What effect do fathers and faith have on a child? In If I Write About My Father, Sheila Stewart explores the daughter-father relationship drawing on reflections about her father, a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister who immigrated to Canada and joined the United Church. Her poetry uncovers the complexities of growing up as the minister’s only daughter in a family shaped by church and manse in small-town southern Ontario. Stewart braids narrative and lyric, the textures of liturgy and memory. While critiquing patriarchal weight and constraint, the work explores how a particular religious upbringing shapes thinking, the rhythms of language, and the fabric of consciousness. In this quest, the poet draws from the sensory world by walking the woods and Lake Ontario shores. 

“To understand my father I found poetry. I do not want to give it to him.” The voice in Sheila Stewart’s third collection emerges from the tension between what is withheld and held dear; what is withheld and then given; what is given, and what Stewart demands be held. These poems are an argument with a father, but more than that, with the many fathers of a culture, the fathers who declare one’s un-worth. In answer — gently, insistently — Stewart begins an un-fathering.
Soraya Peerbaye, Tell: poems for a girlhood

In this captivating and bold collection, Stewart faces the ghost of her father, a Presbyterian minister born and raised in Northern Ireland. Stewart accepts her “ghostly duty” and states “such celestial hierarchies can go to hell.” Poem by poem, she releases his grip—his dark, brooding legacy, his impact and hold. We experience her salvation through glowing images and gripping lines—“tulips pointing red petals” and “voices reverberating in my thin chest.” Through the act of poiesis, a daughter finds her own redemption. 
Catherine Graham, Put Flowers Around Us 
and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems

Sheila Stewart’s publications include two poetry collections, A Hat to Stop a Train and The Shape of a Throat, and a co-edited anthology of poetry and essays entitled The Art of Poetic Inquiry. Awards include the gritLIT Contest, the Scarborough Arts Council Windows on Words, and the Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Contest. Her poetry has been widely published in Canadian and international journals. She recently left teaching at the University of Toronto to devote herself to writing.