“Nuanced and poetic, The Art of Looking Back details the evolving understanding of a mature woman looking at the tapestry of feelings and experiences from her younger years, especially triggered by memories of a well-known older man’s obsessive enchantment with her as a flowering young woman through to her middle years.

Filled with rich reminiscences from earlier years and critical questions posed as an older woman, Theresa Kishkan’s poetic and vibrant writing grapples with youth’s evolving self-image, the reactions and decisions creating life’s trail, and the questions and insight that age can bestow.”—Christina Johnson-Dean, writer, teacher, and art historian

“This ground-breaking book examines concepts of shame and complicity and obsession, and so it is, by turns, disturbing, heart-breaking, and infuriating. But most of all it is relentlessly honest and beautifully written.”—Caroline Woodward, author of Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper and other titles

“Theresa Kishkan travels an odyssey of her own memories and a lifetime of reflections to recover her younger self from an avaricious, obsessive older man and a society all too eager to judge or look away. By translating the passage of time and knowledge earned along the way into new memories, Kishkan brings the reader on her quest for reclamation. Have our cultural times changed enough to meet the author’s gaze?”—India Rael Young, curator of art and photography at the Royal British Columbia Museum

“Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back excavates art, memory, and the boundaries we cross—willingly or not. She recalls her late-1970s style—a faded jean jacket, flowers in her hair, a green hat, or was it red?—while confronting the lingering discomfort of being painted nude without consent by an older, married artist, Jack. She also encounters his even more unsettling depiction of his pre-adolescent daughter—a painting she later purchased and brought home. Each glance revives unease: why did she make it her own? Writing back to histories of domination, Kishkan joins muses and models like Fernande Olivier and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, reclaiming the gaze. Unflinching and vividly rendered, this memoir probes complicity and betrayal, showing art’s power to bear witness—and to expose the perpetrator—decades later.”—Irene Gammel, director of the Modern Literature and Cult

Key Selling Points

• Author reputation. Theresa Kishkan is a well respected writer of poetry, essays and fiction.
• Unique insight. The author is a woman in her 70s reflecting on her youth in the Victoria, BC art scene and her own agency.
• Previously unaddressed content. The painter, Jack Wilkinson, is a respected figure in the Canadian arts community, and this memoir adds new insight to his legacy.