The Weight of the Heart

By Theresa Kishkan

When her brother dies in the turbulent water of B.C.’s Thompson River, Isabel sets out to find traces of him in the places he loved. At the same time, she is seeking locations referenced in important literary works by Sheila Watson and Ethel Wilson for a graduate thesis. Her map becomes a cartography of both feminine and personal engagements with landscape and memory. In locating the sources of rich creative expression and by reaching back to ancient ceremonial rituals for death and the afterlife, she finds a way to reconcile her own grief and the writing of B.C.’s early feminist writers whom she fears risk being forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palimpsest Press
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781989287507

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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