See other posts in the series: P1 P2 P3 P4
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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 a little more each day. 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 respond 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 #5: Mnemonic is all about remembering, about looking backwards. What do you see when you look forwards?
TK: Oh, I look forward to so many things, a rich tangle of threads I’d like to work with – colours, textures, fiction meeting non-fiction, poetry encountering mathematics. I have two novellas about to seek a home in the publishing world (preferably with French flaps…). I hope to write another novella; I have a faint notion of it and am really eager to find out more. My current work-in-progress, Blue Portugal, is an extended piece of non-fiction – I’d thought it would be a single narrative but I’ve changed my perspective and am now envisioning it as a series of linked essays. I’m investigating family history, the lives of my paternal grandparents whom I knew slightly as a child (they died when I was young) but who are my guides into the history of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th c. How far away that seems – and yet I’m connected to some of its places and people through my grandparents. When I read Gregor Von Rezzori’s wonderful memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear, set in Czernowitz (Chernovitsi) in the early 20th c., I was fascinated to discover something of the landscape of my grandfather’s childhood (though in truth his family would have been the shaggy potato farmers mentioned briefly by Von Rezzori, not the army officers or the Jewish aristrocracy).
I wrote about my grandfather in Mnemonic – or at least I wrote about the small traces of him that I found in my father’s papers when he died. I stood in the abandoned mining town of Phoenix, B.C. for the opportunity to be where he’d been as a young man newly arrived in Canada. But now, through the wonders of online genealogical databases, I’ve been able to figure out a few more things about him. This will occupy an essay – at least one, perhaps more.
In the winter of 2012, I was taken by Czech friends to the tiny village where my paternal grandmother grew up. I was actually able to see the shabby wooden house where she was born in 1881 and lived until her marriage to her first husband. I saw the church where I think she was married, saw the road she must have walked to school and to church and perhaps away from that home on her way to Canada in 1913 with her five children in tow. On that same trip to the Czech Republic, I visited the monastery in Brno where Mendel conducted his experiments with peas (and also kept wonderful daily weather notes). In an earlier question, you mentioned nature and nurture. This is at the heart of the work I’m immersed in.
[pullquote]How a woman born in an isolated wooden house in the Beskydy Mountains hovers over me at my desk, in my garden, how her second husband, born in a small village in Bukovina, shadows me as I approach my 60s. It’s all so strange to me but also comforting. I barely knew them but they gave me my dark eyes, my broad shoulders, my Slavic soul.[/pullquote]
I’m also thinking about how brief moments in our own personal history have considerable consequences. One example: I date my deep aversion to mathematics to my first year of junior high. My teacher was a young and charismatic guy who may well have been a good math teacher but he was also a flirt. I’d never been flirted with before by a teacher and it unsettled me. Though I wasn’t one of the favoured girls who rode around in his convertible at lunch time, I was placed in the front row with several others – I realize now it was because we all wore mini-skirts! I learned almost nothing and as a result, I’ve been plagued all my adult years by regular dreams which centre on anxiety about not knowing math. So I’ve decided to try to figure out some of the early steps I missed out on in my mini-skirt in the front row of that grade 8 classroom. I’ve been reading some fascinating books, G.H. Hardy’s elegant essay, A Mathematician’s Apology among them. I have in mind (speaking of the rich tangle of threads) a quilt which will allow me to incorporate some of the beautiful graphics I’ve encountered thus far – De Finetti’s diagrams, illustrations of Mendel’s law, Pascal’s triangle, etc. One of my sons is a mathematician and it occurs to me that some areas of our relationship are not unlike the ones between my grandparents and myself – the vast distance that love must travel to find a meeting place. I can work out the pattern of inherited traits by concentrating on Mendel but there is also this huge unknown area I am trying to map. I barely know how to use the tools but I’m determined to learn. (And how ironic it was just recently to see that long-ago math teacher’s obituary in the newspaper and to realize there was much more to him than the handsome fellow who stole the hearts of so many of my classmates, maybe even my own.)
So as well as looking forward, I’m still looking back, I suppose, but I truly want to make a record in a world changing so quickly I have to catch my breath. I want to create a family archive, a literary archive, for my own children and future grandchildren but I wonder if what we leave is ever enough — or exactly what we intended. I suspect my grandparents were too busy with the hard work of making a living to even think about what they might leave for the future. And their parents, their grandparents, were likely illiterate. Maybe our recorded lives are only ever faint palimpsests to the future generations, so many of the layers of what we have done and who we were almost invisible to those trying to find their way to us across that messy beautiful map of love.