Theresa Kishkan
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Using the richness of braided essays, Theresa Kishkan thinks deeply about the natural world, mourns and celebrates the aging body, gently contests recorded history, and considers art and visual phenomena. Gathering personal genealogies, medical histories, and early land surveys together with insights from music, colour theory, horticulture, and textile production, Kishkan weaves a pattern of richly textured threads, welcoming readers to share her...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In her vibrant first novel Sisters of Grass, Theresa Kishkan weaves a tapestry of the senses through the touchstones of a young woman's life. Anna is preparing an exhibit of textiles reflecting life in central British Columbia a century ago. In a forgotten corner of a museum, she discovers a dusty cardboard box containing the century-old personal effects of a Nicola valley woman. Fascinated by the artifacts, she reconstructs the story of their owner,...
3) Patrin
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Patrin Szkandery, a young woman living in Victoria BC in the 1970s, restores an ancient quilt and travels to Czechoslovakia to trace her Roma history over the unsettling terrain of central Europe in the years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The pieced cloth proves to be both coded map and palimpsest (patrin) of her extended family's nomadic wandering through Moravia in the first decade of the 20th century. The elegant and beautifully attentive lyric...
Author
Language
English
Description
Declan O'Malley came to the coast of British Columbia because it was as far away from Ireland as he could possibly go. Haunted by memories of his family's death at the hands of the Black and Tans, Declan is unable to escape his grief. He immerses himself in a new life, seeking to produce a more perfect translation of Homer's Odyssey while at the same time becoming closer to the family on whose property he is living. But Declan cannot free himself...
5) Phantom Limb
Author
Language
English
Description
Every now and then, readers find themselves fortunate enough to come across a writer whose work fits their lifestyle and belief systems so well that the relationship between writer and reader seems familial. Though geographically estranged, perhaps, it's as if both author and reader hail from the same town, studied under the same teacher, and spent the long, warm evenings of summer hanging feet off the dock, side by side. Reading the work is like...
6) Inishbream
Author
Language
English
Description
A wanderer arrives by chance on Inishbream, a rocky dot in the sea just off the west coast of Ireland. A lover of boats and a strong worker, she soon marries the young owner of her stone cottage. For a time, she does her woman's work, fishes with her husband, and walks along the shore, imagining Saint Brendan and the invisible world so real to the islanders. Through the winter, she repays Inishbream storytellers with tales of coastal British Columbia,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Warm, imaginative, and thoroughly original, this memoir intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in the life of novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and in this book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her personal history. Naming each chapter for a particular tree - the Garry oak, the Ponderosa pine, the silver olive, the Plane tree, the Arbutus, and...
Author
Language
English
Description
When her brother dies in the turbulent water of B.C.'s Thompson River, Isabel sets out to find traces of him in the places he loved. At the same time, she is seeking locations referenced in important literary works by Sheila Watson and Ethel Wilson for a graduate thesis. Her map becomes a cartography of both feminine and personal engagements with landscape and memory. In locating the sources of rich creative expression and by reaching back to ancient...
Author
Publisher
Mother Tongue Publishing Limited
Language
English
Description
"In her new collection of essays Kishkan unravels an intricately patterned algorithm of cross-species madrigal, horticulture and love. Opening with 'Herakleitos on the Yalakom, ' a turbulent homage to her father, and ending in 'Euclid's Orchard, ' amidst bees and coyotes, her touchstones of natural history and family mythology are re-aligned and mortared with metaphysics and mathematics. Along the way her signature lyricism of place and home sings...