Tag: Kerry Clare

a year of Blue Portugal

theresakishkan6 Comments

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: “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.

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

theresakishkanLeave a comment

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.

 

 

a summer book shelf

theresakishkan1 Comment

morning visitor.jpg

A summer book shelf. Doesn’t that sound lovely? The truth is, well, messier. I’ve been trying to organize the shelves in our book room (or library, as we grandly call it). Yes, we have one. It used to be a playroom (and before that, a bedroom for the one child we had when we first built our house; by the time we moved in, another was due in two weeks….). The rooms we needed to accommodate the three children who eventually formed our family elbowed their way off that original bedroom/playroom and it seemed like a good idea to set up banks of shelves for the books that accumulated in the way books do. You think you have a few. You realize you have twice that many. Then three times that many. And so on. It’s like one of those math puzzles that hurt your brain. And if you’re like us, or at least like me in particular, you like to look things up in books rather than depending on the Internet exclusively. There’s something about taking one of the volumes of The Complete Gardener’s Collection to sit with as you drink your morning coffee, looking up one thing but then finding yourself reading something else with great interest.

So as I tried to find shelf room for some of the books in the piles that have grown against each wall in my bedroom, the surfaces in my study, some of those in the teetering columns against the bookcases themselves, I found myself thinking, Did I read that? Putting it aside to take upstairs to join the others on my bedside table. And there were others that I’ve bought and put on the lower stairs, waiting until I’d read my library books or the books I was using to research a particular thing in the novella I’m currently writing. I’ve also been gathering books about music for an essay I’ve been asked to write.

This morning, I realized the stairs were clear. The library shelves are as jammed full as they can possible be, several boxes are packed up for the thrift store or the book sale at the local library, and I’ve been thinking about what I’ve read in the last week. For some reason, the selection felt memorable. One title talked to another. A long gorgeous novel set in Ireland actually entered my dreams and I watched the two main characters diving off rocks into glittering water. Another made me laugh and cringe and worry about how the story would end. One or two were unsatisfying in ways that made me wonder why I seem to be outside the tide of current thinking.

Barbara Gowdy’s Little Sister, for instance: very well-plotted, well-written, but I found the whole thing kind of preposterous. I respect this author but can’t warm to her work. And I’m perfectly willing to take the blame for this. I never finish one of her books and think, Oh, I’ll need to read that again one day because I’ll want the story to unfold again, taking me along. I wasn’t taken along.

A book that was the antithesis of Little Sister was At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill. Not a new book – it was published in 2001 – but rich and timeless. O’Neill uses language like his shadow-brother, James Joyce; and it’s no coincidence that the novel takes place mostly around Sandycove, with its Martello tower haunted by that earlier James. There’s so much in this book. The life of a community with its rich and its poor, swimming, fatherhood and its gaps and tenderness, young men learning what their bodies are capable of, in the ocean as they swim towards the Muglins, and in the awkwardness of love. The complicated politics of Ireland in 1915-16 and its heroes and martyrs. The Church. I can easily imagine finding this novel in a stack waiting to find a place on the shelves and thinking, Oh, I’ll put it by my bed because I want to read it again.

The two books that spoke to one another were an unlikely pair at first. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs is a wonderful guide to Woolf’s writing process. Briggs studies the material evidence of this and provides a fascinating exploration of the context of each of Woolf’s books. What she was reading, what she was thinking, her health, her friendships, what she hoped to do as she found her way into the deep work. An Aftermath section follows each chapter, detailing the critical responses to the books and– this is so interesting!– the sales information, the reprinting schedules, and how Woolf responded to the reviews and both the successes and failures of her books. Her schemata for To the Lighthouse is particularly enlightening. “She found herself with that ‘quick decisive stroke’ writing the words ‘To the Lighthouse’ at the top of a fresh page of her notebook, and following it with a diagram rather like a letter ‘H’– the ‘two blocks joined by a corridor’, which would make up the structure of the novel – the longer ‘Window’ and ‘Lighthouse’ sequences joined by ‘Time Passes’”. It made me want to pick up To the Lighthouse again, a novel I re-read every four or five years, always with a sense of rediscovery and pleasure. Of all Woolf’s novels, this one drew its author back into the idyllic days of her childhood summers and the beauty of that, the resonance, is palpable.

I loved finding To the Lighthouse at the heart of Kerry Clare’s delightful Mitzi Bytes. Sarah Lundy’s book club meets to eat good food (even a cake decorated with a lighthouse), drink some wine, and engage in a spirited discussion about the novel. Which becomes a discussion about much more, some of it coded and allusive. As Sarah’s life is coded and (in some ways) allusive. And elusive. How many of us don’t live multiple lives? Those of us who are parents know this. Those of us in relationships (of any kind, really). I read this book in two afternoons, on a long wicker lounge in our sunroom, not wanting to finish but hoping for a happy ending. At some points, that didn’t seem possible. The book is described as “a grown-up Harriet the Spy for the digital age”. I confess I never read Harriet the Spy. (Nancy Drew was the girl detective of my childhood though I suspect she wouldn’t work in the digital age. Her roadster? Her reluctance to kiss her boyfriend on the porch for fear the neighbours would see. Her sleek outfits and perfect diet, made possible by a kindly housekeeper?) But in some ways, To the Lighthouse is the shadowy H haunting these pages, bridging the before and the after, time passing, even as the computer crashes and the digital files are lost (but not the photos on her phone!):

The kids were changing all the time, so fast so often that from one morning to the next, they seemed like entirely different people. Sarah needed the pictures as proof of where the time went, but all the rest of it, everything else that mattered, were stories she kept filed away on her brain. It was an unreliable filing system, nothing ever turning up at the right moment and so much at the wrong time, but it worked. And it was possible that she didn’t need an archive, that she could go forward now.