The Threshold is a series of conversations with writers from the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award.
Read the opening editorial, “What a Story Costs.”
There is a photograph that does not appear in Her Story, and yet it is everywhere in it. It might be the red-and-blue stripe of an airmail envelope. The stairs a child ran up once and then again, decades later, without thinking. Three bottles—milk, juice, and water—placed by a bedside by a father who had no other language for tenderness at midnight.
The Prairie Collective does not begin with explanation. They begin with what is already there.
The collective is a collaboration between two South Asian artists and writers based in Vancouver, whose shared practice weaves together storytelling, photography, and memory work to illuminate the layered experiences of migration. Their story, Her Story—a dialogue between a first-generation immigrant and their second-generation Canadian partner—received the Honourable Mention in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award.
It is a piece that holds two crossings at once: a literal one and an inherited one. The conversation that follows is part of The Threshold, the Gallery’s ongoing series with writers from the Award.
"We approach storytelling as an act of reclamation and opacity, honouring the persistence of narratives that resist linear tracing—those that survive through fragments, gestures, and memory."
On the Courage to Write
What moved you to share this particular story—and was there a moment when you almost didn’t?
It was the chance to work together with my partner and I. We hadn’t really collaborated on anything creative before, and this felt like a way to come together not just as individuals, but as something more collective. At the time, we had recently found ourselves in a new city together, navigating a new environment, new rhythms, and in many ways, learning each other’s rituals more closely. So this project became a space where that learning could unfold.
There was a moment when we almost didn’t submit because we were thinking about who might read it. In South Asian communities, there’s always that underlying question of “what will people say” when personal experiences are brought into the open. That hesitation felt real. But instead of stepping back, we worked through it and found creative ways to hold the story without exposing more than we were ready to. Submitting it became part of that learning too, and the Gallery of Human Migration team was incredibly gracious and accommodating in helping bring it to life within the bounds of what we were comfortable sharing.
What the Prairie Collective built is not a confession. It is a structure—careful, layered, designed to be felt without being exhausted.
The story moves through three parts: Inheritance, Return, Construction. Each section carries its own weight. The mother who rationed food for six siblings. The father’s midnight bottles. The phone bill a child negotiated in two languages, neither of them quite her own. These are not anecdotes. They are load-bearing.
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?
We’re still in the process of unfolding, still figuring out what our collective could become and how to bring it more fully into the world, but what has shifted is how we hold each other’s stories. This project opened up migratory memories we hadn’t fully shared with each other before, and perhaps even ourselves. The pieces of our lives that existed separately before this project, now sit alongside one another in this Gallery.
On Surprise
Was there a moment during the process—writing it, submitting it, or after—that surprised you?
What surprised us was how many memories were already there inside of us, just waiting. There’s a whole landscape of experiences that each of us carries, and it only takes a single question to unlock something that hasn’t been spoken about in years, sometimes decades. Memories that felt distant suddenly came forward as if they had been waiting to be called upon. What was beautiful was how, once one memory surfaced, others followed. Our working sessions created a kind of trust, a space where these fragments could be held gently, without pressure. And in that space, more kept arriving. That unfolding was something we didn’t anticipate and something we’re deeply grateful for.
There is a grandmother at the centre of this story who is never quoted. She appears near the end, almost as a revelation: the one who started the wave, who got all her children married in India and still found a way to bring everyone here. She is the reason. And she speaks only in the shape of what came after her.
Her Story is, in this way, also her story. The women thread runs through every generation of it: the mother who worked two jobs and talked to her first child constantly, feeding her the gossip, the dramas, the grief she had nowhere else to put. The daughter who grew up carrying someone else’s loss before she had words for her own. The granddaughter—by lineage and by learning—who is still arriving.
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 is precisely what we were trying to explore. We were intentional about creating a space where overlapping truths could exist side by side, and where both what is said and what remains unspoken across generations can be felt. We will leave this for readers to encounter as they move through Her Story.
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?
We would say: tell it. And if something is holding you back, take your time with it. There are ways to shape a story so it can exist without giving away more than you’re ready to share. You can build layers into it and allow it to be felt without needing to fully expose it. It takes time, but you hold the power to give it that time. Not every story needs to be immediate or complete. It needs intention, and to be held long enough until it finds the right form.
At the end ofHer Story, one of the voices offers an image: the migrant’s embassy. Not a building. Not a country. A structure assembled across time, inside every person who has ever crossed — or stayed, or received. Its architecture is dynamic, they write. It adapts to collapse.
The Prairie Collective has built one such structure here. It holds two crossings, three generations, a grandmother’s silence, and a father’s midnight care. It holds the question of whose story this is and answers it simply: everyone’s. And then: keep building.
The Prairie Collective received the Honourable Mention in the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. Their story, Her Story, 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.**