Welcome to this Issue

Earlier this spring as my daughter prepared for her exams and her final assignments, she also had to solve a last-minute change to her living arrangements at university for the coming fall semester. This last-minute scramble of finding an apartment and a roommate was a stressful time for her but as someone entering adulthood she handled it in a remarkably mature way—weighing options, taking the time to consider who she wanted to live with and where. She was working on it. She had it under control. She was not panicking.

I, however, was.

It was not my intention, but my behaviour had the result of nothing less than creating tension. My regular texts containing unsolicited advice or forwarding apartment listings were received with (mostly) patient “ok, thanks” and as time went on, simply “ok,” but the more she carried on showing competent signs of independence, the more neurotic I became.

I was just trying to help.

During this period, from our office window my colleagues and I would periodically check in on a mother goose nesting along the side of a neighbouring building. There was also a frantic, protective father goose marching up and down the path defending their territory. He was creating tension of a different sort, ensuring his partner and future children were safe, honking and spitting at passersby who ventured too close, leaving them dodging, and sometimes running, from his aggressive behaviour. When I think of that time, I see his behaviour as a manifestation of my own, manic in my actions to shield my daughter from…what? Additional stress? Hindsight tells me it was the mother goose, patiently sitting out this brooding period, that should have been my inspiration. I would have been so much more helpful if I’d just kept quiet, if I’d just kept a warm “space” open for my daughter if she needed it.

The wisdom of geese.

The tension created in Scott Armstrong’s short story “Morning Lemons,” where a wife’s business venture pulls the entire family into a promotional event involving a collapsing cake, left us all feeling the embarrassment of it and sympathetic to the husband who has a habit of starting his day with vodka and a splash of lemonade.

The issue of fat shaming at a family reunion adds stress in ViNa Nguyên’s “Body of Sand,” while the police officer in Colette Maitland’s “Miss Touchy Feely” tries to diffuse the mood when she comes up against the challenging owner of a local business. The anxiety and uncertainty of immigration and the notion of home is explored in both Carousel Calvo’s “Certainty” and Maleeka Ellaithy’s “Feels Like Both.” In Samuel L. M.LeBaron’s “Rain” we see a poignant intimacy in a marriage affected by illness, while Matthew Fox’s “Lucky” is a portrait of an Italian immigrant family with its raging father and long-suffering mother as they navigate losses. The precarity of relationships feature prominently in Lisa Alward’s “Little Girl Lost,” in which a young woman is intrigued by an artist’s alternative lifestyle on the cusp of her own marriage, and what can only be seen as a conventional future. In Joshua Levy’s “The Edge of Portugal” a raging storm creates a tumult in a hotel, while offering calm reassurance within a marriage. The tender relationship between three boys is examined in Jake Tobin Garrett’s “String Theory” where a permanent move and sexual awakening stir up a sense of loss and other unsettling feelings. Finally, in fiction, Kate Cayley’s “A Day” is a sharp reminder of the constant nervousness around border crossing, this one more pronounced as we are taken back to Checkpoint Charlie and the dividing line between east and west Berlin in the early sixties.

In nonfiction, Pauline Holdstock’s “Vita Has Brain Surgery” is a constant hum of stress as her alter ego undergoes a medical emergency. Helen Humphreys revisits a relationship she had as a teenager, reassessing it through the long lens of time in “ The Boiler Room.” Ronna Bloom takes us through the fraught world of online dating in “The Sad Men and Me,” while Melissa Kuipers looks to the pelican world when examining her own challenges with breastfeeding in “The Pelican in her Piety.” Rounding out our nonfiction is Gary Barwin, who explores the connectedness to everything in fiction and poetry.

We have another sublime line-up of poetry in this issue, including Katherine DeCoste with “Matins;” Jill Solnicki with “Blue Rooms,” “Hawk,” and “Guanajuato;” Bernadette Rule with “Good Neighbour” and “Into Sweet Water” and Kelsey Andrews, with “Peony.” Brenda Sciberras brings us “Eviscerated Chickens,” “From the Prairie,” and “Sunday drives,” while we have Ulrike Narwani with “Trading Places,” “Wind No Longer Blows Here,” and “Only Cold;” and Jane Byers with “Impregnator,” and “Lunch Buckets and Lattes.” We also have Genie MacLeod’s “Solstice Carol;” Anny Tang’s “Orbits;” Judith Krause’s “Fèlicette” and “In Search of the Holy” and Carlee Bouillon’s “glass,” and“2,000 secret chestnut trees.”

There is certainly enough stress in the world, and yet how easy it is for us to add micro-tensions when interacting with strangers and loved ones alike. That is what the material in this issue has demonstrated. How easy, and how needless. I regret the tension I caused but fortunately my relationship with my daughter is such that she could see the humour in my temporary madness, and I have learned a solid lesson in the unnecessary stress I created. Even though it was motivated by care and love and protectiveness, it was not at all helpful.