Theresa Kishkan, Sisters of Grass
Two refrains run through Theresa Kishkan’s intimate novel Sisters of Grass , two little phrases that keep reverberating across the pages and that ought to keep the reader reflecting on the passage of time, both inside the novel and in their own lives: “I have dreamed of a girl,” and versions of “In such ways is the world remembered.” It’s a novel of imagination, Sisters of Grass , a novel of memory, that dramatizes in small ways and small lives the ways that readers and writers conjure up whole worlds out of nothing—except that somehow, and to the surprise of no one who’s ever read Theresa Kishkan, it’s an intensely place-bound novel that feels more real than it has any business feeling. The plot is easily described. Anna, a museum curator and mother, is building a textiles exhibit for her small community: “If only,” she sighs, “there was a way to decode the memories contained in cottens and woollens, buckskin and beadwork, the shape of bodies impressed in fibres” (p56). At the same t