Warm, imaginative, and thoroughly original, this memoir intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in the life of novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and in this book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her personal history. Naming each chapter for a particular tree — the Garry oak, the Ponderosa pine, the silver olive, the Plane tree, the Arbutus, and others — she draws on Pliny the Elder's Natural History, John Evelyn's Sylva, and strands of mythology from other classical and contemporary sources to blend scientific fact with natural history and the artifacts of human culture.
Never pedantic and always accessible, Mnemonic reveals — through one woman's relationship with the natural world — how all of us have roots that intertwine with the broader world, tapping deep into the rich well of universal themes. In the words of Pliny the Elder, "Hence it is right to follow the natural order, to speak about trees before other things..."
Theresa Kishkan is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Her essays have appeared in Memewar, Dandelion, Lake, Contrary, The New Quarterly, Cerise, and many other magazines and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Relit Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction. Her collection of essays, Phantom Limb, won the first Readers' Choice Award from the Canadian Creative Non-Fiction Collective in 2009. An essay from Mnemonic won the 2010 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Prize.
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"An astonishing book, a tribute to the unique and patient genius of its author. . . . At once erotic, intellectually rigorous and beguiling, Mnemonic is cultural botany, memoir, arboreal ethnography and love story. It is a sublime and rare thing when writing so gracefully defies taxonomical classification." — Terry Glavin, author of The Sixth Extinction
"Theresa Kishkan invites us into the company of her favourite trees, where memories perch lightly in the foliage. Her words are readied for flight, yet her stories have deep roots in the experience of a life well lived. Mnemonic will nourish your own heart wood." — Candace Savage, author of Prairie: A Natural History
