This migration anthology is an entertaining miscellany of factual stories, essays, newspaper reportage, and even a poem, all of which highlight the humour, as well as the ironies and agonies generated when humans seek a new homeland. The authors, and their stories, are as diverse as our Canadian population itself, and help to tell who we all are within this amazing, tolerant, nurturing geographic space called Canada. All migrants have stories, but not all are writers, so although most authors here are academics and/or widely published, the voices of others are well represented.
The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani-prize winners: the novel Berlin (2012); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His novella, The Last News Vendor, published in the fall of 2019, won the 2020 Hamilton Literary Arts Award for fiction. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Island & Other Galaxies, appeared in the fall of 2020 and was longlisted for the ReLit Awards. A new poetry collection, At the End of the World was published in 2021. The short story, "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence," was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and both "The Sand Flea" and "Casebook: In The Matter of Father Dante Lazaro" are Pushcart Prize nominees. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer's residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a 200,000-word novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton.