She had written it down. Every word. She had submitted it, waited, and been selected. And then, at the threshold of publication—of being truly, publicly seen—she stepped back.
I think about her often.
Not with sadness, but with something closer to recognition. Because what she did was not a retreat. It was an act of profound self-knowledge. She knew what she was ready to carry, and what she wasn’t. And in that knowing, she taught the Gallery something no editorial meeting could have.
Telling A Migration Story Is Not The Same As Being Ready To Release It
This past year, the Gallery of Human Migration held its first Migration Literary Award. We invited Canadian writers to submit personal migration stories—their own, their family’s, the ones that had been travelling inside them for years waiting for a place to land. The response moved us. People wrote from across Canada, across generations, across languages they were still learning to trust on the page.
Seven of those writers agreed to sit with me this year, to talk about what the experience gave them and what it asked of them. And I am waiting for more of them to respond to our invitation. The majority of them are women. All seven of them, in different ways, said something I didn’t expect—not because it was surprising in retrospect, but because hearing it said aloud made it real in a new way.
The hardest part wasn’t writing the story. It was deciding that the story deserved to exist outside of them.
I asked each of them what moved them to share this particular story—and whether there was a moment when they almost didn’t. Every single one had a moment. A hesitation. A hand on the door before they opened it. One described sitting with a completed draft for weeks before submitting, rereading it not to revise it, but to make sure she could live with the world holding it. Another spoke about whose voice lived inside her story beside her own—a mother, a grandmother, a community she hadn’t asked permission from—and the weight of speaking for a silence that wasn’t only hers.
That question—whose voice, beside your own, lives inside the story you submitted—produced the answers I will carry longest from these conversations. Migration stories 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. To write one is to make a decision on behalf of others who didn’t choose to be on the page.
That is not a small thing to ask. And yet, the writers who did it found something waiting on the other side that surprised them. Not relief, exactly. Something larger. One of them described sharing her story as a way of making her own vulnerability into a ‘technology of attention’ for someone else. A story, she said, is a threshold—a space people can cross to truly acknowledge one another’s existence. What she had held as a private burden turned out to be a civic one. Something that, once offered, allowed others to exist more fully.
I have been thinking about that ever since. The Gallery has always believed in the power of story to change how people see one another. But I hadn’t found those words for it before: a technology of attention.A threshold. That is what we are trying to build—and what the writers who came through this process helped us understand we were already building.
What The 2025 Edition Taught Us
What the 2025 edition taught the Gallery—and I say this as someone who designed it, believed in it, and watched it unfold with genuine awe and genuine humility—is that recognition and competition are not natural partners when the material is this personal. A competition asks for a story to win. To place. To be measured against other stories that are also, in their own way, irreplaceable. We saw writers rise to that frame with extraordinary courage. We also felt, in the quieter moments of the process, that something in the form was working against something in the material. That the stories were being asked to perform in a structure that didn’t quite fit the shape of what they were carrying.
The Gallery’s approach to migration has never been about spectacle. We are not interested in the drama of rupture alone—in trauma rendered for an audience. We are interested in resonance. In what persists. In the sentence that finally holds the thing a person has been carrying for years, and what happens to the reader who recognizes themselves inside it.
The 2025 process confirmed something we had sensed but not yet said clearly: the form of recognition shapes what kinds of stories feel safe enough to arrive.
The woman who withdrew before publication wasn’t a failure of the process. She was its clearest teacher.
The Tapestry—the 2026 edition of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award—is the Gallery’s response to what we learned. It is not a competition. There are no rankings, no grand prize, no podium. Every selected voice is honoured equally, held inside one of three interpretive frames: Staying, Crossing, Receiving. These are not categories for judging a story. They are homes for it. Places where a story can rest alongside others that understand it.
The curatorial jury does not rank. It reads, and listens, and selects. The writers who are honoured will not be told they won. They will be told they were heard, seen, and felt—and that their story will live in a curated publication, with long-term visibility, as part of something larger than any single recognition.
One of the writers I spoke with described the Gallery as less like a formal archive and more like a nest—a protective container designed to hold the vulnerability of our shared journeys.
That image stayed with me, and it led me back to the name we had chosen for 2026. A tapestry does not display its threads. It holds them. Each one arrives separate, carrying its own colour and tension, and the weaving is what transforms them—not into something uniform, but into something that could not exist without every thread present. What was a private weight becomes, in the structure, a civic one. The vulnerability does not disappear. It becomes load-bearing. That is what we want The Tapestry to be.
The 2025 edition was open to Canadian writers. The Tapestry is open to writers everywhere. Migration is a universal human experience—not a Canadian story, not a single nation’s story, but one that moves across every border, every generation, every tongue. Expanding the invitation felt not like a policy decision but like an act of consistency: if we believe that migration is the story of humanity, the door has to be wide enough for humanity to walk through.
Someone Is Sitting With A Migration Story Right Now
Maybe they’ve been sitting with it for years. Maybe it belongs partly to someone else—a parent who crossed a border before they were born, a community that never spoke about what it survived. Maybe they’ve started it three times and stopped. Maybe they’ve told themselves it’s not literary enough, not dramatic enough, not the kind of story anyone outside their family could understand.
What I know, after sitting with the writers who chose to finish, to submit, to remain, is that 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. To write that story is not to speak for all of them. It is to make space for them on the page. To say, “We were here.”
The Gallery has watched what happens when a person decides, despite all of that, to write it down. We have seen what it gives them — not just the recognition, but the act itself. The clarity that comes from finding the sentence that finally holds the thing you’ve been carrying. We built The Tapestry for that person. For the story that isn’t sure yet whether it belongs. For the voice that deserves to be heard on its own terms, not ranked against another voice that is also, in its own way, true.
** The call for submissions opens March 31, 2026. The deadline is August 31. **
But the invitation—to believe that your story is worth telling—has no deadline.
The writers I interviewed will be featured in individual portraits published across the coming months. Their words, their hesitations, and what shifted in them after—these belong to them. I am only the first door.