The Threshold is a series of conversations with writers from the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award.
Read the opening editorial, “What a Story Costs.”
I said, at the end of April’s editorial that opened this series, that I am only the first door.
Keiko Honda is what I meant.
I first encountered her through the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award—as a voice that arrived already shaped, already carrying something.
Her migration story An Art Enthusiast Became an Artist Herself, received the Honourable Mention from the jury.
When I sat with her to talk about what it had cost her to share that story, and what it had given her, I found myself doing what I suspect happens to everyone who enters her orbit: I stopped trying to lead the conversation and started listening for what it was already trying to say.
What follows is hers. I am holding the door.
Keiko Honda arrives at the word “thank you” the long way around. Not the English phrase — the Japanese one. Arigatō.
Its literal roots translate to something closer to “it is difficult for this to exist.” That this exact moment, these people in this place, together, is not a given. It is rare. Precious and rare.
She is a community organizer, an essayist, an artist, and the host of more than 180 cultural salons held in her Vancouver living room.
She arrived in Vancouver in her early forties, navigating the city from a wheelchair. Her career in cancer epidemiology had ended at thirty-nine due to spinal cord inflammation in New York City, where she had lived for fifteen years after moving from Japan. For a long time, she told herself she was a Japanese national living abroad. Not an immigrant. An observer.
When asked what moved her to share her migration story—and whether there was a moment when she almost didn’t—she reaches, again, for arigatō.
What moved you to share this story, and was there a moment when you almost didn’t?
For a long time, I held these reflections closely. But there came a moment when I realized that my own vulnerability could act as a “technology of attention” for someone else. I saw that a story is a threshold—a space people can cross to truly acknowledge one another’s existence.
Throughout my life, I have witnessed countless quiet, granular shifts that have allowed me to exist and remain alive in deep gratitude and passion. I felt a responsibility to share a glimpse of these tiny “field observations.” Sharing my story felt much the same as “arigatō”—a profound reminder that this exact moment isn’t just a given. It is precious and rare.
For a long time, I held these reflections closely. But there came a moment when I realized that my own vulnerability could act as a “technology of attention” for someone else. I saw that a story is a threshold—a space people can cross to truly acknowledge one another’s existence.
Throughout my life, I have witnessed countless quiet, granular shifts that have allowed me to exist and remain alive in deep gratitude and passion. I felt a responsibility to share a glimpse of these tiny “field observations.” Sharing my story felt much the same as “arigatō”—a profound reminder that this exact moment isn’t just a given. It is precious and rare.
A story is a threshold—a space people can cross to truly acknowledge one another’s existence.
Since her story was published, Honda’s work has shifted. Her forthcoming book, Words That Last (Caitlin Press, 2026), has grown from the same understanding the salons gave her: that vulnerability is not a private burden. It is a civic one.
Since your story was published, has anything shifted in how you carry it, or in the work you’re doing now?
The most profound shift has been the realization that we don’t ever truly ‘set a story down.’ Instead, we simply learn to carry it differently. I once thought sharing these stories would offer a final resolution, but the community’s response taught me otherwise: that vulnerability is not a private burden, but a civic one. It is a threshold that, once crossed, allows others to exist more fully.
This has fundamentally reoriented my current work. I have moved away from the ‘spectacle’ of past trauma and toward the ‘granular’ observation of the present. In both my community organizing and my writing, I no longer seek a tidy resolution.
I seek resonance. I find I am now far more invested in what I call the ‘imagination of the open ‘door’—that disciplined willingness to stay in the uncertainty long enough for something precious, rare, and unplanned to become visible.
One of the collaborations that emerged from Honda’s relationship with the Gallery is “A Mirror, Not a Memorial,” a piece developed together, centred on her grandfather’s memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945 (Caitlin Press, 2025). Released on March 21—the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—it was a deliberate act: these histories are not monuments to the past. They are living mirrors for the present.
Was there a moment during the process—writing it, submitting it, or after—that surprised you?
What surprised me most was the profound sense of belonging that arrived after the submission. It was an unexpected expansion — a feeling of becoming part of something much larger than my own singular narrative. The more I learned about the Gallery and the people behind it, the more I came to appreciate the space they have cultivated. It is less like a formal archive and more like a nest—a protective container designed to hold the vulnerability of our shared journeys.
The surprise, I realize now, is that the “arigatō” of storytelling—the difficulty of these stories existing—is made easier when you find the right nest.
When we move our stories from the private desk to the collective container, they stop being burdens we carry alone and start being a technology of attention. We aren’t just looking back at where we came from. We are looking into a mirror of our shared humanity to see who we might become together.
Migration stories, Honda says, are rarely singular. They travel in families. They carry the dead and the living. They hold people who may never read them, who may never know they are there.
Whose voice, beside your own, lives inside the story you submitted?
Lisa’s, first. She was the artist-in-residence who sent an email I almost deleted—and ended her invitation with four words I had no framework to receive: I think you are an artist.
I had lived in Vancouver for barely a year and a half. I was navigating a city from a wheelchair, grieving a career in epidemiology that a spinal cord inflammation had ended at 39, and still quietly insisting to myself that I was a Japanese national living abroad, not an immigrant. Lisa’s voice cracked something open. She lives inside that story, not as a supporting character, but as the catalyst without whom there is no story at all.
Then there is Rudi, the poet who compared his relationship with an audience to navigating a bridge with traffic flowing in both directions—always striving for that fluid exchange, never guaranteed.
And Chris, the Korean-Canadian architecture student and breakdancer who walked into my living room and said it felt, somehow, like a home. Their voices are in the story because they taught me what I was actually building: not a salon, but an intertidal zone. A threshold space where people arrive as one thing and leave as something slightly, irreversibly more.
And underneath all of them—quieter, further back—is my family and the ancestors I never met.
How I perceive the world, how I inhabit my mother tongue, how I reach for a brush when words alone are not enough: none of this originated with me. It arrived already shaped and already weighted, passed down through people whose names I know and people I can only sense.
Migration, I have come to understand, does not begin at the airport. It begins much earlier—in the particular way a grandmother holds silence, or a grandfather chooses which stories to write down and which to carry only in the body.
Migration stories carry more than one person’s truth because migration itself is never singular. You arrive carrying everyone who sent you, everyone who received you, and everyone who, without quite knowing it, named you into being.
After 180 gatherings, Honda has learned something she now considers almost a law: the stories people are most afraid to tell are almost always the ones the room most needs to hear. She has a message for the person sitting with a migration story right now—the one who has told themselves it isn’t literary enough, isn’t dramatic enough, and doesn’t belong to them alone.
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?
The doubt you are feeling is not a sign that the story doesn’t belong. It is a sign that it matters.
When Lisa first invited me to share my story, I reasoned my way out of it. I had lived in Vancouver for barely a year and a half—what history did I have worth telling?
I was self-conscious about my disability, my accent, the gap between the life I had planned and the one I was living. I told myself I was an observer. Observers don’t become the subject.
But after hosting more than 180 gatherings in my living room, I have learned this: the stories people are most afraid to tell are almost always the ones the room most needs to hear. Not because they are dramatic. Because they are true in a way that feels, to the person listening, like an unexpected relief—as if something they had been carrying alone turns out to have been shared all along.
Your story does not need to be complete to be told. Migration stories are by nature unfinished. That incompleteness is not a flaw. It is the most honest thing you can offer.
Someone needs to speak first. It might as well be you.
Keiko Honda received the Honourable Mention in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award.
Her story, An Art Enthusiast Became an Artist Herself, 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.**
The Tapestry
Migration Literary Award 2026
Your story of migration — inherited, lived, witnessed across generations — has a place here. The Tapestry, the 2026 edition of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award, is an international recognition and publication initiative honouring personal and ancestral stories. Every selected voice is honoured equally. No rankings, no podium. Submissions opened March 31 and close August 31, 2026.