Welcome To This Issue

When our daughter was seven, she came into the kitchen, where I was waiting to take her to school, and slapped a piece of paper on the counter. She told me I needed to sign it before disappearing to get her coat on. The paper was from the school, an official document from the office with words that indicated she was in trouble. When I turned it over, I saw a series of drawings in boxes that was clearly her work: first image a stick girl and stick boy; next image the boy’s hand on the girl’s head; next image another stick girl appears with her hands on the boy’s shoulder. I was struggling to follow the narrative. When I asked her about it, she said that the boy had grabbed her friend’s hair so she had pulled him off her to make him stop. That she acted impulsively, using her hands instead of her words meant she had crossed a line. So, to the office she was sent, where she was tasked with drawing the incident as a way of offering evidence, possibly learning a lesson. The principal wanted her to take responsibility for the incident.

We live in a complicated time with respect to accountability. With political figures blaming their losses on rigged systems, tech billionaires absolving themselves of any unethical behavior with regards to the mental health of the world’s youth, oil producers denying the crisis they are perpetuating on the climate despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary. The question of who is to blame is hardly a secret for most of us, but still the culpable deny any wrongdoing. They clearly need their own version of my daughter’s principal.

This current crisis in accountability came to mind as I was reading through this issue. I was struck by how keen the characters were to take responsibility, to find blame in themselves for their situation. When a woman agrees to go to an Al-Anon meeting in support of her sister’s attempt to deal with her alcoholism in Sue Murtagh’s “Is This My Christine,” she is concerned that someone—most likely herself—is to blame for it. This need for self-blame is further confirmed when her sister angrily demands that “she stop playing My Sister Drinks Because.”

A misguided sense of responsibility is evident in Glenn Clifton’s “Soil Samples,” where a mother, who is an anti-vaxxer committed to her own version of well-being treatments, seems to find reasons and cures for her son’s mental health illness. The responsibility she feels for him, as she waits for a signal of what he might need is summed up in her reflection “And yet she knew that at its root, she was to blame.”

In Megan Beadle’s “Wildflower Ladies,” a woman returns to her hippie days on a retreat with other women, visiting a place of tragedy from her past, wanting to “press the bruise” as she feels she is culpable for the accident. In Adrian Markle’s “Run-Off Season,” the circumstances of the narrator’s stepfather living in a house on a flood zone asks questions about universal culpability with regards to climate change, but at the same time he must decide whether to take responsibility for the care and recovery of both his father and the house. In Tam Eastley’s “Just College Shit,” the reader is in on the joke when a series of goldfish die, and it becomes clear that the culprit is not prepared to own up to it.

Elsewhere in fiction we have Emmy Nordstrom Higdon’s “4:00 AM,” Nikita Eaton-Lusignan, “Beginning,” Eric Lee’s “A Rock of Offense,” Nadja Lubiw-Hazard’s “Carve Our Names,” Molly McCarron’s “Full Term,” Nadine McInnis’s “The Ghost House,” Kaye Miller’s “Tephra,” Paul Ruban’s “The Undertaker,” (translated by Neil Smith), Robert Benz’s “Pocket Full of Rye,” and Trish Sissons’ “Rushing the Landing.”

In nonfiction we have Ian Roy’s “A Good Life,” where a case of mistaken identity prompts a meditation on absent fathers. In “You Are Not Forgotten,” Elizabeth Ruth writes about her secret life as a poet and the beloved aunt whose story she felt needed to be told.

In poetry we have three poems by Andrea Scott including “Dear P.K. Page,” “The World in My Mouth,” and “Prepping the Beds.” Marco Melfi is here with “Stardust Apartments,” “Plaza Sign Down” and “Safeway Bags Play Hooky,” Jean Van Loon with “Full Wolf Moon,” “March,” and “Reworking my Will,” Frances Boyle with “Creatures of the Field,” “Any tramway town,” and “Pine Hill, Perennial” and Peter Richardson with “Address to Six Red Oaks,” “Notes on Watching Footage of a Stalled Caravan” and “Gazing at Swifts.” Robert Bowerman brings us “Poppies” and “Coffee Shop,” and we’re publishing Bill Garvey’s “Ginger,” Shane Neilson’s “Patron Gods of the True Faith,” and Natalie Hryciuk’s “Dreams of the Dispossessed.” Also in the issue is Marilyn Bowering’s “Life by Water,” and “On the Way to the Ferry,” Betsy Struthers’ “In the small hours” and Suzanne Nussey with “Life Skills,” and “At Seventy.”

On hearing our daughter’s story we were a bit conflicted. While we adhered to the “no hands” policy in school, we admired the fact that she had stood up for her friend, and physically protected her. But in the end, I signed the paper, she admitted her wrongdoing, and that was the end of it. In these conflicted times, it’s difficult to understand why it’s so hard for the leaders of the world to take responsibility. I mean, even a child can do it. 

– Pamela Mulloy