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Michael Helm's most recent novel, "Cities of Refuge" (2010), takes as its starting point an act of violence that reverberates through, and intertwines, the lives of a group of disparate people living in Toronto. Raising questions about contemporary regimes of racialization, art's capacity to respond to violence, and the ethical ambiguity of fiction's attempts to account for historical and political atrocities, the novel constitutes a challenge to familiar notions of family, justice, and truth. In this interview, Helm addresses the "resistance" of nontransparent language and the power of literature to lift readers out of the "white noise" of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camilla Gibb discusses how and why her creative impulse finds its inspiration elsewhere—in Ethiopia and England for her novel "Sweetness in the Belly" and Vietnam for her novel "The Beauty of the Humanity Movement"—the limits of the cultural appropriation debate, and the relationship between her training as anthropologist and her fiction writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Kim Echlin discusses Canadian writers' interest in writing about other cultures, which requires research and an empathic imagination as well as the responsibility to people who cannot tell their own stories of trauma. She addresses primarily her process of writing "The Disappeared," her novel about Cambodia, in which the central character tests the limits of empathy and witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karen Connelly's poetry and prose has dealt extensively with her experience of living abroad and writing about foreign places—notably Thailand, Burma, France, Spain, and Greece. In this interview, she discusses how learning a foreign language offers her a point of entry into a new culture and transforms her sense of self as well as how her books—especially "Touch the Dragon," "One Room in a Castle," "The Lizard Cage," and "Burmese Lessons"—engage with concepts of the foreign and the fraughtness of empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years that poet P. K. Page spent in Brazil as wife of the Canadian ambassador are widely considered to be a transformative episode in her literary career, marking a dramatic shift in her aesthetics. Critical work on Brazil's influence on Page tends, however, to deploy Brazil as a trope of the foreign, eliding her affiliation with the Canadian embassy. This construction of Brazil mirrors Page's own narrativization of her time there, exemplified in her 1969 essay "Questions and Images," originally published in a special tenth anniversary issue of Canadian Literature but most frequently cited in its 1991 republication in "The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New." This essay examines the different print contexts of "Questions and Images" to call for a rereading of Page's Brazilian work that is more attentive to the geopolitical realities of Canadian-Brazilian relations and the alignment of Page's travels with a particular moment in Canadian cultural nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]