Tag: Patrin

“Don’t fear the voices”

theresakishkanLeave a comment

Tonight is the launch for my novella Patrin. In the way that one does, I’m anticipating questions (not necessarily tonight but in the next while as friends and strangers read this book that takes place partly in the city of my birth and partly in the country of my grandmother’s birth) about the intersection of fact and fiction. Sometimes I write what I call fiction and sometimes I write what is presented as non-fiction. Each is embellished with elements of the other. How could it be otherwise? I think of myself as a writer first,  a citizen of language, and sometimes the world is so rich and dense with materials, with possibilities, that I feel dizzy with it. Joyous with it. And sometimes burdened by it.

For the past few years I’ve been working intermittently on pieces which hover between essays and stories. Some are just fragments of dialogue, overheard. Some are lists of findings, catalogues of family details. Some are sustained narratives. One is a wild patchwork of math and botany, genetics and animal behavior. I haven’t worried about the final organization of this material. Yet. But I know that at some point I’ll have to decide what it is.

I’ve been rereading Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock. It’s one of my favourites of all her books, though I have to say that on any random day, my favourite might be another book entirely. Maybe I mean that it’s the book that puzzles me and enchants me, in equal measure. Some of it seems to be pure memoir. Sometimes Munro takes a single fragment of factual material and meditates upon it, asking questions of it, giving it a life beyond its immediate presence. She writes, in her Foreward, about the genesis of the book. She tells us that she had been looking at family accounts, letters, recollections:

I put all this material together over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something like stories. Some characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can every be.

During these years I was also writing a special set of stories. These stories were not included in the books of fiction I put together, at regular intervals. Why not? I felt they didn’t belong. They were not memoirs but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person. In other first-person stories I had drawn on personal material, but then I did anything I wanted with this material. Because the chief thing I was doing was making a story. In the stories I hadn’t collected I was not doing exactly that. I doing something closer to what a memoir does — exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the centre and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and colour and did things they had not done in reality. They joined the Salvation Army, they revealed that they had once lived in Chicago.

I don’t know that any of those surrounding my particular self joined the Salvation Army but there are some individuals and occasions I don’t know enough about and perhaps never will. And maybe it’s time to explore the possibilities of those instead of waiting, waiting, waiting to find out the actual facts which I suspect will never be revealed. The land my grandmother bought near Grays Harbor, Washington, for instance — how did an immigrant woman living in Drumheller, a widow (I think) at that point, with at least 7 children, buy land in Aberdeen? My father told my son that she discovered the property was worthless and she took a shotgun with her to confront the man who sold it to her. Did she get her money back? My father said she shot fish to feed her children. Grays Harbor is a bay composed of many estuaries — the Hoquiam River, the Humptulips River, the Chehalis, all of them salmon-bearing rivers. In those years — this would have been the early 1920s at the latest — I imagine the salmon-runs were the old legendary runs, so many fish you could cross the river by stepping on a living bridge. I can smell those fish, can see that woman with her shotgun and her children. So a story, a fragment, and as mine as anything ever is.

Releasing one book to the world creates such space for the imagination. I have been sorting (in the most chaotic way) some of the material I have in my study and I keep hearing quiet voices. In Patrin, there’s a poem by the wonderful Czech poet Jan Skacel; its opening line is “Don’t fear the voices.” Patrin Szkandery takes the poem and its advice to heart. And maybe it’s time I did too. I look at this photograph, for instance — a baby who would have been my aunt if she’d lived. Julia Kishkan. She died before my father was born and I know almost nothing about her death. This photograph is anything but empty though. Her older (half) sisters, the curtain, the window, the cloth under the casket, and all those brothers and sisters who aren’t in the photograph. Julia’s parents, my grandparents, whom I barely knew but whose lives deserve my attention, now if ever there was a time. “Don’t fear the voices, there’s a lot of them.”

julia

Forecast

theresakishkanLeave a comment

Autumn, publishing season. John’s new book arrived the other day. Forecast:Selected Early Poems (1970-1990), published by Harbour Publishing. It gathers together the work he published in chapbooks and small books now out of print. Harbour did a lovely job of production. When Anna Comfort O’Keefe was designing the cover, she and John exchanged ideas, various images, and came up with something I think is really interesting. (I took this photograph in the sunroom with today’s sunlight dappling the book.)

forecast

The front cover shows a window opening, newly-framed. Looking out, you see trees (the trees out our windows), a full moon that provides the “O” in the book’s title. And the back cover shows the same window opening several decades later but you’re looking in, the trees reflected in the old glass. That’s our blue window, the one in our dining area. And the book’s trajectory covers a similar span of years.

I know these poems so well. There are some from books published before I met John in 1979 and in fact I’d read some of them before I knew him. “The Crossing” is one of my favourites, from Port of Entry. Its preoccupations — place, how we find ourselves a place and how we write into it and out of it — forecast much of our life together.  Here are the final lines:

not until arrival does the journey

focus. but that is late and looking

back distorts the purpose

we cannot hold our coming through the world

Continue reading “Forecast” →

“How to describe that music?”

theresakishkanLeave a comment

zurnas

I’ve returned the final (I hope!) proofs of my forthcoming novella, Patrin (Mother Tongue Publishing). Have proofed its beautiful cover, accepted a number of invitations to read from it this fall (will update my News and Events page shortly), and now can anticipate its arrival at the end of summer. This morning I thought about the music that serves as part of its soundtrack. Zurna and dauli, the wonderful double-reeded horn (often made of apricot wood) and double-headed drum at the heart of Balkan Romani music. (For more on this, here’s a link to a review I wrote of Bright Balkan Morning.) I listened to a lot of this music while writing Patrin and this morning I can hear it as I postpone heading outdoors to begin the watering…

How to describe that music? Some of it made me want to dance,
and certainly people danced; mostly men, as dancing was a particularly
male activity on Crete. The door stood open, and they moved
inside and out as though the two were the same place. Two zurnas
and a dauli, out under the vine. The sound filled the darkness
right down to the harbour where the water answered back. Some
songs I knew must be rebel songs for their ferocity, the way the
older men at the bar raised their fists and loudly sang the refrains.
But other songs, plangent and achingly lovely, entered my body
and made me feel intense sorrow—though I didn’t know what
to attach the sorrow to. Yiannis, beside me, told me that Nestor
brought the gypsy soul to Cretan music, played the zurna with a
gypsy inflection. The long quavering notes, rich with vibrato—the
other musicians stopped playing to listen. I was unused to wine,
and my glass kept being refilled. Piney, and sharp, it was a perfect
accompaniment to the salty cheese and the plates of small
fried fish, tomatoes coated with golden oil, dishes of olives, green
and black, some of them bitter and others as large and meaty as
chicken. Loaves of bread, heavy, dusty with flour. When we finally
found our way back to the flat, trailed by a few young men who
wanted to know, How do you make the reeds? How do you know
what to give to the drone player? Nestor told them, Tomorrow, ask
me tomorrow. I must take this young lady to her bed.

from Patrin

“the trout are true”

theresakishkanLeave a comment

across the Fraser River

Canada Day. I never knew I was a nationalist until I spent time out of the country when I was a young woman. In those years we had a prime minister to be proud of. Of course I’m thinking of Pierre Trudeau. I never voted Liberal but apart from some fairly draconian moves (the War Measures Act comes to mind), he was a pretty good reflection of my values or at least a compromised version of them. Maybe I mean a consensual version of them. When I was in France in March, I had a brief conversation with a young couple in a bakery. They confessed they were hoping to emigrate to Canada because they felt that the French (and I think they also meant the EU) leadership had betrayed them. But Canada! John and I told them that our country certainly had the potential to be so much better than it currently is but it will take work. And new leadership. Reading the Tyee this morning (my favourite online news source), I felt a kind of despair at the portrait Ian Gill paints of Canada in 15 years.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/07/01/Election-Frighteningly-Near-Future/

It will take some effort to get rid of this terrible government and I’m willing to contribute.

In the meantime, another beautiful hot day has dawned. When I went out to water the vegetable garden, the robins were waiting in the trees nearby. And when I fill their bath, they settle in to duck their heads and flutter their wings. I watched one of them raise its head, beak open, and then it sang. So late in the season but still the urgency to sing.

I wish you Happy Canada Day. May we recover our beautiful country before it’s too late. Here’s a short section from Patrin, in which the fictional character travels with her parents to Edmonton to visit her paternal grandmother. Of course it’s based on a childhood memory, though we never had anything so fancy as a trailer. The trout are true, though. And ice-cream at Edson.

 

From Patrin:

When I was very young, we went to Edmonton every summer to visit my grandmother. We never questioned that this was the way we’d spend the two weeks of holiday time my father received from his employer, a marine communications firm. My parents owned a small trailer, which my mother spent the week before our departure readying for the journey. Bedding was aired and packed away in the storage cupboards under the seats. She made food—meatloaves, spaghetti sauce, macaroni casserole—which she froze and then put into the trailer’s icebox the night before we left. This meant we didn’t need to buy ice until two or three days into the trip. We meandered a bit, took our time. My father liked to fish so we spent an extra night or two at various lakes and rivers along the Yellowhead Highway where he’d get up early and try to catch our breakfast, and my mother read magazines—I remember Redbook and Good Housekeeping—in a folding lawn chair by the side of the lake, her legs turning golden brown in the sun. As advised by the magazines, she wore a hat to protect her face and prevent premature aging.

I swam. I didn’t like to fish because it always seemed that the fish looked straight into my eyes as they came up on the line, panicking and thrashing to free themselves. The one time I deftly removed the hook from the throat of a fine rainbow trout and released it back into the river, my father had such a fit I thought he’d burst.

Swimming, I could forget that I was taller than most other girls my age, that I was dark and about as unlike Hayley Mills as someone could be, and just push myself away from the shore into green water. I’d float face down as long as I could, looking at weeds and tiny bullheads, then turn to face the sun, my eyes washed clean. I had my father’s skin and never burned.

I asked him questions. Did you travel here with your parents? No, he said. We had no holidays. We worked. Ever, I asked. Not ever. And were there cousins? None that I knew, though my mother came to Canada with sisters and brothers, but they had no contact. What about your father’s side of the family? That’s enough questions, he said, with such finality that I didn’t try again.

We stopped, always, at Maligne Canyon where we looked down so far to water that I felt dizzy, felt like the planet had tilted and I had lost my gravity. After that, it was a morning’s drive to Edmonton, with one stop at Edson for ice cream and somewhere else to eat meatloaf sandwiches before we arrived. My mother poured coffee from the dented silver thermos for my father and for herself, and I had lemonade from the jar she kept in the icebox.

Once we’d arrived, my father backed the trailer into the weedy driveway next to the small house he’d grown up in, and my mother took her gift of apples and peaches into my grandmother’s kitchen, which smelled of her—wool and smoke and something she rubbed into her knees when they ached.

“Was it a code?”

theresakishkan4 Comments

“The poem about cloth insinuated its way into my work with the quilt. Cresses green culled beneath a stone,/And given to a woman in secret./The shank of the deer in the head of the herring,/And in the slender tail of the speckled salmon. Was it a code? I knew about watercress and how it grew in cold clean water. How it could refresh water with its filtering root system. Did a secret reside in the loden green leaves, the small elegant scraps of velvet?”

I’m delighted to share the final cover for my novella, Patrin, to be published by Mother Tongue Publishing in September. The photograph was taken by Diana Hayes and the cover designer is Setareh Ashrafologhalai (who is also designing the pages as well). There was a simpler version of this in the earlier stages of the book’s production but it was felt that it didn’t bring together enough of the book’s threads. So Setareh revisited her earlier designs and came up with this. I think the spine and end papers will be burgundy, to echo the colour of the title. You can see the patrin itself, in the triangle immediately above the left corner of the title block. (Patrin or pateran: a handful of leaves tied to a tree or thrown on the ground, by Roma people, to indicate their course.) You will be able to order the book directly from Mother Tongue closer to the time and of course your own local bookstore will either stock it or be able to order it for you. I can’t wait to hold it in my hands.

new patrin cover

“you have not forgotten about us”

theresakishkan4 Comments

This weekend I’m working on last-minute tweaks of my novella Patrin. This is the last chance I’ll have to make sure everything is in order before the file goes to the copyeditor next week, followed by the book designer in early June. (Patrin will be published by Mother Tongue Publishing in September.) Mostly when I edit, I am looking at sentence structure, the flow of the narrative from one section to another — and because I’ve written this book as a series of “stanzas” rather than chapters, and because the schema is not consecutive or linear, I want to make sure that the transitions are smooth, that the reader moves from one to the next with a sense of inevitablity rather than confusion.

This morning I was reading for another reason: I wanted to ensure that a few thematic elements were highlighted at important moments in the narrative and then gracefully stepped into the background when they’d had their moment. They appear again and again, like a refrain, but I don’t want them to be too garrulous or repetitive, like the dinner guest who keeps telling the same story in the same old way.

I’d forgotten (in the way one does when writing “fiction”) how much of my own life and habits appear in this book. It’s not my story, exactly. Patrin Szkandery is a little older than I am. And her background is not mine. But we went to the same parties in Victoria in the mid-1970s. She worked in the bookstore I loved to visit for its faded oriental carpets and wonderful selection of antiquarian books. Our travels echoed one another’s, though she fell in love with a musician in Greece and my love was a fisherman/taverna owner.

But we share one important thing — which is the reason I began this book in the first place. We both long to know more about our family history in Central Europe in the early years of the 20th century. The more I tried to find traces of my paternal grandmother’s family, the more disappointed I became. And the more attention I paid to other histories that were almost as shadowy. When the writing I was doing became more and more fragmentary, when the gaps became wider and more unfathomable, Patrin came to me as a gift. Her quest was similar to my own but I could allow her to discover things that were not mine to find. I gave her my great-grandmother’s family name as a surname so the exchange was not entirely one-sided.

If I was twenty years younger, or thirty, I wonder if I would have the same difficulties finding the quotidian details of my family’s history? Later in the 20th century, people took more photographs, their names appear in more records (even the ship’s manifest listing my grandmother and her five children as they sailed from Antwerp to Saint John in 1913 got salient details wrong), bureaucracies won’t leave them alone, and by the early 21st c. people began to consciously dedicate themselves to their own personal archive by zealously recording every thought and adventure on social media.

I’m grateful to have access to these details, though I’m reluctant to participate much myself. The other day in Ottawa, my daughter-in-law Cristen and I went shopping for a dress for Kelly to wear to a wedding in Montreal. I bought the dearest little dress the colours of a Monet garden and Cristen bought a tiny cardigan (or shrug) to go with it. And this morning, because I’m not on Facebook where I know there are lots of images for a distant grandmother to pour over (if she could just make herself sign up), Cristen very sweetly sent me some photographs of Kelly in her finery.

kelly in her dressI wonder if mine will be the last generation to try so hard to find so little about family history? Or if subsequent generations will simply feel too burdened by the heavy load of information? My grandmother kept a strange assortment of things — every receipt for building materials used to build a house in Beverly, Alberta; mass cards; the few letters my father wrote to her as a young sailor in the 1940s; photographs of my brothers and me sent by my mum during the years of our childhoods. But there are only one or two pieces of correpondence from her former home in Moravia. My friend Lenka translated one letter for me, sent to my grandmother from someone who is obviously her godchild.

Dear godmother, thanks God for your letter since you have not forgotten about us and after all you wrote us. We were very much looking forward to your letter and we have read it several times and we learned about your life and success. We thank God that you have your own dwelling and a piece of field, so you are luckier than us as we do not have anything, neither dwelling nor own piece of field, not even work. Dear godmother, yet we do have something – faith and trust in God that He has not left us yet and we hope that He never will as long as He wants us to be in this world.

Dear godmother, a few years ago nobody would have thought we would live such a life because this is beyond description what poverty it is here in the old world, not only in our Czechoslovak Republic but in the whole Europe.

The letter was sent from the village of Boconowice, near Jablunkov, which is not far from the Polish border and not far from Horni Lomna where my grandmother was born and raised. (I believe the village is also on the Lomna River, the namesake of my grandmother’s village.) I wonder if the godchild was the child of a brother, sister, or cousin of my grandmother? Sometimes mysteries simply remain unsolved and sometimes you try to imagine an alternate history, an invented story to stand in for the silence of the past. As I read Patrin this morning, I realized that’s what I’ve done. And it’s no surprise that the road between Jablunkov and Horni Lomna is where Patrin finds important information about her own lost family.