Tag: Winter Wren

foundational

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Yesterday I had a virtual visit to a class reading my novella, The Weight of the Heart. (Thank you, Richard Pickard!) In the course of the discussion, I found myself admitting that the 1970s had been foundational to me — as a writer, as a person figuring out how to live on this earth. I found out the things I wanted and I tried to build a life that would include them. I didn’t realize then how pottery was part of that, pots built by BC potters, using earth and pigment, but looking around my house this morning (begun not quite in the 1970s but close: we started building our house in 1981 after buying the land a year before and spending a year figuring out where we wanted the house and how we would proceed…), I can see the evidence.

This red raku tea bowl was made by Wayne Ngan in the early 1970s. My then-sister-in-law Rosemary Kent (herself a potter) owned a small art gallery in Bastion Square in Victoria. They often had pieces made by Wayne. He’d come to Victoria from his home on Hornby Island with new pots. I fell in love with this one but couldn’t begin to afford it (I was a university student) and Rosemary surprised me with it at Christmas. The glaze is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

This wide shallow bowl was also made by Wayne. I saw it at Rosemary’s gallery and realized that I could buy it with unexpected scholarship money, received after I’d already paid my tuition with earnings from my summer job at Butchart Gardens. You can’t really see it but there’s some blue in the slip used to create the design. We used to eat salad from this bowl regularly, particularly when friends came for dinner (it holds a lot of salad!) and I remember how surprised people were when the last helping of greens had been lifted from the bowl and we could see that engaging little face!

I am not entirely sure if this pot was made by Wayne Ngan. I bought it from a couple who’d set up a table at a huge swap meet at the site of the old Tillicum drive-in theatre (now the Tillicum Mall) in Victoria. They’d come from Hornby Island and were selling everything to spend a year in Europe. They had pots by various artists, including Gordon Hutchens, and they assured me that this large vessel was made by Wayne. It doesn’t have a seal so I can’t confirm it. But it’s heavy in the way so many pots were then and sometimes I put dried rushes or flowers in it. When I lifted it up to check once again for a seal, there was a stick of driftwood sticking out of, left over from wind-chimes I made a few summers ago with my grandchildren, also emblems of the 1970s!

These wind-chimes hang by our front door and a rose has sent out a tendril to join the music before winter. Sometimes I see Anna’s hummingbirds paused on it between sips from the feeder which hangs just to its right.

Sometimes I just take one of the pots in my hands and hold it. There’s life to them, life in their shapeliness, their inner space. In a wonderful interview with Spencer Bailey on the podcast Time Sensitive, the potter Edmund De Waal says this:

I think it’s completely my grounding, really, which is that the making of one vessel and then making another vessel, taking it off the wheel, making another one, has an extraordinary element of rhythm within it. But at the heart of the rhythm, of course, is this interior space of a vessel, which is a breath. And so, there’s an embodiment there. It’s almost a breathing into the vessel. I don’t want to sound like God or Prometheus, but, for me, a vessel, it’s a container of breath.

Surrounded by things made of earth, shaped by hands, I am in the foundational time again, the one I wrote about in my novella, Winter Wren. What mattered then matters now. The quiet of a west-facing house, the view at dusk, finding a way to live a life in which these things have a place, a place known and loved and cared for. I think it’s completely my grounding, really…Yes, and yes, and yes.

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: the other fish

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Note: this was posted last July and in the meantime, the 5th title in our novella (and innovative prose forms) program has been published. And it’s Anik’s book, Cabin Fever! When we were first discussing the possibility of creating a micropress to showcase novellas, we’d each written one and our experience with publishers was the same. They’d tell us they liked our work but they couldn’t possibly publish a novella! So I remember we smiled at each other over a glass of wine by our woodstove — she was visiting for a few days, enroute back to Amsterdam from Dawson City — and it was in that moment Fish Gotta Swim Editions was formed. We began with my novella Winter Wren, followed by Frances Boyle’s Tower, Barbara Lambert’s Wanda, and Jennifer Falkner’s Susanna Hall, Her Book. We intended to publish Cabin Fever as well but Anik kept saying, No, not just yet, until last summer as we ate spot prawns and garden salad and Reader, she said Yes. So we began planning immediately and now Cabin Fever is fresh off the press, ready for orders. In fact, we’ve shipped an entire case of books in the past week. If you’re interested in buying your own copy, visit us at https://www.fishgottaswimeditions.com/books-1

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snickett rock

I met my dear friend and publishing partner Anik See in 2003. She came to live in a cabin at Bargain Harbour and for the next two years, I saw her every week or so, sometimes more often. A writer, a letterpress printer, a world traveller (by bicycle; see her book, A Fork in the Road, for details of this), a chef, and a remarkably kind and intelligent woman. In 2005 she met a Dutch artist who won her heart and a new chapter of her life began, one that included moving to the Netherlands, having a child, working in broadcasting, teaching, creating podcasts, restoring books and manuscripts, and more. I see her whenever possible. In 2014, she came for a few days enroute back to Europe from a residency at the Berton House in Dawson City, and over a glass or two of wine by our woodstove, the two of us decided to establish a micropress to publish the occasional novella. (You can read about that here.) John and I flew to Amsterdam the next year for Anik’s wedding to the Dutch artist. And because of, well, life, we haven’t seen her since. Until Friday. With great pleasure, we welcomed her family for a couple of days. I remembered how much she liked Harbour suppers (because that was what Edith Iglauer called them)– steamed spot prawns, garlic butter, fresh bread, salad, a galette of fruit in season–so that’s what we had the first night, talking into the dark. When I see her, we just pick up where we left off. We cook food, talk, share books, ideas, and this time we got to celebrate her son’s birthday with a little party on Saturday night, setting the table under the vines with platters of Greek lamb kebabs, chicken with Sicilian salt and herbs, lemon potatoes, salad, warm focaccia with rosemary and flaky salt, a chocolate torte with homemade maple ice-cream. And as we talked, we made a decision about the 5th novella for our Fish Gotta Swim Editions. We’ll share details in a newsletter in October.

On Saturday night, after the birthday boy had gone to bed and the guest (Anik’s former neighbour at Bargain Harbour) was getting ready to leave, Anik’s husband, Walter Von Broekhuizen, said to me quietly, I made something for you. Come and see. If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit, you might remember I’ve mentioned some cedar rounds from time to time, cut from dead trees we had taken down last fall, victims of the climate emergency. (Western red cedars don’t tolerate the periods of excessive heat and drought well.) I kept thinking I wanted to make something with them. But what? I’m not an artist. I had in mind just organic constructions that would let them show their beauty, maybe supported in place by nets of old rope. I thought I might be able to “knit” the nets. I showed Walter the piles of cedar the other day and then somehow, without anyone seeing, he made this for me.

portals

The rounds are braced to some extent by a helpful arm of chestnut. Walter showed me how I could use metal flanges if I want to secure the rounds for a time–eventually they will deteriorate of course and anyway life is ephemeral–but when I said I hoped I could somehow net some of them with knitted rope and add shells, he liked that idea. He also said, You can put things in the middles too. And yes, that will be something I know my grandchildren will enjoy thinking about. A birds nest, a special rock, the tiny skull of a shrew.

After we took them down to the Langdale ferry yesterday, John and I stopped for a swim at Trail Bay. As we walked back to the car, I stopped by the rock at the top of this post. It’s big enough for two people to sit on, looking out across the Strait. Two women maybe, talking about novellas, making a place for them in the currents of literary activity. We knew what we’d call our press at the same moment. Fish Gotta Swim, we both said at the same time. Because novellas gotta. They do.

wren

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wren

This morning there’s a dusting of new snow on the mountain, winter’s tentative nudge. And on the railing of the porch outside my study window, a wren perched for a few minutes, then investigated the little bird house hanging from the eaves. No one nests in it but in the depths of winter I’ve seen as many as 6 wrens enter at dusk to gather together for warmth. I confess I still call them winter wrens. I knew them before it was decided that there are actually two distinct species in North America and that the ones I’ve loved all my life are more properly Troglodytes pacificus or Pacific wrens. It doesn’t matter. They’re wrens. They are always around in winter, singing in the salal, the woodshed, their song as lovely as anything I’ve ever heard. In my novella Winter Wren, the main character Grace hears them singing near the cabin she’s bought above Sandcut Beach, west of Sooke. She hears them and then she listens to Bach’s Flute Partita in A Minor, the Bourrée anglaise, and realizes that there are intricate convergences.

She was on the porch, wringing the mop over the edge when her favourite movement of the Bach Partita in A Minor, the last, the Bourée Anglaise, began. Leaning on the railing, she loved how the passage floated out in the wintry air, a counterpoint to waves and wind. She hummed a little of it from memory. She’d heard Jean-Pierre Rampal play this in Paris, the amazing backward rhythm of the bourrée balancing the rapid run of sixteenth notes, and ever after thought of it as music she would choose before all else.

It wasn’t until the movement was almost complete that she realized she was hearing another sound, another melody answering the bourrée, ascending as the flute descended. Startled, she looked around, fearful. Was it someone whistling on her property? No, it was a bird. It must be a bird because there wasn’t anyone or anything else in sight. And it came from within the salal on the trail down to the waterfall. Peering into the undergrowth, she came face to face with a tiny dark bird, very pert, bobbing and bending on the stem it had claimed. From its open beak came a long undulating series of notes as melodic as anthing Bach had put to paper.

It was this time of year that my friend Anik See stopped in to visit us on her way back to the Netherlands from a residency at the Berton House in Dawson City. We’d both recently completed novellas and we’d both received many rejections from publishers, who all said something like, Oh, this is lovely work but we can’t publish a novella. Anik and I looked at one another after about the 6th story of rejection and we laughed. You know what this means, one of us said, and in that moment, our little imprint fishgottaswimeditions.com  was born. We decided to start with one of our novellas because then, if the whole enterprise didn’t work, there’d be fewer people to disappoint. We decided on Winter Wren (and I’m hoping Anik will consider including her Cabin Fever on our list too). We’ve published 4 novellas thus far: Winter Wren was followed by Frances Boyle’s Tower which in turn was followed by Barbara Lambert’s Wanda and our most recent title was Jennifer Falkner’s Susanna Hall, Her Book. You can visit our website (linked above) for more information.

Because I’ve been visited by the wren and because I just washed the bowl that was used for the cover of Winter Wren and I’m reminded all over again of these birds in the low brush, their song, I’m offering copies of my novella for $10 plus postage (currently $3.50 in Canada, $5.50 to the US, and I don’t know how much to other places right now but I’d simply charge the cost).

winter gifts at High Ground

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I know Christmas is more than a month away but if you’re thinking about gifts, we can make it simpler for you by offering some of our own books, limited edition chapbooks, and broadsheets printed on our late 19th c. Chandler & Price platen press for sale during the season.

mud bottom

For example, John’s Mud Bottom (details here) is $35. If you buy a set of the Companions Series Broadsheets (also here), a folio of 12 letter press broadsheets including poems by Gillian Wigmore, Russell Thornton, and Maleea Acker written in reponse to other poems printed enface, priced at $150, then we will include a copy of Mud Bottom for free with your order.

winter books

For a selection of our books, including my Euclid’s Orchard, Winter Wren, The Age of Water Lilies, Inishbream, Patrin, A Man in a Distant Field, and Red Laredo Boots, and John’s crawlspace (winner of the 2012 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Forecast (Selected Early Poems: 1970-1990), and This Was the River. the deal is this: buy one at cover price and receive a second book of your choice for 50% off. We’ll happily inscribe the books. Postage will be charged at cost.

If there are other books you’re interested in or you see something on the High Ground page (including chapbooks, individual broadsheets, including Michael Ondaatje’s “Breeze”), please ask us. And if you think that background scarf on which the books recline is as ravishing as I think it is, visit Caroline Jonas’s website. (I recently ordered the scarf as an early Christmas gift from my husband because he won’t be able to shop this year!)

the decades

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lino

I looked out just now to see if there’s the first snow on the mountain because it feels cold enough down here. There isn’t yet, but I bet it’ll come by next week. I love the cold nights, stars, that beautiful scimitar moon in the mid-November dark sky.

I just made a (clumsy) linocut for this year’s Christmas card. A winter wren, with a slightly foreshortened beak and awkward legs. (The lino was brittle this year, even when warmed by the woodstove.) I’ve chosen a short passage from my novella, Winter Wren, and John will print later this week.

Every year I make a linocut and he sets type and prints a card. I remember the first one we created, in the basement of the house we rented in North Vancouver before moving here in December of 1982, after a year and a half of living first in a tent here, then the shell of our house while we made it comfortable enough to live in. That first card used some old wooden type that came with the press and we had enough to print just two words: LOVE&JOY, all in caps, with the beautiful ampersand.

How the years accumulate. I listened to Emmylou Harris while I worked on the lino and realized I’ve been one of her biggest fans, boots and all, since grade 11. 1972. But I don’t think I ever paid much attention to this beauty, the one that caught my heart this afternoon.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll go to Edmonton (speaking of cold) to spend time with our family there. Emails arrive, asking would we like to go for a sleigh ride on Whyte Avenue, would we like to go to an abbreviated Nutcracker (our grandchildren are 2 and 4), and what about a Dickens tea? I remember carving lino in the early year with an audience, my own children, young enough to be impressed by a small knife making images in a piece of lino warmed by the woodstove. Young enough to listen to any music I played, and yes, there was a lot of Emmylou Harris even then. I wanted to preserve time in the images I cut with my little box of tools. I still do. John’s been sorting the decades of Christmas cards to make sure we have a full collection for the High Ground Press archive and there they are—a house on a hill with a moon overhead; a cat in a window with a star by its ear; a tree by the front door; a gingerbread person; a snowflake; a pinecone; the two fish undulating under stars (the image Anik and I appropriated for our Fish Gotta Swim Editions pressmark); a fishing boat with bright lights on its rigging (inked in by hand); and more that I can’t remember right now.

Sometimes I forget what’s to come. In late summer, preserving fruit and vegetables, I forget that I’ll be here in the house on a cold day in November, wondering what might make a card image for this coming Christmas. Or that listening to a cd heard hundreds of times over the years, I’ll stop as Emmylou sings,

So blind I couldn’t see
How much she really meant to me
And that soon she would always be
On my mind, in my heart,
I was blind from the start

“…who notices the cloth-gowned scholar?”

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last year's quilt

The winter wren has begun to visit most mornings, perching on a chair outside my study window, peering in, then skitting up to a rattan birdhouse to check it for spiders. Every year I forget and every year I am reminded, when this happens, that they are secret birds, with careful habits, and when I see this one, I know where I am in the year.

waiting

At this point in my life, it’s all about patterns. Reading my entry from November 1st last year—https://theresakishkan.com/2017/11/01/finding-my-way-into-winter/—I see that I was stacking wood (due to a health malady on the part of my husband, whose job this usually is). Last night, around supper time, a guy delivered a load of fir, right on time. (John’s been cutting and splitting wood here, too, but there wasn’t enough to last the cold months; we burn 3 or 4 cords.)

Last year I was stitching the quilt at the beginning of this entry, from linen I’d tied and dipped in indigo dye. I backed it with warm red flannel and it’s on a couch, for cold evenings. This year? I have another length of the linen, not quite so deep a blue, but I’m about to turn it into something, not sure what yet, but maybe, oh, a quilt?

this year's quilt

I have some Moravian blueprint, too, bought from a shop near my grandmother’s village in the Czech Republic, and hoarded until the right thing came along. I think it might look beautiful with this linen. We’ll see. The cold months are long and fires are warm. It’s been raining for days and I think of Du Fu, preparing for winter:

In Chang’an, who notices the cloth-gowned scholar?
Locked behind his gate and guarding his walls.
The old man doesn’t go out, the weeds grow tall,
Children blithely rush through wind and rain.
The rustling rain hastens the early cold,
And geese with wet wings find high flying hard.
This autumn we’ve had no glimpse of the white sun,
When will the mud and dirt become dry earth?

 

novellas for a rainy day

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rainy day friends

It’s raining, a lovely soft sound on the roof. A perfect day to curl up with a novella, or three. In that spirit, I’m offering my three novellas—Inishbream, Patrin, and Winter Wren—for $45. (That’s a paltry $15 per title! But I’m only offering them as a trio.) I’ll ship for free in Canada. Other places? We can talk!

On my Books page, you can read about the individual titles. And here’s a little sample of rainy writing from each of them:

Listen. There were weeks when the sun refused us. At first I thought I could never live in such a place, but then I learned the sweetness of the Irish mist, how it enveloped you and numbed you to any real action or consequence. And you wandered in it, your hair jewelled, and you let yourself drift in great imaginings, where the ruined castle on the coast was made whole and you lived there, where the beached hooker* was yours and you mended it.

—from Inishbream (Goose Lane Editions, 2001)

My grandmother told me once that her father had worn a cloak, a loden cloak, given him by a man who’d bought some of the copper pots. It repelled both wind and rain. Sometimes he’d open it to allow two or three of his children to shelter within, she said. We sat under trees while the rain poured down, and it was our own tent, warmed by our father’s body.

—from Patrin (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2015)

Where am I, where am I? Again, she woke and tried to orient herself in the new room. Curtains, no—the fogginess was because it was raining outside and she couldn’t see farther than the window. Her room was a cube of wood and glass. In the bed she had been born in, she leaned forward and watched drops of water slowly find their way down the glass to the sill. The trees dripped. The cabin was cold and she put off the moment when she would push away the eiderdown and rush to the woodstove to start the morning’s fire.

—Winter Wren (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2016)

*The Galway hooker (Irish: húicéir) is a traditional fishing boat used in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland.

the murmur of voices in cold air

theresakishkan4 Comments
near stump lake
It’s always interesting to me that new friends can be made in one’s later years and that you find yourself wondering why it took so long to meet these people. In truth, I knew of Robin and Jillian Ridington before I ever met them. They are distinguished anthropologists, the authors of books that form an important part of the canon of North American ethnographic studies. On my desk I keep a copy of Where Happiness Dwells: A History of the Dane-zaa First Nations , an extraordinary gathering of stories told to them by elders living in the Peace River area, a place where they’ve done fieldwork (and made friends) for decades. I also loved When You Sing It Now, Just Like New: First Nations Poetics, Voices and Representations.  (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
We met at the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival. I’ve been involved with the Festival as an organizer and writer since the first year—2005—and Jillian and Robin have been supporters since that first summer. I thought Robin in particular looked familiar but it wasn’t until later, after I’d taken a break from the Festival for a few years and then returned, that we became friends. One of the highlights of the summer is joining them for dinner on their Nordic Tug—they come to Pender Harbour by boat, often from their haven on Retreat Island, near Galiano Island. Robin grills steaks over the most ingenious barbecue at the stern of the boat (where there’s also a mangle for washing clothing; they spend a lot of time exploring coastal inlets and islands, living aboard for weeks on end). The tug drifts in slow circles on its anchor and we talk, drink red wine, eat until it’s time for Robin to take us back by Zodiac to the dock at Whiskey Slough. The old harbour is there as we talk—the net sheds, small houses with weathered boards, a few boats I remember from the days when we bought our halibut and salmon as the fishermen returned each year—though the new harbour continues to grow those huge houses and fences and yachts capable of taking out docks as they turn.
So friends, with whom we began a conversation years ago and we pick up where it left off whenever we meet. When we were in Victoria for a reading at Munro’s Books in October, we stayed with the Ridingtons for two nights (before heading over to the Surf Motel). We had delicious meals at their table and a wonderful evening of pupus (the Ridingtons spend winters on Maui where they immerse themselves in high Hawaiian music and culture and I love that they use Hawaiian words so naturally at home, including this word for appetizers!) and wine with John Schreiber and Marne St. Claire. I gave them a copy of Euclid’s Orchard as a gift. And this morning Robin returned the gift with this beautiful review: https://sites.google.com/site/plumeofcockatoopress/books-read-2017
Perhaps because her son Brendan is a mathematician, she used the matrix of Euclidean geometry as a way of interpreting the web of cultural and natural influences surrounding their lives.  She even attempts to learn something of mathematics, enough at least, to inform and organize and understand her experiences on their land.  As with everything Kishkan has written, these essays are beautiful, personal, and at the same time universal in their scope.  They are to be read, contemplated and then returned to after some dreamtime assimilation.
Jillian reviewed Winter Wren (and by inference, Patrin) in the summer 2017 issue of Herizons. The review isn’t available to read online but here’s a link to the issue in the event you might want to order it. (I read Herizon at the library and it’s terrific.)
http://www.herizons.ca/node/602  Jillian is intelligent and perceptive; here’s the first paragraph of her review:

BC writer Theresa Kishkan has been writing compelling fiction and poetry for many years. Recently, she has embraced the novella as her chosen form. A novella “retains something of the unity of impression that is a hallmark of the short story, but it also contains more highly developed characterization and more luxuriant description.1” In other words, it’s a perfect form for women writers who have a story to tell, but lack the time or desire to write an extensive novel — or simply find their material more suited to the shorter form.  For me, the novella a perfect form – long enough to fully develop characters and plot, but short enough to be read in the snatches of time I usually find available. Kishkan’s first novella, Patrin, published by Mother Tongue Press in 2015, tells of a woman’s search to find her Roma foremothers, using clues sewn into a quilt left to her by her grandmother. It is a tale of renewed roots and reclaimed skills. Her latest work, Winter Wren, is the first publication from Fish Gotta Swim Editions, a new company founded by Theresa and her friend Anik See, which will specialize in novellas.  And these two books are little gems – brilliant and reflective.

How do people find one another? How in this world of billions of people do we find the ones that we can share conversations of poetry and dreamers and music, of our families, of the old coast we all love and remember, the politics we deplore, the books we are reading (and writing)? We do, though. When we were in Victoria, Robin played a soundscape recorded by Howard Broomfield in Doig River—children singing, stories shared, dogs barking, the murmur of voices in cold air, by fires so near you could smell the smoke. I’ve dreamed of those voices, preserved on tape and in memory, and it’s what I’ve always wanted. Continuity, true place, true words.

writing on the edge of the world

theresakishkan6 Comments

It’s an exaggeration to say that I live on the edge of the world. Our peninsula juts out into Georgia Strait and west of us, beyond the smaller islands in the Strait, is Vancouver Island. If you drive across it, you arrive at Long Beach and the communities of Tofino and Ucluelet (where we’ll for a few days in late March). That area truly feels like the edge of the world. I went to Long Beach many times as a young woman in the days when people lived in driftwood shelters at the high tide line and you could wander the miles of sand naked if you liked, with only a shell tied to your ankle with a strand of seaweed.

So not the edge of the world here on the land we’ve lived on for 35 years. But some days it feels like that. It’s temperate rain forest, the sea is near, and the view from our dining area is due west so that we see the sunsets year round. Lately we’ve been looking at Venus tangled in the big firs just beyond the window. The year is following its usual route to spring and the red-winged blackbirds are whistling on the marsh we pass on our way to the mailbox. If I wake in the night, I hear barred owls. No coyotes mating yet but we saw a dead one on the side of the road a month ago and I’m wondering if it was one of the pair we’ve had in our woods for years now.

Some days it feels as though we’re very far from the centre of things. I read the news online every morning, from several sources. The world does not feel like a safe place. Not just politically fraught and damaged by human action — its oceans, its atmospheres, its weather, its potential to feed the hungry — but seismically as well. (I wish I didn’t know about this site but I do. This morning, a 4.9 quake southwest of Port Hardy. I wonder if that what we felt, or thought we felt, when we woke.) We do what we can. We keep a supply of dry food and candles. We recycle. Take care of our garden. We send money regularly to organizations supporting civil liberties, free speech, refugee resettlement.

I know that writing can be a political act but mine has never felt that way. I admire writers who are called to that action. I read them. But my own work is quiet. It’s a kind of recording. Not simply my own experiences but places I’ve loved, what they’ve meant as locii of interconnected histories. Relationships. How people are shaped by plant communities and vice versa. How stories are told and held in memory, not just our own but the earth’s. What is held in the layers of stone and sediments. How bird song is part of that. Pollen records. Grass distribution. The architecture of honeycomb.  And how books can be maps to understanding those stories.

In my novella Winter Wren, a potter tells Grace that he wants his pots to be about the place he made them. His clay comes from the Sooke Highlands, his glazes are created by burning native plants — skunk cabbage, scouring rush — and using the ash for the silica it contains. I want that too. I want my books to hold what I love, to remember what I’ve known, and to keep these things safe and true.

Here’s what Grace looked out at each day on the edge of the world. Those rocks have been there for at least 25 millions years, the layers like pages keeping a story in place.

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