The Threshold is a series of conversations with writers from the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award.
Read the opening editorial, “What a Story Costs.”
He was eight, walking home from school in grade three, when he started narrating his own life. Rain ran toward the curb, and somewhere in that runoff a reel was already turning—a boy watching himself as the main character of a story he hadn’t yet found words for. Decades later, those words found their way into the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. The story was called “Reclaiming My Name.” The jury gave it first prize. The boy who once stood at the curb is now finishing a memoir,My Name Is Mohamed: An Immigrant’s Journey of Resilience, Identity, and Faith, arriving from Broadleaf Books this fall.
Mohamed Hammoud came to Canada from Lebanon as a child and was handed a new name almost the way a school hands out supplies on the first day—here is your pencil case, and here is your name, neither one quite yours yet. He became Mike, then Mikael, after a joke in French class turned into something he kept. The migration that mattered most, he says, was never only the one across an ocean. It was the slower one, back toward a name he’d been taught to set down.
The Threshold sits with writers from the Gallery’s first Migration Literary Award—not to ask what they won, but what the writing asked of them. Read the opening editorial in this series, “What a Story Costs,” for where these questions began.
Watch The Whole Conversation
Watch the full conversation with Mohamed Hammoud and go behind the scenes of his 2025 Grand Prize winning story, Reclaiming My Name. Learn how it took shape, what Mohamed wrestled with, and what he chose to keep. We’ve also laid out the conversation in more detail below.
On the Courage to Write
What moved you to share this particular story—and was there a moment when you almost didn’t?
I started writing back in 2019, not to be published. I was writing to heal from some personal challenges, to give shape to something unresolved that couldn’t be resolved until it was spoken.What moved me wasn’t confidence. I wasn’t looking for an audience—the opposite. I wanted clarity, the distance between my feelings and what I was projecting.
There was a moment I considered not submitting. Not because I doubted the story, but because I wasn’t sure I could find the right language for becoming and belonging. I knew most of what I was saying was about belonging, but I had to pull back and see how it was also about becoming. That’s where migration lives: not only in the physical movement, but underneath it.
On What the Story Left behind
Since your story was published, has anything shifted—in how you carry it, how your family or community responded, or in the work you’re doing now?
The story evolved into the memoir. I’d shared a few chapters with close friends first, and the feedback was generous, partly because I was letting people look deeper into who I was. When you write, you expose your soul. But you’re also opening a door, because others can understand you, and through that, themselves.
The book comes out this October with Broadleaf. This is the first time I’m publishing traditionally; I’d self-published before, but this has been its own education. We timed the release to coincide with Islamic Awareness Month in the United States. I hope it helps people understand the other a little better.
What I try to portray isn’t one person’s story — it’s a tapestry of shared stories, shared humanity. So it may be my account, but how many people migrate from a homeland and face the same pressures of belonging, the same work of becoming somewhere new?
Only three people are named in the book outright — three teachers who shaped me as a child newly arrived, heroes in my path back to the name Mohamed. It’s dedicated to my mother, my wife, and my children, but I don’t name them. I haven’t taken permission from the people in my life to tell their part of this.
I still shake sometimes when I say Mohamed aloud. It’s like a scar — healed, but always there to remind you. It’s the most popular male name in the world, and I carry it with pride. That doesn’t erase the vulnerability, given what’s happening globally. People look at me and say, you don’t look like a Mohamed. The name is a door. It depends on who decides to open it, and if someone closes it, you open another one.
On Surprise
Was there a moment during the process—writing it, submitting it, or after—that surprised you?
How little control I had over what the piece revealed to me. I began with a sense of what I wanted to say, but the act of writing exposed connections I hadn’t fully considered. The editors didn’t just react to the text — they asked questions that exposed what I’d left unexamined. The story kept transforming as it was tested.
As a kid in grade three, playing in the puddles at the curb, there was always a reel turning in my head — me, telling a story about myself. Not ego. It was my voice, even at eight. When I finally put it on paper, I realized some things didn’t need to be shared. There were chapters about family, about God, even my cat — part of my life, but not part of this story. My editors called them loose threads, ones that pulled away from the manuscript instead of strengthening it.
The hard work of a writer is deciding what to cut, almost harder than deciding what to write. No one is going to read fifty-eight years of a life. You pick the highlights and trust the reader to say, I’ve been there. I can relate. I wasn’t writing for sympathy. I wanted someone to recognize themselves in it.
Whose voices live inside it
Migration stories often carry more than one person’s truth. Whose voice, beside your own, lives inside the story you submitted?
My story was never written in a single voice. It carries my parents — their decisions, the circumstances before mine, a language tied to a place that doesn’t translate cleanly into another. It carries the silences of a community that understands part of the story without needing it explained.
At the same time, I resisted claiming I spoke for others. The chapters that got cut were often the ones leaning that way, a little too certain of themselves. I was grateful to my readers for catching it. What’s present are traces of other lives as they crossed mine, moving through my own perception and my own limits. Multiple voices live in the book, but they aren’t fully represented—what I’ve written reflects an encounter with them, not their totality.
A word to the one who is hesitating
Someone is sitting with a migration story right now—unsure whether it’s worth telling, whether anyone will understand it, or whether it belongs. What would you say to them?
Their story is already belonging. What remains is the sharing of it.
I’d question the hesitation itself. Worth telling, according to whom? External validation is an unstable measure. Plenty of stories don’t fit prevailing expectations, and that doesn’t make them less true. As for whether it will be understood — some of it won’t land with every reader, and complete understanding was never a requirement for telling something honestly.
If somebody picks up my book, I don’t expect them to feel exactly what I felt. They’ll interpret it their own way, the way each of us pictures a different blue when someone says the word.
So rather than encouragement in the abstract: write it first, before deciding whether it’s worthwhile. Let the writing tell you what the story is asking of you. Writing isn’t about recognition. It’s a way of understanding yourself first, of finding clarity inside the forest of words and feelings, and coming out somewhere safer—somewhere you can sit with your own words and know they might matter to someone else.
I’ve always wanted to make things a little easier for others, especially as an immigrant. Writing has just given me another door to do that through.
Mohamed Hammoud’s “Reclaiming My Name” received first prize
in the Gallery’s inaugural 2025 Migration Literary Award.
Mohamed’s memoir,
My Name Is Mohamed: An Immigrant’s Journey of Resilience, Identity, and Faith,
arrives from Broadleaf Books this October.