Bookworm, no. 148
Grace Henkel reviews Theresa Kishkan’s “The Art of Looking Back.” Rob Benvie on Jeff Miller’s “Temporary Palaces.” Inside the May issue.
The Art of Looking Back
Theresa Kishkan
Thornapple Press
216 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
In 1978, the twenty-three-year-old poet Theresa Kishkan opened a letter from Jack Wilkinson, a respected artist. It contained a nude portrait of her and an admission that he wanted to draw her: “As you might deduce, I am enchanted.” She responded, even though she had only met him a few days earlier at a gallery in North Saanich, British Columbia. In The Art of Looking Back, she compares the incident to the myth of Pandora: a woman shamed for her curiosity, whose one act unleashed pain and uncertainty into the world.
Wilkinson’s mentorship intrigued Kishkan. After learning she had plans to travel for a year, he insisted she sit for him. “All I want, all I need, really, truly, is to be near you, to see you,” the married father of three wrote. His pressure and her respect for his work persuaded her. “I didn’t know how far he would go,” she writes. “That the one or two times I came to his studio and took off my clothes would result in hundreds of drawings, in poses I’d never affected; paintings of my face on a body not mine, intimacy implied that was never actual.” Kishkan struggled to break from these distorted images. Gossip spread. She felt exposed as her agency over her image slowly eroded. In one letter, Wilkinson, who died in 2007, boasted of distributing hundreds of prints of her to galleries and private collectors in Victoria. His words landed like a threat: “You will probably be quite well known, every inch of you.” Their connection continued into the late 1980s.
At first, Kishkan’s reflections seem detached. They slowly unravel to expose her suppressed inner turmoil: “Shame truly does gnaw at the soul, marring its goodness, its trust.” In the end, she is compassionate toward the inexperienced version of herself. She refuses to scold her for being flattered, intrigued, and naive— or for maintaining a connection that, despite a harmful power imbalance, held meaning for her.
—Grace Henkel
Temporary Palaces
Jeff Miller
House of Anansi Press
320 pages, softcover and ebook
For the scrappy idealists of Jeff Miller’s Temporary Palaces, punk is more than a fashion statement. It’s an expression of countercultural ethics, self-actualization, and fierce loyalty. But as the characters in this heartfelt, well-crafted novel learn, time has a way of diluting the purity of those ideals.
Beginning with Ottawa’s early 2000s punk rock scene, the book follows three friends (and occasional lovers). Ben is focused on his band, the Blank Tapes, even as his bandmate Rob drifts toward a vaguely defined radicalism, forged around a rowdy squat house. Meanwhile, the aspiring photographer Alex struggles to determine her own artistic identity while she navigates the trio’s emotional entanglements. While the politics aren’t articulated beyond gestures of DIY resistance, they are true to the ephemerality of youthful rebellion. The activists’ ethos is less about ideology than a shared spirit of defiance. By the end, Miller demonstrates how those values can warp over time.
A loving, lamenting ode to a scrappier era, Temporary Palaces is peppered with satisfying needle drops from the alt-rock pantheon. And while Miller’s portrayal of grassroots movements can teeter toward gauzy romanticization, he shows such affection for his subjects and approaches the story’s core tragedy with such unflinching honesty that the novel is rescued from becoming too syrupy. Despite one character’s offhanded musing that “it’s only punk rock, eh?…Not life or death,” the stakes couldn’t be higher for the impassioned punks of Temporary Palaces.
—Rob Benvie
Inside the May Issue
“Elizabeth David made such transformation her recurrent subject: humble ingredients made extraordinary by paying attention to the wisdom and experience of generations of ‘country housewives.’ And it may have been when I paused to wonder what a persillade is (there are things she expects you to know) that I became aware of the absence of her voice.” David Macfarlane devours an author’s oeuvre.
Sam White reads Mark Anthony Jarman’s collection, Smash & Grab.
“All this is to say that I now think of Indian Horse as the most Canadian book I have read.” Arjun Basu finally gets around to Richard Wagamese’s masterpiece.
And much more!
LOVED Temporary Palaces, and so delighted to see it reviewed here!