See other posts in the series: P1 P2 P3 P5
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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 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 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 #4: “Place” and “Home” seem to be more than backdrops in your essays, they appear to be protagonists in their own right. How do you think that our homes and communities – where we live or no longer live – shape us? Is there a nature vs. nurture element at play?
TK: When I was a child, my family moved every two years because of my father’s naval job. Once we returned to the same neighbourhood in Victoria; twice we lived in the same row of family housing at the radar base on Matsqui prairie, and a third time in the Fraser Valley we lived just a little further down the river; I lived in Victoria as a young woman, with sporadic travels to Europe, and after university graduation, I spent a year on an island off the west coast of Ireland before returning to Victoria again. I wanted so dearly to have one home.
I sometimes wonder about how we are influenced by the idea of home and how, in turn, we influence its presence in our lives. I know that I was imprinted by Victoria in the late 1950s, early 1960s. I can feel its weather, can hear the waves of Ross Bay crashing onto Dallas Road in storms, can see (in dreams and even in my waking life) the shape of Garry oak branches against a winter sky, gnarled as elk antlers. Yet there was an earlier Victoria (of course) and where it is located on the tip of Vancouver Island had been home for centuries to native peoples who nurtured beds of camas and wild onion and used fire to establish and maintain meadows fringed with Garry oaks. I’ve increasingly realized that my imprinting included that earlier Victoria – its historical buildings and parks and cemeteries were part of my domestic history. My parents did their banking in an old building on Government Street and on Saturday mornings, I had to wait for them on hard wooden benches while they paid their bills and made their small deposits. The cemetery I’ve already mentioned but it was a paradise for children who were told to go ride their bikes on its quiet lanes. A spooky paradise because it was easy to believe that the dead spoke to us from beneath the earth or from the shadowy corners of the mausoleums. And Beacon Hill Park was the far range of where I was allowed to ride my bike to and where I watched old men play chess or checkers in the pavilion overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the ancient fortifications at Holland and Finlayson Points in the foreground, though unknown to me then. The older I get, the more I remember all of this. When I first read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, it was with such a sense of recognition: “Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” For me, though, the outside world and the interior of my home were without borders. Seamless.
My husband had a nomadic childhood too and when we met, we decided we wanted to create a home for our children which would be constant. And it was. It is. It is also a place, an acreage, which we know as well as any place on earth. We’ve lived here long enough to know the plants, the resident birds as well as the migratory ones (and when to expect those in spring). We know where the sun rises, the particular route of its setting over the course of a year, where Venus appears in the February sky, accompanied by the scimitar moon, where the prevailing winds come from, when to anticipate the first fall storms, when the coho salmon the nearby creek return to spawn, where the snakes hibernate, how to tell the difference between a treefrog tadpole and a long-toed salamander tadpole. I don’t think a place imprints itself so much on us as we imprint ourselves upon it. A home is a template that we fill with emotions, memories, colours, occasions. But a place teaches us. We learn it, and from it. We learn its layers – its natural history as well as its human history. Our home near Sakinaw Lake is part of the human history of a very beautiful and specific place, alive with wind and second-growth Douglas firs, western red cedars, arbutus, alders, dogwoods. Deer browse the salmonberry bushes. Bears pass through on their way up the mountain to the berry patches or down to the creek during the salmon run. We’ve added to it with our garden and orchard but it doesn’t need us.
I keep a few necessary books on my desk, along with a changing selection of titles relevant to what I’m working on. A constant is Gary Snyder – his essays and his poems. I love his “Building”, a poem chronicling his own home in the Sierra foothills of California. How beautifully it concludes:
This is history. This is outside of history.
Buildings are built in the moment,
they are constantly wet from the pool
that renews all things
naked and gleaming.
The moon moves
Through her twenty-eight nights.
Wet years and dry years pass;
Sharp tools, good design.