Interviews | Gallery of Human Migration

The Door He Chose to Open

He was eight years old when he started narrating his own life from a Toronto curb, watching puddles run toward the storm drain. Decades on, Mohamed Hammoud’s award-winning story “Reclaiming My Name” became the seed of a memoir arriving this October. In this Threshold conversation, he talks about the name he set down as a child, the one he’s still learning to carry without shaking, and what it costs to decide which chapters of a life deserve to exist on the page.

We Are the Architects, We Are the Architecture

Three bottles by the bedside — milk, juice, water — placed every night by a father who had no other language for care. It is one of the images at the heart of Her Story, a dialogue between a first-generation immigrant and their second-generation Canadian partner, honoured in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. In this conversation, the Prairie Collective reflects on what it means to build a story together, how memory unlocks itself in layers, and why belonging is always under construction.

The Car That Carried the Story

Ana-Maria Posada-Borda has been thinking about car rides for as long as she can remember—not the destinations, but what her parents said in those moments, facing forward, the cost of each word only clear to her later. Born in Montréal to Colombian parents who arrived before she did, she is eighteen years old and already published. Her story, submitted to the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award, received the Honourable Mention. In this conversation, she reflects on writing in secret, the surprise of being read, and what she would say to anyone sitting with a story they’re not sure belongs.

The Music She Carried

A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, and Winnie—stubborn, curious, already bending the rules—follows the sound upstairs toward a coughing Canadian soldier and a life she couldn’t have invented. In War Brides, Elisa Bryce weaves four generations of migration and music into a single voice. The Gallery of Human Migration spoke with the 2025 Migration Literary Award Honourable Mention about inherited courage, the women who held the story, and why she kept writing.

The Nest That Holds The Story

Keiko Honda arrived in Vancouver in her early forties—navigating a new city from a wheelchair, hosting cultural salons in her living room, telling herself she was an observer. Then four words in an email changed everything. In conversation with Gallery Executive Director Nancy Perin, Honda reflects on what it truly costs to move a story from the private desk to the collective container, whose voices live inside the stories we think are ours alone, and why the doubt you feel about telling it is not a warning. It is the clearest sign that it matters.

A Mirror, Not a Memorial

In 1945, a Japanese family stranded north of Korea’s newly drawn 38th parallel survived not through strategy or strength, but because of one Korean ship captain’s quiet, unwitnessed act of compassion. That act is the reason Keiko Honda exists today. In this interview, Gallery of Human Migration Executive Director Nancy Perin speaks with Honda about her grandfather’s translated memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945—and what his story reveals about empire, migration, and the patterns of racial discrimination we are still living inside now.