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    Inishbream
    Inishbream
    Inishbream
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Inishbream

    By Theresa Kishkan

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A wanderer arrives by chance on Inishbream, a rocky dot in the sea just off the west coast of Ireland. A lover of boats and a strong worker, she soon marries the young owner of her stone cottage. For a time, she does her woman's work, fishes with her husband, and walks along the shore, imagining Saint Brendan and the invisible world so real to the islanders. Through the winter, she repays Inishbream storytellers with tales of coastal British Columbia, not so very different, after all, from their own. In the spring, the islanders learn that their isolation will end: the government has promised them modern houses on the mainland. The wanderer cannot wait for the migration; she must leave Inishbream and go home alone. In the islanders' soft dialect and the wanderer's own tongue, Inishbream conjures relationships between the newcomer and her husband, between the island people, the sea, and the land, and between the coastal landscapes of reality and imagination. In the uneasy peace of partial acceptance, the foreigner grows, changes, and starts to envision her own place in the world. Inishbream is also available in a hand-printed and hand-bound limited edition from Barbarian Press. That Inishbream was chosen for this exclusive private edition attests to the clarity of Theresa Kishkan's storytelling and the beauty of her writing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoose Lane Editions
    Release dateOct 7, 2011
    ISBN9780864927156
    Inishbream
    Author

    Theresa Kishkan

    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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      Book preview

      Inishbream - Theresa Kishkan

      Other books by Theresa Kishkan

      FICTION

      Sisters of Grass

      POETRY

      Arranging the Gallery

      Ikons of the Hunt

      I Thought I Could See Africa

      Morning Glory

      Black Cup

      ESSAYS

      Red Laredo Boots

      Copyright © Theresa Kishkan, 1999, 2001.

      All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying of any part of this book should be directed in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

      First published in 1999 in a special limited edition by Barbarian Press.

      Inishbream is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

      Edited by Crispin Elsted and Laurel Boone.

      Wood engravings by John DePol.

      Book design by Ryan Astle.

      Printed in Canada by Transcontinental

      10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

      Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

      Kishkan, Theresa, 1955-

      Inishbream (electronic resource)

      Electronic monograph in ePub format.

      Issued also in print format, 2nd ed.

      ISBN 978-0-86492-715-6

      I. Title.

      PS8571.I7516 2001   C813’.54   C2001-900132

      Published with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, and the New Brunswick Culture and Sports Secretariat.

      Goose Lane Editions

      Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

      Fredericton, NB

      Canada E3B 5X4

      www.gooselane.com

      For Jeremy Shanahan

      CONTENTS

      An Invocation to Saint Brendan

      The Book of the Generations

      The Green Fields of Canada

      The Book of the Chronicles

      Irish Mist

      The Brand

      A Gale From the West

      Sea Area Forecast

      Remembering Winter

      Patterns of Evolution

      Lament for Christy King

      Epilogue

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      AN INVOCATION TO SAINT BRENDAN

      THEY EXIST ON THE ROUTE

      of great migrations. From high points on their island they can observe the plants, fish, birds and the human wanderers, all moving westward to some dreamed land. The northern diver, tired of flight, rests on the waves; the currents carry kelp aloft. These will all arrive on some far shore, a clump of themselves in a weary tangle.

      And Brendan, you desired to leave parents and motherland, you set forth in a skin-covered craft, the hull formed and measured by your body, length of your forearms, distances between your knuckles, width of your palms. Notched sticks were employed. Your boatswain, a seabird, a black-footed albatross; your guide and your god, the polestar.

      And the fishermen, Brendan, they were excited, unable to contain themselves. They relayed the following information: It was a greatish currach, flying two sails as they did long ago, and by God it was a sight to behold, them ladeens aboard talking of a journey over the wild ould Atlantic, past the Faeroes and Greenland, and with luck they’ll arrive at a new land, if ye can believe such a thing!

      You have shown them the guidance of the Great Bear and Orion (beloved of moony Artemis and the brightest constellation). These fishermen are your fair sons, fathered by your outpouring love for the old whore-sea and all skills of navigation.

      THE BOOK OF GENERATIONS

      I HAD NOT KNOWN

      about the islands. I’d thought the land ended suddenly and completely, the way land will, losing itself to the sea, and then only cold water and swimming things travelling the long miles to the banks of Newfoundland.

      So I’d no thoughts of staying. The coast itself welcomed those on journeys, provided meals of brown bread and stout, but it did not gladly entertain the idea of settlers and refused growth of any nature. And it offered no empty houses, just shells of granite rock, roofless and claimed by birds, a few renegade badgers, some travelling folk who could stretch canvas temporarily over the tops to keep out a disapproving sky, a rain that would never stop. For no one approved in heart of the tinkers, nor of a wayfarer, stooped with a pack and a storyteller in my own small right.

      No one told me that off the coastline existed a riddle of landforms, mysterious with oratories, old boats you’d dream to fix, protected species of birds, beasts, and sometimes poets who incanted through the days in stone houses of the ancestors.

      It was a vet who’d given me a ride, his destination the smug town at the extremity of Connemara.

      – You’re looking for somewhere to live? Mostly you’ll find only holiday rentals, and you’ll pay very dear. But why don’t you try the islands, or at least try Inishbream. It’s close.

      It was. You could see it from the Sky Road when you knew where to look. Just a few visible houses, the lichen-growers, and not a lighthouse to be seen, only a lanky protective Mother of Jesus, whitewashed yearly by a fool who’d go, and the rocks. There is a legend told of the Children of Lir: they rested on those rocks in the form of swans. And years before or later, Saint Brendan the Navigator sailed past in a currach of skins, smeared with animal grease to keep out a threatening sea because everyone knows a duck will not be cold or pulled under when the oil is still on its feathers.

      I remember there was not a ferry, the island too small for a regular schedule and a dock of large proportions, the necessity of a hired captain and a Bord Failte office with maps and brochures (though you’d find one in the town, with a telex that never functioned). The vet drove me to the strand, and I waited where the land ended, on the edge of a typical field defined by stone walls, no sense of geometry, shapes awry and scandalous.

      And where the field ended, the stones began an untidy descent to the sea. The man who was Festy Kenneally (for Fechian, saint of the buried chapel on Omey Strand) was riding the tide in, the bottom of the currach scraping. I went to meet him, and I helped him pull the craft across the strand, anchoring it finally with heavy rocks, laying the oars to rest.

      – May I ride across with you?

      – I must first be bringing the turf down.

      We did that, brought down sacks of sweet fuel, the fruits of several weeks’ labour on the bog and delivered by Miceal O’Gorman, an Eyrephort farmer with a van. Smelling the turf, I remembered riding down the Westport road past the acres of acrid earth, wondering at the crops of such a place.

      – Do you burn the earth?

      – We do.

      My arrival startled no one. There was the house of someone’s dead mother, was there not, and it should be lived in, with the roof a new one. A woman yet! — but a lover of boats and sea, and she can pull the ould currach like a man, Festy assured them after we’d rowed in tandem to the quay, myself hiding the blisters. We made the boat fast, and then I was shown the house.

      It faced north, the northern sea, marred only by lichens and the slow passage of snails over the damp wall. There were dead ashes on the hearth. Three calves who lived permanently out the door. An elderly, confused dog

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