CHERYL ALLEN, 41

Give Me Back My Dad! (2011)

Cheryl Allen heard Munsch tell the story that would become Give Me Back My Dad!, which chronicles an ice fishing trip in which the fish catch the fisher, years before the book was published.

I WAS 11 YEARS OLD when I met Robert Munsch in 1991. My family lived in Rigolet, an Inuit community on the coast of Labrador, and he stopped in our town. My dad was a life skills teacher at our local school. Robert wanted to experience going out on the land like we always did, so my dad volunteered to take him on an overnight ice fishing trip at our cabin. Ice fishing was something I did with my dad all the time when I was a child. A few other students from our school came on the trip, too. I remember drilling through the ice, and it being very cold.

When we got back to town, there was a Labrador tent—a white canvas tent that’s sort of like a portable cabin—set up. We chopped wood from the trees and laid the pieces on the snow, and that served as the floor of the tent. People put their sleeping bags and other things on top. A portable stove went inside to keep it warm.

After everyone gathered inside the tent, Robert told the story that became Give Me Back My Dad! We all thought it was very funny. Everybody was laughing. In Give Me Back My Dad!, a fish catches my dad and brings him underwater. The next day at school, Robert told the story again to a class full of students. Everybody loved it. I remember feeling kind of proud that the story was about me.

‘My daughter was very proud that her mom and grandpa were in a book’

The book came out years later, in 2011, after the Pick-aMunsch contest Scholastic Canada held in fall 2010. I was very excited when I heard the story was going to become a book. By then, I had two daughters of my own. My eldest daughter, Megan, who was eight at the time, was very proud that her mom and grandpa were in a book. After it came out, Robert came to visit us in our hometown again. My daughter and I went on a helicopter ride with Robert, to give him a tour of the town and Goose Bay. The next day, we invited him over to my grandparents’ house. My grandmother prepared a traditional meal with goose, vegetables and steamed molasses pudding. Robert tried the different parts of the goose that we eat, like the head and the feet. He loved it.