Author event with Theresa Kishkan
Schedule
Fri May 29 2026 at 01:00 pm to 02:30 pm
UTC-07:00Location
5797 Cowrie Street, Sechelt, BC, Canada, British Columbia V0N 3A0 | Gibsons, BC
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Local author Theresa Kishkan will be joining us to present her new memoir, The Art of Looking Back: a Painter, an Obsession, and Reclaiming the Gaze.At 23, Theresa Kishkan met an artist who became obsessed with her. She was young, she was flattered, and the situation quickly overwhelmed her. He drew and painted her for a few months, after which she went away for a year. When she returned, she was determined not to resume the relationship.
But the artist made contact with her after the birth of her first child and became a family friend, bringing gifts of paintings. Those images hung in Theresa’s home, and one in particular reminded her almost daily of her younger self, in ways both positive and not so much. She avoided looking too closely at his images of her and at his long, passionate and often troubling letters.
Decades later, while sorting old correspondence, she was taken back to those early days and began, at last, to write about her relationship with the now-deceased artist. The Art of Looking Back is a meditation on the male gaze, on reclaiming one’s younger self, and on agency: how we lose it, how we find it again. This poetic memoir asks questions about older men and younger women and girls, and the persistence of that dynamic in art.
Theresa Kishkan lives near Ruby Lake with her husband, John Pass (a poet and winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2006 and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2012), in a house they built in the early 1980s and where they raised their 3 children. She has published 16 books, most recently Euclid’s Orchard, a collection of essays about family history, botany, mathematics, and love (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017); a novella, The Weight of the Heart (Palimpsest Press, 2020), in which a young graduate student attempts to create a feminist cartography with the works of Ethel Wilson and Sheila Watson; and Blue Portugal and Other Essays (University of Alberta Press, 2022), a collection of lyrical essays. Her books have been nominated for many awards, including the Hubert Evans Award and the Ethel Wilson Prize; her essay collection, Phantom Limb, received the inaugural Readers’ Choice Award from the Creative Nonfiction Collective in 2008. Her memoir, The Art of Looking Back: a Painter, an Obsession, and Reclaiming the Gaze, has just been published by Thornapple Press.
Check out the review in BC Bookworld https://issuu.com/bcbookworld/docs/bc_bookworld_vol_40_no._1_spring_2026.
Talewind Books will have copies of the memoir for sale at the event.
Register Online here: https://sechelt.bc.libraries.coop/event/theresa-kishkan-author-event/
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Where is it happening?
5797 Cowrie Street, Sechelt, BC, Canada, British Columbia V0N 3A0, 5557 Inlet Ave, Sechelt, BC V0N 3A0, Canada, GibsonsEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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