Join award-winning writers Theresa Kishkan and John Pass for readings from their newly released books of memoir and poetry.
The Autumn Leaves Reading Tour features Kishkan reading from her imaginative and original memoir, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, and Pass reading from crawlspace, his first collection of poetry since he won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2006. They will be appearing at Harbourfront library Tuesday (Nov. 22) at 6:30 p.m.
In Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in life. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and through the pages of her book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her personal history.
Naming each chapter for a particular tree, such as the Garry oak, the Ponderosa pine, the silver olive, and others, Kishkan draws from various strands of mythology from classical and contemporary sources to blend scientific fact with natural history and the artifacts of human culture, exploring her personal past within a botanical/historical context.
The poems in Pass’s crawlspace work within the narrowing passages imposed upon us by the inevitable strictures and limitations of living and experience: aging, love and loss, tightening or unravelling family ties.
Pass was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Water Stair and won for the book titled Stumbling in Bloom. He has also won the Canada Poetry Prize and was twice shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
The reading is free and open to the public. For more information, please call 250-753-5411.