Closes January 1, 2025.

Japanese Canadian Place & Memory: Call for Submissions

In Terrain of Memory, Kirsten Emiko McAllister addresses the challenges of moving a post-redress, Japanese Canadian community forward and toward a transformative reimagining: “A new purpose as well as affinities and relations of interdependence are needed if a group is going to sustain itself as a collective…a community has the capacity to reproduce itself over generations.” After the positive impact of writing-based intergenerational gatherings such as Mata Ashita, we hope to support a continued tradition of community storytelling in order to honour the histories we hold close and find new ways of co-authoring collective futures.

We propose this place- and memory-focused anthology of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from Japanese Canadians affected by displacement and dispossession, and their descendants, at a time when scholars, artists and activists are racing to capture wisdom between generations and move toward interconnected JC storytelling. Japanese Canadian internment is deeply woven into the road map of Canadian nation-building, and yet, so many physical sites of these memories have been erased and redeveloped. As such, this collection serves to re-map JC space, place, and memory overtop the uneven terrain of Canadian history.

We are eager to read memories of Powell Street and PNE grounds, the camps and sugar beet farms, cultural centres or picnics and the places we seem to recall in an instant, however distant they may be. But we are equally excited for inventive snapshots of unexpected JC place-making, whether it’s an intergenerational Zoom room, field trips that bring together new histories and old, or reinvigorated cultural practices shared with other communities. We also hope this anthology will prompt our community to reflect on how our place-making has intersected with settler colonialism and how our collective action has lent strength to other marginalised groups. Throughout this project, we hope to be surprised and encouraged by the ways in which our community continues to grow, change, interact with others, and reflect on our intertwining histories. 

In addition to the print anthology published by Véhicule Press, contributors’ work will be published online as part of a digital mapping project that will not only serve as a space for contributors to reflect on and further contextualize their work, but also a way to highlight the connections between their poems, stories, and creative nonfiction.

This collection will be co-edited by Michael Prior (poetry), Kerri Sakamoto (fiction), and Leanne Toshiko Simpson (creative non-fiction), with overarching curatorial guidance from Kyle Yakashiro and artist Mia Ohki, who will be providing visuals for the book. The anthology is currently untitled; its name will take shape alongside our editorial process.