head, the scent of spruce smoke, a far off barking of dogs at the farms we passed on our way up. I am holding my breath for Ukraine. It’s my breath I am holding, that smoke settled into my bloodstream, the horilka making my eyes water, and my two vyshyvanka hanging in my closet, red flowers in the darkness. I was told when I bought them that they were talismen, a protection and a reminder of the stories they tell with red thread, and black. A lucky person was one who was born wearing a vyshyvanka. I was lucky to travel to Ukraine in my 60s, lucky to meet far cousins, and to be greeted with bread and salt, with tiny glasses of moonshine flavoured with mountain herbs, and I am reading backwards to remember it all.

At each farm, someone is picking apples, by ladder, by filling a bucket with windfalls. A man, a woman with a child, a couple with a basket between them. Stooks stand in the fields. Horses graze, dogs sleep as though dead in the dry grass. There are pumpkins still in the gardens, heaps of watermelons, horseradish leaves lush by the houses. At the farm where we turn to climb the road to Sokilske, an old table is balanced under a pear tree and a family is seated around it. The man raises his glass. A horse lifts its head as our wheels spin briefly, gaining traction for the steep rise. We can almost smell the Cheremosh River. And listen—there are chickadees in the sunflowers. Chickens scatter at the side of the road.

vyshyvanka

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“In the narrative that follows, then” (Myrna Kostash)

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single woman

It was May, 2017, when Myrna Kostash and I were both guests of the Word on the Lake Writers Festival in Salmon Arm. We’d met several times over the years and I remember we’d talked of our shared Ukrainian heritage. Hers was a daily living part of her. She knew the language, knew the Ukrainian Orthodox religion and its saints; mine was something I was just beginning to discover. At the gala event, I remember Myrna read something from a work-in-progress about finding an unknown ancestor, a writer, in a photograph and trying to trace both the image and its story. John leaned to me and said quietly in my ear: You have so much in common. He knew I’d also discovered a name, my surname, attached to a writer in a village not far from where my grandfather had been born, a writer who founded a small museum. Myrna and I had a drink together on the sunny patio a day or so later and she encouraged me to travel to Ukraine. She’d been several times, maybe more, and I remember she mentioned the company whose name had been given to me as a sort of secret password at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, east of Edmonton, in 2015, a moment that is part of “Museum of the Multitude Village” in Blue Portugal & Other Essays.

You were walking just beyond the pigsty, beyond the wide shorn fields with stooks of hay standing like men waiting for winter, you were pushing the stroller with your baby granddaughter, your husband and son (the baby’s father), when a wagon drawn by two horses turned onto the narrow road. Would you like a ride, asked the woman sitting on a bale of straw, scarf tied neatly under her chin, and an apron over her skirt and rough cotton blouse. Of course you wanted a ride. The horses stood quietly while, between the three of you, you hoisted the stroller onto the wagon, and then you climbed on too. Where do you come from, asked the woman, and you knew the rules at this living museum: she was in character, a Ukrainian immigrant from the 1930s, and she would act and talk as though the years between then and now hadn’t yet occurred. Ivankivtsi, you replied. And then she whispered, Have you been there yourself? And you whispered back, No, no, I don’t even know how to begin to find it. Cobblestone Freeway, she said in a low voice, a woman passing on information best told in secret. Then she was herself again, joshing with the driver, talking about the harvest.

Myrna said she’d gone to her family village, Tulova, as part of a Cobblestone tour. That set the wheels in motion, not for the next year, though we booked a tour for fall, 2018, but had to cancel because of health issues, but the year after that, 2019, 6 months before the pandemic, and well before the Russian invasion, wagon wheels, train wheels, the wheels of the car that took me to my grandfather’s village, the van that drove us to Tulova, Myrna’s village, where lamps glowed on the graves in the cemetery, to Kolomyia, Kosiv, to Tiudiv, Bukovets, to Kryvorivnya where a priest kissed a gospel already worn thin, though not to Valyava, where the Kishkan who was a writer had lived. When I met my grandfather’s relations (my relations!) later, unexpectedly — they’d learned of my visit to the village where I wasn’t able to find them and had tracked me down to a hotel in the Carpathian mountains–, I asked about Vasily Kishkan. They weren’t sure of a relationship, though probably there was one, and Nadya, who called me her sister, said, He wrote a book, though she wasn’t sure what kind of book.

Last week Myrna’s new book arrived at Talewind Books in Sechelt. Ghosts in a Photograph. I’ve been trying to read it slowly, savouring each word, even waking in the small hours to read just a few more pages before trying to sleep again, my head filled with stories, hers and my own. In her Foreword, she talks about the form her books takes, using fragmentary bits and pieces of source materials, song lyrics, hand-drawn maps, biographies, autobiographies, conference papers, scholarly works.

In the narrative that follows, then, my voice echoes different sources and takes different forms–straightforward narration, storytelling, intervention in other people’s texts, speculation, second-guessing, and argumentation, often with my own previously published texts.

As I read this, I was agreeing with my whole heart. Sometimes this is what we do. Sometimes we’ve written what we know, what we can guess, and then later, we find out more. Does that make what we’ve already thought deeply about, and written about, wrong? Or is what others have written, with knowledge of the photograph, the map, the newly discovered letters, wrong? Nope. I think of it as an ongoing and living history, a hybrid history, always changing a little, evolving in a way. One generation hides or submerges the story, to survive. Another generation discovers and attempts to decode. Twice now I’ve published books with versions of my family stories and maybe there will be a third book because I keep finding out new things. The essay “Tokens” in Euclid’s Orchard, for example: it’s about my mother, who never knew her biological parents, apart from a few strands of, well, not story, exactly, but hearsay. A year or two after I’d written the essay, I submitted a DNA sample to one of the companies specializing in that sort of thing. And a year or two after that (maybe a year after the book came out), I found out who my mother’s biological father was. My mother is dead; but she has living relatives. She had two half-brothers, now deceased, and they had children. I’m not ready to begin that particular adventure yet but one day, perhaps.

So I’m half-way through Myna’s book, a wonderful and meticulous work of love. And as I read, I’m remembering the photograph I found last fall, a group of men, several women, and even a baby in front of the Ukrainian Hall in Drumheller:

ukrainian hall

That man, second on the right in the back row: I’m almost certain he’s my grandfather. When my archivist son was here last February, I showed him. We compared it to the small hoard of photographs I have of my grandfather, and Forrest said, Yes, I think you’re right.

The photograph at the top of this post is a ghost who has become part of my daily life. I don’t know who she is. This image is one of only a handful of photographs left as part of a small secret hoard of my grandfather’s papers  I took from my parents’ home after they died. I say “secret” because I didn’t know about them until it was too late to ask but my father kept almost everything about his early family life secret. Or at least he didn’t — wouldn’t— talk about it unless he’d had a few too many whiskys and he’d become maudlin. Was this woman a sweetheart my grandfather left behind when he came to North America in 1907? I showed her to my new-found relatives in Ukraine but they didn’t recognize her. She’s become the focus of part of a novel I’m working on but maybe she needs to be more.

What is it I want? I want everything. I want to know the long line of my family going back centuries, I want to know their houses, their gardens, their sorrows, their hopes, the names of each and every one of them. I want to know about the feuds and the weddings. When Myrna finds a baptismal certificate for her maternal grandfather and a historian friend helps her to read it (it’s in both Latin and a form of Ukrainian unfamiliar to her):

Suddenly, out of the void I had assumed was my grandfather’s genealogy, I have great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, Ivan, Hryhori, Mykhailo, Anastasia, Anna, and two Marias.

I want this also. I want their names, the colour of their eyes, how it felt to go out in the mornings when frost was still on the tall grass, how it felt to smooth the hair of a beloved, how it felt, how it felt, all those years ago that are my years too.

redux: “Once I told them, You look like goddesses, all of you, there in the water, so graceful as you raise your arms.”

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Note: this was 4 years ago and this morning, re-reading, I was surprised to realize I was revising “How Rivers Break Away and Meet Again”,  an essay that is central to my Blue Portugal & Other Essays. I didn’t know then that the collection would be finished, would be published, and that a copy would sit on my desk to remind me of how the thinking and writing I do gradually accumulates until, voila, a book….

morning swim

Kerry Clare at Pickle Me This has a wonderful post this morning, a review of Swell: A Waterbiography, by Jenny Landreth. It’s a book I’d like to read, and will. I’ve been reading books about water lately, about swimming, about various kinds of immersion. Jessica Lee’s Turning: A Swimming Memoir was so beautiful and so brave that I began to plot ways of swimming in winter. Wait, I do swim in winter, though in a pool, not the lakes Jessica has found near Berlin, where she lives. I swim daily in Ruby Lake from June to late September and then it’s the Pender Harbour Aquatic Centre, where my children learned to swim more than 30 years ago, and where the lifeguards do their best to save my lane for me, the one closest to the big windows and on the side of the pool because otherwise I can’t keep straight.

I’ve been revising a long essay on rivers and the venous system, mostly because it keeps getting rejected and I return to it with a nervous eye, wondering what to do to make it something more attractive to readers. I loved writing the early drafts. I wanted to do something I hadn’t done before, not in prose, so I used both margins to justify different parts of the text. I wanted the typography to echo the text. I wanted the text to meander on the page as a river meanders through a landscape and our veins and arteries carry our blood through our bodies. (Writing this description, or justification, I realize how this might be the reason no one wants to publish it. It looks odd. It uses space in an unexpected way. But who wants to keep doing the same old, same old?)

Here’s a little of the essay, a section justified to the right margin (though some sections move back and forth between margins, as a swimmer moves through water):

8. Deep Venous drainage system

The fibular vein. Anterior tibial vein. Posterior tibial vein. The three become the popliteal vein at the knee; and then that vein enters the thigh, via a passageway called the adductor canal, as the femoral vein. These are the veins where the thrombosis formed, a clot poised like a temporary island, breaking free, travelling into my pulmonary system where it lodged as an embolism, threatening my heart.

My heart never knew it was threatened. My heart grew large with love that time, in anticipation of a third grandchild, surrounded by other family members, hearing their voices, sitting with them at the long table we’d eaten at for more than three decades. My heart, unaware, as I tried to catch my breath. It never knew it was threatened. It was filled with love, it was heavy with love.

And other minor veins drain into the femoral vein, like small creeks. The femoral vein graciously receives its tributaries as rivers receive theirs, the threads of mountain courses, of run-off, of bog-dark sweet creekwater, limestone, gritty, clear as mirror glass, dense with salmon, lively with mayflies and dragonflies catching fire, of rivulets, right-bank, left-bank, forked, streamlet, greater saphenous vein, which usually receives the external pudendal vein as well as the superficial epigastric vein, and the superficial circumflex iliac vein.

When I go for my swim at the local pool, I see the older women whose class is finishing just as I enter the water for my laps. They are thin, large, stooped, high-stepping, and lame. On their legs, the story of their lives thus far. Varicose veins, spider veins, venous insufficiency, superficial phlebitis, swellings and dark bruisings, lymphedema: some of them use walkers or canes to help them into and out of the water, to the hot-tub where they are helped down the stairs. But in the pool—sometimes I arrive early enough to see this—they raise their arms, they float, they are light as birds in the clear water while gentle music plays and the instructor leads their movements from the walkway at the edge. In the hot-tub after, their heads above the warm froth, they are beautiful, talking among themselves as the music continues and I swim my laps, listening to them.

…listen to your suppliants voice, come, and benignant in these rites rejoice;
Give plenteous Seasons, and sufficient wealth, and pour; in lasting streams, continued Health.

Once I told them, You look like goddesses, all of you, there in the water, so graceful as you raise your arms. Join us, one of them says, smiling, using her cane to walk unsteadily to the change room. My own legs are uncertain rivers, uncertain streams, their courses changing, islands forming of my own blood, its platelets and fibrins turned semi-solid.

“…the Deadman and Bonaparte, Upper Hat Creek”

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back in the river

                                                                 the Deadman and Bonaparte, Upper Hat Creek,

Coldwater, and the Kispiox where my children waded on a hot day in July, the Leech and Jordan, the Nitinat and Koksilah, the Oyster and Nimpkish, the Po (a rock, with an inscription, “Qui nasce il Po”, near Pian del Re, then the long journey to its fossil delta) and Arno (where I stood on another bridge and wished I could afford soft gloves) and the sweet Hoh, Queets, and Ozette where I camped as a young woman, the Snake, the Escalante and Kanab, the Lost and the Warm, and the Coeur d’Alene,

the Kern, the Mad, Klamath, and Rowdy Creek,

the Sooke, the Elk,

and the one I walk to season after season, near my home, where coho salmon swim in by starlight

and mergansers wait to feed on their eggs.

Note: this is an extract from “How Rivers Break Away and Meet Again”, included in Blue Portugal and Other Essays, available from any bookseller.

“A kind of opposite is also true.”

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constellations

Last night I stayed awake for longer than usual, wanting to finish the book I was reading: The Smallest Lights in the Universe, by Sara Seager. Sara is an astrophysicist at MIT and the book is a memoir of her professional life, her passion for exoplanets and the possibility (she would say probability, I think) of life forms in the vast universe. It’s also a memoir of her unexpected widowhood and how she moved ahead in her life and career with two small boys to care for. I found it an entrancing read and after I closed it last night, I thought for a long time about stars and motherhood and grief.

Two nights ago, I was returning to bed after visiting the bathroom and I paused to look out the window at the dark sky. (Although we have curtains, we seldom draw them shut at night.) Two nights ago there were so many stars that I stood for a time just taking in the silvery shimmer across the vault of sky over the Douglas firs just beyond my house, the beauty settling in my whole body like a promise. This is here, I thought, despite everything else. Despite the vaccination delays, the lists of those who have died, the willful denial of science by too many, the families in trouble, those who are lonely and isolated. Despite the horror it’s easy to succumb to when the new numbers are released each afternoon. This is here, this matters, this keeps me standing in the darkness looking out, I thought. I’d just begun The Smallest Lights in the Universe that evening so maybe I was particularly vulnerable to the beauty but I hope I’m never immune to it. In late November, 2018, I fell on ice and without knowing right away, I injured my retinas. In the days immediately following my accident, I had the sensation of seeing stars cascade past my face, a sensation as thrilling as it was frightening. Or to be honest, I wasn’t frightened until later, when I had emergency surgery to repair my eyes, and learned how serious the situation could have been if I hadn’t gone to the hospital when I did.

On a snowy evening in Edmonton, I sat in a chair high above the city glittering below, and saw images so beautiful that I know why people have sought them since they first ate datura or drank fermented honey and ingested mushrooms so toxic they could not have lived long afterwards. In dark caves they applied ochre, charcoal, and ground calcite to show light falling from the faces of horses and spiral patterns that led them to a dizzy apprehension of time and starlight. Following the spiral, they went to the heart of the mystery. It was never ours. It was always ours.

When I sew my spirals, I am finding my way into darkness, hopeful that I will find my way back. I am walking a path worn to the bare earth. It’s one way I know to hear myself think. I sew small shell buttons to the ends of each trail, a place-marker, shining as the light shone by my face in an Edmonton room where I lay in intense pain, but also in joy as I heard my grandchildren singing. Two little dicky birds sitting on a wall, one named Peter, the other named Paul.
—from “The Blue Etymologies”, in Blue Portugal and Other Essays, forthcoming.

It might sound dramatic to say I was changed by the experience but I was. I learned how precious my eyesight is—and isn’t it strange that it takes injury sometimes to allow us to understand what a gift it is to see?

There’s a very moving moment in Sara’s book when she is in New Mexico with her sons, trying out a new camera prototype, capable (she hopes) of finding the information she anticipates will further her work with exoplanets. It’s a moonless night on a desert with the Milky Way overhead.

We wanted to stay out there with the stars until the sun began its rise, washing them out one by one until even the brightest had disappeared.

We would know they were still up here. People about the sun and its reliability, how even on the darkest days we know it will come out again. A kind of opposite is also true. Even on the brightest days, beyond blue skies, there are countless stars shining over our heads.

I think of the shimmering stars within my eyes themselves, shining, shining, I remember looking at stars with my children decades ago, but in the place I still live, our attempts to find and name the constellations, I think of how much has been lost but how much still remains, lit by starlight when I least expected it.

“Let me then…”

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rivers

“Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream.” (from ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Virginia Woolf)

Yesterday, using the new printer that arrived on Friday (old one, perfectly serviceable, would no longer talk to the aging computer it was linked to and of course there are no longer drivers available, etc.), I printed the first full draft of Blue Portugal & Other Essays, a collection I’ve been working on for the past two years. In fact, it’s not quite finished. There’s a place holder, a title, for the final essay: “Museum of the Multitude Village”. This last essay I hope to write after a trip to my grandfather’s village in Bukovina in September. In trying to locate more Kishkans in that area, I discovered a museum in a neighbouring village, founded by one Vasily Kishkan, described as a writer and teacher.

museum

This collection surprises me and it doesn’t. I wanted to pursue some threads and I did that. I also found myself revisiting landscapes with new information, trying to make sense of what I already knew, or thought I knew. If I was trying to write a book to fit the current market, I’d be very disappointed now because this isn’t that kind of book. I have my touchstones for what I do and thank goodness they are always close at hand. Last night I was re-reading Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, by Julia Briggs, a book in which the author explores Woolf’s life through her writing, including diaries, letters, and unpublished work. She invites the reader to follow Woolf as she writes, edits, faces both uncertainty and the true possibilities of her work. Last night I was particularly interested in the chapter on the writing of Roger Fry’s biography, a book she began with hope and excitement and concluded with something like despair as the machinery of war sounded everywhere around her (the book was published in 1940). As solace, she wrote some autobiographical sketches, including “A Sketch of the Past”, the most beautiful essay about her childhood at Talland House in St. Ives. I remember walking to the road above Talland House on a trip to England in 2005, entranced by its views and garden. Could I hear voices from where I stood on the road? Coming from the trees? Maybe.

Yesterday, with my newly printed manuscript in hand, I sat outside with my red pen. I’ve already edited most of the essays but one I finished recently, “Mapping, an Unknown Place”, was still pretty rough. I didn’t realize how rough until I had the actual pages in hand. I’m still that old 20th century writer, the one who needs to see the pages following one another in actual time and space, not on a screen. So I scribbled and made notes to myself and spent time at my computer entering the changes.

pages

And realized this morning that I was writing to my father. The essay tries to find him (again) in the place where he was a child. I’ve gone there before but this time I had more information, as though that would allow me to be closer to him. Did it? I don’t know. But it made me feel remorse for how our relationship left too much unsaid. On this day, of all days, I want to give myself a second chance with him and one of the opportunities that writing gives us is just that. Let me then, Virginia Woolf said, descend again into that stream. And oh, yes, that’s what I hope for.

The map I have been trying to draw eludes me. I look and look again. Was it here the washtubs were stored, in full view of the singular hill, was that the river beyond the cottonwoods, the road with its little haze of dust? Yearning is a cloudy overlay. As much as I want to see the thing clear and definite, the land, the house, the road leading to town, and away to the places my father walked, looking for bones, I am lost in the contours of paper and dirt. My thumb rasps old paper. Wandering down the gravel road alongside the barren ground with its tufts of tough grass, broken bottles at the edge, a few brave grasshoppers clicking, I keep my face averted from the truck with the Canadians Against the Temporary Foreign Workers Program sign painted across its side. I will it away. Away. On the map I can’t draw or annotate but keep clear in my imagination, I can find the exact location where my Canadian family (all foreign workers, domestic, miners, subsistence farmers) began. The cone-shaped hill holds more than its layers of mudstone, sandstone, shales, and seams of dark coal. Within the hill, the fossilized bodies of dinosaurs large and small, later mammals, reptiles, fish, trees as unlikely as giant redwoods and mulberries in that dry land. On its steep slope, my father lingers. My finger traces the road, the place where Michichi Creek enters the Red Deer River, its elbows of ice and the pike and walleye resting in the shadows. I smell the mineral scent of the waters, far off rain in the clouds. My father is riding towards me, hell-bent for town. He is 3 years old. He is 13. He a man bent by the news that his brother died. I open my arms to him, full of questions, full of love.