Blue Portugal and Other Essays

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 intellectual and emotional preoccupations. With an intimate awareness of place and time, a deep sensitivity to family, and a poetic delight in travel, local food and wine, and dogs, Blue Portugal and Other Essays offers up a sense of wonder at the interconnectedness of all things. Braided essays about the natural world, aging bodies, family histories, and art and visual phenomena. "Kishkan's lyrical essays glow with the generosity and poetic grace of a richly perceptive mind. Blue Portugal and Other Essays explores natural and human histories, the veins and rivers of then and now, with fierce and tender insight. An overnight train, a weathered rock, a button, a blueprint, the complications of the human heart-all rendered in beautiful prose." Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of Following the River: Traces of Red River Women "Phantom places resonant with mysterious meaning, dreamy hauntings from half-remembered lives, revenant landscapes fragmented in the prism of memory; the living, the dead; rivers as the veins of life and veins as the rivers of being; migrations through time, geography, and experience; a husband and wife reading Dante's Inferno to each another by firelight and the machinery of medical technology delivering readings from Cancerland-this is just a marvellous book. Theresa Kishkan is amazing." Stephen Hume, author of A Walk with the Rainy Sisters "Blue Portugal and Other Essays is forget-me-not powerful, small sparking essays building and building to cacophonies of bright brilliance. Be prepared to be cracked (Crack. CRACK) wide open-raw, vulnerable and moved: you'll then be carefully knitted and quilted back into a transformed whole. Such is the skill of Kishkan's literary craft: she narrates entire, and stunningly well-researched, universes. From the intimately domestic and inner to the bountiful global and beyond, Kishkan takes you by the hand and the heart. She walks with you through her worded worlds and gently restores you back into a revisioned life, days and places you'll never see quite the same way ever again. Gently profound. Richly delicate. Therapeutic and needed." Sarah de Leeuw, author of Where It Hurts About the Book:
• Braided essays about the natural world, aging bodies, family histories, and art and visual phenomenon.
• In these interconnected essays, you will float down rivers, explore old maps with news of family history, listen to Bach, sew stars onto indigo fabric, mourn and celebrate the aging body, and tap your toes to the Supremes as the table is laid for a summer feast.
• Gathering personal genealogies, medical histories, and early land surveys together with the liminal spaces of memory and insights from music, colour theory, horticulture, and textile production, Kishkan weaves patterns and dangles loose threads, welcoming readers to share her intellectual and emotional preoccupations.
• The title essay recalls a wine she first drank in her grandmother's homeland; another dances with memories of mothering and the structure of Bach's Partita No. 2 for solo violin.
• With an intimate awareness of place and time, a deep sensitivity to family, and a poetic delight in travel, local food and wine, and dogs, Blue Portugal and Other Essays offers up a sense of wonder at the interconnectedness of all things.
• Author website: https://theresakishkan.com.

About the Author:
Theresa Kishkan was born in Victoria, BC and has lived on both coasts of Canada as well as in Greece, England, and Ireland. She now makes her home on t