See other posts in the series: P1 P2 P4 P5
A satisfying read is dependent upon two critical components: what is read and when. Up the book comes, then down the book goes if the timing isn’t right.
Released in 2011, it’s taken two years for Theresa Kishkan’s memoir, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, to find its way to me. Writer and reader Kerry Clare acted as connector via her engaging website picklemethis.com (and its big sister, 49th Shelf). Author discovered, I linked into Theresa’s site and ordered two books, Mnemonic and The Age of Water Lilies, a novel. We began an email correspondence.
While there is a glut of knowledge in the world, there is a dearth of wisdom. I read Mnemonic voraciously. I pondered, chewed, deconstructed, and reconstituted each piece, slowing down to a crawl to savour the words. You see, I am shifting gears and am filled to overflowing with heavyweight existential questions that demand a certain level of engagement and tenacity. I need answers.
The Mnemonic essays are both fearlessly personal and universally approachable, shaped by the conceit of the tree species she has known and loved. They are stories set locally and abroad, which emanate a profound appreciation of the influence of place and home. They balance the intellectual with the physical, book-learning with adventuring, producing the action-oriented storytelling that I favour.
Turning the pages was a bit like visiting with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Our geographies correspond so closely: Duncan and Chemainus; Powell River and Texada Island; the Fraser Valley and the Fraser Canyon; Wallachin and Kamloops. These are the places of my childhood. The arbutus that grow freely near her home are my personal totems. I felt the heart-pangs as her three children grew up and moved away, as I watch my four change daily. Like a reflection in a mirror, I am helped to see: to understand what’s coming; to name what’s happened; and to examine – and absorb – who I am in this moment.
This book couldn’t have come at a better time.
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The Kishkan Oracle.
I would offer five questions by email, one at a time, and Theresa would respond as she saw fit. And she did: beautifully, expressively, generously. Here is our discussion of Mnemonic, and a life thoughtfully lived, over five days and five posts.
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QUESTION #3: In two parts –
a) Would you describe yourself as curious? Or is there a different driver for you? b) Can you identify the moment you became “you”?
TK: a) I think I was born with a sense of wonder. I remember playing on a rocky hill near our home in Victoria when I was 3 or 4 – it was just across the road from our house and we were allowed to play there if we took the family dog – and finding the egg cases of some recently hatched creature. They were rubbery and smelled like snakes. (I knew very well what snakes smelled like because my brothers used to put them down the back of my t-shirt.) For years I thought they’d held tiny snakes – until I discovered that our native snakes all give birth to live young, as do our north-western alligator lizards. So what were those small cases in the dry moss? I have no idea but I remember feeling as though I’d found such an amazing thing and in a way I still feel like that when I find clumps of frog spawn in a pond near my house, when I come across the area up the mountain behind me where the elk sleep, the grass flattened by the weight of their large bodies, when I watch the meteor showers on August nights. The universe has always seemed like a beautiful intricate puzzle, the pieces cleverly connected if I am patient enough to find how and where they fit together.
One thing leads to another. I don’t understand much about mathematics but I am fascinated by the Fibonacci sequence which has its place in everything from the arrangement of florets in sunflowers (among other plants), in Sanskrit prosody (where it occurs in the sequence of long and short syllables within a fixed length of verse), in the curve of waves, and in the family trees of bees. It’s as though there’s a language anterior to our own and we have glimpses of its grammar from time to time. Perhaps if I concentrated on one thing, I might know more about this, know it more deeply, but I love the sense of connectedness that knowing only as much I do provides me!
[pullquote]So yes, curious. We have a joke in our family that my epitaph should read, “Let’s look it up!” It was my mantra when my children were small and I haven’t yet been able to shake it.[/pullquote]
And I do love reference books for this purpose (though of course the internet is seductive too). Field guides, lexicons, star maps, ethnographies – they are as interesting as novels. So often, when you go to a good reference book, you find some marvellous sidebar or adjacent entry that takes you somewhere else or else you read the bibliography and discover that there are books about fire ecology or the life cycle of crickets and, well, who knew this could be so intriguing? In “Snow”, a remarkable poem by Louis MacNeice, the poet tells us, “World is crazier and more of it than we think,/incorrigibly plural.” I want to do my own small justice to that sense of wonderful plurality.
TK: b) There was never an actual moment. It was more a long process of recognition. I grew up in a loving family but I wasn’t like them in so many ways. Our family culture centred on hockey, baseball, camping trips in summer. I couldn’t even begin to describe to them how the world shimmered for me, how I heard voices in the rustling of leaves, that I cried when I saw birds courting in spring, the long skeins of geese flying south in autumn. But we were not guarded and herded as so many kids are now so I had enormous freedom as a child to wander, to explore, to read. To go my own way. To take a book to the Ross Bay Cemetery near our house when we lived in Victoria or to the slough when we lived in the Fraser Valley and to dream my way through it. My parents took us to the library every Saturday morning and my older brothers taught me to read and print quite early so that I could sign my name and take out my own books. My parents were products of their backgrounds – they grew up during the Depression; my father’s family were recent immigrants from eastern Europe and very poor; my mother was raised in a foster home – and they had no idea of how university might work or indeed that it was even a possibility for their children. The Result of this is that I took my guidance from two wonderful high school teachers who encouraged me and made suggestions and helped me fill out the scholarship forms. Not knowing what course of study I should take resulted in me sampling a little of many things and that’s made all the difference. I found things to study which matched my sense of the world or else led me to new unimagined worlds.