Lee Maracle

But actually, there's a, yeah, so there's some related to my dad, some related actually to little, little threads of some of the mental illness that has hit different members of my family at different times.

And But also it's a book of what do you do at the end? What do you do at the end of the world? I feel like we live at this time in the world when every day we wake up, we feel like what is going to happen to us? And so it's really, and I remember something Lee Maracle had said years before she passed.

She talked about how we're at this moment in the world that we're You know, the climate crisis and humanity is racing toward violence.

Just we've been here before and we've negotiated our way through.

She lived from 1922 to 2014.

Widely recognized as one of the most formidable short story writers of the 20th century.

And the focus here is her partially autobiographical collection, which is appropriately titled Montreal Stories.

Yeah, and Montreal in the era Gallant was writing about, particularly the 1930s and '40s, was a master class in division.

That's a strong word, abandoned

But doesn't physical distance, like decades of living in a completely different European culture, fundamentally degrade a writer's memory? Doesn't she lose the right, or at least the accuracy, to define the emotional undercurrents of a city she no longer navigates every day?

It's a very common critique of expatriate writers, for sure, but I think it fundamentally misinterprets how observation and memory work in literature

How so?