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to say that there are a lot of group dynamics at play in my family also not gonna lie almost immediately upon cracking this one open i decided that the writing style of the authors was very refreshing sure it s nice to be the target audience of a book that s a great bonus but primarily this book was a refreshing read because the authors were conveying information even personal information as with the examples from their own lives that they included without splattering their own biases all over the page i m a blogger my opinions are all over everything you read here but in a book that s meant for a wide audience who all do nonmonogamy in their own ways i appreciate that the authors aren t villainizing anybody for having different needs wants or expectations than they themselves might have which is an authorly behaviour that sometimes crops up in books podcasts my own blog you name it about non monogamy it was really nice to not see it here i went into this read looking forward to what the authors might have to say and i was not disappointed reading this book forced me to recognize that hierarchical polyamoury doesn t only show up as a pre planned thing where a nervous couple goes unicorn hunting or opens up with veto power already in place in either case giving no thought to the potential for hurting the real people they re treating as extra marital adventures sometimes hierarchical poly arrives the way it did for me whoops one partner s been around for much longer than the others and so i scheduled one on one time with my various others around the availability of that initial partner one partner s been a nesting partner and day to day decision making team mate for much longer than the others and switching gears to three way discussions takes practice and more active intentionality than i expected the book s section on intimacy like social and emotional intimacy gave me ways to think about how for example my desire for a big poly family and frequent time spent with each and all of my partners can come into conflict with my own need for solo recharge time but also how some of my partners have more capacity for overlapping us time with family time and how i need to take that into consideration when planning group events both in terms of who is comfortable with those overlaps and who s not and in terms of who might be too willing to give up one on one time in service to a group activity when they actually need some couple time with me there s an entire chapter on conflict thank goodness i am wildly conflict avoidant so this chapter was really helpful it discussed broad categories of conflict that can show up in romantic groups and how one can navigate them with suggestions for addressing someone s controlling behaviour vs handling a breach of trust versus supporting someone s insecurities without being eaten by them and more on a related note i appreciate stacey s comparison in a related livestream of metamours and telemours to in laws they are people your partner comes with who you just kind of have to deal with because they are a package deal i may not like my father in law but i had to figure out how to get along with him because we had a person in common i may not like my metamour we might not have been anything more than acquaintances who saw each other at the kink club a few times a year but as long as they re dating my partner we have a person in common and i have to figure out how to get along with them the book s different ways of categorizing types of conflict was very helpful in terms of helping me figure out when a given sense of this isn t great on my end is about me and a metamour having conflicting needs or dovetailing insecurities that have us at loggerheads versus when it s maybe time to have a check in with our mutual partner about a controlling behaviour situation or talk directly to my metamour the dread i experience just thinking about that regarding irreconcilable differences and how we can work things out so that we both get to be with our mutual partner but don t necessarily have to spend quite so much time with each other in terms of things i would have liked to see done differently i deeply appreciate the section on escalations and deescalations moving in together having a break up shifting from nesting partners to long distance or vice versa but i would have really liked it if this section had been longer and delved into things a little more maybe that s because most of my romantic group conflicts have been related one way or another to escalations and deescalations but i d have liked to see more about that in terms of how the book is written the authors are both academics which means that the book is written by people who spend their time explaining concepts to people who might or might not be invested in the material or paying a lot of attention on any given day i too was a ta once upon a time which is to say that the writing is both friendly and full of easy to understand explanations and examples while also being written clearly and in ways that get the point across without assuming the reader is coming at the material from the same experiential vantage point the authors who comprise one dyad in a much larger polycule offer examples from the shared life of their romantic group but they do it in ways that recognize everybody s roles in a given sample situation there s no retroactive villainization happening here thank the gods and even when the authors own biases are showing they re making the effort to avoid saying xyz behaviour practice way of relating is just bad and instead point out their potential pitfalls and offer suggestions for what one can do to mitigate those pitfalls if the practice behaviour or way of relating is something that feels good and right for you personally i ve been doing non monogamy for almost twenty years i found useful things in this book and had it been available when i started i might have had an easier time with some of the issues i ve stumbled over again and again while trying to navigate my own insecurities and do good poly with my people i would recommend checking this one out note for those who are local to ottawa there s a launch for this book happening on wednesday august 19 at probe i don t have any further details at this time but will be watching the probe calendar and thornapple press facebook page in the hopes of finding more information tags book review books nonmonogamy polyam polyamoury relationships comment reblog true power builds community filed under d s queer leave a comment august 4 2026 lughnassadh 2026 true power builds community initially wrote this for my paganism blog but thought it was appropriate to put here too tags community d s leather paganism queer comment book review the art of looking back by theresa kishkan filed under books leave a comment may 18 2026 disclosure i signed up to be a reviewer for thornapple press books and so was sent a copy of theresa kishkan s the art of looking back specifically so i could make my opinions known about it on ye olde internet am i getting paid for this no am i getting a free print edition of the book for this yes synopsis as provided by the publisher 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 aer the birth of her first child and became a family friend bringing gis 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 oen 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 what i thought of this book so as you know bob i spent the better part of a decade building a career as a professional figure model i wrote a chapbook about the intersections of figure modeling dude with a camera modeling and various forms of sex work so when the email from thornapple landed in my inbox offering to send me a copy of the art of looking back i was really excited to get my hands on it another model i thought and a poet too and proceeded to check the mailbox every day in hopes that it had arrived the art of looking back is a memoire it s wildly different from the self help book i reviewed earlier and the first thornapple book i ve read that isn t explicitely about sex gender or relationship structures which doesn t mean it isn t implicitly about all of those things it was interesting to read the memoir of a model my mother s age who was posing for painting a generation before i was it also made me so so angry to begin twenty three year old theresa isn t a professional model which if you ve been a profession model that s probably setting off alarm bells right there so many of my own figure modeling clients would introduce themselves and first thing they d be up front about what they paid they were all highly invested in keeping things professional even the ones who ran into me in night clubs i was barely old enough for would ask me to go to their latest vernisage or sit in on a class so that i d know what i was getting into it doesn t mean i never ran into a slimeball with bad boundaries but that happened all of twice in a busy ten year period so i think it s relevant to mention especially when constrasted to potential clients on model mayhem who were forever looking for 18 25 no experience necessary and offering to pay in photos the story told in the memoir is one that asks how much agency did i have and how much of what happened is my fault the story is a familiar one it s still a familiar one fifty years later a much older man engages a naive sheltered entirely reasonable young woman in the same or an adjacent field in friendly conversation he says i d love to paint you they have lunch they talk about stuff they re both interested in she thinks an interesting adult yes she s legally been an adult for five years in this particular story but the dude is her dad s age is taking her seriously listening to what she has to say and the whole time he s making shit up about what kind of relationship they have while relying on plausible deniability his own reputation society in general s eagerness to blame women for our own oppresion and both her relative unknownness and un knowing ness to cover for what quickly becomes some really inappropriate behaviour i read this woman s memoir this woman who kept thinking she had to talk to this loser with a mix of bafflement and understanding i get why she felt like she had to keep talking to him i get how we re all conditioned to check and double check every micro expression for some kind of evidence that we might have led him on but watching her blame herself for the breakdown of this dude s marriage for example just had me going honey what on earth a guy who having interacted with her at all for a grand total of three months tracked her down when she moved overseas and re inserted himself into her life after she returned got married had a kid trying to become a family friend a guy who painted her remembered face onto the nude bodies of other presumably also remembered but maybe featured in other paintings women and threatened to show them around the small city and insular arts community they shared because she d left town without giving him a forwarding address and thus abruptly put an end to the imaginary world where he could tell himself they were dating there was one person in the whole book not her eventual husband not her mother but a random old irish woman born in the 1890s who told her that that douche bag s feelings were his own i find it kind of telling the way the author comments about this that she didn t have much use for men i remember back when i had any use for men how much internal pressure there was to give them the benefit of the doubt make excuses for their behaviour and manage their feelings the memoir talks about the author questioning whether her poetry had been published a whole book published at twenty because her publisher thought her work was good or given that he d alegedly talked pretty crassly about what she was getting up to in ireland while he handed her forwarding address to her stalker if he also had an imaginary potentially fuckable version of her in his head superimposed over her real autonimous existence the answer to that one is who the fuck knows at least with regards to her very first book but given that she s had a number of books published through goose lane and palimpsest press since turning fifty she presumably knows what she s doing as a poet i can understand waiting until the dude canadian painter jack wilkinson a man who sexualized and claimed to be in love with his own daughter who surprise went no contact as soon as possible had died before talking about this stuff in any official capacity i can understand how someone who grew up and had to deal with this garbage decades before no means no was ever a thing would feel like some man s decisions and behaviours were somehow her s to bear the memoir is well structured i may not love the author s voice sorry there s a little too much wine and bread and brie soft focus whimsey to the way she looks at her youth almost like she s carrying around her own fictional version of herself that s equally too naive to know what s going on and still absolutely to blame for it as another formerly twenty something middle class white girl with a university education but not a tonne of street smarts i ll give her the former but definitely not the latter but the story she s telling is sound this is the kind of book i d give my mother someone from the same generation as the author but i might also recommend it to some of my artist clients and to anyone who s wondered was it my fault when someone else decided he wanted to take things the wrong way on purpose tags body policing book review books feminism modeling social morees comment monogamy cosplay filed under poly polyamoury leave a comment april 20 2026 for the first time in nearly 20 years i can see the appeal of monogamy keep breathing your favourite parasocial polycule isn t going anywhere but i have got to talk about this i m used to doing monogamy cosplay when house hunting which my polycule is doing right now or job hunting or going through airport security talking about being a married lesbian rathe...
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