My Father Who Art in Heaven

After her father’s death, Vanessa found a box of letters he’d written to his mother during the second world war. Hoping for some kind of comfort, she began reading them. But the voice in the letters did not belong her father. It belonged to a teenager who was trying to be brave, writing to the person he most loved and trusted. It left Vanessa mourning the grandmother she’d never met and wondering about her own relationship with her son.

My Father Who Art in Heaven is a creative non-fiction piece that Vanessa wrote about that experience. It was published in The Ravensperch in 2017.