On Remembrance Day, November 11, 2025, reposting this ode to my father.
The Space Between
A picture hangs in my living room, a sort of collage, but more organized, befitting its contents. It includes my father’s Royal Canadian Air Force wings and stripes from World War II, a green-and-gold RCAF emblem he embroidered while in traction for months in a veterans’ hospital, and two black-and-white photos, rimmed in gold. The pieces are carefully arranged against dark-blue cloth, framed in gun-metal grey with dignified flecks of gold. The photo on the left, taken before my father shipped out to England in 1942, depicts a handsome, athletic, optimistic, young man in his NCO uniform. To the right are his wings and stripes, a few threads out of place. From the photo on the right, the face I remember smiles out at me in his Pilot Officer uniform at the time of his medical discharge in 1945, still a handsome man.
In the first, he’s twenty-one. In the second, he looks much more than three years older. … (Read more here.)
Books on war and peace by UKing’s MFA in CNF alumni:
Faubert, Marsha (class ’18) Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, Goose Lane Editions, 2023. Review coming soon.
Fish, Amy (class of ’23) One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, Goose Lane Editions, 2025. Review coming soon.
Hartmann, Suzanne (class of ’21) The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community, Dundurn Press, 2024. Review coming soon.
Reichert, Bonny (class of ’22) How to Share an Egg, A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty, Penguin Random House, 2025. Read my review here.
Tattrie, Jon (class of ’20) Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey From Syria to Canada, Goose Lane Editions, 2020. Read my review here.
