The Threshold is a series of conversations with writers from the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award.
Read the opening editorial, “What a Story Costs.”
A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, England. Downstairs, Winnie — twenty-two, quick-witted, already bending the rules of what polite girls are permitted to do — feels her toes begin to tap. Upstairs, a Canadian soldier is coughing through pneumonia and homesickness, playing the music of a country Winnie has never seen. She climbs the stairs anyway.
That is where Elisa Bryce’s story, War Brides, begins. Not with a border crossing or a departure date, but with a sound—and the particular stubbornness of a young woman who cannot resist following it toward something unknown.
Elisa received the Honourable Mention in the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award in 2025. Her entry wove four generations into a single voice: her great-grandparents Winnie and William, whose love crossed the Atlantic in the wake of the First World War; her own mother, who handed down the violin; and Elisa herself, a military spouse who has moved across Canada, following a soldier the way Winnie once followed a fiddle tune. History, she writes, is a tune that gets remixed and repeated.
She spoke with the Gallery from near Edmonton, Alberta.
On the Courage to Write
What moved you to share this particular story—and was there a moment when you almost didn’t?
I was worried that I wouldn’t do justice to my ancestors’ experiences. But my mom was happy with the completed story. It is important to remember your roots.“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” — George Eliot
The fear of failing the people whose lives you are carrying into language is one of the quieter pressures a writer can feel. Elisa names it plainly—and then keeps going. She finishes the story. Her mother reads it. Something holds.
There is a particular kind of courage in stories that pass through women’s hands. Winnie’s mother stood on an Oxford pier and watched her daughter board a ship for a country she had never visited, toward a man her family had come to love. Elisa’s mother told the story of Great-Grandma Winnie to a daughter who wanted to watch cartoons instead of practicing violin and then pressed a fiddle and a piano into her children’s lives anyway. Elisa’s submission to the Award was, in some sense, the next link in that chain—a daughter carrying forward what was handed to her, hoping she’d done it justice.
She had.
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?
I am still writing and sharing stories with others.
That sentence does something that longer answers sometimes cannot. It is a continuation, not a conclusion. Elisa does not describe the story as finished—published, yes, but not set down. She is still at it.
Migration stories have this quality. They do not end at arrival, or publication, or recognition. Winnie’s story did not end when she fed the cow for the first time, or when William built their house on the Ontario farm, or when she stood at the pier in Halifax and caught her breath at a city that had not yet healed. The story kept going. It kept asking to be held. Elisa is still holding it.
On Surprise
Was there a moment during the process—writing it, submitting it, or after—that surprised you?
I was very honoured to see the story enjoyed and shared. I love entertaining people with stories. This one just happens to be true.
That last line holds the whole philosophy of her work. Elisa is, at her core, a storyteller—someone who understands that a true story and a good story are not opposites, but that the truest ones carry an extra weight, a responsibility to the real people who lived inside them.
The delight she expresses is not the satisfaction of a task completed. It is the specific pleasure of a performer who has earned the room’s attention—a pleasure she traces directly back to Winnie, who waltzed her way through Oxford by secretly redirecting piano tuition money, and who filled a Canadian farmhouse with dancing every Saturday night until the neighbours came from across the township. The mischief ran in the blood. So did the joy of an audience.
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?
This story was the combined voices of my great-grandparents, grandparents, and mother as well as my own.
Four generations in a single submission. Four sets of hands on the same thread.
War Brides moves in two directions at once—forward through time, following Winnie’s crossing and arrival; and sideways, into the present, as Elisa herself packs a car for Edmonton, learns to miss the farm, and prays for a husband serving overseas.
The women in the story are not footnotes to the soldiers they love. Pauline, the German-immigrant mother-in-law, teaches Winnie to smell hay and speak to cows with the brisk patience of someone who has already survived the loneliness of leaving everything familiar behind. Winnie rewrites herself as a farmer’s wife with the same stubbornness she used to sign herself up for dance lessons. Elisa’s mother preserves the piano, the violin, and the story.
The migration in this family was never only the men’s. It moved through women’s hands.
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?
People will find something to resonate with—they are human, and it is part of the human experience.
There is no ornamentation in that answer, and none is needed. Elisa has already made the argument with the story itself.
Winnie boarded a ship to Canada having seen, from a distance, photographs of a vast and empty wilderness. She arrived in Halifax to find a city still scarred from an explosion that had levelled four hundred acres and killed thousands of people — a sight no one had thought to warn her about. She had peeled potatoes in an Oxford kitchen; she would now be expected to learn the difference between hay and straw and to make peace with a cow the size of a small apocalypse.
None of it was what she expected. All of it became home.
The story resonated because Elisa trusted that it would—trusted that a woman from Oxford learning to milk a cow in 1921 was not a niche experience, but a human one. Trusted that grief and mischief and music and love travel across borders and centuries without needing translation. Trusted that the people reading it were also, in some way, carrying something across a distance—whether they had crossed an ocean or simply tried to become someone their parents might not yet recognize.
The story was worth telling. It turns out it always was.
Elisa Bryce received the Honourable Mention in the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. Her story, War Brides, can be read here.
The Tapestry, the 2026 edition of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award, is now open for submissions.
**Deadline: August 31, 2026.**