Search

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]